Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: Comparative Perspectives 2021004617, 2021004618, 9780367529703, 9781032042886, 9781003094401

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AESTHETICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART

This volume brings together the finest research on aesthetics and the philosophy of art by stalwart critics and leading scholars in the field. It discusses various themes, such as the idea of aesthetic perception, the nature of aesthetic experience, attitude theory, the relation of art to morality, representation in art, and the association of aesthetics with language studies in the Indian tradition. It deliberates over the theories and views of Aristotle, Freud, Plato, Immanuel Kant, T. S. Eliot, George Dickie, Leo Tolstoy, R. G. Collingwood, Michael H. Mitias, Monroe C. Beardsley, and Abhinavagupta, among others. The book offers a comparative perspective on Indian and Western approaches to the study of art and aesthetics and enables readers to appreciate the similarities and differences between the conceptions of aesthetics and philosophy of art on a comparative scale detailing various aspects of both. The first of its kind, this key text will be useful for scholars and researchers of arts and aesthetics, philosophy of art, cultural studies, comparative literature, and philosophy in general. It will also appeal to general readers interested in the philosophy of art. Prabha Shankar Dwivedi is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Tirupati, India.

AESTHETICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Comparative Perspectives

Edited by Prabha Shankar Dwivedi

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Prabha Shankar Dwivedi; individual chapters, A. C. Sukla, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics The right of Prabha Shankar Dwivedi to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and A. C. Sukla, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics for the individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dwivedi, Prabha Shankar, editor. Title: Aesthetics and the philosophy of art: comparative perspectives / edited by Prabha Shankar Dwivedi. Other titles: Aesthetics and the philosophy of art (Routledge (Firm)) Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021004617 (print) | LCCN 2021004618 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367529703 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032042886 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003094401 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics. | Art--Philosophy. Classification: LCC BH39 .A294 2021 (print) | LCC BH39 (ebook) | DDC 701/.17--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004617 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004618 ISBN: 978-0-367-52970-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04288-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09440-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by SPi Global, India

This book is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Ananta Charan Sukla (6 November 1942–30 September 2020), the founding editor of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, who was instrumental in bringing out this volume.

CONTENTS

ix xii

Notes on contributors Introduction SECTION I

Aesthetics and aesthetic perception

1

1 Aesthetics beyond aesthetics: Regarding the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic and recharting the field of aesthetics

3

WOLFGANG WELSCH

2 Aesthetic perception

25

HAROLD OSBORNE

3 Aesthetic experience: A review

33

V. K. CHARI

4 Aesthetic qualities, aesthetic experience, aesthetic value

53

STEPHANIE A. ROSS

5 On play and aesthetic theory

68

T. R. MARTLAND

6 Aesthetes, critics, and the aesthetic attitude

78

STAN GODLOVITCH

7 Art and goodness: Collingwood’s aesthetics and Moore’s ethics compared T. J. DIFFEY

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8 On the challenge of art to philosophy: Aesthetics at the end of epistemology

105

GIANNI VATTIMO

SECTION II

Art, artefact, and the philosophy of art

113

  9 Aristotle and Freud on art

115

MILTON SNOEYENBOS AND ROBERT FREDERICK

10 Art and morality

129

JOHN HOSPERS

11 The artefactuality of art

154

RONALD E. ROBLIN

12 Representation, representativeness, and “non-representational” art

162

CHARLES ALTIERI

13 Imitation and art

182

GÖRAN SÖRBOM

14 Theory of impersonal art

194

A. C. SUKLA

15 East and west in Coomaraswamy’s theory of art

204

P. S. SASTRI

215

Index

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

Charles Altieri, Rachel Stageberg Anderson Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and former Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. He specializes in 20th century American and British literature. He has authored numerous books and journal articles. V. K. Chari, Former Professor at the universities of Banaras, New York, and Carleton University of Ottawa, Canada. An authority on comparative literature, comparative literary theory, and aesthetics. He contributed extensively on theoretical perspectives of the Sanskrit Alamkāra Śāstra vis-á-vis their Western parallels. T. J. Diffey, Emeritus Reader in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sussex where he taught from 1962 until his retirement in 2003. He was editor of The British Journal of Aesthetics from 1977 to 1994 and is author of Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” (1985). He has published numerous articles in aesthetics, some of which were collected in his book The Republic of Art and Other Essays (1991). Robert Frederick was Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. He was also Research Scholar at the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley and editor of the Center’s journal Business and Society Review. He is the author of The Philosophy of Right and Left (1991) and co-editor (with Michael Hoffman, 2014) of  Business Ethics: Readings and Cases in Corporate Morality. Frederick and Hoffman were also editors of the series Foundations of Business Ethics. Stan Godlovitch was a Professor at the Department of Human and Leisure Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities Section, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand. He is well-known for his writings in philosophical and environmental aesthetics.

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John Hospers, an American philosopher and political activist, was interested in Objectivism. He conducted research, wrote, and taught in the areas of philosophy, including aesthetics and ethics. He taught philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Brooklyn College, California State College Los Angeles (1966–1968), and the University of Southern California, where for many years he was chairman of the philosophy department and Professor Emeritus. He is famous for his writings in philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics. T. R. Martland, former Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York, Albany, New York, USA. A well-known scholar of aesthetics, he was a regular contributor to the journals such as the Anglican Theological Review, American Philosophical Quarterly, the British Journal of Aesthetics, and the like. Harold Osborne, former President of the British Society of Aesthetics and a founding editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. Known for his extensive work in aesthetics, he was a leading authority in modern art history. He edited many books on aesthetics and art, including The Oxford Companion to Art (1970) and The Oxford Companion to the Decorative Arts (1975). Ronald E. Roblin, former Professor of Philosophy and Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy at State University College at Buffalo. He has published in such magazines as the Journal of Thought, International Studies in Philosophy, and the Philosophy and Phenomenological Review. Stephanie A. Ross, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri–St. Louis, USA. Most of her research focusses on issues in the philosophy of art. In addition to a book on garden aesthetics, What Gardens Mean (1998), she has published articles on a range of topics, including allusion, modern music, women and fiction, musical conducting, the death of art, landscape appreciation, and aesthetic qualities. She has also contributed invited encyclopedia entries and handbook articles on such topics as expression, the picturesque, and artistic style. P. S. Sastri, former Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Nagpur, and former Professor of English at the University of Saugor, Madhya Pradesh, India. He obtained degrees in English, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Philosophy; a Ph.D. in Rigveda, aesthetics, and Coleridge, and D. Litt. in Indian Philosophy. He has authored nearly 60 books on literature, Philosophy, English, and Telegu. Göran Sörbom, Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. His main interest has been in classical studies, and he x

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has written a number of papers concerned with aspects of the theory of mimesis and the Greek art revolution. He has also written on the theory of value and art reviewing as an important section of the art world. In 1983, he organized a meeting which resulted in the foundation of the Scandinavian Society of Aesthetics. He was the chairman of the Society during its first 16 years. The Society edits Nordisk estetisk tidskrift (the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics). Milton Snoeyenbos, former Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University, Atlanta. He has been a regular contributor to the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, Metaphilosophy, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and the like. A. C. Sukla, founding editor of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. He specialized in comparative aesthetics (Sanskrit and Western), literary theory, philosophy of art, philosophy of literature, religion, mythology, and cultural studies. He was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Sambalpur University, Odisha, India. He had been a Visiting Professor to the Universities of Liverpool, Cambridge, Cardiff, Lampeter, Uppsala, Siena, Helsinki, and several Indian Universities. He wrote extensively in the areas of comparative aesthetics (Sanskrit and Western), philosophy of art, philosophy of literature, and literary theory. Gianni Vattimo, Italian philosopher and university Professor who served in the European Parliament. He has been a leading member both of the 1960s turn in continental philosophy to a relativistic view of religion, art, and sexual freedom and the espousal of postmodern secularism and anticapitalism. He has authored numerous books and journal articles in the areas of continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethics, and political philosophy. Wolfgang Welsch, a contemporary German philosopher and a leading figure of German-speaking, postmodernist theory and philosophical aesthetics. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany. He has authored a number of books and articles in philosophical aesthetics and postmodernist theory. His writings have been translated into various languages.

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INTRODUCTION

It is the power of perception that distinguishes humans from the rest of the creatures on this planet. Most of the creatures are born with basic some sensory organs, and a majority of them surpass humans in certain sensory powers, but humans developed the power of discretion while using senses and being driven by them. It goes without saying that discretion, like the whole lot of distinctions attained by humans, owes its existence to the linguistic competence of humans that enabled us to understand the inherent beauty present around us. Senses command most of our activities; it, however, is true that the ability to practice restrain over senses allows us to be graded as sane, insane, sage, or demon. Though taste and beauty may seem to be inseparably tangled at certain points, they deal with two different faculties of senses. The taste receptors work more closely with olfactory receptors than the photo or auditory receptors which are primarily responsible for aesthetic perception. Bharata Muni uses the analogy of relishing a tasty food to explain the relish of aesthetic pleasure, but the enjoyment derived from these two activities cannot be equated, as they vary in degree. Therefore, Bharata does not put the two on the same pedestal. However, this comparison of taste can be understood in a graded manner. Bharata uses this analogy to explain the mixing of ingredients for obtaining the taste in these two activities, but the enjoyment that emerges out of tasting a succulent dish and viewing an aesthetically designed piece of performance has not been suggested to equal in degree. This analogy is capable of making an ordinary man understand the nature of rasāswāda (relishing aesthetic enjoyment), while aesthetic experience may not be that easily accessible to those who haven’t activated their photo and auditory receptors to the level of a ‘sahṛdaya’ or cultured man. If we go deeper into this theory of Rasa, we will find that rasāswāda is equated with the ‘Brahmānandasahodar’ (ultimate blissful state) as Viśvanātha says, which also is regarded as the highest goal per Indian philosophical understanding. The concept of civilization itself has inseparably been associated with the human’s competence of understanding and appreciating the idea of taste and beauty. In the East, as well as the West, understanding the nature and appreciation of beauty was attempted with the inception of philosophy and xii

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art but slightly in a vague way. In India, the formal beginning of the study of art and aesthetics is believed to have started with the composition of the Nāṭyaśāstra, but if we survey the history, we’ll find that Pāṇini, who wrote his Aṣṭādhyāyī in the fifth century B.C.E., makes mention of his predecessors Śilālin and Kṛśaśva who wrote Naṭasūtras, which are not available now. But even Naṭasūtras cannot be considered to be the advent of the study of art, as prosody was studied as one of the Vedāngas, and Nighanṭūs make mention of the usage of Upmā in the Ṛgveda. In the Western knowledge system, the formal discussion about the study of art and aesthetics starts with Plato. Here, a difference between the Indian and the Western approach to aesthetics can apparently be observed in terms of its emergence. The Western knowledge system from the very inception of this branch of knowledge sees the philosophers as the propounders and considers aesthetics a branch of philosophy. Passmore in this regard says, It is still left as a game for philosophers to play, unlike astronomy, biology, mathematics, economics, which have made discoveries, have developed systematic theories, and in that way have shaken themselves free from philosophy…. Perhaps there are conditions for independence which aesthetics has so far failed to fulfil. (1968:47)1 While the Indian tradition of knowledge from the beginning found it associated with the perception and appreciation of artistic beauty by a sahṛdaya spectator/audience/reader. However, appreciation of art and beauty has been inherent in the creative faculty of the human mind that keeps modifying the world to make it more and more beautiful within the limitations and expansions of its aesthetic sense. Philosophy of art is mostly seen as an associate of aesthetics, and, to some, it is synonymous. But there have been many scholars in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy of art who distinguish these two closely associated branches with a sharp division considering one to be connected with the critical understanding and appreciation of art, while the other is connected with sensory appreciation of an object of beauty. P. S. Sastri, in his essay titled “East and West in Coomaraswamy’s Theory of Art” (included in this volume as a chapter), citing the views of Coomaraswamy, says that he rejected the word “aesthetics”, which was coined by Baumgarten from the Greek. The original Greek word refers to the sensations which represent an organism’s reactions to the external world. Such reactions are also noticeable in the world of plants and animals. Since art is “an intellectual virtue”, Coomaraswamy refused to accept the expression “disinterested aesthetic contemplation”. As Plato said, “We cannot give the name of art to anything irrational”. Art is rational, and it is also a ritual in which the body, mind, heart, and soul are fully involved. “Art has to do with cognition”, as Aquinas has stated. xiii

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This collection is aimed at bringing some of the finest writings from the stalwarts in the areas of “aesthetics and the philosophy of art” to the fore for students and scholars across the world. The chapters featured in this volume were vetted thoroughly before their inclusion from the past issues of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics since 1978. The volume, on the one hand, offers a comparative perspective on Indian and Western approaches to aesthetics and on the other is intended to enable the reader to appreciate the similarities and differences between the conceptions of aesthetics and philosophy of art on a comparative scale, detailing various aspects of both. This volume also distinguishes itself from other volumes on a similar subject by showing the rich variety of work written by legends like Harold Osborne, the former president of British Society of Aesthetics and the founder editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics; John Hospers, an American philosopher and political activist; Charles Altieri, Rachel Stageberg Anderson Professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Wolfgang Welsch, a German philosopher; and the like, and therefore, the chapters will have a special appeal to the readers. The books on a similar subject that are already published do not attend to the issues addressed here. Most of the books in this area either talk about aesthetics or discuss the philosophy of art but not both in the same volume, while both concepts are very much entangled with each other and can better be understood in relation to each other. Wolfgang Welsch, in his chapter, cites Arthur Danto to show the shift from the traditional notion of aesthetics to art criticism. He says that Danto’s suggestion “to shift from aesthetics to art criticism doesn’t question the traditional frame: we should still talk about art (and perhaps solely about art). But Danto refutes the traditional understanding as to how this frame is to be filled. Traditionally, the goal of aesthetics was to establish the proper concept of art – its universal and everlasting concept. Hence aesthetics could be  – and was even supposed to be – explicated without considering individual works of art or historically different types of art”.2 He further cites Schelling and says that Schelling expressed the similar notion “when he declared that a philosophy of art had to treat only ‘art as such’ and ‘in no way empirical art’ – his own philosophy of art representing, as he continues, ‘a mere repetition’ of his ‘system of philosophy’, this time with respect to art, just as in – the next instance with respect to nature or society”.3 This volume is a first of its kind, which is hoped to stand apart and attract readers by virtue of the quality and antiquity of the chapters. Books such as Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics by Gordan Graham and David Boersema’s Philosophy of Art: Aesthetic Theory and Practice introduce the fundamentals of art, aesthetics, and art philosophy and throw light on how they apply to modern work. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, an anthology edited by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen is another book in this area of study, but it focusses more on the contributions of the analytic tradition to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Furthermore, these books do not talk about Indian xiv

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aesthetics at all while the current volume comprehensively addresses this issue. The current volume gathers its strength mainly from the variety of chapters it contains. The chapters range from introductory discourse to advance research in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy of art. It, further, facilitates the readers’ understanding by providing them a comparative perspective. Another strong aspect of this volume is linked to its contributors who are stalwarts of this area of study. Even their names would attract the readers towards this volume. The book comprises two sections. The first section titled “Aesthetics and Aesthetic Perception” contains chapters relating to the idea of aesthetic perception and experience, offering a comparative perspective to the reader by providing access to the views of the scholars of Indian and Western traditions on a similar issue and further offering the reader an opportunity to compare and understand the writings of stalwarts on both concepts. The first chapter in the first section begins with an answer to the question “What is aesthetics?” and goes beyond by bringing into discussion the contemporary relevance of aesthetics. This chapter is by Wolfgang Welsch, a German philosopher. He, in this chapter, elaborates on the concept of aesthetics deliberating on the rigid and closed-ended overview of aesthetics and attempts to contest it while making an attempt at understanding the field of aesthetics by looking at various dictionary definitions. Further, the author presents certain presuppositions about aesthetics, focussing on an approach of going beyond tradition. The chapter then is divided into two parts. The first part talks of the globalized aestheticization, where the discussion is about the aesthetics becoming banal in the global world where it is drawn from everyday practices to fashion. This part also throws light on the impact of both traditional and contemporary aesthetics. In the second part, the author deliberates on important aspects of aesthetics and discusses art and experience in relation to various media outlets, talking about the reshaping of reality, lost linearity, and the fundamental remodelling of our senses with the emergence of media. The chapter, in the first half of the second part, addresses the issue of conceptual clarity and its resemblances and linkages drawing from various thinkers, especially Wittgenstein. The author here talks about the expression of aesthetics, proposing two ideas which include coherence and comprehensive aesthetics. In the second half of part two, the author delves deep into the interdisciplinary readings and its advantages and provides some critical insights into arts with reference to the world and everyday perception. Lastly, the chapter looks at the understanding of aesthetics as an inter-, cross-, and trans-disciplinary project. The chapter advocates for such an inclusive understanding of aesthetics as would allow aesthetics to include diverse rationalities in practice. The second chapter in the volume discusses the faculty of perception for aesthetic engrossment, showing concern for people’s use of emotional and cognitive awareness to judge a work of art rather than analytical or discursive understanding. In this chapter, the author, Harold Osborne argues that, xv

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generally, the human mind functions when it has value attached to cultural value, importance, and meaning, and when an individual is denied the impetus to develop his personality, then that civilized society falls ill, and the individual experiences frustration, what Sartre called “nausea” and Kierkegaard and Camus called “alienation”. In practical life, our predominant habits are dictated by the need to utilize perception as the main source of information about a world of things which are subject to our manipulation and to which we respond. Therefore, in everyday life, perception is emasculated, which impinges upon our aesthetic awareness. The chapter deliberates that the elementary aesthetic stance is capable of development along two distinct paths, which are the refinement of discriminatory acuteness (sensibility) and the enlargement of synoptic apprehension. It says that a work of art is judged to be successful aesthetically to the degree that it fulfils this function of extending and satisfying perception. The satisfaction and the joy which we experience is no recondite sensory pleasure but the satisfaction experienced in the exercise of a skilled faculty for its own sake. This is why we can properly speak of aesthetic satisfaction as cultural values, and this is why they carry an accrual of spiritual vitality. It so argues, at the end, that in cultivating the perceptive skills required for the appreciation of the arts, one of the most difficult tasks is to accustom oneself to perceive precisely and exactly what is there, and hence, it is the apprehension of a richly practical implication that extends the perceptual faculty, which is the hallmark of aesthetic activity. In the third chapter, V. K. Chari intends to problematize the essence of an aesthetic experience and deliberates on the idea that an aesthetic experience accompanied by the aesthetic object that generates it is not easy to define. The aesthetic object, however, is of utmost importance because not all objects can be put under the umbrella term “aesthetic object”. The chapter discusses that in an age of electronic waste and scrap art, it is enormously tedious to identify an aesthetic object and give it the seal of recognition of an artwork. With the problem of the aesthetic object comes the problem of perception. The chapter talks about the kind of perception or the qualities of the percipient, inherent to understand the essence of an aesthetic object, and the awareness of the percipient without which an aesthetic object can go unnoticed. The author, using Michael Mitias’s and Monroe Beardsley’s arguments, tries to differentiate between a work of art and an aesthetic object while also dealing with the epistemological and ontological aspects of aesthetics. Further, this chapter aptly justifies the subtitle of the volume, “Comparative Perspective” by bringing in elements from Indian aesthetics, specifically Abhinavagupta’s commentary on Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra to compare it with the relevant Western theoretical concepts propounded by eminent philosophers like Beardsley. The author begs to differ both from Beardsley and Abhinavagupta in his understanding of the aesthetic experience while using them to construct his understanding of the subject and thereby using their frameworks to support his argument. The chapter works xvi

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on a dense philosophical piece that on the whole is successful in giving a holistic idea about the essence of an/the aesthetic experience. The fourth chapter in the volume starts with the discussion on the nature of aesthetic experience towards understanding what aesthetics is and, thus, to bring to light the inherent nature of such experience. In determining the specialness of aesthetic qualities, Stephanie A. Ross brings about the views of many other writers regarding the aesthetic quality with a critical approach in mind and opts for a realistic approach to it. The chapter extends the sphere of aesthetics/aesthetic qualities to other aspects like natural scenes, aspects of daily life, etc., rather than confining it to mere works of art (which earlier had been the tradition). It comes out that the specialness of aesthetic qualities actually lies in the way in which the qualities interact with one another; accordingly, the properties that make something special and their base properties go together, creating an integrated view. Therefore, there does not exist a particular thing that can be termed the aesthetic hallmark. What makes an experience an aesthetic one, what lends this specialness, what adds to its value comprises all – the base properties, aesthetic qualities, perceptual, intellectual, emotional experience, etc. The chapter also discusses the value of art in the light of a critical analysis of writers like Malcolm Budd, Alan Goldman, etc. On the whole, the chapter treats the notions of aesthetic quality and aesthetic experience and tries to dissolve the complexity by interconnecting the notions which come into being in our treatment of a work of art. The fifth chapter in the book is another writing that offers a rich discourse on a comparative scale. Here, T. R. Martland, keeping in view both Indian and Western traditions and adopting an inclusive approach, goes along the line of aesthetic theory. He notes that while the Indian approach has been that of a dissatisfied party trying to undo the loss, the West has been observational and analytical about the loss. The chapter talks about the effect of the Greek scholar Aristotle on Western empiricism and about how Aristotle made close empirical observations while also discovering expressions of universal truths transcending the empirical data. It delves into the discussion of the exploration of parallels between human society and the “society” of bees by Aristotle and his successors. It ponders over the shift that was recorded from Aristotle’s approach of observational empiricism to his successors catering to allegorical generalizations. The chapter deliberates how this latter theme remained constant from Virgil onwards till Petrarch restored the Aristotelian balance as he regained the lost empirical mode of looking, on levels both practical and theoretical. The emphasis was re-shifted from universal allegory to find the dissimilarities. Such insight was further emboldened by the likes of Bacon, rooting for a mix of the experimental and the rational faculties. Pondering along those lines, the chapter finally talks about the recognition of an act, such as lila (playful) creativity, and explains that the Indian theory is about keeping the outer expressions in harmony with the inner primordial unity. It creates a disengagement between the meaning xvii

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of Shiva’s dance and how he understands it for himself, but the Western speculation supports Shiva when he dances playfully, aiming for destroying the primordial structures and creating a new world. Stan Godlovitch, in the sixth chapter of the book, takes into consideration the nature of an aesthetic experience and discusses the attitude theory. The main contention here is to try to explain why there appears to be no compelling way of resolving any disagreement between its proponents and critics. It suggests that the acceptance or rejection of the attitude theory is more like the expression of an ideological nature about the aesthetic experience which remains outside the bounds of arbitration by argument. These aesthetic ideologies are bodies of beliefs about the nature of aesthetic experience which draw upon concerns that lie outside the domain of aesthetics proper, the four of which are discussed at length later in the chapter. These deal with the aesthetic view of aesthete’s, bourgeois’, critic’s, and democrat’s. The chapter argues that behind every theory purporting to capture the essence of aesthetic experience there lurks an aesthetic ideology which is based on the assumptions which are psychological or value-dependent rather than philosophical. What the ideologies do is underline one stubborn feature about the aesthetic; namely, different people experience and value the aesthetic in very different ways. Therefore, the chapter concludes, there are many ways of having an aesthetic experience and not one in particular. The seventh chapter is by T. J. Diffey, in which he deliberates on the essential differences between R. G. Collingwood’s theory of art, which is discussed in The Principles of Art (1938), and G. E. Moore’s idea of goodness in Principia Ethica (1903). The author juxtaposes Collingwood’s theory of art with Moore’s theory of goodness and brings out the strengths and fallacies of their arguments. The chapter gives a part-by-part analysis of the philosophical difference between aesthetics and ethics and not only compares the works of Moore and Collingwood but also critiques their individual stances and the philosophical systems they adhere to. The author brings out the faults, anomalies, and differences in opinion ingrained within both Moore and Collingwood. In addition to the consolidation of the respective authors’ arguments, the chapter analyzes the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Moore and Collingwood, writing three decades apart, have different views of aesthetics and its relationship to ethics. The chapter gives an account of Collingwood rejecting Moore’s idea of aesthetics as a “valuation of all the different forms of beauty”, whereas according to Moore, everything that is beautiful is essentially good, making good and beautiful coexist and almost interchangeable in Moore’s philosophical framework. However, Moore cannot give a precise definition of what he understands “goodness” to be and hence his argument of good and beautiful remains a vague idea unsupported by reasons. The chapter supports Collingwood’s arguments about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics by calling it more theoretically grounded, as Collingwood’s perception about the difference between good and bad art is systematic: a work of xviii

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art is bad when it fails to express “a given emotion”. Nevertheless, the author feels that Collingwood is guilty of the oversimplification of ideas, and his inability to separate psychology from aesthetics is something that Moore steers clear of. The chapter successfully manages to transcend the limit of a “comparative space” and gives a concise understanding of the ontological and epistemological perspectives of aesthetics and ethics. The concluding chapter of the first section is by Gianni Vattimo, which marks the transition in the book from the discussion on pure aesthetics to the discussion on the philosophy of art. This chapter discusses the contemporary challenges that art poses to philosophy and the way such a change/ challenge alters the schemata of philosophy. It further explains how the former Aristotelian knowledge of the totality of causes and principles has ceased to exist; it has been transformed into epistemology and methodology. The impasse of such a situation has also been deepened by the involvement of philosophy with aesthetics as propounded by Immanuel Kant. Aesthetics too, on the other hand, has lost its essence, becoming a sort of “epistemology or methodology of art and beauty.” The chapter gives a logical explanation to the disruption of epistemology in aesthetics and the way the avant-garde has been instrumental in challenging the “tranquil certainty of philosophical aesthetics”. It deliberates the manner in which the avantgarde movement in its different forms of Surrealism, Dadaism, and Cubism refused to accept the restrictive framework of philosophical aesthetics in exchange for the “experience of truth”. The chapter discusses the present crisis of philosophy, considering Dilthey’s view that philosophy has excluded its systematic framework and moved towards the “philosophy of life”. This shift or movement can be observed in the works of Schopenhauer, Ruskin, Emerson, etc., which influences the “interests of the new generation”. Heideggerian concepts are skilfully utilized in the chapter to deliberate upon the challenges faced by the systemic discipline of philosophy. The problems of philosophy and the challenges that it faces are laid out in the forms of interesting dialogic inquisitions. The second section of the book is titled “Art, Artefact, and the Philosophy of Art” and takes up the idea of the philosophy of art from different perspectives and discusses it in various contexts, including the idea of art and aesthetics, art and representation, art and morality, imitation and art, the idea of impersonality in art, and so on. This section discusses art and artwork in isolation and in relation to aesthetics. The first chapter in this section takes up the discussion on art from the classical time and understands it in the modern context on a comparative scale. Milton Snoeyenbos and Robert Frederick, the authors of this chapter, trace the similarities between the theories of Aristotle and Freud on the subjects of pleasure, imitation, and knowledge. This chapter discusses Aristotle’s theory of imitation as the basis of a work of art and discusses the view where for an unpleasant object, the pleasure comes through knowing and learning. The chapter then tries to look at Freud’s engagement with the idea of pleasure with xix

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respect to art and imitation, where Freud talks about repressed wishes in the unconscious that bring an unpleasantness and pain to the being. Here, in order to be relieved from the pain, one might turn to dreams, which bring a discharge of accumulated energy due to the repressed wish, and thus achieve pleasure but which is a disguised fulfilment, or to the artworks which are social in nature and generate manifest dreams but alongside also provide a forepleasure of the aesthetic kind, which he claims provides a much more gratification of repressed wishes. The chapter then deliberates what Freud calls a secondary system of wish fulfilment in which artworks work as a site of production of sympathetic interest in the common lot and hence are able to provide a “path back to reality”, along with a sustainable pleasure, as a reflection of reality. Thus the chapter establishes that Aristotle and Freud both share the view that art provides its (deepest and greatest) pleasure through imitation. On that note, the discussion moves to a comparison of Aristotle’s and Freud’s views on tragedy. The chapter finally establishes various points of similarities in the accounts of art and imitation in the theories of the psychoanalyst and the philosopher. In the tenth chapter in the book, John Hospers discusses the relation of art to morality in relation to how they affect each other and the person they happen to interact with. It starts with a discussion of the moralist conception of art where art at its best remains an elude from or an interlude to life’s serious business and at its worst a menace to the society, as it does away with morality. It discusses the views of Plato and Tolstoy who advocated such a conception of art. The chapter discusses another polarized view of art – aestheticism – in which art is above all the other things of significance and nothing is allowed to interfere with its freedom to express. It then explains a possible mixed space and position where none of the two – art and morality – remain subservient to each other and are always seen functioning as dependent on each other. The discussion proceeds to Aristotle’s idea of “catharsis” and its relevance while arguing that artworks allow a release from the elements of destruction that humans keep building within. The chapter also argues that to confront or ignore the depressing modern scene and lifestyle, one might need art at the level of consciousness. The chapter finally focusses the discussion on the clash of moral and artistic values, taking its cue from various events of censorship, major and minor. It argues that no subject is worthy of censorship if it is taken in the way the artist intends it to be – the “right way” – while also making a case that artwork has aesthetic powers that makes it immune to adverse moral effects and effectively tends to paralyze “immoral” tendencies. In the end, the chapter talks about the value of truth and freedom through art while insisting that even the ideas that are called false or improper can be only established as such when they are allowed to be discussed. The 11th chapter brings forth an analysis of the distinction between a  “work of art” and an “artefact” through the notion of artefactuality. Contrary to George Dickie’s claims that artefactuality is a defining xx

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condition of art, Ronald E. Roblin argues in this chapter that artefactuality is complex in nature and, therefore, neither necessary nor sufficient for certain groups of artworks and cannot be a defining characteristic of art, making the identification of artworks with artefacts open to question. The chapter first distinguishes between two important senses of the term “work of art”: the evaluative senses and the classificatory senses, where the former is to praise a work of art to ascribe artistic value to it and the latter is about classifying or identifying an object which is purported to have artistic value. As a rule, the notion of artefactuality has been tied to the idea of craft or technical skill, the existence of which presupposes the existence of an agent whose conscious activity is directed towards the production of an artefact. The chapter proposes four essential conditions that are required for the existence of craft and, therefore, for the production of artefacts. These are (1) the distinction between means and ends, (2) the distinction between planning and execution, (3) the distinction between raw material and finished product, and (4) the distinction between form and matter. Among these four, the first and the second conditions apply to craftsman, and the third and the fourth conditions apply to the object. Through analyses of these artworks, the author clarifies that artwork may be an artefact but that art is not per se artefactual, therefore denouncing the rationality of Dickie’s claim, and he believes that Dickie has confused the notion of a work of art. The chapter concludes that what distinguishes works of art from artefact, in general, is the creative dimension where an artefact can be mass-produced while an artwork cannot because mass production is the antithesis of creativity. Charles Altieri in the 12th chapter of this section critically analyzes the nuances of representativeness in a work of art and tries to understand the representativeness of art as a process within our cultural practices. The concern of the writer is why art as exemplification has so often been considered a means of instruction or vehicle of idealization. The writer, through the visual example of Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition: Red Square and Black Square”, gives a theoretical argument for treating the painting schematically without distorting Malevich’s intentions of trying to produce through painting a condition of non-objectivity where art captures a permanent condition of “spiritual” force. The author admits that the artwork must, to be an artwork, retain its control over the coordinates that generate its sense of sense. The chapter discusses the theory of representation, which uses the display function as a way of preserving the realm of meaning in the text. The provincial identification is possible with what the text displays or schematizes as meaning. The chapter argues that the representation can be a matter of representativeness – not a function of how signs project resemblance to the state of affairs but a surrogate inviting an audience to take it as something to be identified with by projecting a possible world. The author insists that it is necessary to resist the temptation to treat what art pictures as a description and the representation structure need not refer to the existing state of affairs. The display is thus free to apply to possible situations: the xxi

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work becomes an element of our grammar, not of our stock of truths. The author argues that work can be in dialectical engagements with precisely the tensions that Derrida articulates, but they do not need to deconstruct themselves, as they are conditions of possible identifications, concluding that the schema displayed in artworks functions simply as a rhetorical invitation. In the 13th chapter, Göran Sörbom argues about the theory of imitation that is mostly seen as the theory of art and can be better understood as the theory of pictorial representation. The chapter discusses the idea of “mental images” to understand the distinctive character of imitations, stating that the painting of a real house and an account of a real incident are imitations which might resemble actual images but are produced through mental images in the minds of beholders, readers, or listeners. These mental images as “sensual qualities of particulars” can occur as perceptions, illusions, hallucinations, memories, dreams, imaginations, and daydreams. Among all these qualities, perceptions stand apart because they stand true to the world and carry perceptual imprints, which are a kind of world stamp on the mind. The mental images are produced through “perceptual apparatus”, which is composed “out of elements the beholder sensed before” and is called imagination. The communication of these imaginations with the outward object is called imitation. The most important aspect of mental images, which this chapter deliberates upon at a considerable length, is the idea of similarity with mental image and imitation. It also discusses the distinctive views offered by Aristotle and Plato. For Aristotle, the imitations might be “instrumentally good and such that good and end in themselves”. For Plato, imitations cultivate certain habits, especially to behave rightly or wrongly and hence the activities like poetry and music are important to a man. In the last part, the chapter argues that the imitation has undergone certain changes over a period of time and the production of imitations is shaped by particular socio-cultural and socio-economic conditions at any given time. The 14th chapter uses a comparative perspective to look at different aspects of impersonality in art and attempts to locate various views drawing from Eliot’s observations to its Indian counterparts. A. C. Sukla compares T. S. Eliot’s opinion “the poet is as impersonal as the scientist and poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics” with the romantic view, which argues that a poet is inseparable from his personal emotions and creative expression or poetry. The chapter largely draws upon Eliot’s theory of impersonality and sees it in connection with art of varied types. The chapter further takes into discussion the views of Indian critics whose opinions stand in stark contrast to Eliot’s views while offering an elaborative discussion on aspects of Indian aesthetics. It talks about the views of Abhinavagupata, whose analysis on the poetic process further problematizes impersonality in art. In the other section, the author offers a comparative analysis of “rasa” in Indian aesthetics with Eliot’s “objective correlative”. This section also offers Eliot’s analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and discusses why such an analysis would conflict with Abhinavagupta’s xxii

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understanding of the subject. In the final section, the author brings two important arguments regarding impersonality in art: Firstly, he brings forth a view of Eliot that suggests “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry”; secondly, he argues that the search for impersonality in art might be a possibility in Vedic texts because they are “visioned by the sages, and not written by any one”. Finally, the author concludes that it is illogical to search for an absolute impersonality and while an honest critic need not look out for “biographical data of the poet”, his appreciation would be incomplete without the realization of the distinguished personal spirit of the poet. The concluding chapter on this section is by P. S. Sastri, which on a comparative scale analyzes Anand K. Coomaraswamy’s views on the theory of art propounded in his varied writings from the Eastern and Western perspectives. This chapter discusses the various stages in the history of a work of art traced by Coomaraswamy, showing the influence of Croce’s views on his analysis that somehow creates certain drawbacks in his propositions. Coomaraswamy, under the influence of Croce’s views, recognizes mere “intuition” of utmost importance, ignoring the significance of scholarship and practice that always was stressed by the Indian aestheticians in the origin of art but to his own credit considers the practice of art a form of Yoga. He believes that the purpose of Yoga is a mental concentration which puts an end to all distinction between the subject and the object of contemplation. This chapter further brings out a valid distinction between art and work of art, as per Coomaraswamy’s view, who opines that the thing made is a work of art, made by art but not itself art; the art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made. Art then is not the end of the artist’s work but remains in the artist. The chapter further discusses the language of art that, according to Coomaraswamy, is symbolic. The discussion here about art is more of a philosophic nature where the Hindu and Christian ways of understanding art and beauty are of primal significance. The comparative views discussed here show both interface and affinity. Coomaraswamy’s approach to an artist from whom he seeks spiritualism (śreyas) not hedonism (preyas) is closer to that of Hegel’s. The chapter, finally considering the views of Coomaraswamy, compares the art and aesthetics in the East and the West and shows with clarity the similarities and differences between the aesthetic experiences of the two traditions. Aesthetics has invariably been the same for people of all ages irrespective of cultural, religious, or geographical boundaries since the time they evolved as humans. Though philosophers have viewed it differently, it intrinsically remains the same. The current volume approaches the term “aesthetics” with an inclusive perspective that discusses thoroughly the views of philosophers on aesthetics as a critique of art and as a branch of study that is perceived much beyond it. The book includes the writings of the legendary scholars of both Indian and Western traditions that offer a comparative perspective on the idea of aesthetics and art criticism. Having surveyed all xxiii

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the chapters included in this volume, I can compile my understanding of aesthetics as critiquing fine art with a special attention to beauty. Here it becomes indispensable to refer to the Hegelian conception of fine art that is wider in scope and provides a much clearer explanation of the idea of fine art. Hegel considers architecture, music, poetry, sculpture, and painting to be fine art, as they alone have free beings. But it does not mean that the perspective of the book can be confined to my tentative definitional understanding of the term solely. It provides a much wider understanding of the idea of aesthetics where a trans-movement between the philosophy of beauty and the philosophy of art can simply be perceived. It includes the critique of aesthetic experience ranging from the enjoyment of ephemeral, sensuous pleasure to the state of Brahmānanda sahodar (ultimate blissful state) that is equated with sat, cit, ānanda (being, consciousness, bliss). I am deeply indebted to Prof. Anant Charan Sukla, the founding editor of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics for entrusting me with the responsibility of editing this volume. This volume would not have been possible if not for his guidance and encouragement. Sadly, Prof. Sukla passed away in September 2020. His demise came as a shock to the academic community and also to all the young scholars and students whom he mentored over the past years. This book is dedicated to him. I also take this opportunity to place on record my heartfelt thanks to Mr. Viraj Shukla who contacted me on behalf of Prof. Sukla and put me in touch with him. He has helped me immensely throughout the preparation of the manuscript and I owe him a great debt of gratitude. My sincere thanks are also due to Dr. Shashank Shekhar Sinha for his constant encouragement in bringing this volume out. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their crucial suggestions and recommended rearrangements that enriched the book immensely. Ms. Antara Ray Chaudhary and Ms. Anvitaa Bajaj from Routledge, and Ms. Saritha Srinivasan from SPi Global supervised the publication of this book and patiently guided me through the entire process. I acknowledge my deep gratitude to my teacher Prof. Bhavatosh IndraGuru for his motivation and guidance. I would also like to thank my colleagues Dr. V. Vamshi Krishna Reddy, and Dr. Rahul A. Sirohi for their critical advice and timely support. My research students Pankaj, Atul, Kashyapi and Srikanth have been of great help at various stages of the making of this book. Dr. Shraddha Singh deserves a mention here for reading the manuscript and raising valuable questions. I acknowledge here the support and warmth that I have received from my colleagues at IIT Tirupati.

Notes and References 1 Passmore, J. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana De Filosofía, 2(6), 1968, 47–70. Retrieved January 9, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40103912. 2 For more details, please see the first chapter in this book, “Aesthetics beyond Aesthetics: Regarding the Contemporary Relevance of the Aesthetic and Recharting the Field of Aesthetics” by Wolfgang Welsch. 3 Ibid.

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Section I AESTHETICS AND AESTHETIC PERCEPTION

1 AESTHETICS BEYOND AESTHETICS Regarding the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic and recharting the field of aesthetics* Wolfgang Welsch

Introduction: Outline of the problems The prevailing presupposition: Aesthetics as artistics What is aesthetics? The answer given by encyclopaedias is clear. The Academic American Encyclopaedia says, “Aesthetic is the branch of philosophy that aims to establish the general principles of art and beauty”.1 Correspondingly, the Italian Enciclopedia Filosophica declares, Estetica e la “disciplina filosophica che ha per oggetto la bellezza e l’arte”.2 The French Vocabulaire d’ Esthetique defines aesthetics as “etude reflexive du beau” and “philosophi et science de l’art”, respectively.3 And the German Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie says, “Das Wort ‘Asthetik’ hat sich als Titel des Zweiges der Philosophie eingeburget, in dem sie sich den Kunsten und dem Schonen […] zuwendet”.4 In short, aesthetics is artistics is an exploration of the concept of art with particular attention to beauty. What, then, could “aesthetics beyond aesthetics” – as advocated in the title of this chapter – be? In order to be meaningful, the expression “aesthetics beyond aesthetics” would have to point to something beyond this art-bound understanding of aesthetics, to something beyond artistics. But how could this – although being beyond the established sense of aesthetics – still be a kind of aesthetics? Does the term “aesthetics” lend itself to a trans-artistic meaning? Traditionally, this clearly is the case. “Aesthetics” goes back to the Greek word class aisthesis, aisthanesthai, and aisthetos – expressions which designate sensation and perception in general, prior to any artistic meaning. *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. XVIII, No. 1–2, 1995, pp. 1–23.

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Current usage is not restricted either in everyday language; we use the term “aesthetic” even more often outside than inside of the artistic sphere when speaking, for instance, of aesthetic behaviour or an aesthetic lifestyle, or of aesthetic peculiarities of media, or an increasing aestheticization of the world. The discipline “aesthetics”, however, traditionally didn’t thematize sensation and perception. It focused on art alone – and more on conceptual than sensuous problems of art. Mainstream contemporary aesthetics still does so. The academic discipline tends to restrict itself to artistics – no matter how uncertain the notion of art itself may have become in the meantime. Certainly, there have been exceptions and countertendencies to this dominant feature. Remember, for example, that Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the father of aesthetics – who created the term “aesthetics” in 1735, first lectured on the subject in 1742, and published the first book bearing the title Aesthetics in 1750 – conceived of aesthetics as a primarily cognitive discipline designed to improve our sensuous capacity for cognition. Among the scope of the new science – which he defined precisely as the “science of sensuous cognition”5 – he didn’t even mention the arts; he certainly used examples from the arts, especially from poetry, but only to illustrate what aesthetic perfection – as the perfection of sensuous knowledge – might be. Shortly thereafter, however, when between Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790, The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism around 1796 (an essay of unknown authorship), and Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, aesthetics started an unheard of career, leading it to the top of philosophy; aesthetics was understood exclusively as being the philosophy of the arts. And for centuries, this remained the dominant understanding of aesthetics started by philosophers as different as Hegel and Heidegger or Ingarden and Adorno. There was, to be sure, still a countertendency, reaching from Schiller’s shift from artistic at first to political and educational art and finally to the “art of life” (“Lebenskunst”) through to Marcuse’s idea of a new social sensibility or from Kierkegaard’s description of aesthetic existence and Nietzsche’s fundamentalization of aesthetic activity through to Dewey’s integration of art into life. But this countertendency didn’t actually change the design of the discipline. The artistic focus remained dominant, and to a certain extent, even these opposing tendencies shared the basic presumption of traditional aesthetics; they too understood art as being the very model of aesthetic practice and as paradigms for the shift to the trans-artistic understanding of aesthetics they advocated. Currently, the discipline still sticks to the artistic restriction. There may be many good reasons to turn to the recognition of an aesthetics beyond artistics, but in trying to foster this tendency for some years, I have in fact found much interest and support outside the discipline – from cultural institutions or theoreticians in other fields6 – but predominantly resistance within the discipline itself. One still assumes it goes without saying that aesthetics has to be artistics. One is still held captive by this traditional picture. And to continue this 4

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allusion to Wittgenstein, I am inclined to say, “And we cannot get outside it, for it lies in our discipline and this repeats it to us inexorably”.7 Overcoming the traditional presupposition The scope of this congress The present congress*, however, makes an attempt to escape from the aesthetics-artistics equation. The program is quite clear on this point. It suggests bridging “the gap between academic research and phenomena of the everyday world” and analyzing “how aesthetics itself, as a discipline […], is affected by this challenge”. It further suggests that “traditional criteria and models developed to explicate art or beauty are not necessarily adequate for explicating phenomena in the real world”, and it urges the placement of aesthetics “in a larger context” and reconsideration of the disciplinary design of aesthetics with particular emphasis on “interdisciplinary approaches”.8 Some progress, I think, has been made towards this goal during the last days. From aesthetics to art criticism Let me refer just to the initial step made by Arthur Danto. I take his opening presentation to represent an attack on the core of traditional aesthetics. Certainly, his suggestion to shift from aesthetics to art criticism doesn’t question the traditional frame: we should still talk about art (and perhaps solely about art). But Danto refutes the traditional understanding as to how this frame is to be filled. Traditionally, the goal of aesthetics was to establish the proper concept of art – its universal and everlasting concept. Hence aesthetics could be – and was even supposed to be – explicated without considering individual works of art or historically different types of art. Schelling, for example, frankly expressed this when he declared that a philosophy of art had to treat only “art as such” and “in no way empirical art”9 – his own philosophy of art representing, as he continues, “a mere repetition” of his “system of philosophy”, this time with respect to art, just as in the next instance with respect to nature or society.10 However inappropriate this strategy may appear to us today – and mostly appeared to artists (Musil, for example, decided such aesthetics as the attempt to find the universal brick fitting each work of art and being suitable for the whole building of aesthetics11) – Schelling indeed expressed a basic belief of traditional aesthetics: that there is such a thing as an essential and universal concept of art and that establishing this concept would constitute and fulfil the task of aesthetics. This was the immanent reason why aesthetics apparently didn’t have to closely consider singular works of art but make do with just some initial knowledge of some works of art,12 taking these as a starting point for the development of aesthetics’ intuition of the concept of art in general. 5

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Of course, this traditional strategy is untenable.13 The practice of art doesn’t consist of exemplifying a universal notion of art but involves the creation of new versions and concepts of art. And the new concept certainly has some aspects in common with the concepts formerly dominant but definitely differs from it in other, no less important, aspects. This is obvious in every shift from one style or paradigm to another. Hence paradigms are connected by some overlaps from one concept to the next – by “family resemblances” – but not by a universal feature applicable to all of them or constituting an essential core of all works of art. There is no such thing as an essence of art. So the traditional approach is basically mistaken. It is based on a misunderstanding of the conceptual status of art – with this misunderstanding even constituting the very core of traditional aesthetics. In this sense, insight into the genesis of different concepts of art through art itself and into their family resemblance – instead of a supposed essential unity – reveals the fundamental flaw of traditional, globalizing aesthetics and requires the shift to a different, pluralistic type of aesthetics. I would like to take this to be the crucial argument which refutes traditional aesthetics and which justifies and even requires, the shift from aesthetics, for example, to art criticism, as advocated by Prof. Danto. Towards a broader design of the discipline But the reorganization of aesthetics which we currently have to consider might reach even further. Thus far, I have only discussed the paradigm shift due within the classical frame of aesthetics, within artistics. We can’t be held captive any longer by art’s essentialistic picture. But it might be time to get rid of the traditional frame itself – to no longer be held captive by the equation of aesthetics and artistics. The inner pluralization of artistics – the shift from a mono-conceptual analysis of art to poly-conceptual art criticism – might have to be supplemented by an outer pluralization of aesthetics – by an opening up of the field of the discipline to trans-artistic questions. This is what I will advocate in this chapter. In the first part, I will try to develop the main topics of an aesthetics beyond aesthetics. In the second part, I will try to clarify its conceptual admissibility and suggest how to rechart the territory of aesthetics. I will advocate aesthetics’ opening out beyond art and the development of a cross-disciplinary structure of the discipline. This structure, of course, still includes questions of art but now encompasses trans-artistic questions as well. And this, as we shall see, is important for the analysis of art itself. Art can more adequately be dealt with in the perspective of an aesthetics which is not restricted to the analysis of art alone.

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Some main themes and the relevance of an aesthetics beyond aesthetics There are, generally speaking, two groups of reasons for a broadening of aesthetics: The first refers to the contemporary fashioning of reality, the second to the contemporary understanding of reality.14 Aesthetic fashioning of reality – embellishment Globalized aestheticization Today, we are living amidst an aestheticization of the real world formerly unheard of.15 Embellishment and styling are to be found everywhere. They extend from the individuals’ appearance to the urban and public sphere and from economy through to ecology. The individuals are undergoing a comprehensive styling of body, soul, and behaviour. In beauty salons and fitness centres, they pursue the aesthetic perfection of their bodies; in meditation courses and New Age seminars, they practice the aestheticization of their souls; and etiquette-training equips them for aesthetically desirable behaviour. The homo aestheticus has become the new role model. In urban areas, at least in the rich Western societies, nearly everything has been subjected to a facelift over the last years. Take shopping malls as an example. The economy, too, largely profits from the consumers’ tendency not to actually acquire an article but rather to buy oneself, by its means, into the aesthetic lifestyle to which advertising strategies have linked the article. Even ecology, often considered to be economy’s opponent, is in aesthetic regards its partner. It favours a styling of the environment corresponding to aesthetic ideas like beauty or complexity. If rich industrial societies were able to do completely as they wish, they would transform the human, urban, industrial, and natural environment in toto into a hyperaesthetic scenario.16 Genetic engineering, which links ecological and individual styling, is another case in point. You know how much this technology is going to be used in order to adjust all kinds of life according to our wishes; it is also capable of providing just the type of children we want, according to our aesthetic expectations – and genetic technology is largely guided by aesthetic patterns. It’s a kind of genetic cosmetic surgery. We people of today, thrown into the world as we are, have great trouble attaining the ideal of homo aestheticus; future generations, however, should have it easier straight away: genetic engineering, this new branch of aestheticization, will have come to their aid ahead of them. There is certainly no need to expand further on these tendencies towards embellishment and a globalized aestheticization – the phenomena are all too obvious. Let me instead consider the relevance of these developments for aesthetics.

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These phenomena do not actually constitute new domains of the aesthetic. Aesthetic orientation and activity have always borne upon the real world, however little the discipline of aesthetics may have taken this into account. What’s new today is the extent and the rank of such aestheticizing activities. Aestheticization is becoming a global and primary strategy. The impact on contemporary aesthetics This tendency must, I think, influence contemporary as well as traditional aesthetics. The impact on contemporary aesthetics consists in making the reflexion on these phenomena obligatory, as they represent not only an expansion of the aesthetic but at the same time alter the arrangement and estimation of the aesthetic. Hence aesthetics – as the reflective authority of the aesthetic – today must also analyze the state of the aesthetic in fields such as the living environment and politics, economy and ecology, ethics, and science. It must, in short, take the new states of the aesthetics into account. This in no way means that the current globalization and fundamentalization of the aesthetic is simply to be sanctioned; rather, it belongs to the agenda for sufficient aesthetic diagnosis and critique today.17 The relation to traditional aesthetics The impact on traditional aesthetics becomes evident when we ask whether tradition has ever advocated a globalization of the aesthetic. It clearly has. Some prominent aesthetic programs of the past have definitively envisaged a globalized aestheticization, which they even expected to guarantee the final accomplishment of all our tasks on earth and the definitive happiness of mankind. Remember, for example, how the Oldest System-Program of German Idealism anticipated that the mediating power of the aesthetic, bringing together the rational and the sensuous, would make “the enlightened and the unenlightened […] join hands” so that “eternal unity reigns among us”, this being “the last, the greatest work of mankind”. Or consider how mediators of aesthetic ideas like the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, Werkbund and Bauhaus – mediators insofar as they tried to realize aesthetic values advocated by aesthetics in the everyday world – were convinced that globalized aestheticization “would altogether improve our world. In this way, old aesthetic dreams are being realized in the present aestheticization. But the irritating fact – which requires explanation – is that the results are quite different from the original expectations. They are – to say the least – disappointing. What was meant to endow our world with beauty ends up in mere prettiness and, finally, generates indifference or even disgust  – at least among aesthetically sensitive people. In any case, nobody would dare to call the present aestheticization an accomplishment. Something must be wrong with this realization of old aesthetic dreams. Either this realization misapplies the old programs or these venerable and 8

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beloved programs themselves must have contained a flaw, which has remained hidden so far and which is now being revealed. Sometimes realizations – even partial ones – can be revealing. This, I suppose, is the case with the current aestheticization. Some flaws in globalized aestheticization So, what are the reasons for the disappointment in the present aestheticization? What are the critical points to be raised by an aesthetic reflexion on these processes? Let me mention three points. First: Fashioning everything as beautiful compromises the quality of the beautiful. Ubiquitous beauty loses its distinctive character and turns into mere prettiness or becomes simply meaningless. You can’t make what’s exceptional a standard without changing its quality. Second: The strategy of globalized aestheticization dialectically falls victim to itself. It ends up in anaestheticization. The globalized aesthetic is experienced as annoying and even as terror. Aesthetic indifference then becomes a sensible and almost inevitable attitude to escape from the importunity of the ubiquitous aesthetic. Anaestheticization – that we refuse even to perceive the divinely embellished environment – becomes a survival strategy.18 Third: What arises instead is a desire for the non-aesthetic – a desire for interruptions, breaks, and the axing of embellishment If there were a task for art in public space today, it would consist not in introducing ever-more beauty into an already over-embellished environment but precisely in stopping, in interrupting this aestheticization machinery by creating aesthetic fallow areas and deserts in the midst of the hyperaesthetic.19 20 Repercussions for traditional aesthetics These critical experiences with the contemporary realization of the old aesthetic dreams of embellishing the world must in turn influence our assessment of traditional aesthetics. Aesthetics used to praise beauty and embellishment and believed to have good reasons for this. But it never considered the consequences of the globalized embellishment which it advocated and which we are experiencing today. It never seemed even conceivable for traditional aesthetics that globalized embellishment might disfigure the world – instead of consummating, or even redeeming, it. Moreover, traditional aesthetics’ praise of beauty has provided effective support for the current processes of aestheticization. And its passion for beauty prevented people from considering the negative effects of aestheticization, even after they had become obvious. The driving, legitimating, and heroizing power of traditional aesthetics is at least partly responsible for the modern tendency towards aestheticization, as well as for the blindness towards its counter-effects. 9

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Hence triple criticism of traditional aesthetics applies. First: The simple praise of beauty calls for criticism. Either by distinguishing between lesser and greater beauty – the former being indeed so close to mere prettiness that it could be envisaged as common to both “the enlightened and the unenlightened” and be put into practice by the current strategies of embellishment, with only the latter being an exceptional and moving phenomenon – the one which Rilke called the beginning of what’s frightening or by considering that beauty is a value only in opposition to standard nonbeauty, losing its distinctiveness, however, by its very propagation. Second: One of the flaws of traditional aesthetics was to promote beauty alone (or predominantly), and to neglect other aesthetic values or, in other words, to forget its own discovery that variatio delectat – and not a single aesthetic quality alone. This mistake becomes painfully clear through the present embellishment. Aesthetic – possibly the proper discipline of plurality – had turned monistic and failed to recognize that homogenization is – in aesthetic regards too – systematically wrong. Third: The efficacy of traditional aesthetics in the household of our cultural beliefs and desires, which seems to go without saying, needs to be called into question. It is a task of current aesthetics to point out the mistakes in traditional aesthetic concepts vis-á-vis their contemporary realization. Aesthetics has every ground to become critical of itself. To sum up this point: The current aestheticization not only presents new problems and tasks for contemporary aesthetics but also has critical repercussions for traditional aesthetics — this being partly responsible and broadly supportive of flaws in the current aestheticization processes. Therefore, the phenomena of aesthetics beyond aesthetics concern not only those who are willing to broaden the range of aesthetics but also are likewise an obligatory and revealing issue for those who still adhere to aesthetics’ conventional frame. There is no way of ignoring the aesthetics outside of aesthetics if you want to develop a valid version of aesthetics inside aesthetics today. Aesthetic comprehension of reality A second group of arguments in favour of the turn to an aesthetics beyond aesthetics refers to the current comprehension of reality. This has, I will argue, become more and more aesthetic. There is an obvious predominance of image and aesthetic features today not only in the current shaping of reality but also in the current mediation of reality. It stretches from the meditation of single objects or subjects and the meditation of our daily news to our basic understanding of reality. Think of the pictorial dominance in advertisement and in the self-presentation of companies or of your own photographic appearance on the World Wide Web. Consider how the pictorial requirements of television not only select what might count as news but also recently influence the presentation of news outside television in the print media. And, finally, consider the change 10

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in our comprehension of reality. In earlier times, to count as being real, things had to be calculable; today, they have to be aesthetically presentable. Aesthetics has become the new currency in the reality trade. Again, I don’t want to look at these phenomena in too much detail. They are all too familiar and have often been analyzed. Instead, I want to consider the impact of these developments on aesthetics and to point out some of the new tasks of aesthetics in the face of these developments. For reasons of time, I concentrate on just one point – on what I call the derealization of reality – and two of its consequences: the reconfiguration of aisthesis and the revalidation of experiences outside the electronic media. Derealization of reality By “derealization of reality”, I mean the fact that reality – as nowadays is primarily mediated by television – is deeply affected by this type of mediation.21 Reality tends to lose its weight, to shift from compulsoriness; it undergoes a strange and momentous kind of levitation. This is largely due to peculiarities of media aesthetics. These generally favour weightlessness and the free mobility of bodies and images. Think of the trailers for television programs. Everything is subject to possible manipulation, and within this media “manipulation”, there is no longer a normative but just a descriptive term. Whatever enters television enters a realm of transformability instead of constancy. If there is a “lightness of being” anywhere, then it is in the electronic realm. Furthermore, we not only know and see that everything is manipulable, but we also have knowledge of factual manipulations. Remember the Gulf War reports which sometimes showed technological fakes and never showed victims. Or consider our knowledge about pixel technology. You never know whether you are witnessing the real thing or a fake, and this, of course, affects our belief in the alleged reality. Well, “what you see is what you get”, but you won’t get what you shouldn’t see, and you can never be sure whether the gift is reality’s or just the channel’s. Experiences of this kind, first of all, engender a weakening of our belief in media reality. The difference between the representation and the simulation of reality becomes less and less evident and tends to lose its relevance. Accordingly, the media increasingly present their pictures in modes of virtuality and playfulness.22 23 All this, however, doesn’t make us turn away from the media. Despite being aware that the images may be fakes, we nevertheless stay tuned. We obviously prefer the consequence of changing our comprehension of reality and follow the road of derealization. Secondly, this attitude towards media reality extends more and more to ordinary reality too, with this being increasingly presented, shaped, and perceived according to media’s features. With television being the main bestower and the role model for reality, derealization spreads everywhere. 11

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Reality loses its impressiveness, and gravity tends towards levitation and becomes less obligating. Already the importunity of media’s presentation of reality obviously doesn’t create affection anymore but rather its opposite: indifference. Seeing the same images – however impressively they may be arranged or intended to be – on different channels the same evening or repeatedly during a couple of days reduces their impact. Sensationalism plus repetition creates indifference. Hence our attitude towards reality – inside and outside of the media – becomes more and more as if it were a simulation altogether.24 We don’t take reality to be all that real anymore. And amidst this suspension of realness, we behave, judge, and act quite differently. Our behavioural patterns are becoming simulative and interchangeable. Many of the embracing phenomena in today’s daily life are related to this ongoing softening of our comprehension of reality – but so is some progress in liberty, I would argue. Reflexion on these processes – as they are engendered by peculiarities of media aesthetics – is an obligatory theme for a contemporary aesthetics which doesn’t want to ignore, but actually take into account, the present state and the relevance of the aesthetic. Reconfiguration of “aisthesis” Let me turn to the next point, the reconfiguration of aisthesis. One interesting consequence of the current media dominance is a questioning of the primacy of vision, which has characterized occidental culture since the Greeks and is culminating in the television age. Today’s critique of this ­ocular-centrism is due to other reasons too, but the experience of media is a prominent factor in it. Vision was traditionally favoured for its hallmarks of distance, precision, and universality; for its capacity for determination; and for its close link with cognition. From Heraclitus via Leonardo da Vinci to Merleau-Ponty, vision was considered our most excellent and noble sense. But meanwhile, the features underlying this privilege – dominative features of perception and cognition – have been questioned by philosophers like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, or Derrida and by the feminist critique (think of Irigaray). And presently, we are experiencing that vision is in fact no longer the reliable sense for contact with reality that it once was taken to be – not in a world indemonstrable physics and no longer in the world of media. At the same time, other senses have met with intensified interest (paralleled by the suspicion that the traditional primacy of vision might have done them injustice). Hearing, for example, is being appreciated more and more for its – anti-metaphysical – proximity to momentariness instead of permanent being, for its essentially social character – in contrast to the individualistic feature of vision – and for its being linked to emotional experience and feeling – in opposition to the emotionless mastery of phenomena by vision.

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Touch, too, has found its advocates, both due to new development in media technology as analyzed by Marshall McLuhan and Derick de Kerckhove25 and to its highly bodily character – this again in contrast to the “pure”, uninvolved character of vision. What has been taking place more and more ever since is a breakdown of the traditional hierarchy of the senses – with vision on top, followed by hearing through to smell – and a recognization of the sensuous realm which no longer shows a definite hierarchy but tends either to an equitable assessment of the senses or – what I would prefer – to different purposerelated hierarchical sets. With regard to this rearrangement of aisthesis, we are living through an eminent change in cultural features and demands. Aesthetics – as the reflective discipline of the aesthetic realm – should consider the new states of aisthesis and their connection with the change in cultural patterns. By analyzing these transformations, it could possibly also help us to enhance these processes in an appropriate way. Here lies one of aesthetics’ proper contemporary tasks, which also offers the chance to move from being a rather dusty old discipline to being an interesting area of discussion and contemporary analysis. Revalidation of non-electronic experiences Another consequence of media experience and the derealization tendency consists of a revalidation of experiences outside electronic media. The general feature is the following: In contrast to the peculiarities of media reality (or media derealization), we begin to turn to a new appreciation of nonelectronic reality and experience, putting particular emphasis on those characteristics which are inimitable and unsubstitutable by media experience. The highly developed electronic world doesn’t simply overcome or absorb traditional forms of experiences – as some media freaks claim – it also gives rise to a new evaluation of their peculiarities. What is taking place today is a complimentary revalidation of ordinary experience in contrast to media experience. This, to my knowledge, hasn’t been sufficiently recognized in the discussions of recent years. In contrast to universal mobility and changeability in the media world, we are to value anew resistability and unchangeability, the persistence of the concerts as opposed to the free play information, and the massivity of matter as opposed to the levitation of imagery. In contrast to arbitrary repeatability, uniqueness gains values afresh. The electronic omnipresence awakens the yearning for another presence, for the unrepeatable presence of hic et nunc, for the singular event. As opposed to the mutual social electronic imaginary, we are again learning to value our own imagination, unavailable to others. And the body possesses a sovereignty and intransigence of its own. Think of Nadolny’s “Discovery of Slowness”26 or of Handke’s “Essay on Weariness”.27 Altogether matter, body, individuality, and uniqueness are gaining new relevance.

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In order not to be misunderstood, of course, I don’t intend these tendencies as a simple counter-program to the artificial paradises of electronic worlds but rather as a program complimentary to them. Neither do these values negate the fascination of electronic worlds – they do, however, come in as a counterpole – nor is the concern one of a simple return to sensuous experience, such as applied in pre-electronic times. The revalidations are far more tinted and etched by the experience of the electronic world. And there are obvious interconnections between electronic and non- electronic experience. Sometimes natural experience is just the thing electronic freaks are aiming at too. My favourite example is the extraordinary Californian sunsets – beloved especially by the electronic freaks of Silicon Valley, who in the evening drive to the coast to watch these sunsets and then turn to the artificial worlds of the Internet. According to the prevalent media tendency on the one hand and the revalidation of non-electronic experience on the other hand, our aisthesis is becoming profoundly twofold. It pursues, roughly speaking, both media fascination and non-media goal. And there is nothing wrong in this duality. On the contrary, this is an interesting case of the present turn to plurality in general. We are – and should be – able to wander between different types of reality experience. The present aisthesis is the domain where this is perhaps the most easily and successfully done. Resume Having, in my introductory remarks argued that the discipline of aesthetics should transcend the traditional equation of aesthetics and art, I have in this first part considered the impact of the current aestheticization processes on contemporary, as well as traditional, aesthetics and, meanwhile, pointed to three specific domains of an aesthetics beyond aesthetics. The derealization of reality, the reconfiguration of aisthesis, and the revalidation of ordinary experience are important issues for any contemporary aesthetics which tries to do justice to its name. Aesthetics would, I think, criminally hurt itself if it left the discussion of these issues to sociologists, psychologists, or the feuilletons alone.

Recharting the field of aesthetics In the second part of this chapter, I now want to address three remaining questions with respect to my suggestion to rechart the territory of aesthetics by opening it up beyond traditional aesthetics. First: Why is it conceptually sound for the discipline to comprehend all dimensions and meanings of the aesthetic? Second: Why does the opening up of aesthetics bring with it advantages for the discipline, even with respect to its narrower scope of analyzing art? Third: What would the disciplinary structure of an aesthetics beyond aesthetics be like? 14

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Conceptual clarifications The polyvalence of the term “aesthetic” Some colleagues object to the possibility of an aesthetics beyond aesthetics, that the difference of meanings of the term “aesthetic” inside and outside aesthetics would make a discipline trying to cover all of them hopelessly ambiguous and a victim of mere equivocations. There certainly exists a considerable variety of different meanings of the term. The expression “aesthetic” can refer to art and beauty in particular, or to aesthesis in general, or it may designate a type of unobliged existence, or refer to an ontology of virtuality, fictionality, and suspension. But does this polyvalent grammar of the expression indeed condemn it to being unusable? Ought one to drop the expression because inexactitude in a concept is synonymous with its unusability? The problem of aesthetics’ semantic ambiguity is as old as the discipline itself. Remember that Baumgarten defined aesthetics as the “science of sensuous cognition”,28 whereas Hegel understood it to be decidedly a “philosophy of art” and “of fine art”,29 to which Konard Fiedler objected: “Aesthetics is not the theory of art”, and the “juxtaposition of beauty and art is the protos pseudos in the realm of aesthetics”.30 Almost every aesthetic theorist says something interesting, but each says something different. Wittgenstein once noted, “Anything – and nothing – is right”; “this is the position you are in if you look for definitions […] in aesthetics”.31 Yet not even within the realm of recognized traditional versions of aesthetics has this ambiguity led aestheticians to despair of the usability of the expression and of the sense of a discipline devoted to it. Family resemblances And it didn’t have to. Wittgenstein has shown a way out of the alleged conceptual difficulty. He demonstrated that, although coherence in usage is necessary for terms with variant uses, this coherence need not be thanks to a unitary property but can come about in a different way: through semantic overlap between one usage and the next. The different meanings then have, as Wittgenstein said, “no one thing in common”;32 rather their relationship results from overlaps alone. This is what Wittgenstein called “family resemblances”. It is in exactly this way that the term “aesthetic” works. Family resemblance characterizes its grammar. In borrowing a passage from Wittgenstein, one could say, Instead of producing something common to all that we call aesthetic, I am saying these phenomena have no one thing common which makes us use the sane word for all, but they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all “aesthetic”.33 15

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In this quote from the Philosophical Investigations, I have only replaced Wittgenstein’s word “language” with “aesthetic”. Aesthetics should cover the full range of the expression “aesthetic” The consequences are significant. First: A coherence in the discipline of aesthetics is possible according to the family resemblances between the different meanings of the term “aesthetic”. One has to sufficiently differentiate between these usages, but if one does do so, one can profit greatly from their variety, analyze the overlaps connecting them, and develop an aesthetics which comprehends the full range of the expression “aesthetic”. Second: Aesthetics should fully profit from this opportunity. It has no good reason to restrict itself to artistics. One may, of course, do this in one’s own research, just as other aestheticians may primarily refer to the non-artistic aspect but as a discipline, aesthetics should comprehend the whole range of such endeavours. And the polyvalence of the term “aesthetic” is rather a sign of its relevance. It is precisely those concepts which are important that like to be polyvalent, and with respect to such concepts, a non-ambiguity commandment has never applied. How else, for example, could there have been an ontology when the expression “to on” (as Aristotle showed in exemplary fashion) is all but hopelessly ambiguous? Or think of the different meanings of logos (language, relationship, reason) – ought they have forgone the development of a logic on its account? The polyvalence of an expression can be no reason for hindrance of the development of a corresponding discipline, it’s just that this must be in a position to distinguish the diverse meanings and to take account of all of them. Hence, a comprehensive aesthetics – as I advocate it – is conceptually possible, and aesthetics should beware of taking selections as its point of departure. It would be wrong and antiquated to give, or want to dictate, a single ultimate concept of the aesthetic. The meaning of a word is not what enamours theoreticians or what they decree – “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”, as Vlfittgenstein pointed out.34 To decretorily exclude those parts which don’t suit one’s preferences or to declare one certain meaning the basic among the diverse meanings of the aesthetic is an imperial gesture which suggests clarity but de facto draws the field of the aesthetic incorrectly. Bad philosophy flirts with the traditional expectation that one must reduce the multitude of meanings to one basic meaning in all circumstances. But to perform conceptual bulldozing instead of a complex analysis of the problems means failing one’s duty – in both philosophy and aesthetics.

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Why the discipline should take advantage of an opening up beyond its traditional restrictions Being conceptually possible, in what way will an opening up of aesthetics beyond its traditional limits prove advantageous to the discipline? Interdisciplinary and institutional advantages Becoming more complex, it may – admittedly – become more difficult too. But in no longer being closed around a narrow set of questions, it would acquire contact and interchange with other disciplines and gain new fields of research. This, I think, constitutes an advantage not only on the level of content but also on institutional levels. The type of aesthetics I advocate will meet greater interest, both for its breadth and its contribution to current problems, and it will meet greater support – also in terms of funding. Advantages with regent to art – Art transcending the traditional limits of aesthetics Ultimately, an opening up of aesthetics beyond art is advantageous to the analysis of art itself. Because art always reaches beyond art, it refers to extra-artistic phenomena and states of aesthetics. Therefore, transcending the aesthetics-artistics restrictions in favour of an aesthetics beyond aesthetics is obligatory, even in respect to the traditional nucleus of aesthetics, the analysis of art – in which ways does art transcend itself?

THE WORK OF ART RELATED TO THE WORLD BEYOND IT

Reference to the state of the aesthetic  Even when apparently being autonomous, art has always and quite consciously reacted to the state of the aesthetic outside of art in the world surrounding it. Traditionally, in an aesthetically sparing world, it has championed the Elysium of beauty; when in the modern world sensibility has been under threat, art – heedful of its old bond with the sensuous – has understood itself as the harbinger and rescuer of the sensuous (Matisse and Dubuffet being examples); where embellishment is rife, as it is nowadays, art can see its responsibility in countering this and behaving decidedly demurely (arte provera and concept art being examples). Today’s art in particular struggles with the dominance of media images. It can oppose their importunity, or succumb to it, or experiment with fictions between traditional artistic patterns and current media perception.35 Whatever the relationship concerned may be, such artworks require understanding of their specific intervention in the artistic, as well as non-artistic,

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states of the aesthetic.36 There is no sufficient description of art which would not have to include aspects of an aesthetics beyond artistics. Art opening views of the world  Moreover, the energy of works always transcends their frame or the museum’s threshold or the moment of their observation. The works open up perspectives on the world – not only by representing it but above all by exemplifying new views of the world. It belongs to the key experiences with art (and, conversely, to tests as to whether someone actually confers efficacy upon art or would like to banish it in eulogizing about its autonomy) that, upon leaving an exhibition, one is suddenly able to perceive the world with the eyes of the artists, through the optics of his or her work, in the light of his aesthetics.37 This is pretty much the natural and undistorted behaviour: to engage art’s perceptive form in the perception of reality too, not to shut oneself off to the efficacy of artistic optics but to operate and experiment with it. The elementary aesthetic experience is not that art is something closed but rather that it is able to open one’s eyes to unaccustomed views of the world.38 Works of art are often above tools for an amended and intensified perception of reality. Art and everyday perception  Consider further how forms of perception which today appear natural and self-evident originated historically in a process in which art played a pivotal role – romantic art, for example, had a key role in the perception of the world of mountains. Some parts of our everyday perception are a sediment of generations of art experience. There are always interactions between natural and artistic perception. Art providing models of existence  Beyond this moulding of forms of perception, works of art can also attain the function of a model for ways of living. This already belonged to the normative demands of classical art and carries on in modernity, after the dissolution of general norms, in the generation of potentials for individual planning – Rilke’s description of the archaic torso of Apollo, which he concludes with the line, “You must transform your life”, provides an impressive description of this phenomenon. Certainly, the border between art and reality outside of art is not easy to lay down, but the entanglements and transitions between the two are no more to be ignored. An aesthetics of art always has to consider the dual character of artistics on the one hand and of aesthetics beyond aesthetics on the other hand. Adorno once noted this in reference to Beethoven: Nobody can, for example, claim to be conversant with a Beethoven symphony unless he understands the so-called purely musical events and the same time hears in it the echo of the French Revolution. How these two moments of aesthetic experience are related is one of the intractable problems of a philosophical approach.39 18

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Consistently, this led Adorno to the observation that aesthetic experience is driven “beyond itself”.40 SPECIFIC CONSTELLATIONS OF P THE VARIOUS DIMENSIONS OF THE AESTHETIC IN SINGLE WORKS OF ART

Complexity  Let me – after art’s particular relation to the state of the aesthetic in the world surrounding it and art’s general potency in suggesting new kinds of perception and behaviour – also mention that art in itself always comprises a variety of types of perceptions, some of which are not specifically artistic. For example, one couldn’t even recognize the objects in pictures without bringing in day-to-day perceptive competences. Furthermore, the simplest perception of whatever in a painting requires not only contemplation but also imagination and reflexion. What one sees during the internal analysis of a painting is never a factum brutum, but it is perceived in a process which implies an imaginative bringing forth and depends upon preceding and subsequent interpretation. And there is always an interplay with aesthetic experiences of other artworks, as well as with non-artistic aesthetic experience. Modern breaks  Consider, finally, how modern art in particular has worked out reconfigurations of the perceptual field by questioning the time-honoured definitions and borders of art. Duchamp questioned the diktat of visibleness, Joyce the book form, Pollock the limits of painting, Cage the status of music. It was precisely the avant-garde’s program to pass the narrow status of artistics and to open out into an aesthetics. It would be an anachronism to ignore or revoke this through an aesthetic-theoretical constriction. CONSEQUENCES

Comprehensiveness of aesthetics  All this demands an aesthetics which – as distinct from traditional artistics – is willing and able to take the extraartistic entanglement of art into account and to consider all the dimensions of aisthesis to reach out over the whole span of the aesthetic. Potential consequences for art itself  An aesthetics of this type will prove fruitful not only for the purpose of understanding and interpreting art – not only for observers but to some extent also for the creation of art – but also for artists. It opens up a different perspective on what art is about. Once an artist has (for example, following Schiller) discovered art’s potency to develop models for what Schiller called “Lebenskunst”, he may proceed very differently from the traditional search for the perfection of the artwork itself – Beuys would be an example. Or once the artist (following Nietzsche) has recognized the constitutive role of aesthetic features in cognition, she may start thinking, “Hey, my proper task might not be to create art for art’s sake 19

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but to develop and exemplify possible views, ways of perceiving, to invent perceptual and conceptual patterns” – Eva Hesse is an example. In such ways, the type of trans-aesthetics I advocate can engender new kinds of art itself. It is a type of aesthetics which is of some interest to artists themselves, who – for very good reasons – are so dissatisfied with traditional aesthetics. Aesthetics beyond aesthetics: For the benefit of art  To sum this up: An opening of the aesthetics, beyond aesthetics to the complete range of aisthesis, seems necessary not only for the benefit of art. This, I think, is ultimately the striking argument for an enlargement of aesthetics. The restrictive art aesthetics, however, is not even capable of actually being an aesthetic of art. It far more restricts and fails the art which it purports to serve. It locks art within the golden cage of autonomy, with which neither traditional nor modern art complies. It practices aesthetic-theoretical ghettoization. If art isn’t analyzed in the perspective of an aesthetics, including viewpoints beyond aesthetics, it will necessarily be aesthetically misrepresented. Recognizing the discipline Cross-disciplinary design of the discipline Finally, what will the structure of the discipline aesthetics, according to this opening, be like? My answer certainly isn’t surprising: It will be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. I imagine aesthetics as a field of research which comprises all kinds of questions concerning aisthesis, including contributions from philosophy, as well as sociology, art history, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, etc. Aisthesis constitutes the frame of the discipline, with art being one – yet no matter how important, only one – of its issues. The following may sound more surprising: I imagine the aisthesis-related parts of the various disciplines I have just mentioned to be actual branches of the discipline of aesthetics, to be included in its institutional structure. Aesthetics should be cross-disciplinary or transdisciplinary in itself and not just enter into interdisciplinary when occasioned by meetings with other disciplines. An aesthetics department, in my view, should have all these branches taught within itself, and the aesthetician should possess considerable knowledge of, and be able to teach at least some of, these branches – and not only, let’s say, the ontology of art or the history of taste. Transdisciplinarity This suggestion of an internally transdisciplinary structure to the discipline may appear strange, but such a structure is, I think, necessary in almost every discipline today. This is due to recent insights which amount to a basic change in our understanding of the structure of rationalities and, correspondingly, of fields and topics of research. 20

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In modern times, differentiation and separation of types of rationality were advocated – with these types supposedly being clear-cut and essentially diverse. But recent analysis of rationality has shown that this is superficially correct at best but basically wrong. The diverse rationalities don’t allow themselves to be delimited from one another in some water-tight fashion but exhibit entanglements and transitions in their core, which evade traditional departmentalization fundamentally. Such entanglements, transitions, and interpretations have become the contemporary agenda. Outlook I cannot expand on this point further in this chapter – I have done so in my recent book on reason.41 And though you may find this prospect interesting, you may in general remain doubtful. But with respect to aesthetics, I do hope the prospect of a cross-disciplinary design to the discipline as necessitated by its opening out, for which I have given some reasons, may appear plausible. Already in its history, aesthetics has experienced considerable paradigm shifts in its conceptual features, some of which I have mentioned. Indeed, such shifts don’t happen every day, but they may – for good reasons – happen someday. Wittgenstein, considering his own paradigm shift in philosophy, once wrote, “I still find my own way of philosophizing new, and it keeps striking me so afresh; that is why I need to repeat myself so often. It will have become second nature to a new generation.”42 Of course, I am not saying by analogy, “The cross-discip1inary structure of aesthetics beyond aesthetics will have become second nature to a new generation”. But this may well be the case – outside the disciplines, it already seems to be the case.

Notes and References 1 Academic American Encyclopedia (Danbury Connecticut: Grolier Inc., 1993), vol. 1, p. 130. 2 Enciclopedia Filosofica (Firenze: G. C. Sansoni Editore, 1967), vol. 2, col. 1054. 3 Vocabulaire d’ Esthetique (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 691 and p. 692, resp. 4 Historiches Worterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1971), vol. 1, col. 555. 5 “Aesthetica [...] est scienta cognitionis sensitivae” (Alexandar Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica [Frankfurt a. d. Oder. 1750], 1, 1). 6 Cf. Die Aktualitat des Aesthetichen, ed. Wolfgang Welsch (Munchen: Fink, 1993). The volume documents a congress which took place under the same title in Hanover in September 1992. It assembled experts in philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, political science, feminism, media, design, neurophysiology, epistemology, art, and art history and attracted several thousand participants. 7 Wittgenstein said, “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe [New York: Macmillan, 1968], p. 48e [115]). 8 All citations from the First Announcement in September 1993. 9 Letter to August Wilhelm Schlegel, 3 September 1802.

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10 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst [Lecture in Jena, winter term 1802/03] (repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftilche Buchgesellschaft, 1976). p. 7 and p. 124, resp. 11 “Die wissenschaftliche Aesthetik sucht nach dem Universalziegel, aus dem sich das Gebaude der Aesthetik errichten liebe.” (Robert Musil Tagebucher, ed. Adlof Frise [Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976]. p. 449). Musil wrote this note around 1920. 12 The result of this outset is that philosophy of “this type knows no way of saying anything about real art. When Schelling became secretary general of the Munich Almlemie de: bildenden Kunste and was obliged through this office to give lectures about art, he lectured not once about art throughout his 15 years in office. The hour of reckoning becomes the oath of disclosure for aesthetics. 13 I have discussed the problems of traditional aesthetic in more detail in “Traditionelle und moderne Aesthetik in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Praxiz der Kunst” (Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, XXVIIL 1983, pp. 264–86). My counter-concept was first developed in my Aesthetiches Denkzn (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990, 3rd ed, 1993) and later in “Aesthetisierungsprozesse: Phanomene, Unterscheidungen, Perspektiven” (Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie, 41/1. 1993, pp. 7–29; English version: “Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions, and Prospects”, in Theory, Culture and Society, print). 14 I have more broadly developed these thoughts in “Aesthetisierungsprozesse: Phanomene Unterscheidungen, Perspektiven” viz. “Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects” and will partly rely on this article. 15 “Aestheticization” basically means that the anaesthetic is made, or understood to be, aesthetic. 16 In the United States, one of the most common arguments for providing help for the homeless is that you don’t want to meet these people on the streets because they are aesthetically offensive and disturbing. 17 For a discussion of the possibility of an aesthetic critique of the aestheticization process of Wolfgang Welsch, see “Aesthetisierungsprozesse: Phanomene, Unterscheitdungen, Perspektiven” viz. “Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena and Prospects”. 18 I discussed this for the first time in “Asthetik und Anasthetik” (in Asthetisches Denken, pp. 9–40). 19 I developed this point specifically in “Gegenwartskunst im offentilchen Raum Augenweide order Argernis?” (in Kunstforum International, vol. 118. 1992, pp. 318–20). 20 Well, in American cities, you still have such a desert. Their definition is ethnic and economic. 21 By “media” I will – in the following – always refer to electronic media, without suggesting that there might be any kind of experience independent of media of some kind or other. 22 And the viewers replace their former belief in media reality with a desire for media entertainment. 23 I am referring here primarily to television, which in fact is somehow an oldfashioned medium in today’s electronic world. But it’s the one which everybody knows and uses. And the effect of the more advanced technologies is not different but enhances the derealization stimulated by television. 24 The usual objection to the simulation thesis that the simulated and real would never really be mistaken does not apply to the simulation thesis; for it doesn’t assert anything like this. It intends to draw attention to something else: that behavioural patterns which are being practiced in the pilot electronics are increasingly

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impregnating everyday behaviour too. The virtualization of reality is a long-term effect of media worlds. The user is perhaps aware of the difference between simulation and reality. But the silent point is that this difference is coming to mean less and less. Simulation is being apprehended without further ado as reality’s substitute; it is even being esteemed as a more consummate version of reality. The experience of simulation is even being made more and more the matrix of real behaviour: deviations from the electronic ideal imagery no longer count as a sign of human nature but rather as burdensome imperfections. Originals in media conditions – here as elsewhere, say, within art – are now just disappointing. The real is being more and more assimilated to the ideal media conception. 25 Cf. Derrick de Kerckhove. “Touch versus Vision: Aesthetik neuer Technologien”, in: Die Aktualitat des Aesthetischen, pp. 137–68. 26 Sten Nadolny, die Entdeckung der Lansamkeit (Munchen: Hanser, 1983). 27 Peter Handke, Versuch uber die Mudigkeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 28 Alexandar Gottlieb Baumgarten. Aesthetica, 1. 28 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten; Aesthetica, S 1. 29 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet, ed. Michael Inwood (London: Penguin 1993) [I]. 30 Konard Fiedler, “Kunsttheorie und Aesthetik” in Schriften zur Kunst. ed. Gottfried Boehm, 2 vols (Munich: Fink. 1991). Vol. II. pp. 9-24, here p. 9. Similarly, Barnett Newman noted, “The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty […] by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty” (quoted after Arthur C. Danto, The Disenfrcuichisement of Art [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 13). 31 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 36e [77]. 32 Ibid. 31e [65]. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 20e [43]. 35 I have discussed these different possibilities in more detail in “Artificial Paradises?” (esp. part IV), in Aesthetik Thinking (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, forthcoming). 36 It is precisely where the energy of art intersects with the everyday tensions that enthralling forms of art come about. And paradigmatically in these eases, aesthetics has to be able to comprehend the interventionist logic of these art forms which operate on, or in transition between, the borders of art and the living environment (cf. Wolfgang Welsch. “Ubergange”. in siemens Kulturprogramm I990/91, Munich 1991, pp. 29–33). Art is always art in context (cf. Wolfgang Kemp. “Kontexte. Fur eine Kunsgeschichte der Komplexitat”, in Texte Zur Kunst, Heft 2, 199] 89–101). 37 Goethe had already described and paid tribute to this. Upon entering a cobbler’s workshop, he believed suddenly to see a picture by Ostade before him “so perfect that one ought only really to have hung it in the gallery. […] It was the first time that I came to notice in such high degree that gift. which I subsequently exercised with greater awareness. namely to see nature with the eyes of his or that artist to whose works l had dedicated a particular attentiveness. This ability has accorded me much enjoyment” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part II. Book 8). 38 Such external references in artistic paradigms are not at all astonishing since the artistic perceptions were themselves developed in contact and in the coming-togrips with environmental as well as other artistic perceptions. Therefore, they are also able to intervene in the realm of our experience and to reconfigure our world’s aesthetic nexus.

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39 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, transl. C. Lenhardt (London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 479. 40 Ibid., 478. 41 Wolfgang Welsch, Vernunft: Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995). 42 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. by G.H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. by Peter Winch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 1e.

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2 AESTHETIC PERCEPTION * Harold Osborne Many writers besides Bernard Berenson have spoken about the enhancement of vital awareness – a more than usual energizing of our perceptual grasp of things – which is, typically, attendant upon successful aesthetic engrossment with a work of fine art. In my own writings, I have on various occasions put forward the suggestion that this expansion of awareness is as close as we can come to a key criterion for distinguishing aesthetic commerce from other kinds of preoccupation with the objective world. What I have in mind is a form of cognition characterized as direct apprehension or insight rather than analytical and discursive understanding, though sometimes it may follow from discursive analysis, and distinct from an emotional response, though sometimes it may be accompanied by or even excited by emotion. In this chapter, I try to elaborate in greater detail than before on the nature of this aesthetic expansion of awareness and incidentally to suggest why I have proposed it as a criterion of aesthetic activity. I shall begin with certain more general considerations and proceed towards the particular. Everyone, I believe, would accept that the rough and ready distinction between sleeping and waking is too crude to encompass the realities of experience. There are many stages between deepest sleep and full waking alertness. We may sleep profoundly, or we may sleep superficially with the senses half triggered for the response to any disturbance or interruption. There are intermediate states between sleeping and waking and sometimes, though awake, our actions are mechanical, our attention diffused rather than concentrated, and we behave, as it is said, “as if in a dream”. At other times, the senses are alert, the attention is fully focussed either externally or internally, and we are keyed for action or keenly in control of a continuing activity. In addition, there are rare moments – most people are familiar with them occasionally – when the faculties are raised to an unusual pitch of alertness, when we observe more keenly and rapidly, think more clearly, achieve insights more penetrating than ever before, or enjoy enhanced powers of will and decision. It is on occasions such as these that we seem most

*  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. I, No. 1, Summer 1978, pp. 13–20.

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fully to be alive and life seems most worth living. These peak experiences are the culmination of life’s meaning. Humankind is at its best when meeting a challenge or engrossed in an activity that has importance and value. It is then that humankind’s faculties are stimulated to the highest pitch, energies come most competently into play, and humankind is charged with the fullness of life. When challenge and purpose are lacking, the mind is depleted and directionless; humankind is disoriented and at odds with itself. Colin Wilson grasped this point when he said, “The mind is a concentrating machine. That is the purpose for which it was built: to enable us to focus and concentrate on meanings in order to be able to pursue them consciously and purposively instead of gropingly and blindly. Whenever we use it for this purpose, the effect is rather like clenching your fist; it gains in hardness and weight, and we experience a sense of reality. If it is left ‘unclenched’, unconcentrated, for too long, the result is the feeling of ‘life failure’, of unreality”.1 The human mind must be harnessed to a purpose in order to function. And the purpose is tied up with the sense of value, importance, meaning, which cannot be artificially implanted or supplanted. In primitive societies, the paramount needs of survival, material comfort, hunting, and food gathering, protection of family and clan, defence of territorial claims absorb available energies. The values of the individual are closely identified with those of the clan, and there is little or no incentive for the development of what civilized men call individual personality. Civilization means the introduction of techniques and routines, including ever-more elaborate techniques of a collaborative effort for satisfying the basic needs with less and less expenditure of energy so that energy is released for the pursuit of other purposes. And when this happens, other values become necessary if society is to avoid deterioration. The compensatory values which emerge in advanced civilizations are the values of what we compendiously refer to as “culture”. It is when these values are not taken seriously that civilized society falls ill. The sicknesses to which civilization is prone to result from boredom and purposelessness, the disorientation of individuals who are given the conditions but denied the impetus to develop personality. When living becomes routine and no longer demands the concentration of faculties harnessed to the pursuit of accepted values, there ensues torpor and depression, a sense of unreality and frustration, what Kierkegaard and Camus called alienation, Sartre called nausea, and the uncertainties of personal identity which the characters of Samuel Beckett display. The values of culture, a logically and practically necessary condition for the successful progress of civilization, may be seen as emerging when faculties evolved in the interests of survival are diverted to other ends than the basic needs of survival and immediate sensory gratifications. As the urgencies of practical pressures diminish, these faculties are not allowed to fall into abeyance and atrophy but are cultivated deliberately, perfected into skills, and exercised for their own sake or rather for the sake of the higher-level satisfactions attendant upon their own perfection and 26

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exercise. It is only when these values, which belong to the development and enrichment of personality, are set above more elementary gratifications and needs that civilized society remains in a healthy state. When cultural values are no longer taken in earnest but are regarded as a secondary luxury or a supererogatory refinement then society is eroded by spiritual demoralization. This affliction has perhaps never been a more serious danger than today when unprecedentedly rapid advances in material technology have effected enormous reductions in the necessary output of energy not only on the part of a favoured minority but also for the vast majority of civilized people while at the same time eliminating the satisfactions and pride which used to be attendant on good craftsmanship and when the same technological civilization has induced a materialistic outlook leading to the devaluation of non-material aims as a pleasant but unnecessary indulgence. There is a greater necessity than ever before that educationalists should resolutely counter this attitude and inculcate from conviction to the importance of cultural values. Cultural values, then, are values deriving from the satisfactions attendant on the cultivation and exercise of human faculties for their own sake rather than for ulterior ends of material comfort and gratification. They form one large category of intrinsic values. They may be classified, I think, into two main groups. In one group fall the manifold values which are rooted in the cultivation of our reasoning powers and the exercise of thought for its own sake, culminating in logic, mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and metaphysics. Closely akin to these in the same group are values deriving from the cultivation of curiosity and exemplified in such disciplines as history, sociology, and the taxonomic sciences. In the other main group are the values stemming from the cultivation of our perceptive powers and the exercise of percipience for its own sake. It is against this background that I now propose to elaborate on the idea of aesthetic expansion of awareness. What we perceive and how we perceive it are determined by the nature of the interests which predominate at the time. Perception is a selective and organizing process, and the principles of selectivity and organization which it imposes are ordinarily dependent upon habits of attention built up from childhood by the stringencies of practical life. In practical life, our predominant habits are dictated by the need to utilize perception as the main source of information about a world of things which are subject to our manipulation and to which we respond. Therefore in everyday life, perception is emasculated and jejune: It is an instrument for obtaining clues for action, and it is allowed to impinge upon our awareness only to the extent of its serviceability for furnishing these cues. Although – or because – sensory perception is our only direct contact with a world outside ourselves, it is ordinarily channelled and born to practical needs. We are not ordinarily interested in dwelling upon and savouring the unexpurgated content and quality of sensory experience. All this has, of course, been said many times before. It is mentioned here only to point up the enormous revolution which 27

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occurs when perception is attended to, cultivated, and enjoyed, not as a practical instrument but for its own sake. Sometimes, on rare occasions, such a revolution of attitude occurs amid the routines of daily life. Sometimes when we see the clear starry firmament at night or a field of ripening corn blazing with poppies in the sun, when we hear the song of many birds at early morning or the blending of bells in a medieval town at evening, we rejoice. Our attitude changes abruptly. We attend to the experience for itself and not for the information it gives about something other than itself. We experience an upwelling of richer vitality in such perceptive activity, and this, I am maintaining, is the paradigm and prototype of aesthetic activity, elementary though it still is. The joy which attends such vital enhancement must be distinguished from the titillation of sensory pleasure. There is a theory which finds the paradigm of aesthetic experience in sensory pleasure such as the pleasant smell of a rose.2 Following Kant, I have argued – I hope convincingly that this theory leads in a wrong direction and implants a fundamental error at the heart of aesthetic understanding. It is not the physical pleasantness of a smell, a taste, or a touch which gives rise to what we call the aesthetic. It is the change of attitude which occurs when, instead of wallowing in the physical pleasure, we turn attention to the nature of the experience itself, savouring and discriminating its intrinsic quale. We can do this as well with sensation, and when attention is so deflected, the impact of its pleasantness or unpleasantness recedes. Our joy has its source in the exercise of perception for its own sake, and this is the prototype and paradigm of aesthetic experience.3 This elementary aesthetic stance is capable of development along two distinct paths, which have not hitherto been systematically distinguished. I shall call them the refinement of discriminatory acuteness (what is sometimes more shortly called “sensibility”) and the enlargement of synoptic apprehension. 1. In his essay “Of the Standard of Taste”, David Hume uses the term “delicacy of taste” with the meaning of discriminatory acuity, saying, Where the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition, this we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense. He illustrates this with a story front Don Quixote about kinsmen of Sancho Panza with a hereditary judgement of wine so sensitive that they could detect the presence of an iron key on a leather thong at the bottom of a hogshead of wine. Such refinement of discriminatory acuteness may be cultivated in particular fields by such persons as professional wine tasters, those who savour, pronounce on, and invent a descriptive vocabulary for perfumes, gourmets, and connoisseurs of food, and so on. Skilled craftsmen could often judge the qualities of their materials 28

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by touch and taste. When such refinements of sensibility are cultivated and exercised for their own sake, the attendant enjoyment is aesthetic, as with the delicate fingering of jade practised by Chinese connoisseurs. Finely discriminating sensitivity is a necessary contributory factor to cultivated appreciation in all the arts, for it is notorious that differences so minute, as to be barely perceptible in themselves, may have major effects on the balance and unity of complex works of art. Indeed, it may often be the case that true defect or felicity in the organization of the whole work first impinges on our awareness, and through that awareness, we come to detect the point of detail. Although he did not draw appropriate conclusions from it, Wittgenstein, among many others, liked to call attention to the surprisingly massive consequences of very small errors of proportion in architecture or the wrong balance of volume in music. In painting and sculpture, very small differences of colour, shape, size, texture, etc., can have consequences for the artistic organization as a whole which far outweigh in importance the more massive changes caused by major accidental damage, the fading of colours through time, and all the injuries due to wear and tear. In music, very small differences of pitch may ruin a performance, causing us to condemn it as “out of tune”, although certain folk melodies and some performances on stringed instruments gain emotional colour precisely by small departures from the scale of equal temperament. In the appreciation of literary art, finely honed sensibility to the sound and rhythm of words, and to nice shades of meaning, is a sine qua non which the literary artist not only assumes but makes it his or her business to galvanize and extend in his or her readers. Without the power to make exceptionally fine discriminations, appreciation is crummiest and inhibited in any of the arts. 2. A work of art is a construct existing for the express purpose of exercising and extending percipience when the faculty of perception is activated towards it without ulterior purpose. A work of art is judged to be successful aesthetically in the degree that it fulfils this function of extending and satisfying perception. The satisfaction and the joy which we experience is no recondite sensory pleasure but the satisfaction experienced in the exercise of a skilled faculty for its own sake. This is why we can properly speak of aesthetic satisfactions as cultural values. And this is why they carry an accrual of spiritual vitality. The refinement of discriminative acuity is only a part, though a necessary part, of the expansion of perception, brought into play in the appreciation of art objects. More important still is the massive increase in the volume and depth of content. In practical life, we habitually operate with relatively small perceptual units, combining these intellectually in the manner of clues. But works of art, even those which seem superficially simple, are extremely complex organizational wholes, which must be apprehended directly in 29

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perception as wholes simultaneously with the apprehension of their parts. The elements of a work of art contribute to the composition of the whole as an organic unity4 in such a way that the whole is not constructed intellectually and analytically from its parts but is present no less directly to perception than the parts. There is, moreover, in most cases a complex organization of parts within parts at different hierarchical levels. Each whole at each level of containment manifests perceptual properties which are not present in the parts of which it is composed and which cannot be intellectually inferred from the properties of its parts and the relations in which they stand to each other. These are the properties which we call “aesthetic” – elegance, gracefulness, and a thousand for which there are no names. Indeed, the aesthetic properties of every work of art are original and unique to it, even when they can be brought roughly within some named category. The art of the critic consists in conveying an impression of these properties through the medium of language, which lacks the means to describe them. It is in the apprehension of artistic wholes that high-level aesthetic perception departs most notably from the practical awareness which operates in everyday life, and it is for this that the cultivation of a special perceptive skill is most necessary. The analogy of Gestalt perception is sometimes adduced in order to explain artistic apprehension, and provided that it is treated as an analogy only – and an imperfect one at that – there is nothing against it. We do indeed in ordinary life perceive certain fairly simple configurations as immediately as we perceive the elements from which they are composed. We see a triangle as directly as we see the three lines which compose it. We do not first notice three lines, then notice the relations in which they stand to each other, and then make a rapid intellectual inference: “This must be a triangle”. We see the triangle directly. Similarly, we perceive an artistic configuration directly and simultaneously with its constituent parts: We do not apprehend it by inference from the parts. An artistic configuration has (aesthetic) properties which are not present in and cannot be inferred from the parts and their relations. But the differences are still more important than the similarities. Not only are artistic configurations immeasurably more complex, even in the simplest works of art than the Gestalten with which ordinary perception operates, artistic configurations have the uniqueness of particularity, whereas the Gestalten of ordinary perception are essentially generalizations. We are confronted with a near square, and we see a square, with a near circle and we see a circle-Gestalt, and so on. To see a Gestalt is to reduce to generality. In perception, the Gestalt is akin to the concept in thought processes. But a large part of the essential vitality of aesthetic perception derives from its avoidance of this generalizing tendency. Moreover, as many psychologists have demonstrated, in ordinary practical perception, there is an active tendency to complete open or imperfect Gestalten, perceiving what we do not see. In cultivating the perceptive skills required for the appreciation of the arts, one of the most difficult tasks is to accustom oneself to perceive precisely and exactly what is there – without, of course, remaining 30

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blind to incomplete Gestalten when these are introduced as a feature of the total composition – as, for example, in music, piquancy may result from a withheld resolution, and in the work of Leon Polk Smith, Ellsworth Kelly, and other Hard-Edge painters, a special feature was often made of incomplete shapes, suggesting completion outside the canvas. It is the apprehension of richly and tensely organized perceptual material without practical implications that extends the perceptual faculties and brings about that expansion of awareness which, we have claimed, is the hallmark of aesthetic activity. It is sometimes profitable to illustrate a point by contrast, and with this in view, it may be opportune to say a few words about so-called children’s art. The drawings of young children generally reveal a fresh and lively delight in colours and shapes. They are spontaneous and uninhibited, often manifesting what in an adult would be called a too glib facility. Their colours are strong but crude, with little or no interest in subtle contrasts or blendings, without finer discriminations. Shapes too are vigorous but unsubtle. These drawings are concerned with representation, but with representation by means of standard configurations or Gestalten. They represent a world of things by means of visual conceptualizations with barely the most elementary attempts at individual discrimination. A house is a house, and a man is a man – walking or standing or speaking. In his or her drawings, the child is repeating what he or she is learning in ordinary life, training and evolving practical habits of perception destined to facilitate finding his or her way about a world of things by the application of stock configurations. The child’s picture may tell a rudimentary story – the man (papa) rides up to the house on a horse while the child (me!) shows joy, and the woman (mama) stands watching. But beyond the needs of the story, there is, except in the rarest instances, no attempt to compose or organize forms in such a way as to invite or make possible unified perception of the picture as a composition. Up to the age of ten or 12, the child is discovering the rules and forming the habits of practical perception; there is a lack of the powers of concentration, as well as the deflection of practical interests which make possible an aesthetic approach. From this point of view – and what other point of view is there? – children’s drawings are not art. In general, it is not until puberty that they need artistic guidance. Until then, their work is not bad or indifferent art. It is without even the rudiments of that aesthetic interest which could warrant a drawing being judged as good art or bad. This does not mean, of course, that children’s drawings are without value or interest. But whatever value they have is not an aesthetic value.

Notes and References 1 Wilson, Colin. Order of Assassins (Ch. 8), Hart-Davis, (1972). 2 For example, “What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?” by J. O. Urtmon. Proc. Arist. Soc. Suppl., Vol. XXXI, 1957. Reprinted in J. Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts. Temple University Press, (1962).

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3 See “Odours and Appreciation”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 17, No.1; and Harold Osborne’s The Art of Appreciation (Ch. 3). Oxford University Press (1970). 4 See my paper “Organic Unity Again”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 16, No. 3, criticized by Catherine Lord in “Kinds and Degrees of Aesthetic Unity”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 18, No. 1.

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3 AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE * A review V. K. Chari The problem of aesthetic experience is twofold: (1) to establish that aesthetic experience is qualitatively distinct from non-aesthetic experiences, such as religious or sexual, and (2) to show that it is in some way relevant to critical discourse – to our analysis and appreciation of artworks. Critical attitudes towards the concept have shown extreme reactions – from the one that denies that there is an experience called the aesthetic to that which says that it is useless to standardize it and talk about it since it is altogether too subjective and variable to be of any use in our discourse concerning the arts. Contemporary aesthetics has, in fact, called into question the very notion of the “aesthetic” (Sparshott 1982, 467–86). The protagonists of aesthetic experience insist, however, that there is a peculiarly distinct sort of experience that arises only in the context of our encounter with aesthetic objects. Sure enough, there is some experience – experience, too, of a pleasurable nature – that we all derive from works of art and objects of nature, for otherwise, why would anybody attend to them at all? But then, there are difficulties in identifying and defining aesthetic objects. Artworks may be easier to isolate since they are the product of human intention and purpose, and they are often put out into the world with the label “art” attached to them. However, there are also a vast number of crafts or products of human skill that may be regarded as artworks – regarded, that is, for their perceptual interests. But can they be said to generate aesthetic experience? The case of natural objects is even more difficult to deal with. But inasmuch as some of them evoke feeling in us, their identity as aesthetic objects has to be established purely in terms of the experience they evoke. Even accredited artworks do not produce the same kind of measure of response in all people, with the result that we do not seem to have a stable entity called aesthetic experience to talk about. Be that as it may, we could still perhaps give a description of the kind of experience that some of us may be believed to derive from an aesthetic *  This article was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. XXIII, No. 1–2, 2000, pp. 7–30.

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object and what happens in it. But we would have a hard time, purely in terms of its internal properties, demarcating the boundaries between it and other related experiences, between one kind of pleasure and another. An easier way to distinguish it may be to start with the aesthetic object and define aesthetic experience as the kind of experience that arises from the object and that is appropriate to it. Since every experience must be an experience of something, and there can be no experience without an object and since the content (and the character – pleasant, unpleasant, etc. – too) of an experience is to a large extent determined by the nature of the object, it would seem to be the right step first to identify the aesthetic object before we discourse about the experience relating to it. What then is an aesthetic object? This, of course, is tantamount to asking, “What is beauty?” “What is art?” A question that has bedevilled philosophers over the ages and that proves to be particularly difficult in our age when any object whatsoever, any contraption, or even a pile of junk items can be regarded as aesthetic objects, provided they come with an institutional stamp or are backed up with a theory of art. However, for convenience, we may confine our discussion to those objects only that are widely agreed to be beautiful and worthwhile and attempt an answer to the questions in the following ways. The answer would range from the object-pole of the question to its subject-pole. I. In objectivist terms, an aesthetic object may be defined as any object, natural or man-made, possessing certain qualities that arrest our attention and evoke in us a pleasurable or gratifying feeling that is marked out in some respects from other sorts of experiences. This is a view maintained by Beardsley, among others, although his theory is confined largely to artworks or intentional objects. For Beardsley, there is such a thing as an aesthetic point of view and an aesthetic experience, which can be distinguished from non-aesthetic experiences in terms of its own internal properties and which derives from an objective field of observation – namely, the artwork characterized by certain value-grounding qualities or aesthetic qualities. Corresponding to these “phenomenally objective” qualities are the “phenomenally subjective” features characterizing the aesthetic experience. A work of art, in his definition, is any perceptual (sensuously presented) or intentional (imaginatively intended) object that is deliberately regarded from the aesthetic point of view. The aesthetic point of view is not, however, a special mode of perception but simply the capacity to perceive the various elements of the artwork “synoptically” in their mutual relationships. II. In subjectivist terms, an aesthetic object is any object, natural or manmade, to which we bring a special kind of attention – different from ordinary kinds in that it focusses on the object for its own sake and not for any practical/utilitarian reasons. This is the root taken by the “aesthetic attitude” theorists from Kant down to our own time, although 34

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these theorists would seem to assume that the object must, in some unspecified way, be worthy of contemplation in virtue of its qualities. Now, the first approach assumes that qualities are phenomenally objective and hence available for critical analysis. The second makes the perception of an object as an aesthetic object dependent upon the percipient’s adopting a particular attitude towards it. The aesthetic is a mode of perception, not an aspect of the object. On this view, any material thing whatever – a blackbird or a wheelbarrow – is, at least theoretically, capable of becoming an object of aesthetic appreciation. III. An attempt to mediate dialectically between the two poles is that of the phenomenologists – Ingarden, Dufrenne, Iser, etc. (ignoring marginal differences) – an approach that is consistently applied to aesthetic questions ably defended by Mitias (1988a, 1988b). According to this, the putative aesthetic object becomes so both in virtue of certain qualities or properties possessed by it and the perception of the percipient which, in several ways, compliments, contributes to, and thus constitutes the object of appreciation. In dialectical terms, there is first the artwork which, mediated by perception, emerges as an aesthetic object. A distinction is made here between what are strictly the material, objective features of the art object and the perception of them as value-grounding qualities or aesthetic qualities between the artwork and the aesthetic object (a distinction also observed by John Dewey). The aesthetic object is then, on this view, both objective and subjective in terms of its ontic status. While the complete idealist would say with Coleridge that “we received but what we give”, the phenomenologists would go with Wordsworth in saying that we “half receive and half create”. Several problems emerge out of this brief profile of views on aesthetic experience; first, a definition of the aesthetic object and its ontic status; second, a clarification of the terms “aesthetic qualities”, “aesthetic values”, “aesthetic point of view”, and “aesthetic attitude”, and third, an examination of aesthetic experience or “aesthetic emotion” and its psychological lineaments.

I.  The aesthetic object: Its mode of existence The problems involved in this concept are an aesthetic object, an object out in the world as any other object, ready-made as found, or does it become so under certain perceptual conditions? If the latter is the case, then what precisely is the nature of its transformation from one condition to another, or in other words, what was it before, and what is it after, the transformation? And again, is there a real metamorphosis of the object? A material change in the object under any perceptual condition is, of course, inconceivable. Hence the change can only be in the viewers perception, under ideal conditions of observation, and validated intersubjectively. But perceiving an object as an aesthetic object required not merely certain perceptual 35

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conditions but also innate capacity in the perceiver to recognize or project, as the case may be, the aesthetic character of the object – since any object by itself is a neutral entity and can be viewed in non-aesthetic ways or in alien uses. This capacity may be one that is acquired through training and cultivated, or it may be a distinct faculty called “taste” (in terms of faculty of psychology), or a disposition in humans to appreciate whatever is aesthetic about an object. In any case, unless the perceiver is the kind that takes interest in nature or art objects and brings to them the proper attention, these things will not be seen as aesthetic objects. Much depends then on the perceiver or connoisseur (rasika or sahṛdaya in Sanskrit). It is in and by his perception that a non-aesthetic object – that is, an object that was not aesthetic before – is transformed into an aesthetic object. But this transformation is not a real event in the world; it is an appearance. The fog in the sea, the painting, the piece of music, or whatever remains just what it was before I perceived it as aesthetic or discovered in it, or projected onto it, some special significance or value. This conclusion is implicit in the aesthetic attitude theory. Even according to Beardsley’s “aesthetic point of view” theory, it is only when an object is viewed from that point of view that it will be recognized as an aesthetic object and will come to light in its own character. Here, of course, the implications that the object is what the object was – already aesthetic (remember that Beardsley is talking about artkind instances mainly) – and it is only perceived for what it is, whereas the aesthetic attitude theory assumes that the attitude alone does the whole work and posits the aesthetic object. But here the question is whether anything that is not intrinsically what it is seen to be or regarded as can become what it is not except by an act of the creative imagination or delusional vision in which a rope can be seen as a serpent, inanimate objects humanized, and profound meanings read into a sunset, trees, hills, and cataracts, as in Wordsworth’s nature poetry. Natural objects, obviously not being aesthetic by intention (Arnheim’s “weeping willow” is obviously a case of pathetic fallacy), need to be looked at with a special attitude or in a particular frame of mind in order that they may be regarded as aesthetic at all – regarded, that is, for their own sake, for the perceptual or imaginative pleasure that they are capable of yielding. The aesthetic attitude theory, as conceived by Kant, is based primarily on the model of mute natural objects which are innocent of any aesthetic purpose and which depend on the viewer’s perceptual attitude or point of view to give them any significance aesthetically. And since the attitude is what confers aestheticity on she object, the object by itself has no role in the aesthetic experience. In this case, then, the principle of distinction between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic should be sought, not in the object but in the interest taken. But the same is not the case with intentional objects or objects that are deliberately designed as aesthetic objects or artworks. A poem, a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, a building with decorative motifs, etc., has no other use to function than to be viewed aesthetically. The objects are 36

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deliberately put together in a purposeful manner so that their objective form alone, as an “embodied intention”, should be able to reveal the purpose for which they are intended. Even where an artwork is expressly intended for some other purpose, such as religious or moral, in its own identity as a formal organization, it is first an artwork and then, secondarily, an instrument of use: first a poem, then a message; first a sculpture, then a sacred image; and so on. Works of art are aesthetic objects in their own constitution and identifiable by certain built-in features – such as formal devices, presentational or performance context – which serve as markers. They do not, like natural objects, need the esemplastic imagination of the perceiver for their being what they are perceived to be. Hence Beardsley understands the term “aesthetic object” as synonymous with “work of art” but insists that unless one regards it from the aesthetic point of view, one is not likely to see it for what it is – a demand that is justly made because an artwork can go unnoticed qua artwork without the awareness of a percipient. It appears from this that the conditions of what is called the aesthetic object are not the same in all cases and that in defining it, we have to draw a line between natural objects and man-made works that are expressly designed as aesthetic objects. A further distinction is also necessary among the art objects themselves on the basis of the mediums in which they are embodied. While all art forms require an aesthetic point of view or sensibility to be fully apprehended for their significance, some of them call for the viewer’s or percipient’s own imaginative capabilities in a greater degree than others to provide them with any significance or meaning at all. Thus the verbal and dramatic arts – poems, plays, novels, stage dramas, expressive dances, and the visual arts of the representational type – are fully objective and autonomous in so far as their meanings are contained within their own formal bodies. These may be termed “self-expressive” as they all carry their meaning on the face – they are pictorial representations of objects, persons, actions, etc., or they employ signs – words, gestures, and movements expressive of inner feelings and thoughts. On the other hand, instrumental music, among the visual arts abstract painting and sculpture, and architecture depend, much like natural objects, entirely on the listener/viewer for their aesthetic significance to be realized, although they can be readily recognized by any person as art objects by virtue of their artefactuality. Even in the self-expressive category, no doubt, the meanings of shapes, words, gestures, and actions may not be readily apparent: There will be problems of interpretation and need for elaborate construal – filling the gaps, supplying missing connections, drawing out the implications, etc. But such problems can be met successfully with the help of the well-known canons of interpretation and artistic conventions. At any rate, it should be admitted that the meanings of any human action or handiwork in the self-expressive mode are utterly contained in the mediums in which they take form, although the perceiver, too, may have to exert his or her mind in interpreting them. But interpretation is always of a finished product, of a stable and re-identifiable entity, not of an “emergent” object. 37

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The aesthetic attitude theory has no doubt come under fire from the objectivists. But there is something to be said for the basic premise from which it stems and which it shares with Beardsley’s “aesthetic point of view” – namely, that there are certain values that may fairly be called aesthetic and that people generally perceive in aspects of external and human nature, and in art creations, that move them. Poets, painters, songwriters, actors, dancers, and so on love to recreate such aspects in various ways in art mediums, and the public tends to appreciate them when they recognize them in artworks. Love of nature and the mimetic instinct are common to both the artist and the audience. An art object of the representational or self-expressive type may, therefore, be said to consist of a representation of an object, situation, or any element or aspect of human perception, experience, or consciousness that is of common human interest and that appears significant or arresting to the artist, who tries to capture it in a medium other than that in which it exists in nature (painting, poetry, sculpture, etc.) or the same medium under simulated conditions, mimetically, – that is, music, dance, acting. Some might even go so far as to argue that even nonobjective art must ultimately draw its categorical traits from natural or human models – colours, sounds, shapes, angles, and kinaesthetic elements. But we need not press this point for our present purposes. At any rate, when an object possessing certain discernible value-bearing qualities is sufficiently entrancing, then the aesthetic attitude or point of view plays its role: a disinterested attention will help active participation in and enjoyment of the properties of the object. But it is not often the case that one enters into an attitude volitionally in order to be drawn to the object. The object itself, if it is worth its salt, may be expected to dictate the kind of attention that is required for its appreciation.

II. Work of art versus aesthetic object: Aesthetic qualities versus aesthetic values Let us now examine the distinction maintained by the phenomenologist between the work of art and the aesthetic object, setting aside the question of natural objects for convenience. This distinction is perhaps also implied by Beardsley’s “aesthetic point of view” to the extent that it says that an art object must be seen from a certain point of view in order to be discovered for its aesthetic significance. The perception from the aesthetic point of view is simply a perception of those qualities in the object that are intrinsically interesting to humans – such as harmony, balance, order, proportion, expressiveness – which are regionally emergent qualities and which it is possible for anyone to see. This perception is thus an anaesthetic quality (A-Quality) perception or “regional perception”. But, as we noted earlier, Beardsley’s A-Qualities are “phenomenally objective” and reside in the artwork; it is just that they are recognized as value-bearers from the aesthetic point of view. It follows from this that aesthetic perception is value perception. 38

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For the phenomenologist, on the other hand, the work of art is but the material basis or “the perduring structural foundation” (Dufrenne, trans., xxiii), which can be put to any number of non-aesthetic uses but which becomes metamorphosed into an aesthetic object when realized in perception. Its material character consists of paints, stones, sounds, or words, as the case may be, or lines, colours, figures, tunes, or meanings, when the same are formally organized. And they become aesthetic through a specific act of perception and are contingent on that act for their aestheticity. The aesthetic character of the artwork, for Dufrenne, is its felt dimension or its affective quality, which is realized only in the consciousness of the spectator. For Dufrenne then, neither the formal organization nor the expressed content of the artwork is yet aesthetic: The meaning of the poem, the melodic-rhythmic structure of the music, the representation in the painting or sculpture are still its sensory material body. They lack the “felt dimension”, which alone makes them aesthetic objects. The aesthetic object has a double existence: as an art object and as an object aesthetically – that is, subjectively – realized. It is suspended between the formal/objective structure of the artwork and the subjective consciousness of the percipient, or better still, it is a tertium quid, a new reality or creation arising from the union of the two. The dialectical structure of this argument is obvious, and it stems from the phenomenological premise that knowledge is at once subobjective or inter-involved. The identity of the object depends on a perceiving subject; there is no object without a subject. This line of reasoning is applied consistently by Mitias to the question of aesthetic qualities, which, he observes, are the real principles of aesthetic distinction (Mitias 1988a). The aesthetic object, like any material object, may be broken down into a complex or, more accurately, a congeries of qualities or properties. But a distinction may be made, albeit arbitrarily for our purpose, between the terms “properties” and “qualities”, let us say, it has objectivist implications: A property is what belongs to the object and what goes into its constitution, whereas a quality – aesthetic quality, that is – in the phenomenological view is that property of the object, which is perceived as being aesthetic – i.e. as having aesthetic value. Mitias does not make this distinction, but it is implied in his argument throughout. Discussing the ontological status of aesthetic qualities, he argues that aesthetic qualities are not ready-mades or the objective properties of the work but that they “emerge in perception” as values (1988b, 29). The contemplative look on the face of da Vinci’s A Musician, the sadness of Valse Triste by Sibelius, the tragicalness of Anna Karenina, or the look of peace and dignity on the face of Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid are not altogether in the work, although they are anchored in it and determined by its material medium, its ontic base. They are there only as potentialities to be actualized or realized as values in the perceiver’s consciousness. Consequently, they have their locus in aesthetic perception. The objective properties of the work are, on the other hand, such things as the bright patch of colour representing the floodlight streaming through the 39

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window in the Kitchen Maid, the organized notes in a musical piece, or the linguistic structure and the described events of Anna Karenina – and they form the physical base for the perception of the corresponding aesthetic qualities. At this point, it will be instructive to probe a little into the question of aesthetic qualities. A review of the scholarly discussion on the subject will reveal the following (Beardsley 1982; Hermeren): (1) Aesthetic qualities (A-Qualities) or aesthetic attributions are not all of the same type: Some are evaluative, and others are descriptive or objective properties perceived as value-grounding qualities, while yet others are variable depending on the circumstances. (2) Some may be attributed literally to artworks, while others (affective or purely value-based terms) are imputed to artworks and can only apply to them by metamorphic extension. (3) An A-Quality must be some aspect of the object that is perceived as a value or as being capable of providing aesthetic gratification. An aesthetic value may be defined as any property of an object that is held to be a source of contemplative pleasure to a perceiver and that bears repeated contemplation. Thus qualities like “delicate” (meaning having thin fine lines or contours), sombre (dark – of colours and landscape), vivid are phenomenally objective or descriptive properties. “Unified”, “coherent”, “complete”, “balanced”, “tightly knit”, “harmonious” are Gestalt or structural or “regional” qualities. “Tragic”, “joyful”, “serene”, “solemn”, “sad”, “cheerful” are emotion qualities or expressive qualities perceived directly in art forms of the self-signifying type (literature, figurative painting and sculpture, expressive dance, and stage acting), but imputed to pure music, landscape, and non-objective painting and sculpture in the non-self-expressive medium. “Bold”, “nervous”, “tense”, “impatient”, “relaxed”, “restless” are behaviour qualities, ascribed metaphorically to artworks. “Shocking”, “stirring”, “funny”, “trite”, “boring”, “beautiful”, “impressive” are reaction qualities and value-loaded and designate affective responses to artworks. They are applied metaphorically to artworks. It also follows from (3) that the so-called A-Qualities – whether objective or purely evaluative/affective – are aesthetic values, perceived as such by a viewer or a community of viewers. Value perception takes someone to discover for himself or herself the values in things. Aesthetic judgement is then necessarily a judgement of values, and to that extent, it may be allowed that the percipient plays an active, creative role in the perception. He or she interprets the qualities residing in the object as value-bearing and capable of yielding aesthetic enjoyment. And these qualities should include not only the formal qualities of the medium, like colours, shapes, and sounds, but also the representational elements – meanings, pictures, and the like. What then are potential in the object and are “actualized” in the perceiver’s consciousness are aesthetic values, not the value-bearing properties themselves. Values come into being in and by the act of perception. An observed property, when seen as a value, becomes an aesthetic quality. As an event in consciousness, an aesthetic quality cannot be deemed to belong to the 40

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artwork. What belongs to the artwork is some perceptible property – visual, auditory, or cognitive (perceived as meaning). While all values depend on a perceiver for their realization, there seem to be different degrees of this realization and different ways in which it is affected. In some art forms, the values themselves may be said to be given in some sense and not merely perceived. In the case of the verbal and dramatic arts, and in other forms of the self-expressive medium, qualities like “sad”, “cheerful”, “comical”, etc., are descriptive properties. The art form consists of them. Moreover, these may not only be objective properties but also the values expressed by the work. The tragicalness of Hamlet or King Lear, the serenity on the face of the Buddha image, the erotic gestures and movements of a dancer are palpably manifested in the work as values. They do not emerge in perception or await actualization by the percipient. They are there insofar as they can be expressed at all, in life or in art. Perceiving the look of peace on the face of an actual person is the same as perceiving it on the face of a painted image of the person, except that the latter is an imitative reproduction or representation. We just see it for what it is, recognizing it by its tokens. But can they still be said to be expressed as values by the work itself? The tragicalness (pity and grief) of King Lear is a feeling registered by Lear and other characters in the play. But it is not a “pleasure-yielding” aesthetic value to them: It is an insufferable condition. The spectator, however, takes pleasure in reliving and empathizing with that condition, and, hence, it is a value to him. Similarly is the look of agony on the face of Christ in a crucifixion painting. On the other hand, the joy of the reunion of lovers in a romantic comedy-drama is a valuable experience both to the characters and the spectators, who are happy in their happiness. Buddha’s serenity, if you know his story, was a value to him, which he cultivated and, presumably, also relished and hence a value in the imaged person in that the image exhibits it. The erotic behaviour of a dancer or stage actor is even more manifestly an “expressed value”, a valuable experience equally to the performer and the spectator. In such cases, we can say that the already actualized affective values of the artwork are simply replicated or reverberated in the consciousness of the spectator. You feel what Buddha felt or, more accurately, what the image “feels”, in a manner of saying. But here one could make a hair-splitting distinction and say that the feeling felt by the spectator is not the same raw emotion that is expressed by the character or exhibited in the image. What the spectator feels is “aesthetic emotion” (rasa, in Indian poetics), and accordingly, one could give it a different nomenclature. While this may hold true of the disagreeable or painful emotions – like grief, anger, fear, disgust – which turn out to be pleasurable in life as in art. But are not even the disagreeable emotions – Lear’s grief or Christ’s agony – qualitatively the same as those felt by me when I identify with those characters – except that they are distanced and imaginatively recalled? A maxim in Sanskrit has it that the poetic or dramatic experience is the same for the poet, the hero, and the audience. However, you may wish to call these very distanced or “imagined” feelings 41

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“art emotions” and hence aesthetic values. But even so, they can be seen as already manifested in the work, at least in their substantial forms. There is another sense in which aesthetic values may be said to be expressed by the artwork, not existing merely as a basis for potential realization. The artwork, as an illocutionary act, was made with the purport of conveying certain values – valuable insights or experiences – and it does so in the only way possible – namely, through the medium of the art form and the properties appertaining to it. The serene look of Buddha and the agony of Christ on the cross are the expressed content of the respective images – expressed through visible, objective signs – and at the same time, they are the values purported by the expressions and found worthy of contemplation by the art lover. In the other self-expressive mediums too, the work occasions sad or cheerful feelings in the reader or spectator because the dancer, the actor, the speaker, the poet himself or herself in his or her own person or his or her persona expresses those feelings. These feelings, when they are replicated or echoed in the reader’s or spectator’s consciousness, are different from those expressed in the artwork only in the sense that they appear in a different substratum, where, of course, they will become intermixed with subjective elements. But they should still be deemed to remain unchanged in their qualitative essence. Otherwise, they could not even be traced back to the work that endangered them, not to say that we can have a shared experience of them. These affective values, it may be admitted, are “realized” in their affective depth only in the experience of the percipient. They are grasped from the artwork cognitively or perceptually (as the case may be) and then realized affectively. And in that sense, they are potential in the work. But they are potential only in the way that certain food values, like protein and vitamins, are said to be contained in certain varieties of food. The value of these elements is realized only when the foodstuff containing them is consumed and takes effect on the body. But what precisely is the nature of this realization in the case of art? The values conveyed by the artwork produce certain reactions in the perceiver – they evoke certain affective responses in him or her. It is the perlocutionary end of the communication act. Considered as communication, art is no different from other kinds of communication. Someone makes an art object for the purpose of evoking a certain response in the viewer. The viewer responds and has an aesthetic experience. Beardsley’s theory supports such a causal explanation of aesthetic experience: the phenomenally objective features of the work of art (Beardsley 1982, 82). This being the case, the beholder’s role consists only in recognizing the values residing in the form and content of the work and responding to them in wise passiveness. He or she does not have to reshape or in any way complement or complete the work, as the phenomenologist claims. The value, of course, takes effect in his consciousness, and in this sense, it is the potential in the artwork as it is in any cause-effect situation. But the artwork, as a meaningful structure, has discharged itself, whether the response (perlocutionary 42

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effect) takes place or not, just as a command given is complete in its meaning whether the perlocutionary action ensues or not, hence its objectivity. In the non-self-expressive, non-objective forms – music, architecture, abstract painting, abstract dance (if ever there was such a thing) – the values cannot be said to exist even as potentialities in any constant or definite way, as they are not amenable to objective tests. There the sound structure, shape, mass, colour, steps, geometrical figures, etc., cannot be said to be value-bearers, except (a) by convention or (b) when regarded as intentional objects whose purport is to convey certain values – sheer perceptual pleasure or some arbitrarily imposed symbolic or expressive significance. Even so, in the absence of any specifiable signification, such as a title, declared theme, or narrative context, one cannot say that aesthetic qualities or values, like sadness, cheerfulness, etc., “emerge” out of the formal elements of these arts. Thus the sadness of a musical piece is actually projected onto it and hence metaphorically ascribed, for the music has no potentiality to occasion sadness in the absence of an invariable relation to overt expressions of sadness. To say with Langer, it is iconic of forms of feeling (the appeal to inner happenings). However, it could arouse emotions in virtue of some formal features (“Contours”, Peter Kivy calls them) that are isomorphic with features of behaviour expressive of them – such as tonality, rhythm, tempo (the Bowasma thesis) – in which case, such features would be descriptive qualities or properties of the object, not “aesthetic qualities” arising out of the contact of the listener’s consciousness with the object. The same argument holds for abstract dance. But the recognition of such values will be, to a large extent, contingent upon the listener’s personal attunement and cultural exposure. An Indian audience, who is unaware of Western music or ballet, would not be able to feel any deep appreciation for it, although he or she can still identify the sounds as music and the movements as dance movements. But non-genuine aesthetic experience may be expected from such encounters. In any case, it is only instances of the non-self-expressive category that the percipient has to add to the artwork, bringing to it experiential material from the storehouse of his or her consciousness. But in instances of the other category – in the self-expressive mediums – there is no need for supplementation by the imagination. Their meanings are contained in their forms. One perceives such objects, makes out their form and their meaning, and then one may be affected by them in some way. But the objective reality of the thing remains unchanged. There is no inter-inanimation or cooperative effort between the art object and the percipient. But here the phenomenologist may point out that what the words of a poem, the gestures and actions of a performing artist, or the representation in a painting may be said to contain is only an “ideal signification” (Dufrenne, 218) or a “schema” (Mitias 1988b, 32), not the sensuous body of the experience itself and that in this sense, the aesthetic object is realized and “completed in the consciousness of the spectator” (Dufrenne, 204). There is the objective reality of the artwork and then there is the subjective content which the work stirs up in the mind – emotions, images, memories, 43

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sensations – the effects that bring the object to life as an aesthetic object. Here we must remind ourselves that any artwork or any act of expression, for that matter, in the verbal, physical, or plastic medium can go only so far and not hand over experience in the body. It can only be a schema. Moreover, the meaning of any sign or sememe (meaning-bearing entity) comes to light only when there is an uptake. But the meaning is always there, situated in its context, whether someone decodes it or not. But this is not the sense intended by the phenomenologist. The meaning, he would say, acquires its identity in being experienced. However, the case of the dramatic arts – stage acting and dance – which are in the action medium – is somewhat different. There the contents of the experience are presented directly and immediately as a live spectacle, as a “happening”, not merely as a schema. So much so that the audience has only to vibrate in sympathy or relive the event empathetically. Even so, no doubt, the manner of realizing the spectacle will vary from individual to individual, each person bringing to his or her experience a wealth of meanings drawn from his personal psyche and his cultural frame of reference. But over such subjective reactions, the art object has no control. Much less do these reactions form part of the meaning of the work. For all meaning or all that is supported by a semantics – a sign-signifie, expresserexpressed (vācya-vācaka, in Sanskrit) relation – is by definition limited and definite. The elaborations or extensions of meaning, imaginative and conceptual proliferations, that a Mona Lisa or a poem by Keats may spur in the mind of a person with a fertile imagination, although they no doubt may flow from the object, cannot with any justice be called the meaning of that object. No doubt, too, that invariably the object is realized in this subjective fashion and is, in the process, enriched by what the individual adds to it in terms of his or her own constructive imagination. But I should argue that all this does not strictly fall within the bounds of what the work itself purports to convey. At any rate, the spectator cannot be said to be “constituting” or “completing” the aesthetic object through his or her act of perception. He or she can only be extending its meaning, value, or significance. For the work itself, as a finished product – whether a poem, a play, a picture, or a dance – contains its own significance, is self-complete and self-revealing (inasmuch as any such thing can be said to be) even without the mediation of the spectator’s consciousness. Hence its objectivity, its autonomous status. We have seen that an artefact – regardless of whether it is completely objective or partly actualized in consciousness – is distinguishable from the rest of the phenomenal world by virtue of its artefactuality. It is either an imitative reproduction of nature; a formulation, shaping, or organization of its elements (categorical traits); or an expression of ideas and feelings in a conventional medium, although many other artefacts (machines, tools, etc.) would also qualify for this designation. But is the experience generated by it so distinguishable from other kinds of experiences? It has been argued by the critics of aesthetic experience and aesthetic attitude that art is continuous or so coextensive with like that there are no elementary aesthetic 44

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interests or emotions and that all the interests, emotions, and urges that prompt people in real life appear in art as well. However, something like an aesthetic interest or aesthetic sense can perhaps be isolated from other life interests – from the utilitarian, heuristic, religious, intellectual, and the like. First, people enjoy making pictures of things or producing imitations of objects and actions. This is Aristotle’s mimetic instinct. Second, they like to create shapes; make formal patterns of objects, sounds, or movements; weave structures of different kinds; and so on. This is Aristotle’s instinct for harmony and rhythm. Third, they also like a pleasurable exercise of their emotions, what Hazlitt called “gusto” (rasa, in Sanskrit), or an excitation of their senses by colours, sounds, and the like. Fourth, there is the instinct for ornamentation (alamkarana, in Sanskrit), which is amply demonstrated by all sorts of decorative motifs appearing in traditional architecture – temples, churches, and mosques – and on images and by costumes, jewellery, and the like, which serve no other function than simply beautifying the appearance of things and persons. In both Indian and Western poetics, rhetorical figures are held to be ornamental additions to the poetic idea, a means of enhancing the meaning. Artistic activity, as well as aesthetic appreciation, may be traced to these urges. There is no need to explain the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon. So one can conclude that there is a thing called pure aesthetic value that is distinct from practical, theoretical, and other values. And if there is such a value, the experience resulting from the pursuit or contemplation of it must also be distinct from experiences resulting from other sorts of activities and objects. Aesthetic activity may be called a self-rewarding activity or play, and an end in itself. But this feature of the aesthetic experience may not be a sufficient condition for its being a distinct kind of experience since there are evidently many other activities – games and sports, for example – that are also self-rewarding, in which case we can only say that aesthetic activity is but part of a larger family of autotelic activities. Besides, as pointed out by Dickie and other objectors, one may not value an art object for its aesthetic interest alone. The aesthetic interest may coexist with the practical, acquisitive, intellectual, and other interests. While this may be granted, it is possible to argue that, in its purest state, albeit maybe for a short duration, the aesthetic interest can be isolated and the quintessential function of the object that provokes that interest is to gratify that aesthetic in the viewer and not to provide some other kinds of satisfaction. In any case, it is necessary to outline the character of this experience before we can make out a case for it in terms of its possibility and worthwhileness. Contemporary discussions of this subject have generally followed Beardsley’s formulation – which has its source in the tradition of Kant and Schopenhauer. According to Beardsley, the five characteristics or “internal properties” of aesthetic experience are object-directedness, felt freedom, detached affect, active discovery, and wholeness. Attentional focus on the aesthetic object, disinterestedness and psychical distance, and the consequent freedom from mundane concerns are also common to the phenomenological and aesthetic 45

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attitude theorists. Both Beardsley and the phenomenologist also emphasize the affective character of this experience. But for Beardsley, the affective element is strictly under the control of the perceptual elements of the artwork. Much the same account can be heard from the ancient Indian theorists, chiefly Abhinavagupta, whose formulations of the “rasa” theory, following Bharata’s Natya-sastra, have been taken as canonical over the ages (Abhinava Bharati, I & VI). Although the rasa experience is generally equated with aesthetic experience by scholars, it must be noted that in its original intent, it related mainly to poetry and stage drama and not to the plastic arts or even to music and dance in their abstract form, taken in isolation from the theatrical context. Poetry was considered separately as a verbal art, and the theatrical spectacle was a mix of dialogue, action, song, and dance (both pure and expressive). The rasa experience was the total experience of the dramatic spectacle. Both Bharata and his commentators, including Abhinavagupta, recognize that music and abstract dance are powerfully effective tools, especially in the theatre, but they argue that they possess no definite emotive significance as they have no semantic or cognitive content – a situation consisting of the objects and behavioural expressions of an emotion. In latter-day literature, the rasa concept was applied to the figurative arts – namely, painting and sculpture (citra and silpa) – and expressiveness was held to be of the very essence of the art of portraiture, as it was of stage acting and expressive dance. The association of music with rasa was taken as axiomatic, though it was recognized that musical notes and tunes (ragas) had by themselves are of no exact signification. Emotions can be expressed only in two mediums: speech (vacika) and bodily action and gesture (angika), which are self-signifying vehicles, while musical sounds, dance steps, and abstract figures have no expressive power of their own and are parasitic on the concrete emotive situation for their evocative function. Understood in the context of the theatre – poetry too is a dramatization of the emotions, according to Abhinavagupta – rasa is an affective experience, not merely a cognitive perception. The primary object of art is not referential, to convey information or to yield any new knowledge, but to evoke pleasurable responses in the spectator. On the much-debated question of whether aesthetic experience is a conceptual or a non-conceptual, non-discursive state, the rasa theory maintains that the essence of this experience is an affective quality provoked in the artist, as well as in the spectator by whatever is the subject matter of human experience – an object, person, thought, or situation. Rasa is an emotionalized perception of the world as opposed to the purely intellectual or theoretical. Representational art is no doubt made up of references to objects and states of affairs. But mere referentiality or exemplification does not confer value on an object (contra Goodman). What is aesthetically valuable can be determined only by the quality (specifically emotive quality) of what is referred to or exemplified. The rasa theory assumes that affective states (emotions or bhavas), like the tragic, the comic, the erotic, the serene, etc., are given a priori – they 46

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are embedded in human consciousness as latent traces or impressions to be sparked into action at the least touch of their objects (cf. Dufrenne, 437– 439 on “aesthetic” a priori). Rasa experience is no doubt still a cognitive process – the instruments of empirical knowledge (pramanas) do operate in so far as it involves the construal of the data of the presented object or spectacle, and it draws upon sense perception, inference, and memory as in ordinary cognition. But the resultant of these processes is a pleasurable thrill termed camatkara, spanda, while the cognitive activity is the penultimate stage of aesthetic perception. In its ultimate stage of enjoyment, Abhinavagupta insists, rasa is a variety of apperception or self-reflexive activity in which the mind oversteps all the cognitive baggage and rests in its own consciousness. Moreover, the objectively presented emotions are not so much cognized as they are “recognized” (cf. Dufrenne: Ube reconnaissance). In terms of his own idealistic epistemology, Abhinavagupta holds that all knowledge is a recognition of the world as oneself. If rasa can be called “aesthetic emotion”, it is not, however, in the sense in which it is understood in Western aesthetics – a pure etherealized feeling, such as even the colours and lines of an abstract painting or the sounds of a musical piece, of the figure, rhythm, and movement in an abstract dance are believed to evoke an “art emotion” pertinent to the so-called aesthetic surface (as Clive Bell, Beardsley, Peter Kivy, and others would have it). The implication is that it is a full-blooded emotion of the ordinary sort (the “garden variety”, if you like) but occurring in a characteristic way in the context of art (particularly in poetry and drama). That is to say that emotions like love, anger, fear, etc., are the very substance of the rasa experience, but they are experienced differently from emotions in real life owing to the peculiarity of the situation – call it the aesthetic situation – in which they occur, and they are all savoured and become objects of gustation in a way that they are not in real life. Love, wonder, heroism, humour, and serenity, which are relished in real life, unlike fear, grief, anger, and disgust, are transformed in art even while retaining their own distinctive flavours. Even the disagreeable emotions are savoured when they are presented through the medium of art (cf. Aristotle). What differentiates life emotions from aesthetic emotions and bestows value on them is the fact that when they are artistically represented, they are rendered relishable and capable of being enjoyed repeatedly (punahpunar-anusandhanatma). The rasa experience is a cognition tinctured by (rusila-vikalpa-sumvedanam) and of the same nature as the mental states like joy and sorrow, which are the stuff of poetry and drama. However, Abhinavagupta insists that the aesthetic emotion is distinct from life emotions and that it is of quite another order – unique and non-ordinary (alaukika). And he adduces the following reasons on support of his claim: (1) It is different from ordinary modes of consciousness as is not subject to obstacles, such as practical, utilitarian concerns, or a complete surrender to the objects of desire (visayavesa-vaivasya). It is also distinct from 47

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Yogic consciousness in which there is a complete turning away from sensuous objects. In the poetic or dramatic experience, on the other hand, the mind is entranced by the object, although it is not totally immersed in it, as in some blind appetite, but retains a degree of contemplative detachment such that it enables one to turn the object over, so to say, and savour it (cf. Dufrenne, 358). The rasa experience consists of the relishing of the contents of the dramatic or other presentation. (2) One of the central tenets of the rasa doctrine is “generalization” (sadharani-karana). The dramatic or poetic emotions, presented as being undergone by the character or by the speaker in the poem in particular situations, take on a generic significance and are felt by the spectator/ readers if they were his or her own. They are divested of their deictic (determinations of person, place, time, and gender) in the spectator’s apprehension and enjoyed for their general human significance. The spectator has no thought of ascertaining the veracity of the events, for the events are departicularized in the spectator’s cognition and freed of their ontic determinations. Rasa is simply the life emotion freed of its limiting factors. This generalization of the emotions, together with their situational setting, is due to the very nature of the context in which they are experienced – namely, (a) the objects of the emotions are not those of the spectator and (b) the characters undergoing the emotions are not related to the spectator in any intimate way, nor are they actual personages, but projections of human types. Similarly, the actor, too, is taken to be such a projection as the situation in which he or she is acting out his or her feelings through word, gesture, and movement is entirely fictitious. The lyrical voice of the poet, too, even if he or she were voicing the emotions actually felt by him or her, is in terms of the verbal presentation, that of an imaginal person. Thus the whole experience of poetry and drama is a visualization (anuvyavasaya) or imaginative projection. In other words, the very fictionality and distance of the poetic or dramatic situation will act as a bar to close personal identification with the presented persons and happenings. However, there is yet a degree of identification due to the power of sympathy in which the spectator’s personal being is involved as if the events of the drama were happening to him. He or she imagines him or herself being in a similar situation with persons whose lives touch him or her most intimately. This peculiar state of mind during the experience of the drama is described by a commentator as follows: “This is another’s (experience); no, this is not another’s, this is mine. No this is not mine. Here in the savouring of the events of the drama, no such discrimination exits”. The dramatic or the poetic situations are therefore necessarily distanced from the practical or personal concerns of the spectator. The poem or play does not convey any specific injunctions to the spectator as to his or her actions or duties. Its emotions, too, are generalized in the way mentioned so 48

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as to prevent wrong identification. The mechanics of the stage presentation, together with the various theatrical conventions will also aid the necessary “break with reality” so that the spectator becomes immersed in the world of the drama to the extent that all his or her worldly interests and concerns are suspended for the time being. Hence Abhinavagupta calls the dramatic experience other-worldly. This is how “disinterestedness” and “aesthetic or physical distance”, which are necessary, if not a sufficient condition of aesthetic experience, are to be understood. In terms of the rasa theory, aesthetic detachment is detachment not from human concerns, as Dickie understands it, but from concerns of a practical or immediately personal nature. The pleasure of the rasa experience is born of our deep involvement in matters of life that are equally our own and of the rest of the world but appearing at a remove from actual life because of the assumed otherness and imaginariness of the presentation. There is the awareness in the back of the spectator’s mind that the whole drama is an imaginative exercise or play. As Dufrenne put it, the world of the artwork is “derealized” by its being a representation of the real world (360). Abhinavagupta maintains that the rasa experience is, in the ultimate analysis, a subjective event – the locus of the experience is the spectator's consciousness, which is a repository of all kinds of memories and residual traces, so much so that what the spectator savours his or her own consciousness, with the artwork merely serving to awaken it. But he says there is also a sense in which the rasa is in the poem or play since it is the emotive apparatus presented in it that is the basis for deluciation and the object of contemplation. Also, the rasa experience lasts only as long as contemplation is fixed exclusively on the object with no sense of cause and effect. The objective presentation is thus inextricable from that state, although what is objectively presented is quickly internalized and assimilated into the subjective consciousness or appropriated to the self, with the result that the ­subject-object distinction seems to disappear for the moment. Abhinavagupta characterizes this as the “state of being filled with the (aesthetic) object” (tanmayībhāva) in which the object blossoms in the consciousness like some wonderful flower (adbhutpuspavat). Several features of this account of rasa may suggest resemblances to the phenomenological account of aesthetic experience, especially in its emphasis on the affective character of the experience and its freedom from ontic determinations and in its focus on the consciousness of the reader/spectator. But the important difference is that the rasa theory does not conceive of the aesthetic object as in any way being a creation or “emergent” of the percipient’s consciousness. The sense of “thatness” is never lost in the experience. The work of art itself is an entirely accomplished thing, with the experience being in the nature of re-envisioning or re-enactment (anusandhana). The poetic or dramatic emotions are those that are brought into being by the poem or play (kavyena bhavyante). Abhinavagupta no doubt writes elaborately about the deeper dimensions of the rasa experience, 49

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waxing lyrical on its blissful nature. But he never forgets for a moment the objective character of the thing that gives rise to that experience. While he maintains the uniqueness and other-worldliness of the experience, he comments that as the rasa excitement of the spectator is inconstant and variable, the work has to be judged only by its objective presentation, as this is only fit for discourse. Abhinavagupta would thus fully agree with Beardsley’s emphasis on the object-directedness of aesthetic experience, as well as with the other criteria laid down by him, such as unity, felt freedom, and detached affect. Both of these critics are one in stating that aesthetic experience is a derivative of an already completed aesthetic object. Its course is dictated by the object. The object itself must, of course, possess some virtues, must be sufficiently enticing in order that it may cause in the qualified viewer the experience appropriate to it. Thus is first the initial perceptual/imaginative hook-up, then the disinterested attention, and then the cognitive, analytic discrimination of the objective properties, followed by the enjoyment of the object in a synoptic perception, although these stages may not always seem perceptible. But neither Abhinavagupta nor Beardsley succeeds in showing that these features of aesthetic experience are sufficient to differentiate it from other experiences marked by a measure of intensity, such as religious or sexual ecstasy. In fact, Beardsley admits that experiences with an aesthetic character may be found to overlap with other kinds (292). Some of Abhinavagupta’s critics raised the same objection. Again, if, as Beardsley argues, the experience and the object share the same set of features, although in two different existential modes (one being phenomenally subjective and the other objective), what is the use of elaborating on the subjective field, especially when the concern of the critic and the aesthete is with the objective features of the work rather than with what happens when he or she encounters an art object? Abhinavagupta too does not work out a satisfactory justification for his excursions into the mystique of rasa experience, except that he seems to suggest that art experience should be held in the highest esteem as it is comparable to the supernal joy of realizing the supreme reality (Brahman or the world-soul). The attempt to show the interdependence of the phenomenally objective and phenomenally subjective aspects of the aesthetic encounter comes from the phenomenologist. But even he, as I have shown earlier, fails to account for the autonomous character of art objects that are in the self-signifying mode. The phenomenological approach that would work well with the natural objects and art forms in the non-self-expressive mode depends on percipients’ realization of their status as aesthetic objects; they run against the common perception of their givenness, their objective character. The argument that the aesthetic object is objective in some respects and subjective in others is at best dubious epistemology. In trying to ensure a place for the reader/perceiver in the aesthetic encounter, the phenomenologist may be guilty of wanting to eat his cake and have it too!

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It cannot, of course, be denied that there is an aesthetic kind of experience that is intrinsically gratifying that people derive from artworks. But this experience can vary in intensity depending on individual taste and sensibility, as well as on the nature of the art form – some people find greater excitement in drama, music, and dance than in painting, and so on. It is doubtful, too, that all art forms are capable of generating the same sort of excitement that Abhinavagupta attributes to the dramatic arts or even that the experience generated by them is of the affective kind at all. Some artworks, like an abstract painting or a musical elaboration performed by an Indian virtuoso, will provoke a critical/analytic awareness in the connoisseur rather than a profound affective experience. One might, however, say with Beardsley that in such cases, the sense of active discovery – of form and meaning – is the reward. But then such discoveries or “eureka” experiences are common to non-aesthetic situations as well. Again, as Dickie and others have argued, artworks may be valued for many reasons – for cognitive, moral, and other values – not only for aesthetic pleasure. But it can still be maintained that in most cases – in dance, portrait painting, music, and, arguably, literature too – pleasure rather than information is the immediate aim of art. However, pleasurability cannot be used as a criterion of aesthetic merit because it is not accessible to critical analysis; there are no tools to measure it. What it all boils down to is that aesthetic experience is a subjective matter and known only by acquaintance – it must be felt in order to be known. Therefore, the Indian theorists appeal to its introspective validity and aver that, in the ultimate analysis, rasa is its own proof (svatah-­ pramana), like direct perception and beyond the limits of discourse. (It is perhaps best to keep it that way!) The real issue then is not whether there is an aesthetic experience but what its usefulness is for critical discourse. In evaluating artworks, we no doubt judge their goodness in terms of their efficacy to communicate a valuable experience, and we judge certain artistic devices or compositional features for their effectiveness in delivering specific effects. It may also be granted (contra Dickie) that unity and its family of related qualities, dependently or independently valuable in works of art, can be predicated on aesthetic experience, although they are not exclusive to it. But they can be taken as axiomatic and artworks analyzed in terms of them, without having to expatiate on their effective or phenomenally subjective counterparts, even as the laws of identity, noncontradiction, unity of meaning, and so on are the norms in logic and semantic analysis, but one does not dwell on the states of mind corresponding to these objective features. Thus, in saying that a poem or a play is unified, has a complex organization, or that it exhibits emotional tension one has said it all. The corresponding affects at the subjective level may be expected to follow. Since any talk about the phenomenally subjective features will only push us back into the work, the work alone ought to be our concern, first and last. Here one must agree with Dickie.

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References Abhinavagupta. “Abhinavabharati”, on Bharata, Natyasastra. Vol. 1. Varanasi: Banaras Hindu University, 1971. Beardsley, Monroe C. “The Aesthetic Point of View”, “Aesthetic Experience Regained”, “What Is an Aesthetic Quality?” “Aesthetic Experience””. In The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays. Ed. Michael J. Wren and Donald M. Callen. Ithaca and London: Cornell U.P., 1982. Dickie, George. Evaluating Art. Philadelphia: Temple U.P., 1988. Dufrenne, Michael. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Trans. Edward S. Casey et al. Evanston: North Western U.P., 1973, p. 358: “The Paradox of aesthetic experience is that one is at once both contemplator and participant”. Hermeren, Goran. “The Varieties of Aesthetic Qualities”. In Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience. Ed. Michael H. Mitias. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Mitias, Michael H. What Makes an Experience Aesthetic? Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988a. Mitias, Michael H. “The Locus of Aesthetic Quality”. In Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience, Ed. Michael H. Mitias. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988b. Sparshott, Francis E. The Theory of the Arts. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1982.

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4 AESTHETIC QUALITIES, AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE, AESTHETIC VALUE * Stephanie A. Ross Introduction In an early work, Speaking of Art, Peter Kivy suggests this concise summary of the problem of aesthetic experience: It involves either the special experience of ordinary qualities or the ordinary experience of special qualities.1 I believe this claim needs to be amended considerably in order to capture the full complexity of the issue. First, two more candidates must be added to Kivy’s list. In canvassing all the combinations regarding aesthetic experience, we must entertain four possibilities: It involves either (1) the special experience of special qualities, or (2) the special experience of ordinary qualities, or (3) the ordinary experience of special qualities, or (4) the ordinary experience of ordinary qualities. I take it that endorsing option #4 is tantamount to simply denying the existence of aesthetic experience altogether. While some might be inclined to say the same of option #3, I would prefer to view it as a gloss or analysis of the notion of such a distinctive aesthetic experience. But doubling Kivy’s list from two to four possibilities is just the beginning. A thoroughgoing analysis of aesthetic experience would not only take a stand on the nature of its correlate or object; it would also extend one level further in each direction and speculate about the relations between aesthetic qualities and their tactual or perceptual base, on the one hand, and between aesthetic experience and aesthetic value on the other. Accommodating these additions to the logical space of candidate answers here, we now confront a dizzying array of possibilities. Jerrold Levinson, in his paper “Aesthetic Supervenience”, has argued that there are four possible relations in which aesthetic qualities may stand to their base properties: definitional reduction, positive condition-governing, negative condition-governing, and emergentism.2 And surveying views about aesthetic value, we can sketch at *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. XXIII, No. 1–2, 2000, pp. 61–78.

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least three options linking aesthetic experience with such value: It might be criterial for such value (definitional instrumentalism), causally contributive to it (contingent instrumentalism), or independent of it (intrinsic artistic value).3 In sum, we have four candidate theories for the first relation (that of linking base properties to aesthetic properties), four candidate theories for the second relation (that of linking aesthetic properties to aesthetic experience), and three candidate theories for the third relation (that of linking aesthetic experience to aesthetic value). A quick glance at the arithmetic needed to determine all possible combinations yields an answer of 48. I will certainly not attempt to investigate each of these combinations in the course of this chapter. Indeed, some of them may not in fact be compossible.4 I shall simply attempt a first broad survey of the terrain. My goals are to identify philosophers who held some of these views, point out the shortcomings of some of their approaches, and indicate some preferred routes through the maze. I shall begin with central pairing, that between quality and experience.

Experience, special, and ordinary Two problems confront us in trying to choose from my revision of Kivy’s grid. What distinguishes special from ordinary qualities, and what distinguishes special from ordinary experience? In addressing the second problem, we might hope to find some introspective criterion. Perhaps the specialness of aesthetic experience is indicated by distinctive qualia or feeling tones. This seems not so far from the view Clive Bell defended in his essay “The Aesthetic Hypothesis”. Bell portrayed the aesthetic emotion as a sort of sexualized inner clanging to which only the sensitive were privy. In the presence of a significant form, it triggered a kind of ecstasy. Here is Bell’s statement of this view: The starting- point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion…. The emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics…. “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art…. A good work of visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy.5 Bell is criticized – and rightly so! – for grounding his theory in a pair of unacceptably circular definitions. We have no independent access to either aesthetic emotion or significant form. Each is known only through the other. What might provide adequate entree to the notion of aesthetic experience or aesthetic emotion? Presumably, these must be known through some intrinsic identifying feature or through a link to something outside themselves, which is in turn definitively knowable. Models for the first sort of 54

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requirement might be our relation to our own pains, or perhaps, to extend the sexuality implicit in Bell’s theory, our relation to our own orgasms. We are authoritative in our reports about our own pains. If I sincerely and repeatedly insist that I have a headache, then the reply “No you don’t” is simply not in order. Nor is any suggestion that relocates or re-describes my condition. Even if you ascertain the actual source of my pain, or amass telling evidence of its severity, my avowal doesn’t change unless I agree that a new description better suits my experience. In this way, our privileged access to our own pains renders us perhaps not infallible, but definitely incorrigible, judges of our painful experiences. Not only are we uniquely authoritative in making such self-reports, but the phenomenology of pain is also such that we can’t be in pain and not know it. By definition, pains are unpleasant feelings that announce themselves to us. The notion of an “unfelt pain” is without application. Granted, I may not be able to determine, of a particular sensation, whether it is very strong pressure or very mild pain. But these are just niceties of classification. That I have the sensation is not in question. By contrast, we would say of the athlete who heroically finishes the race or game despite a serious fracture not that he or she was in pain and didn’t feel it but that there was no pain at all or that the pain was perceived and endured.6 Overall, then, we stand in this very special relation to our pains: They are transparent and self-intimating, and we are incorrigible in our reports of them. There is no reason to think that aesthetic experience works in the way I have just been describing. Despite all his talk of ecstasy and transport, Clive Bell is not entitled to the sexual analogy he tries to exploit in his account of the aesthetic emotion. Compare a query to Anne Landers, Dear Abby, or Dr. Ruth, from someone wondering whether she’s had an orgasm. The appropriate answer here is something like, “If you have to ask, then, sorry, but you haven’t had the experience in question”. This testifies to our belief that such experiences have the epistemological hallmarks mentioned earlier – they are transparent and self-intimating, and our relation to them is privileged in that our sincere avowals cannot be called into question except for issues of meaning. We could spin evolutionary arguments about the overall adaptability of having such relation to our own pains and pleasures. There is no reason to think evolution has fitted us to be infallible recognizers of good art, as well as of harmful situations and good sex. We seem neither to have nor to need aesthetic experience of the sort Bell was trying to defend. So far, I have been arguing that our access to aesthetic experience does not parallel our access to our own pains or sexual pleasures. Art does not seem to trigger in us a mental state that is immediately and incorrigibly recognized on the basis of its distinctive phenomenology. But even if there is no type of aesthetic experience that is immediately knowable in this way, perhaps there is a state that we can reliably get to through some sort of process or procedure we go through. The analogy might be some sort of 55

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machine that arrives at a particular machine state by first passing through a requisite series of prior states. The example I am thinking of in the aesthetics literature here is Edward Bullough’s classic essay “Psychical Distance”. Bullough uses “distance” as a verb; he characterizes distancing as an operation we can perform at will. Although it can be assumed in non-artistic situations (recall his famous example of a fog at sea), perhaps the act of distancing in the presence of a work of art sends us into a state in which we are undergoing an aesthetic experience. The process here would be a progressive stripping away of practical concerns (Bullough’s “putting out of gear”) until we are focussed entirely on the purported aesthetic qualities of the object in question.7 Two questions arise about this candidate for aesthetic experience. First, is it the distinctive aesthetic experience that we seek or merely a uniquely riveted or dedicated type of attention? The very fact that Bullough characterizes distancing in negative terms, emphasizing the practical considerations we banish from our minds rather than citing the competing concerns that take their place, inclines me to view the end state achieved as a rarefied form of attention. Consider a sort of parlour-game instance of distancing. It is possible to take any word in the English language and repeat it to oneself so often that it loses all sense of meaning and becomes akin to a nonsense syllable. The process may take place even more rapidly with a somewhat unfamiliar word. So, take a moment to repeat the word “adumbrate” to yourself over and over. If you find yourself losing your grip on the meaning of the word (“to give a sketchy outline, to disclose partially or guardedly”) and focussing instead on the sounds of its three component syllables, then scrutinize this mini act of distancing. Into what mental state have you dispatched yourself? You have presumably lost such basic practical skills as how to use or understand the word. Do any feeling tones remain? Suppose you previously liked or disliked the word – because it seems arch and stuffy, or because it figured in a spelling quiz you recall from sixth grade, or because you’re just put off by the sound of its three syllables. Do these attendant pleasures and pains disappear in distancing? Just considering this one rather artificial example of distancing has pointed to a dilemma for Bullough’s theory. Bullough himself acknowledges that the process of distancing can be overdone. What is most desirable, he says, is “the utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance”.8 This admission makes clear that a problem that arose for aesthetic experience persists with Bullough’s replacement candidate. We have no internal signs to mark the optimal degree of distance. Yet lacking these, we can only engage the process until all extraneous practical and personal associations have been pared away. The end point will inevitably be rapt attention to nothing but the perceptual properties of the object before us. Returning to the alternatives with which we framed this investigation, such engagement sounds ordinary rather than special. It does not seem a promising candidate for aesthetic experience. 56

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I submit that Bullough’s theory fails on internal grounds since it offers no means for identifying the desired appreciative state, that with the “utmost decrease of Distance”. Moreover, examining the process of distancing encourages us to redirect our investigation since the question we have ended with concerns not the nature of distance optimally achieved but rather the set of qualities that that state tunes in to. Before turning to the new topic of special versus ordinary qualities, let me address one last point raised by Bullough’s theory. That point concerns its Kantian origins. Bullough’s proposal is clearly in the Kantian tradition – a tradition that emphasizes disinterestedness as a hallmark of the aesthetic. Yet I have not yet in this chapter mentioned Kant’s theory. Should we look here for an account of aesthetic experience? Surely Kant posits a distinctive mental state – the free play of imagination and understanding, based on no concept, and resulting in pleasure – into which we are sent when we contemplate certain combinations of form. Moreover, Kant speaks at times as if we are aware of this free play. Consider a passage from the Second Moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful”: We now occupy ourselves with the easier question, in what way we are conscious of a mutual subjective harmony of the cognitive powers with one another in the judgment of taste…. [T]hat subjective unity of relation can only make itself known by means of sensation.9 Of course, Kant’s “easier question” is not at all easy. At issue is whether Kant’s posit of a common sense that allows us an aesthetical (as opposed to an intellectual) consciousness of the subjective harmony of our cognitive powers fulfils some of the epistemological requirements discussed earlier. In particular, does it permit immediate acknowledgement of the relevant mental state (the judgement of taste with its concomitant pleasure) each time we enter that state? If yes, then this is indeed a candidate claim about aesthetic experience. It seems to fit the second of the four possibilities sketched at the start of this chapter, portraying aesthetic experience as a special experience of ordinary qualities. But the Kantian baggage is just overwhelming here. There is no reason to think cognition in general proceeds as Kant suggests, nor that aesthetic experience is exhausted in encounters with beauty. Even if Kant’s account correctly describes our response to certain formal arrays under certain conditions,10 this involves much too narrow a range of items to which we respond aesthetically. Thus in pursuing both Kant’s and Bullough’s accounts of aesthetic experience, our attention has shifted from the inherent nature of such experience to questions about its targets. To what qualities are we attending when we have a desirable or optimal aesthetic experience? That is when we achieve the utmost decrease of distance without its disappearance (Bullough) or the harmonious free play of our cognitive faculties (Kant)? To address these latter questions, let us turn to the other term in my opening formulations and examine the qualities that are considered when we are experiencing or judging aesthetically. 57

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Qualities, special, and ordinary Surely the most famous disquisition on aesthetic qualities is Frank Sibley’s much-anthologized essay “Aesthetic Concepts”, first published in 1949. Sibley identifies aesthetic concepts as those for the application of which taste or perceptiveness is required. He then offers the following list of typical aesthetic terms: unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene, sombre, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate, moving, trite, sentimental, tragic. He supplements this list by acknowledging that some terms have both an aesthetic and a non-aesthetic use, others have predominantly aesthetic use (he cites as examples the terms graceful, delicate, dainty, handsome, comely, elegant, garish), while still others acquire their aesthetic use through metaphorical extension, (his examples here are the terms dynamic, melancholy, balanced, tightly knit).11 Other authors follow Sibley and characterize aesthetic qualities by enumerating a list of typical examples. Thus Jerrold Levinson, in “Aesthetic Supervenience”, states that he will “content [him]self with the usual enumerative induction to characterize the class with which we are concerned: gracefulness, mournfulness, balance, sublimity, garishness, sobriety, flamboyance, gaiety, eeriness, etc.”12 Goran Hermeren offers a similar list (“examples of aesthetic qualities include garishness, tenseness, grace, harmony, gaiety, nervousness, sadness, excitement, somberness, sereneness, solemnity, joy, cheerfulness, boldness, vitality, restraint, sublimity, monumentality, coherence, picturesqueness, mysteriousness, and beauty”) in his Encyclopedia of Aesthetics article “Aesthetic Qualities”. But Hermeren then goes on to draw some distinctions among items in this class, noting that some aesthetic qualities are complex while others are simple, that some are internal (experienced as in the work) while others are external, that some are metaphorical while others are literal, that some are perceived emotional qualities in the work while others ascribe certain reactions or responses to beholders.13 Finally, Alan Goldman, in his book Aesthetic Value, defines aesthetic properties as “those that contribute to the aesthetic values of artworks” and expands upon this slightly one paragraph later as “those that ground or instantiate in their relations to us or other properties those values of artworks that make them worth contemplating.”14 In his opening taxonomy, Goldman recognizes a rich variety of aesthetic terms, each of which picks out properties that can’t be described in a purely physical vocabulary. The eight types of terms he singles out are evaluative, formal, emotion, evocative, behavioural, representational, second-order perceptual, and historical, and for each, he lists a series of examples.15 Goldman admits that the terms he lists cannot be categorized simply as terms singling out phenomenal properties of works of art since the correct application of some of them requires knowledge of external contextual or causal factors.16 Whether a work possesses certain emotion, evocative, or behavioural qualities depends in part on the repertoire available to the

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artist, the range of alternatives from which the artist made his or her selection. Nor can historical qualities like originality be applied solely by consulting the work itself. (Compare the point Kendall Walton makes with the example of guernicas in his article “Categories of Art”.) Goldman also rules out the possibility that these terms all name regional properties of works of art,17 as not all of them turn on relations among parts. In the end, what Goldman deems common to and definitive of the category “aesthetic quality” is a contributory relation to aesthetic value. This is, for Goldman, a property that can be possessed in varying degrees. For instance, Goldman states that “to call a piece of music sad…is not necessarily to evaluate it”; “to say that a painting’s composition is balanced may be to evaluate it positively; to say that it is symmetrical is not evaluative”.18 Calling our attention to “the difference between properties that are evaluative in themselves and those that merely ground evaluations by further examples”, Goldman maintains that the justification of aesthetic claims ultimately rests on the appeal to non-evaluative formal properties. He calls this last set “base properties” and distinguishes five varieties: formal, expressive, representational, sensuous, and historical.19 Most of the authors just surveyed, despite their differing definitions of aesthetic qualities. concur that they are ascribed to works of art by reference to those works’ non-aesthetic properties. Thus in arguing that a melody is graceful, one points out its gentle intervals, lilting articulations, and sprightly tempo; in arguing that a painting is dreary, one emphasizes its dark shadows and depressing subject matter. Different positions are, of course, defended regarding the relation between aesthetic properties and these other nonaesthetic properties, or base properties, on which they depend. Sibley argued in his essay that aesthetic terms are not conditionally governed. Thus in his view, no ascription of base properties guarantees that a particular aesthetic property will be obtained. A sculpture may be pink, curvilinear, and perforated. But the presence of these traits does not establish the work’s delicacy if it is also 20-feet tall and made of steel. And this illustrates why an ascription of aesthetic traits seems ever defeasible. We can always think of additional properties which, if possessed by the work, block the application of the aesthetic property in question 4, the one we in all reasonableness expected the unamended cluster of base properties to support. Goldman, for instance, is fond of supposing hyena cries interspersed in a performance of music by Mozart. Such a performance would not merit the expected aesthetic adjectives. Not only are our expectations of aesthetic description disrupted when properties that would ordinarily command the application of a particular aesthetic term admixed with properties that call for quite different descriptions (immense scale competing with more conventionally delicate shapes and colours, hyena cries interrupting conventionally attractive melodies) but our expectations of a connection between 68 certain base properties and a related aesthetic quality can also be defeated because those same base properties often support the application of a similar but 59

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incompatible aesthetic term. For instance, the evidence that one critic offers to show that a work is elegant could be used by another to prove it is flaccid; the cluster of traits supporting an ascription of jauntiness could be turned into another argument to prove the work vapid and banal. The considerations just adduced are among those Sibley brings out in his article. They provide overwhelming reasons for rejecting the first two of the four possibilities Levinson sketches in his paper “Aesthetic Supervenience”. Given that such terms as “graceful” and “jaunty” can fail to hold despite the presence of base properties with which they’re conventionally linked, it cannot be the case that aesthetic qualities are definitionally equivalent to clusters of base properties, nor that they are logically supported by the presence of such clusters (the relation Levinson, following Kivy, labels positively condition-governed). The presence of the relevant base properties can never guarantee the application of the aesthetic quality with which they are typically associated. Levinson surveys two remaining choices: that the relation between aesthetic and base properties is negatively condition-governed or that it is one of supervenience. Levinson initially rejects the first option because it seems unacceptably vague. It would no doubt be impossible in principle to spell out all the defeating conditions for the application of any given aesthetic term since we can always imagine further instances that require additional amendment. But supervenience itself is not so clear a notion.20 In his penultimate section, however, Levinson concedes that some aesthetic properties do seem to be negatively condition-governed at least in part, and so too, at least to some degree, consist in their structural bases. He offers two options between which to choose – that there is a “continuum among aesthetic attributes, some of which would then be said to be more wholly emergent than others” or that emergence does not require “complete conceptual distinctness from the structural base [but only] some substantial measure of conceptual distinctness, reinforced perhaps by phenomenological separability”.21 Alan Goldman seems to endorse a similarly nuanced view of aesthetic qualities in this respect: He maintains that all such qualities have an evaluative dimension but that different aesthetic qualities vary in how much they are weighted towards evaluative content, on the one hand, and objective content on the other. While we may not always be able to analyze aesthetic properties into their evaluative and non-evaluative components, our aesthetic ascriptions rest on hierarchical chains of justification.22 An aesthetic quality that is highly evaluative is ascribed to a work by appeal to a quality that is relatively more objective; this quality is in turn ascribed by appeal to a quality that is even less evaluative until finally the evaluative dimension is entirely discharged; the remaining claims concern purely factual or descriptive properties of the work. Thus Goldman too eschews a strict division between superstructure and base. We needn’t go any farther in pursuit of Levinson’s account of emergence or Goldman’s account of justification. Suffice it to say that these authors, like many other present-day aestheticians, acknowledge the existence of 60

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aesthetic qualities and deny that they are reducible in any simple way to the non-aesthetic qualities that make up their base. Our task, in keeping with the opening of this chapter, is to determine whether or not this is proof of the specialness of aesthetic qualities. If we grant that they can’t be fully defined in terms of non-aesthetic qualities, then the possibility of their specialness remains open. But we may have even less of an intuitive sense of what makes a quality special than of what might make an experience special. I suppose what we’re looking for is something like “different in kind”, where that difference resides not in the way the quality is experienced but in its very nature. Yet such specialness remains elusive. The authors discussed earlier have acknowledged a great variety of aesthetic qualities. (Recall the lists with which I began this section.) The very range of their examples discourages the hope of finding an essential shared trait that constitutes the specialness we seek. It certainly doesn’t turn on whether we decide to be realists about aesthetic qualities. Most philosophers are not realists with regard to secondary qualities, yet these hardly seem special or exotic. All of us with functioning sense organs presumably have experiences of colour, taste, texture, and so on. Nor can the specialness of aesthetic qualities lie in the fact that they are possessed only by works of art. We can aesthetically appreciate natural scenes, industrial artefacts, aspects of daily life, and more. Maybe, then, the specialness of aesthetic qualities is relational. Perhaps it inheres not in the qualities themselves (for the abstract, balance, delicacy, triteness, joy, and the like seem perfectly ordinary) but in the ways they interact with one another, emerge from or depend on their base properties, and so on. And of course, these are just the sorts of relationships Goldman and Levinson were exploring. This last suggestion points us in a new direction. Our investigation of aesthetic experience has encouraged a more integrative view, one according to which it is not particular qualities that are special. Thus no “checklist” can be uttered to circumscribe the realm of the aesthetic. Nor is it particular experiences that are special. Thus no one type of experience serves as a hallmark of the aesthetic. Rather, the specialness of aesthetic experience, and thus its value, inheres in the way base properties, aesthetic qualities, and perceptual, intellectual, and emotional experience come together in our encounters with works of art. While this view might seem to recall theories that emphasize the organic unity of works of art, I believe it is logically independent of such accounts. It is, however, supported by claims Jerrold Levinson makes in another context. Characterizing aesthetic pleasure, he asserts, “Pleasure in an object is aesthetic when it derives from an appreciation of and reflection on the object’s individual character and content, both for itself and in relation to the structural base on which it rests”.23 Levinson elaborates his claim as follows: We do not apprehend the character and content of an artwork – including formal, aesthetic, expressive, representational, semantic or symbolic 61

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properties – as free-floating, but rather as anchored in and arising from the specific structure which constitutes it on a primary observational level. Content and character are supervenient on such structure, and appreciation of them, if properly aesthetic, involves awareness of that dependency…. Features aesthetically appreciated are features thought of as qualified by, or even internally connected with, their underlying bases.

Value: Some applications I stated at the outset that a number of authors take the value of art to lie in the experiences it provides its viewers, readers, and hearers. For example, Malcolm Budd begins his book Aesthetic Value by announcing, “The value of a work of art as a work of art is…(determined by) the intrinsic value of the experience the work offers”,24 while Alan Goldman claims, “It is in the ultimately satisfying exercise of [our] different mental capacities operating together to appreciate the rich relational properties of artworks that I shall argue the primary value of great works is to be found”.25 But our investigation has offered no reason to assume that the value of art is exhausted by either (1) aesthetic experience or (2) aesthetic qualities. I have in effect repudiated the framework, which I based on some isolated remarks of Peter Kivy, as overly simple. Thus let us dispense with the assumption that the experience of art is such that the presence of distinctive aesthetic qualities triggers a distinctive aesthetic experience. Instead, let us close with some examples in which we investigate the interrelations of all the features we have been tracking in our investigation. Our goal is to ask in a more openminded way just what we experience and what, if anything, we appreciate when we interrogate works of art. I shall briefly consider three examples – our interactions with painting, music, and literature. In each case, I shall offer some observations about base properties, aesthetic qualities, appreciative experience, and aesthetic value. For a problem related to the art of painting, consider Richard Wollheim’s notion of two-foldness, introduced in his book Painting as an Art.26 Wollheim’s claim is that when we encounter a representational painting, we are simultaneously aware of it as a pattern of marks on a surface and as an image of a scene in three-dimensional space. Surely at least some of our awareness of the surface marks on any painting would consist of awareness of what Hermeren, Goldman, Levinson, and others would call base properties. These are the non-aesthetic qualities on which our ascriptions of aesthetic qualities are based. Wollheim’s claim is contrasted with, for example, a Wittgensteinian duck-rabbit account of representational art, one in which we switch back and forth at will between seeing the work as a two-dimensional array and as a three-dimensional representation but cannot sustain both sorts of visions at once. What is noteworthy for our topic of aesthetic qualities and aesthetic experience is this: In Wollheim’s view, the uncovering and fixation on a work’s

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aesthetic qualities is not the goal of aesthetic experience. Rather than ascending from the perceptual to the aesthetic and resting forever in that empyrean ground, Wollheim’s account has us always partially rooted in the everyday realm of ordinary qualities. We maintain awareness of both the recognitional and the configurational aspects of a work, and part of our appreciation flows from this duality. That is, we marvel that these base properties, in this particular array, generated this representational effect. If this is correct, and especially if it transfers to examples of representation in other media and other arts, it requires that we rethink any privilege we may have unintentionally accorded to aesthetic qualities. For a second example, consider the art of music. In an essay entitled “Whole or Part Relations in Music: An Exploratory Study”. Douglas Bartholomew offers a Husserlian analysis of listening to music. Attempting to show “how Husserl’s distinctions between types of parts and wholes shed light on musical structure, activity, and instruction”, Bartholomew argues that presence and absence play a crucial role in our listening. Hearing a melody demands what Husserl called retention and protention. This involves our sense of how the not-sounding tones are absent, or rather, the way in which these not-sounding tones are present…. Thus, as the melody moves from beginning to end, the meaning of each tone is affected by the protention of what is to come and is increasingly enriched by the retentions of what has already happened.27 Bartholomew’s essay invokes ontological claims that I don’t have the time or expertise to explore, but I find his analysis of musical components and our access to them a fascinating one. It certainly requires that we complicate further any simple dichotomy between base properties and aesthetic properties, or even a more sophisticated continuum of increasingly value-laden qualities. How would we classify the protentive traits of a familiar melody? Surely they contribute significantly to our grasp and appreciation of particular compositions. Here we smudge over any tidy distinctions between fact and value, or between quality and experience, since we are, in Bartholomew’s view, taking into account absent qualities, both those previously experienced and those not yet experienced. Moreover, doing so, if he is correct, contributes essentially to our understanding and valuing of the work. Finally, Bartholomew’s approach can be extended to apply to any art that unfolds in time. Narratives, too, must be kept in mind, their shapes estimated as they unfold. Turning to the art of literature, Jenefer Robinson presents an interesting case in her essay “Style and Personality in the Literary Work”. Arguing that individual style in literature is expressed in terms of apparent features (qualities of mind, attitudes, personality traits, and so on) that are attributed to the personality of the implied author, she suggests that we must take in facts of several different orders. One example she cites early on is an

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essay on the opening paragraph of Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors. The author, Ian Watt, claims that some of the most notable elements in James’s prose style include “the preference for ‘non-transitive’ verbs, the widespread use of abstract nouns, the prevalence of the word ‘that,’ the presence of ‘elegant variation’ in the way in which something is referred to, and the predominance of negatives and near-negatives”.28 In Robinson’s view, these stylistic traits ground our reconstruction of the personality of the work’s implied author. Combining Watt’s analysis and Robinson’s theory makes wonderfully clear the complexities that arise in reading and appreciating James’s novel. To understand the tone of the novel, we must attend to a number of facts simultaneously on a number of distinct interpretive levels. We must, first and foremost, read James’s sentences and understand them. This is none too easy in a novel that begins with the sentence “Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted” and soon thereafter challenges its reader with this construction: The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly-disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive – the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange that this countenance should present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” for him, of Europe?29 In doing so, we must also note peculiarities of style and diction, have some sense (if Robinson’s theory is correct) of what personality traits such diction would ordinarily flag, as well as a sense of James’s style in his other stories and novels; how it contrasts with the fiction of his peers; how the character of the narrator, Strether, is being portrayed; how Strether’s character contrasts with that of his foils in the novel; and so on. Again, how might this endeavour be understood on a model that took only aesthetic quality or aesthetic experience as its constructs? I have so far linked aesthetic experience with appreciation and understanding. I may have overemphasized the intellectual aspects of our response to art and underplayed the emotional resonances awakened. But singleminded attention to appreciation would also be a grave error. “Art” is not an honorific term, and there are many mediocre and appalling works of art, as well as compelling and inspiring ones. So let us briefly visit the aesthetic terms, qualities, and experiences unleashed by a meretricious work of art. Consider the opening paragraph of Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel Glamorama:

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It’s a mystery to rue why some people are complaining that Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel is nothing more than a recycling of his controversially graphic “American Psycho,” (1991). “American Psycho,” after all, was a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped novel about a fabulously good-looking and expensively dressed Wall Street sociopath who tortures and dismembers beautiful young women, whereas “Glamorama,” as anyone can see, is a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped book about an entire gang of fabulously good-looking and expensively dressed sociopaths who torture and dismember both women and men – and lots of them. Clearly, Ellis’s authorial vision has grown broader and more inclusive over the past decade.30 At the very least, this review introduces us to a range of aesthetic terms – bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, and overhyped – that our previous authors may have overlooked! It clarifies the sorts of observations needed to ground judgements of originality, suggests a role for revulsion as a possible aesthetic response, and reminds us of the delights of irony. It is important that our aesthetic theories encompass judgements like that expressed in Mendelsohn’s review, as well as our responses to more worthy works of art.

Conclusion I hope I have made some progress in sorting out the notions of aesthetic quality and aesthetic experience. The overall moral I draw concerns the complexity and interconnectedness of the notions that come into play when we address works of art. The closing examples indicate yet another variable that must be worked into the mix, that of artistic intention. For if we’re tying the value of a work to the experience it generates in appreciative audiences, we need to know how far-flung a set of experiences can be before they no longer count as appreciations of that particular work. To adapt an example from Clive Bell, whose views were discussed in Section 2, what if my appreciation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony comes to this: that it is my very favourite symphonic piece to daydream to because it lasts a long, long time; gets very loud; and has differently textured parts that support a varied string of fantasies. Surely this is not an acceptable appreciation of Beethoven’s Ninth. It undercuts the composer’s intentions in presenting the work and conflicts with the implicit conventions of the classical concert hall. This is not to deny that works of art are subject to multiple interpretations and varied uses. There will no doubt be many critics whose verdicts will rehabilitate Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel. Yet their arguments must meet certain constraints. They must show that readers retrieve something of value, that this derives from properties of the work, and that it connects with the author’s intent. Overall, our aesthetic experience is created from and responsive to a wide range of factors. A full account of such an experience will trace the richness of these relations.

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Notes and References 1 Peter Kivy, Speaking of Art (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 70. The actual sentence that was my taking-off point reads as follows: “Since the end of the eighteenth century, there has been a view widely held by thinkers of varying other persuasions that aesthetic perception is not ordinary perception of some special species of quality but rather a special species of perception of ordinary qualities”. 2 Jerrold Levinson. “Aesthetic Supervenience”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 22 (1983), Supplement, pp. 95–7. 3 Experience might be a constituent of aesthetic value in yet another regard if we concentrated on theories of creativity like those of Croce and Collingwood. On such views, the value of art might reside not in a type of experience generated in its audience but rather in one generated in its creators. That is, proponents of the view might insist that creative experience be of a certain distinctive sort – what Collingwood speaks of as clarifying an intuition. While this family of views might indeed make experience of some sort criteria for both the existence and value of art, the experience seems so different in kind (or at least in locale!) from that being considered in our original question that I am not including it in my grid of possible answers to the problem. 4 For instance, we would eliminate those strands that combine a denial of aesthetic experience with a demand that such experience ground aesthetic value and perhaps also those that combine a definitional reduction of aesthetic qualities to their factual base with a claim that aesthetic experience is the ordinary experience of special qualities. Thus 48 is simply an arithmetic result, the number of answers that exists before we sort “Aesthetic Hypothesis”, reprinted in The Philosophy of Art: Reading Ancient and Modern, ed. Alex Neil and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995), through them to see whether some combinations are incompatible on their face. 5 Clive Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis” in Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1914), pp. 6, 7, 8, 29, and 30. 6 One other phenomenon that is often mentioned as a proof of unfelt pain is the experience of dental work while under the influence of laughing gas. Those brave enough to choose this option rather than novocaine (and I am not among them) describe the experience as one in which they felt pain but didn’t mind it. That is, the ordinary connection between pain and its awfulness was severed. Though I’m not entirely sure how to accommodate this example, I don’t think it defeats the line I am taking here since the dental patients are still undergoing a distinct experience which they alone can authoritatively characterize. Thus privilege, incorrigibility, and immediacy remain linked. 7 Summing up the act of distancing in a fog at sea, Bullough states, “The transformation by Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends – in short, by looking at it ‘objectively’”. He repeats the out-of-gear metaphor a page later: “Distance, as I said before, is obtained by separating the object and its appeal from one’s own self, by putting it out of gear with practical needs and ends. Thereby the ‘contemplation’ of the object becomes alone possible”. Edward Bullough, “Psychical Distance”, reprinted in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995), pp. 298–300. 8 Bullough, p. 302. Bullough goes on to remark, “There are two ways of losing Distance: either to ‘under-distance’ or to ‘over-distance”. 9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment, reprinted in Art and Philosophy, ed. W. E. Kennick (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 510. Cp. A later remark: “The judgment is called aesthetical just because its determining

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ground is not a concept 76 but the feeling (of internal sense) of that harmony in the play of the mental powers, so far as it can he felt in sensation” (516). Kant goes on to argue that the existence of a common sense is a necessary condition of the possibility of the judgement of taste. “It is only under the presupposition that there is a common sense (by which we do not understand an external sense, but the effect resulting from the free play of our cognitive powers)…that the judgment of taste can be laid down” (520). 10 Those involving free rather than dependent beauty in the absence of both interests and concepts. 11 Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts”, reprinted in Art and Philosophy, ed. W. E. Kennick (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), pp. 542–3. Following Peter Kivy, I have spoken of aesthetic qualities throughout this chapter. And since I do not draw any particular distinction between qualities and properties, I would use these two terms interchangeably. Sibley, by contrast, speaks of aesthetic terms and aesthetic concepts. I assume he understands these phrases such that both are properly used to pick out or refer to aesthetic qualities. 12 Levinson, p. 93. 13 Goran Hermeren, “Aesthetic Qualities”, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 4, p. 98. 14 Alan Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 20. 15 The examples listed are – evaluative: beautiful, ugly, sublime, dreary; formal: balanced, graceful, concise, loosely woven; emotion: sad, angry, joyful, serene; evocative: powerful, stirring, amusing, hilarious, boring; behavioural: sluggish, bouncy, jaunty; representational: realistic, distorted, true to life, erroneous; second-order perceptual terms: vivid, dull, muted, steely, mellow; historical terms: derivative. original, daring, bold, conservative. Goldman, p. 17. 16 Goldman, p. 18. 17 Goldman, p. 19. 18 Goldman, pp. 19, 25. 19 Goldman, pp. 25, 46. 20 Levinson helps our understanding a bit when he distinguishes supervenience from emergence, noting that all emergent qualities are supervenient on their bases, but some cases of the supervenient fall short of emergence – namely, those in which the relation between the two levels is merely summative (p. 103). 21 Levinson, p. 108. 22 Goldman, pp. 24, 26. 23 Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Pleasure”, in A Companion Aesthetics, ed. David Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1992), p. 332. 24 Malcolm Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 4. 25 Goldman, p. 8. 26 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 21, 73. 27 Douglas Bartholomew, “Whole/Pan Relations in Music: An Exploratory Study”, in Philosopher, Teacher, Musician: Perspectives on Music Education, ed. Estelle R. Jorgensen (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 113, 181–2. 28 Jenefer Robinson, “Style and Personality in the Literary Work”, in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, Ronald Roblin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 455. 29 Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 5. 30 Daniel Mendelsohn, “Lesser than Zero”. Review of Bret Easton Ellis’s book Glamorama in the New York Times: Sunday Book Review, 24 January 1999.

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5 ON PLAY AND AESTHETIC THEORY * T. R. Martland I Although both ancient Greek and ancient Indian philosophical speculations insisted upon an underlying unity in the universe, it is frequently noted that by and large, Indian speculation was concerned with the loss of that unity and consequently focused upon ways to bring it back, whereas by and large Greek speculations took the loss more as a matter of fact and consequently focused upon the results of the loss, upon the divisions of the unity – i.e., upon empirical studies. The observation seems to be accurate. So far as India is concerned, it is especially evident in the Upanisads, but if we press a little, it is also evident in a different way in the Rig Veda where caste divisions first appear.1 Later, in the Brahmanas, the divisions appear in their more developed form, and we even find talk of this now divided unity to be the ideal social community, an organic socio-religious structure functioning through the cooperation of all its divisions: the Brahmins as the head of the body, the Kshatriyas as the arms, the Vaisyas as the trunk, and the Sudras as the feet. But notice, and this is my point, the priest is assigned the place of the mouth or head. As such, it is true, he represents society, and we might say a kind of acceptance of the loss of unity, but as a priest, he also embodies the force for expressing dissatisfaction with the loss. Remember, it is he who is obligated to push into Nirvana. Aristotle provides our classic example so far as Greece is concerned. It is he who is most responsible for the ensuing Western emphasis upon empirical studies. Living things in this world fascinated him. Not only do we have his History of Animals, the longest of all his writings, even after omitting the tenth book, which may not be his, and incidentally in which he speaks of elephants and Indians (Bk. IX, Ch. 1, 610a), but we have On the Part of Animals, On the Generation of Animals, On the Progrations of Animals, and, perhaps, On the Motion of Animals. And to this list we should add On *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. V, No. 1–2, 1982, pp. 41–51.

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the Soul, which Aristotle quickly tells us “contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and above all, to our understanding of nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life” (Bk. 1, 405a.5). And he is a witness to Western empiricism on a more profound level. His interest in the products stemming from the loss of universal unity is in harmony with his rejection of the Platonic emphasis on an ideal world existing apart from the phenomenal world which men experience every day. He rejected the Platonic tendency towards an abstract ousia – that is, a tendency to separate that which is common to individuals from particular phenomenologically experienced individuals – and in its place, he affirmed what I have elsewhere called a concrete ousia, an essence in which what is common to individuals exists in the individual species themselves. This allowed him to affect a methodology using metaphors and, further, allowed these metaphors and similes to develop into allegories. Thus with some philosophical justification, he could look to the creatures of the world and mingle observations about small birds crowding about the owl with folk stories about the enmity between the eagle and the serpent and the friendship between the fox and the raven. He could focus upon what is unique about the things of this world and at the same time point to what they have in common, insisting they share a unity for those who have eyes to see. In the great majority of animals there are traces of psychical qualities and attitudes, which qualities are more markedly differentiated in the case of human beings. For just as we pointed out resemblances in the physical organs, so in a number of animals we observe gentleness and fierceness, mildness or confidence, high spirits or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something akin to sagacity. (Historia Animalium, 488a) As a result, we find talk of the salacious partridge, the chaste crow, the intelligent and timid stag and hare, the mean and treacherous snake, the noble and courageous lion, the crafty and mischievous fox, the cautious and watchful goose, the jealous and self-conceited peacock, and, finally, of man, who alone is capable of deliberation (Historia Animalium, 488b). I hope this does not suggest that Aristotle leaves behind his interest in empirical observations. It is only to point out that though he does focus upon the empirical world, upon the results of the loss of the underlying unity of nature, his methodological assumptions also allow him to generalize from these empirical observations. It is as if from the point of view of external presentation or empirical observation he thought the creatures of his world expressed their unique individuality and were important in themselves, and from the point of view of internal analysis, he thought they expressed universal truths, a knowledge which transcends empirical observation. 69

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II Now I would like to suggest that this trip back to universal truths, harbingers of the underlying unity which so interested Indian philosophers, is interesting to readers of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics because its applied method, with all of its dangers, is the means by which the West moved forward to a theory of art very much in keeping with what I see to be the full implications of Nataraja, of playful (lila) creativity. But I must add, these are implications which Indian speculation, because of its continued focus upon a primordial unity, hesitated, and I dare say still hesitates, to defend. In order to explicate this suggestion, we will trace a pathway to that theory of art from Aristotle’s empirical observations of the honeybee. Aristotle is rather accurate in what he says about bees. Although he continues to speak of “kings”, all the while suspecting they may in fact be “‘mothers’, from an idea that they bear or generate the bees” (Historia Animalium, 553a), to his credit, he hesitates to compromise his observations by forcing on them a too easy parallel of the bee society with human society or in fact even to make moral analogies.2 But this reserve quickly dissipates with later writers. For example, consider Virgil’s impressions in the Georgics, written around 34 B.C.E. The admirable drama of small things; Chivalrous captains, every rank of life, Their manners, tastes, communities, and strife. (IV. 4–7, p. 105) .... And live beneath the majesty of law: Hence only they remember, as they roam, The joys of fatherland and stedfast home; And watching winter's rapid step with awe, In summer days to prentice labour turn, And lay in public storehouse all they earn. For some keep eye to provender, and speed (With time-code fixed) the duties of the mead: And some, within their party walls, distil Tough glue from bark, and tears of daffodil, The first foundation of the comb; whereto They hang their wax, as clammy as the glue. Some lead abroad, emboldening by degrees, The nation’s hope, the full-grown heirs of bees. Some pack the honey’d purity, and swell With limpid nectar every bulging cell. (IV. 183–198, p. 117)

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.... And some, by lot, the warder’s post supply, To watch in turn the shower and cloud go by; Or take the loads their fellow workmen bring, Or charge, and scatter from the sacred ring The drones, a lazy pack: while, in its prime, The hot work glows, and honey redolent of thyme. (IV. 199–204, pp. 117–18) .... Hence, though themselves a narrow term comprise (For never more than seventh their summer flies,) Yet everlasting doth their race remain, Through many ages stands dynastic reign; And grandsires’ grandsires swell the noble train. Than Egypt, Lydia, or Hydaspes more. Or Parthian tribes, their monarch they adore. (IV. 249–255, p. 120)3 A little more than a hundred years later, Pliny carries on in a like manner, “What men, I protest, can we rank in rationality with these insects, which unquestionably excel mankind in this, that they recognize only the common interest?”4 As did Aristotle, he too notes that the “kings” may in truth be concerned with procreation, but his proclivity for making parallels with human society allows him only to think of them as possibly husbands and fathers, never as mothers. An example of his style is as follows: The commons surround him (the king) with marvellous obedience. When he goes in procession, the whole swarm accompanies him and is massed around him to encircle and protect him, not allowing him to be seen. During the rest of the time, while the people are engaged in labour, he himself goes the circuit of the works inside, with the appearance of urging them on, while he alone is free of duty. He is surrounded by certain retainers and lictors as the constant guardians of his authority.5 Later, Christian observers follow this line of discourse and are no less inclined to generalize, Basil of Cappadocia in approximately 370 C.E. is quick to assert “the cock is proud; the peacock is vain…; doves fowls ate amorous…. The Partridge is deceitful and jealous, lending perfidious help to the huntsmen to seize their prey”.6 As for bees, Listen, Christians take the bee for your model…. The book of Proverbs has given the bee the most honourable and the best praise by calling her 71

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wise and industrious. How much activity she exerts in gathering this precious nourishment, by which both kings and men of low degree are brought to health! How great is the art and cunning she displays in the construction of the store houses which are destined to receive the honey!7 What he says about the “kings” is no less forceful and moralistic. It is not election that gives him this authority; ignorance on the part of the people often puts the worst man in power; it is not fate; the blind decisions of fate often give authority to the most unworthy. It is not heredity that places him on the throne; it is only too common to see flattery, living in ignorance of all virtue. It is nature which makes the king of bees, for nature gives him superior size, beauty, and sweetness of character.8 Seventeen years later, Ambrose, Bishop of Millan, continues in the same vein. “Do you hear what Prophet says? He enjoins on you to follow the example of that tiny bee and to imitate her work…. The bee, though Weak in body, manifests her strength in the vigor of her wisdom and in her high regard for virtuous deeds”,9 As for their “kings”, he very much follows Basil. There are notable and natural characteristics in the king as he appears among the bees. He must be, for example, outstanding in size and beauty. Besides that, he must possess what is conspicuous trait in a king – gentleness in character.10 And he seems to be aware of Virgil as well. For example, he too reports that supposedly the bee custom of self-sacrifice for not obeying the laws of the “king” is observed today by the Persians. They inflict death on themselves in punishment for a transgression. But people – neither the Persians whose subjects live under the severest laws nor the Indians or Sarmatians – hold their kings in such high esteem as do the bees.”11

III It should be obvious that Aristotle’s interest in directly observing the living things in this world has ceased to be of interest to these later commentators. What now dominates in explication is what the world’s creatures are alleged to have in common. Gleaned from texts further removed from direct observation, the parallels they draw are always presented to extract a lesson. For example, following a suggestion from Virgil and Pliny, Ambrose declares, The act of generation is common to all. Their bodies are uncontaminated in the common act of parturition, since they have no part in conjugal embraces. They do not unnerve their bodies in love nor are they torn by the travail of childbirth. A mighty swarm of young 72

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suddenly appears. They gather their offspring in their mouths from the surface of leaves and from sweet herbs.12 As might be expected, this theme proves to be useful for preaching celibacy, and for the next thousand years, we find references to the industrious and obedient virgin bee as a model for monks. And so it goes on through these centuries with little variety. Consider the following passage from the 13th-century text De proprietatibus rerum: Bees make among them a king, and though they be put and set under a king, yet they are free and their king that they make, by kind love, and defend him with full great defence, and hold it honour and worship to perish and be split for their king And bees choose to their king him that is most Worthy and noble in highness and fairness, and most clear in mildness, for that is the chief virtue in a king.13 And these lines from Shakespeare’s The Life of Henry the Fifth: Therefore doth heaven divide The state of man in divers functions, To which is fixed as an aim or butt Obedience. For so work the honeybees, Creatures that by a rule in nature teach The act of order to a peopled kingdom. They have at king, and officers of sorts, Where some like magistrate correct at home, Others like merchants venter trade abroad, Others like soldiers armed in their stings Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds, Which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent royal of their emperor; Who, busied in his majesty, surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold, The civil citizens kneading up the honey, The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burthens at his narrow gate, The sad-ey’d justice with his surly hum, Delivering o’er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone. (1:5, 134–204) But at last, a major change does occur. It will put us in the grasp of our suggested thesis. In the 14th century, Petrarch, the first great representative of Renaissance humanism, attempted once again to rectify the Aristotelian balance between the almost lost empirical observation of unique individual things in this world and the dominant tendency up until now to allegorize and find in 73

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these things of the world only universal truths which transcend in value whatever might be found by empirical observation. He did it on two levels, the practical and the theoretical. Practically, he did it with his famous ascent of Mont Ventoux, of which he writes, “I was moved by no other purpose than a desire to see what the great height was like”. Interestingly, he also tells of “an old shepherd, who tried to discourage us from the ascent with much talk”. He said that fifty years before, with an ardent youthful purpose like ours, he had climbed to the very summit and that he had got nothing from it but toil and repentance and torn clothes and scratches from the rocks and briars. Never, he said, had he heard that anyone else either before or after had ventured to do the same.14 As I say, Petrarch was no less eager to rectify the balance between empirical observations and speculative generalizations in theory. For example, in a letter to Boccaccio, dated 28 October 1366, he draws the analogy with a writer who should take care that what he writes resemble the original without reproducing it. The resemblance should not be that of a portrait to the sitter – in that case the closer the likeness is the better – but it should be the resemblance of a son to his father. Therein is often a great divergence in particular features, but there is a certain suggestion, what our painters call an “air”, most noticeable in the face and eyes, which makes the resemblance. As soon as we see the son, he recalls the father to us, although if we should measure every feature, we should find them all different.15 He thus concludes, “We writers must look to it that with a basis of similarity there should be many dissimilarities”. Herein lies the change. That to which we shall henceforth look, he tells us, is not to the dissimilarities in order to lose them to a theory of similarities but to recognize that out of a basis of similarity, there is glory in the dissimilarities. And lo and behold, he garners support for his about-face by creatively changing the direction of the centuries-old allegory of the honeybee. “We should write as the bees make sweetness, not storing up the flowers but turning them into honey, thus making one thing of many various ones, but different and better”. This becomes the new analogy for the future. Approximately 250 years later, Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, spells it out. Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; 74

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for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments, and lays it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore, from closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped. (The New Organon, Aphorism XCVI, Bk. I) We are put in mind of Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses: the camel, the lion, and the child, who, like Zarathustra, in innocence say yes to the not yet.16 No longer does the West think of emulating the bee as if it were the ant or talk of emulating the spider in order to achieve similarities, in effect to weave webs of analogies out of its own mindsets. Since Petrarch, the lesson learned by watching the bee is not one of hard work and obedience to the already known but rather a lesson of creative and forceful innocence which makes things “altered and digested”, different and better”. In terms of an analogy once used by the American poet Robert Frost, the artist is now like the person who goes into the field to pull carrots. Although he is sensitive to the form which each carrot already suggests, he refuses to leave them as they are and keeps on pulling them patiently enough until he finds a carrot that suggests something else to him. It is not shaped like other carrots. He takes out his knife and notches it here and there, until the prolonged roots become legs and the carrot takes on somethings of the semblance of a man.17 Here a kind of evolution takes place, not towards a formal explication of latent tendencies but as a succession of steps away from them. The contemporary art historian James Ackerman uses almost these same words. He insists “evolution in the arts should not be described as a succession of steps toward solution to a given problem, but as a succession of steps away from one or more original statements of a problem” and then adds “what actually motivates the process is a constant incidence of probings into the unknown, not a sequence of steps toward the perfect solution”.18

IV My suggestion now is that this artistic “probing into the unknown”, this “altering and digesting”, making things “different and better”, constitutes the full impact of playful lila creativity, Nataraja, the lord of dancers, king of actors. In the West, it was Karl Groos who was one of the first to teach us to see that “artistic enjoyment”, which he also insisted was something which widens and deepens human perception and emotion, was related to the “highest and most valuable form of adult play”,19 and since Piaget, there has been a general recognition that although in play there is an “accommodation of activity to objects” (a kind of imitation) present, what actually dominates play 75

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is a move in the other direction – a creativity or what Piaget calls “an assimilating activity”, which incorporates the external objects to its schemes.20 Thus, though in play the ego takes charge, it lets go of what is, altering and making everything different, including itself. This is why children play more easily than adults; they can more easily let go of themselves and of their old world.21 When this playful assimilating, creating activity, is recognized or interpreted as the dominance or the enjoyment of the playful assimilating activity itself, its affinity with Indian theory is marked. We are often told Lord Isvara’s creative activity is a kind of sport or play done for its own sake, perhaps because of the simple enjoyment he derives from exercising his body, which, of course, is only to say because “he wants to”, which is no acceptable “reason” at all. In fact, in the Bhagavadgita, we are told that we all must so act, because we must, without motive or ends to be attained, simply for the sport of it. But alas, and here is my caveat, it seems to me that Indian aesthetic speculation hesitates to hold onto play’s and art’s creativity, the assimilation of the world to their schemes. It hesitates to affirm play’s and art’s creative fragmentation of the primordial unity. In Indian literature, one seems to always find an appreciation of the arts “exhibiting inner relations of things” (italics mine), the calling for the arts being appreciated because it expresses not simply emotions but also emotions of a special kind – i.e. deeply felt emotions. I mean to say the eye or the mind is, as a consequence, always directed to something else other than the artwork itself. If we think of William Gass’s example of the striding statue which points, it seems Indian aesthetic theory all too often directs the eye to move beyond the finger’s end, whereas the sculptured figure really bids us stay and journey slowly back along the tension of its arm.19 For example, I am thinking of when Shiva expounds the technique of drama to Bharata. Shiva quickly tells him that human arts must be subject to law and that herein lies its validity. In effect, he is telling Bharata and all of us to put our outer expressions in harmony with our inner primordial unity. It seems he is telling us that his destruction of the past is effective for man in one direction only, to release him from individuality, to lead him to an inner wisdom deeper and older than any grasped through his individuality. But from what we know of Shiva, this is not at all the meaning of Shiva’s playful dance, as Shiva understands it for himself. And at this point, Western speculation lends him its support. For Shiva himself and the West, the playful dance spins out its force in the other direction by affecting an innocent, playful probing into something different and some say, better, towards the destruction of primordial structures and laws and towards the creation of a new world.

Notes and References 1 Please refer to the 11th–12th verses of the 90th Sūkta, 10th Manḍala of the Ṛgveda where the mention is made of how the four varṇas prevailing in Hinduism were produced from the division of the Puruṣa. His mouth was called Brahman, while both his arms emerged as Kṣatriya; the thighs were identified as Vaiśya, and the Śūdra came out of his feet (The Hymns of the Rgveda, Vol. II. Ralph T. H. Griffith (Trans.). Varanasi: The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, 1971).

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2 His generally accurate and unvarnished accounts are continued in Historia Animalium, IX, Ch. 40, 625a. 3 Virgil. The Georgics of Virgil, R. D. Blackmore (Trans.). London: Sampson Low, Son, and marston, 1871. 4 Pliny’s Natural History, Book XI, IV, 12. Philemon Holland (Trans.), Leicester Square: George Barclay, 1847. 5 Ibid., Book XI, XVII, 53. 6 Basil, The Hexaemeron, Homily VIII, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895). 7 Ibid., Homily VIII, Ch. 4, Ch. 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Ambrose, Six Days of Creation, Eighth Homily, Ch. 21, Section 70. John J. Savage (Trans.). New York: Fathers of the Church Inc. 1961. 10 Ibid., Ch. 21, Section 68. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., Ch. 21, Section 67. 13 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Medieval Lore, ed. Robert Steele (King's Classics edition; London: Chatto and Windus, 1907) p. 122. 14 Letters From Petrarch, To Dionigi da. Borgo San Sepolero, 26 April 1336. Book IV, 1, trans. Morris Bishop (Bloomington, Indiana, 1966), p. 46. 15 Ibid, Book XXIII, 19, p. 198. 16 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, first part, Zarathustra’s Speeches, on the Three Metamorphoses. R. J. Hollingdale (Ed), England: Penguin Classics, 1961. 17 Marguerite Wilkinson, The Way of the Makers (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 207. 18 James S. Ackerman, “Style”, Art and Archaeology, ed, James S. Ackerman and Rhys Carpenter (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965), pp. 174–175. 19 Karl Groos, The Play of Man, trans, Elizabeth L. Baldwin (New York: Appleton, 1901), p. 378. 20 Jenn Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, trans. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), pp. 84–7. 21 “Every genius is already a big child since he looks out into something strange and foreign, a drama, and thus with purely objective interest: Accordingly, just like the child, he does not have the dull gravity and earnestness of ordinary men, who, being capable of nothing but subjective interests, always see in things merely motives for their actions”. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Supplements to the Third Book, Ch. XXXI, “On Genius”, Vol. II. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1948.

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6 AESTHETES, CRITICS, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE * Stan Godlovitch Is there anything psychologically special about aesthetic experience? Are there any experiences had towards things which are, by virtue of their intrinsic qualities, aesthetic in nature? Those who believe these questions to have positive answers espouse what I will call the attitude theory; viz, aesthetic experience involves special psychological states or attitudes which are distinct from all other states or attitudes. Those who reject the attitude theory hold that an experience is an aesthetic one only in virtue of the object of that experience – usually an artwork – and not because of some unique psychological quality. Another way of couching the disagreement is this: Attitude theorists characterize aesthetic experience essentially from the point of view of the subject’s mind, while its critics define it in terms of some special qualities of the public objects of experience. I do not intend to defend or refute the attitude theory. I do not think either can be done without begging the question. Rather, my purpose is to try to explain why there appears to be no compelling way of resolving any disagreement between its proponents and critics. What I will suggest is that the acceptance and rejection of the attitude theory are more like expressions of an ideological nature about aesthetic experience, which remain outside the bounds of arbitration by argument. These so-called aesthetic ideologies1 are bodies of beliefs about the nature of aesthetic experience which draw upon concerns that lie outside the domain of aesthetics proper – e.g. (a) the accessibility of aesthetic experience (and relatedly the accessibility of art), (b) the quality of aesthetic experience, and (c) the value of aesthetic experience. Commitment to an ideology provides a way of dealing with certain large questions, such as, “In what does aesthetic experience consist”, or “What constitutes aesthetic appreciation?”, and thus allows attention to be paid to more specific issues about the nature of aesthetic qualifies or the notion of aesthetic judgement. The adoption of any one ideology, four of which I will outline later,

*  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. XVII, No. 1–2, 1994, pp. 89–102.

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provides a stance vis-à-vis the opening questions and thereby defines the boundaries of aesthetic experience. Critics of the attitude theory2 often adopt a cluster of tactics in their battle against it. The first is the Introspectionist Counterattack, which goes like this: (l) The attitude theory entails that aesthetic experience cannot occur without the presence either of some special mental state (e.g. distancing) or some special aspect of an otherwise commonplace mental operation (e.g. unique varieties of sensing). (2) But I, the critic of the theory, have genuine aesthetic experiences without either special states or aspects of mind. So, the attitude theory is false. The second, the Semantic Counterattack, shares the same first premise and conclusion as the aforementioned. Its second premise is as follows: (2’) Any attempts to characterize such states involve linguistic muddles or simple nonsense or the unspeakable. Thirdly, the Reductionist Counterattack supplies the second premise. This offensive has a weak and a strong formulation; viz, (Weak) (2”) Any attempts to identify such states fail to show that they are distinct from or do not reduce to very ordinary states, which are not especially aesthetic in quality. (Strong) (2”) There do not exist any mental states or operations other than the commonplace ones. Indeed, the only distinctions among mental states of a kind derive not from phenomenological differences but the different objects entertained in experience. Although I’ve no time to pursue the details of such manoeuvres, I’m sure that very few committed attitude theorists will pack their doctrinal bags and depart defeated and broken. On the contrary, the critic will be branded at best as question-begging and at worst as deluded about the essence of aesthetic experience. An analogy begs an audience. The attitude theorist is akin to a person who feels bound to describe the special state of being good and drunk. His critic is the lifelong teetotaller. The point at issue is the elusive state of “being drunk”. The enthusiast for drink might come up with an expression which he will claim stands for some mental condition without which one cannot enter the ranks of the drunken. The critic will latch onto the common mental denominator (e.g., dizziness or whatever), demonstrate its ordinariness, and then proceed to bring into the open forum the true nature of the state – which he will do by means, presumably of some causal distinctions. “Being drunk” will be reduced to “dizziness brought on by ingestion of alcohol”. Although the enthusiast may consent to this formula, he knows that isn’t the half of it, and he also knows that he cannot present any argument to the teetotaller to confirm that being drunk is rather special. The analogy is not complete. We require the teetotaller to drink. Suppose he does. Suppose also 79

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that he feels what the enthusiast feels. In this case, he ceases to be a critic and joins the club of happy souls. Suppose, however, that, in fact, he just cannot get drunk (at least insofar as he fails to appreciate the enthusiast’s reverence) but presumes that he must be because he has imbibed something with alcohol and got dizzy. He remains a critic and formally condemns the muddled occultism of the brandy club. This impasse (and that is precisely what it is) betrays what can be called an “ideological” barrier.

II The ideologies concerning me are these: ( a) (b) (c) (d)

The aesthete’s view of the aesthetic, The bourgeois’s view of the aesthetic, The critic’s view of the aesthetic, and The democrat’s view of the aesthetic.

I will concentrate primarily on (A) and (C). It will become apparent that (D) and (B) are, respectively, everyman’s version of these two. Both (A) and (C) regard the accessibility of the aesthetic as limited to the select few. (B) and (D) regard aesthetic experience to be achievable by great numbers of people. For (A) and (C), aesthetic experience is usually memorable and decidedly distinct in quality from ordinary perceptual experience. Both adherents will insist that a special receptivity is needed for aesthetic experience, although the nature of that power is vastly different for the two views. Both positions assume what might be called the intrinsic view of the aesthetic; ars gratia artis fits comfortably into either scheme and no shame is displayed at the suggestion that the aesthetic is a realm sui generis with its own qualities, rules, and rewards. This, however, is where the alliances end. For the aesthete, an aesthetic experience is essentially an inner event, a physiological episode. The critic adopts an object-related conception of his or her experience. Furthermore, the aesthete responds primarily to the manifest content of his or her experience. With (A) we have a revelation by encounter: We don’t, generally speaking, simply see, hear, feel, taste, or otherwise apprehend beauty. Beauty is typically an attention-getter; we suddenly notice it; it breaks into our consciousness. Moreover it does so gratuitously; it does so despite the fact that we had no inkling it was going to be there…. In these situations beauty always appears the “aggressor”…. Beauty “catches” our attention; it “breaks on us”; it “leaps out” at us; it “strikes us”. We seem powerless before its pull.3 The critic may, at times, be struck, but he is bound to check it out, to see whether he has been duped or not. Hence, we might say that (C) relies upon 80

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the discovery by analysis and interpretation of the latent content of the object. The aesthete eschews the whole process of studying such things. He is committed to seeking out those lucky moments when he is carried off by his striking encounter. In (A), indeed, the ultimate aim is to achieve a great experience: Beauty has a tremendous holding power for us. When we perceive a beautiful thing, we don’t want to let it go, we never want to stop perceiving it. It is as if our eyes wanted to drown in the sight, our ears in the sound. When the beautiful thing has disappeared, or we have gone our way, we sense a loss, we feel let down. The structure of this feeling is remarkable like post-coital “melancholy”.4 The critic does not see the aesthetic as continuous with his autobiography. He is dedicated to tracking down great works. This reliance upon the object of study makes (C) essentially intellectual in nature, discursive. Criticism is a skill, a craft, which can be done well or poorly and which can be taught. The appreciation of the aesthetic under (C) can and ought to be expressed to others. The aesthete has his or her own ways. Because his or her approach is quasi-hedonic5 and reactive, because appreciation consists of the most private of savouring, (A) cannot be assimilated to the teachable skills of the critical analyst. There is almost an instinct which guides the aesthete, one which permits the most extravagantly sensitive reaction to phenomena which would normally be bypassed by most of us.6 He or she, of course, cannot provide reasons for appreciation before the fact, nor would he or she want to. For (A), appreciation is a form of enchantment, often so fragile as to be destroyed (rather than enhanced) by discourse: The beauties that we commonly encounter are often so fleeting that most people do not want to risk spoiling the experience of them by discussing them…. Analyses and discussions of specific beauties seem stilted and pointless to all but the most determined of pedants and snobs.7 Clearly, for the aesthete, one cannot procure an aesthetic experience merely by positioning oneself in front of something that happens to be held by all critics to be a masterpiece for all time. The aesthete not only does not need the critics; he or she can actually do without the masterpieces for all time as well. What he holds aesthetically dear is a certain kind of experience itself, which is, for him or her, monumentally intense and memorable. The aesthetic attitude theory is clearly a corollary of (A). Furthermore, unless one subscribes ideologically to (A), one is bound to have difficulty comprehending what on earth the attitude theorists are trying to describe. One must first think of the aesthete as having a coherent view of the aesthetic in order to accept meaningfully something like an aesthetic attitude. 81

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(C) is subject to more scrutiny and controls than (A). The critic is part of a discursive community; the aesthete is very much a free and isolated agent. The critic must deal in justifiable criteria and must rationalize his or her appreciations for them to deserve the name under this ideological banner. The value of aesthetic experience, then, for the critic will be determined by the professionally demonstrable greatness of the object of experience. Another matter distinguishing the ideologies concerns attitudes towards the true extent of the aesthetic. It should be easy to see why given (A) nothing is excluded. Because it is contingently possible for any object whatsoever to elicit in the right person at the right time the requisite enchantment, (A) is just not bound or inclined to draw any hard and fast lines between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic.8 Nor will the aesthete consider for a moment any reason to uphold on aesthetic grounds a distinction between natural objects and works of art. What is pertinent are the qualities of things which happen to trigger an aesthetic response. If an artist can do as successful a job by means of his or her craft as a volcano can do on its own steam, then the artist is to be commended and encouraged. (That the aesthete can operate thus is testimony to his or her relative lack of concern with very human matters such as creativity. His appreciation of creativity (if he or she has it) will not likely be aesthetic in nature.) (C), of course, must distinguish between art and nature. One may be a literary critic, a music critic, an art critic, but one will fail utterly as a geological critic, an astronomical critic, or a zoological critic unless one happens to be a qualified geologist, astronomer, or zoologist. Most aestheticians aren’t any of these things. (C) is, as well, intrinsically culture-bound. The critic has a stake in the special status of art. This art becomes value-laden as the vehicle of higher thoughts and sentiments, the product of complex skills, the manifestation of clever structures and symmetries. The tacit allegiance to art qua created mirrors the structured discipline of criticism itself. Nature is not the product of human craft, and whatever God is, He is not an artist: Works of art have an “inner life” which natural objects do not have…. Speaking of the “inner life” of works of art was a way of referring to the conventional distinctions as to which of their aspects are properly appreciated and criticized and which are not. Natural objects lack this “inner life” because they are not embedded in the matrix of conventions in – which works of art are.9 Criticism and appreciation are channelled and guided from the start. Equally revealing is this reflection of J. S. Ackerman by whom a style is conceived “as a class of related solutions to a problem – or responses to a challenge that may be said to begin whenever artists begin to pursue a problem or react to a challenge”.10 82

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What is significant here is that art which necessarily manifests itself in specific styles is conceived as a form of problem-solving, an activity confined to intentional beings whose purpose and limitations can be delineated fairly clearly. Here, the dimensions of the aesthetic are bound within the program of criticism, a view which can make sense only from within (C). Something must be said about the place of feeling. We cannot ever conceive (A) without passion. Unlike the aesthete, who cannot relinquish affect, this is not necessarily an ingredient of (C). Aesthetic experience is always pleasant, but the pleasure is not always (perhaps not even usually) an affect; i.e., a feeling. We are frequently pleased by something without having a feeling of pleasure. Many of our aesthetic experiences are without affective content.11 From the vantage point of (C), this must be true, even though an aesthete will reject it as a misunderstanding of what aesthetic experience is. The (C) stand on affect is not without merit, however, and we would be hasty in dismissing the ideology as insensitive. Because (C) can accommodate an intellectual, problem-solving conception of art, it can offer reasons for appreciating much art that simply leave the aesthete cold.12 Such art is essentially discursive and perhaps even replaceable by a crisply written provocative dissertation. (C) not only makes room for such works as art; it evaluates them and gives grounds for preference should such be required. The aesthete might well be left indifferent to these works – as will most people – but that is not the problem. The aesthete will never, via (A) alone, understand that these works have a point. Ironically, if the critic must limit himself or herself by trying to confine the aesthetic to the artistic, the aesthete will have a far more restricted conception of art than the critic – unless he or she happens contingently to be captivated. There are, of course, many other dimensions to these two outlooks. If I have made it seem as if the schism were like that between the gourmet and the nutritionist, I can only beg indulgence for the graphic value of caricature. My point has been to give atmosphere to what I perceive as an intractable breakdown in communication. One will note that what I’ve called (A) is not reducible to theories, analyses, and generalizations either about experience or its objects. Indeed, (A)’s outlooks commonly verge on appeals to the ineffable, which, by definition, is not a fit topic for discussion. There is nothing particularly reprehensible about this; however, there is nothing much (A) can contribute to an analytical approach to experience which seeks guidelines, criteria, and evaluative schemes. (C) on the other hand, cannot dismiss the aesthete’s groundwork either as non-existent or muddled. The aesthete may not be terribly clear, but he or she is not so naive as to require unfamiliar descriptions of his experience while clumsily ignoring the obvious. The experience of the aesthetic for him is, indeed, one of the mysteries. So long as he can say that experience is not 83

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just a matter of listening attentively or making sure not to be distracted or exposing oneself to something with no ulterior motive, etc., then that itself should humble his detractors. After all, these species of studious attention are all pretty ordinary, easily recognizable for what they are, and not likely to be confused with something rather more magnificent and stunning.

III If the aesthete seeks private culture and the critic lasting culture, the bourgeois and democrat agree on a more instrumental view of the aesthetic: the consumer aspect. But they differ despite both being attitudes constitutive of mass culture. I mentioned earlier that there are alliances between (B) and (C), on the one hand, and (D) and (A) on the other. Recall, however, that insofar as (A) and (C) are elitist, specialized views, these are at odds with (B) and (D) for which aesthetic appreciation is an experience that can be had by all without too much fuss (as in (B) or without any fuss at all (as (D) has it). I will have rather little to say about the democrat, the advocate of popular culture. This position is not infrequently denounced as vulgar, philistine, crude, and superficial by those who should know better. A reconsideration of these complaints might follow upon exposure to the robust and unequivocal Curt Ducasse. Then again, it might not. Ducasse allows a conception of “the aesthetic connoisseur”, whom we might identify either with the aesthete or critic depending upon the case. To call upon the aesthetic connoisseur for an answer to one’s own questions of aesthetic worth is, when considered in broad daylight, as ludicrous a procedure as would be the letting some person whose taste in matters of cookery differs from ours, but who is a connoisseur of foods, while we are not, choose our dainties for us. What he may do for us to introduce us to delicate dishes of which we knew nothing…. But if after tasting these connoisseur’s dishes we do not like them, or do not find them more enjoyable than our own familiar foods, we should be fools indeed to pick our menu, according to our gourmet’s taste rather than our own. Coarse the latter may be called by him; but we too have a stock of poisoned, question-begging adjectives out of which we may without fear of refutation call his taste perverse.13 How then do we determine what shall ultimately guide us in our pursuit of worthy aesthetic experience? We must abide by the dictates of good taste, the existence of which is heartily endorsed by Ducasse: There is, of course, such a thing as good taste, and bad taste. But good taste, I submit, means either my taste, or the taste of people who are to my taste, or the taste of people to whose taste I want to be.14 84

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Following this is a simple rule offered by way of suggesting the basis for the pursuit of beauty: “For a milking of beauties, there are available only such principles as the relative intensity of the pleasure felt, its relative duration, relative volume, and relative freedom from admixture of pain.”15 Pushpin lives. Bentham couldn’t have said it better. Before one reduces this to crass hedonism, a consideration must be entertained. It is true, (D) operates upon a principle of seeking out the quickest most accessible and enduring, most intense, and least complex kind of pleasure from art. But that it suggests the pursuit of any art at all is itself miraculous if pleasure were merely conceived in the most obvious of forms. Pleasure is just not that monolithic, and no hedonist has suggested that there is, for example, one and only one source of the most intense pleasure such that all men ought to pursue only that. The democrat seeks pleasure as the ultimum bonum. But he or she finds that some kinds of pleasure can only be gotten from rock music or soap operas or canned spaghetti. Furthermore, these pleasures are, in themselves, special enough to warrant his spending time pursuing them, even if that time might otherwise have been taken up with “more intense” pleasure, so-called. I do not think (D) a genuine “attitude” towards or “view” about the aesthetic. Certainly, it leaves far behind a great many interesting aspects such as arise in (A) and (C) (e.g. the value placed in the search for the novel aesthetic experience and the notion of expending skill to uncover greatness in an artwork) and seems to be crippled by its own simplicity. However, it is an outlook of sorts and does provide a notion of aesthetic experience. Democrats certainly hold no grudge against those who disagree with them unless they are instructed to change their ways. Nevertheless, the democrat has no notion of a boor as does his distant aesthetic relative, nor does he look very deeply into the quality of experience. The democrat though will not go far out of his way to achieve a certain special feeling, as does the aesthete because, in the end, he does not really subscribe to many such psychological doctrine. Interestingly, he shares this idea of the basic ordinariness of feeling with his bourgeois brother, to whom we will now turn. 16

IV The bourgeois seeks in his or her own mass way “proper” culture. Typically, conventionalist theories of art fall well within the bounds of (B). If the aesthetic attitude theories reflected dependence upon (A) and drew their strength from it, it will be easy to see why criticisms such as Dickie’s hail from (B), which has sought spiritual guidance from (C). Whereas the critic approaches the aesthetic as judge; the bourgeois approaches ideally as informed spectator. We have seen that the aesthete and democrat bother with art because there is an encounter of some valuable 85

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visceral experience to be had with it, even if the nature and value of that experience vary vastly between the two. The critic seeks value in his or her discovery of the greatness of the work. It is no surprise that complexity – admittedly of a highly specialized sort – appeals strongly. Consider the reflections of critic and theorist Leonard Meyer on greatness in music: Insofar as the intricate and subtle interconnections between musical events, whether simultaneous or successive, of a complex work involve considerable resistance and uncertainty – and presumably information – value is thereby created. This viewpoint seems more plausible when we consider that as we became more familiar with a complex work and are therefore better able to comprehend the permutations and interrelations among musical events, our enjoyment is increased. For the information we get out of the work is increased. What reasons prompt the bourgeois to approach the aesthetic domain, and in what does the value of his or her experience consist given the putative vacuum created by his eschewing the need for “affective content” in aesthetic experience? Since the normal spectator cannot hope to acquire equal standing with the experienced critic without giving up his law practice or assistant directorship or associate professorship in favour of a life of criticism, his own appreciation of the “intricate and subtle interconnections” will never be quite complete. If an answer can be provided, I suspect it will lie in an expression like “aspects of works of art we ought to attend to” and “which of their aspects are properly appreciation”. Worthwhile exposure to art involves something very like a ritual. For example, the theatregoer is described as someone “who enters with certain expectations and knowledge about what he will experience and an understanding of how he should behave in the face of what he will experience”.17 The propriety invoked has nothing to do with etiquette; to have aesthetic experience, (B) requires that we learn the house rules of the art world. Aesthetic experience is conceived of as an achievement of sorts the successful acquisition of which comes with an understanding of the conventions governing the behaviour of artists and audience, “the understanding… that they are engaged in a certain kind of formal activity”.18 This is strongly Wittgensteinian in flavour and is meant to be. It explains why (B) can dispense with affective reaction in its characterization of aesthetic experience. It can do so because the “experience” consists of participating in a certain kind of behaviour according to certain conventions. This requires no one to feel anything, let alone anything special. Furthermore, the objects of experience, the works of art, need not themselves be thought of as essentially expressive or affect-laden. The reliance upon commonplace emotions, where they enter experience, is also understandable. We would be stretching the point to say that the emotions felt and expressed in watching a chess match were special chess feelings distinct in inner quality from, say, 86

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baseball feelings. Similarly, (B) holds no truck with a class of art feelings distinct from all others. The only variable is the object of attention, the chess game, the baseball match, the exhibition, the quartet’s performance – and that is precisely what replaces and neutralizes concern about any peculiarities, such as there may be in the mental condition of the spectator. This notion of experience rests upon a person’s ability to identify something as an aesthetic object. Once he or she can do so, so long as he pays attention to it and is not terribly and hopelessly distracted, then he has an aesthetic experience just by exposing himself to the object. An analogy is perhaps apt here between the bourgeois’s aesthetic experience and the experience of a trained amateur birdwatcher. If there were such a thing as an “ornithological experience”, it would be defined in terms of something like a background knowledge of different bird species, their distinctive marks and habits, and those circumstances where one is undistractedly birdwatching in a relatively efficient way. The catch with aesthetic experience is that it is putatively not so easy to single out a work of art as it is to single out a bird. In a way, however, (B) claims that it is not so difficult either. The birdwatcher ultimately relies upon evolution theory and taxonomy to define his class; the art lover relies upon the cultural conventions and critical theories which make certain choice objects into worthy artworks. What is important here is that (B) holds central the epistemic quality of aesthetic experience. Knowing that such and such artwork has certain properties is integral to the bourgeois experience of art. One would expect the adherent to (B) to read literary criticism, record jacket notes, and histories of art. Such forms a part of the program of expanding one’s knowledge of the conventions. The idea of (B) would be to approach as possible comprehensive expertise of the critic. Since that in practice is not feasible, the bourgeois places his or her faith in the conclusions of criticism in much the same way that the birdwatcher tacitly trusts the taxonomist. The bourgeois believes that aesthetic experience is accessible to anyone who exposes himself or herself studiously to accept art forms, thereby achieving informed perception. What is of interest in (B) is the object of perception itself and not what that object happens to do one. This is not to say that (B) shuns the affective power of the arts; but it is to say that that power is not compelling reason to expose oneself to art in particular. In a sense, the pleasure of aesthetic experience is almost educative for the bourgeois; it functions analogously to a physical fitness program or a trip to a spa. Aesthetic experience is good for one, but not necessarily because it is a source of pleasure pure and simple. If it were just that, then the valued call to further one’s knowledge of the work would have to be underwritten by the promise that more study leads to more pleasure. Not only may this be false, but it probably is false. At best, it is merely contingent and is certainly not going to be true for everyone. But if art is pleasant and elevating for (B), it cannot be extraordinarily so. Consider Dickie’s chiding of those who choose what he regards as a false paradigm of aesthetic experience: 87

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In the overwhelming majority of cases (and this includes most of the experience of painting we either like or think good) paintings do not produce emotional feelings or expectations…. Instances that do produce feelings tend to stand out in memory and because they do, they have been taken as typical.19 Spoken like a committed bourgeois. The moral is that one must not expect to experience memorable feelings in the presence of art. If one does, that is a suspicious bonus and not linked intrinsically to aesthetic experience. Of course, the aesthete is scandalized by all of this. To the suggestion that much of our experience of art consists of our having a “‘cool’ aesthetic experience”, the aesthete replies that such people are probably without aesthetic sensitivity and so without aesthetic experience. Whether or not the aesthete relies upon a special state of mind, a special operation of some typical mental state, a special type of affective response, or what have you – whether indeed the aesthete backs an aesthetic attitude or aesthetic reaction view of experience – is immaterial. What becomes apparent here is that the very points at which communication ceases between (B) and (A) define what aesthetic experience happens, genuinely, to be.20

V The account offered so far may seem impressionistic, but it does have a moral. Behind every theory purporting to capture the essence of aesthetic experience, there lurks an aesthetic ideology. What makes these ideologies what they are is a number of assumptions, some of which are partially philosophical but most of which are either psychological or value-­dependent. Where such assumptions fail to overlap, one finds uncomprehending disagreement. I have tried to illustrate why attempts to rid aesthetics of the relevance of aesthetic attitude will work only in a context where aesthetic is viewed as the handmaiden of criticism. That is, the putative incoherence and insignificance of the aesthetic attitude can figure prominently only when one assumes that art appreciation is primarily epistemic and not affective in nature. That assumption is one which never is nor can be the conclusion of any aesthetic argument. Furthermore, the desire to extirpate aesthetic attitudes insofar as they take on a tinge of the extraordinary will follow from the similarly unargued assumption that an experience unaccompanied by affect or professional knowledge can be an aesthetic one. What, in effect, is at stake in these distinct ideologies is a conception of the real essence of appreciation. It is not clear, however, whether there can be any truth about that beyond the exposure of and to the values which form an intrinsic part of its conception. Suffice it to say that what some adherents to (C) and (B) champion as a bona fide appreciative experience would be regarded by the aesthete not only as falling far short of aesthetic appreciation but also as failing to count at all as an aesthetically valuable experience. 88

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If these rifts are merely terminological, so much the worse for aesthetics. If they rest on something more than words, aesthetics might well reduce to a topic in social psychology or axiology. Whatever the case, there is no philosophical manoeuvre available across ideologies that does not beg the questions at issue. The four aesthetic ideologies I have presented are, understandably, limiting cases. The complexity and compromise inherent in individual presentations allow no unequivocal pigeonholing; however, there is enough specific commitment in such cases to make profitable an attempt to understand their concerns in the light of these idealized simplifications. What the ideologies do is underline one stubborn feature about the aesthetic – namely, different people experience and value the aesthetic in very different ways. Such differences are akin to those which encompass ways of responding to death or one’s homeland or the future of our species. The worlds of the pessimist and the optimist, for example, have a certain amount of furniture in common, but what interests us about these worlds is that they vary in their apportionment of significance. Aesthetic outlooks resemble these value distributions to a large extent. One matter I have taken to be central to aesthetic ideology is the nature and content of aesthetic experience. This in turn draws upon what is taken to be valuable in the pursuit of aesthetic experience. What I have tried to show is that the friction between those who emphasize and those who denigrate aesthetic attitudes is caused by failures on both sides to see either that such attitudes function either primitively and ineliminably or that they fail to function at all. But all of this depends in turn upon just what one identifies as an aesthetic experience. The matter is obviously circular. This should come as no surprise. Nor should it be thought odd that one cannot either analyze out or argue in the experience of aesthetic attitudes. So it is fruitless to embark upon a program of annihilation, just as it is awkward to suppose that claims like “beauty expands our receptive faculty” or “we never want to stop perceiving a beautiful thing” can have any general title to the truth. The accounts we have dealt with are rather more like reassurances to the already committed. As such, they are perhaps interestingly descriptive of the details of their respective ideologies but have no more combative force than does the cry that mankind is doomed in the presence of the beaming optimist. How does one have aesthetic experience? Many ways, it seems. What can one hope to get out of them? Many very different things, so it appears. If these answers seem the apotheosis of dullness, then their very boring obviousness concludes my case.21

Notes and References 1 Although the analogy may be strained, the relationship between these ideologies and aesthetics proper is meant to resemble that between various metaphysical outlooks (e.g. empiricism) and the special problems arising from within which form the accepted contexts of discussion in epistemology, say, or the theory of action.

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2 By far the most unequivocal source of criticism can be found in George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974) – henceforth AA. This work grew out of an earlier piece, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude”, American Philosophical Quarterly I (1964). Of related interest is J. Urmson, “What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?”, PASS XXXI (1957). 3 Guy Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 19 – henceforth NTB. 4 NTB, p. 19. 5 I say “quasi-hedonic” because of the appearance of pleasure seeking. The aesthetic is not, however, so simplistic. He seeks out “experience” – novelty of reaction, even if that involves horror, disgust, and revulsion. 6 See NTB where Sircello aesthetically admires the “elegant” beauty of high-­ voltage electricity towers (p. 106). More poignant is his fixation upon “the gracefully swelling mound of beautifully smooth, creamy-white guts” of a squashed garden slug (p. 108). 7 NTB, p. 128. 8 Because the sources of aesthetic experience make a difference for (C), it is no surprise that there is great concern about the “boundaries” of art. 9 AA, p. 199. 10 J. S. Ackerman, “A Theory of style”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XX (1962), p. 236. 11 AA, pp. 190–1. 12 One has only to think of some of the more iconoclastic contemporary works, such as those of Cage or Rauschenberg or Man Ray. Artworks that are at the same time works of criticism about the nature of art itself are easily assimilated under (C) because the value in such work derives more and more from critical rather than creative skill. 13 C. J. Ducasse, The Philosophy of Art (New York, 1929) from an extract in J. Hospers (ed.) Introductory Readings in Aesthetics (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 292 – henceforth PA. 14 PA, p. 296. 15 PA, p. 297. 16 L. B. Meyer, “Value and Greatness in Music”, in Music, the Art and Ideas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967), p. 36. 17 AA, p. 36. 18 AA, p. 174. 19 AA, p. 191 20 It might appear that salvation is at hand if only we were to adopt a pluralistic view – i.e. one which provides a disjunctive picture of the aesthetic domain. There are, however, two major problems with this: (1) It is not clear that a pluralistic view is anything other than descriptive of the existing competition. Aesthetic ideologies are, as I conceive them, largely regulative and survive in part because of what they forbid from discussion. (2) The various ideologies are indeed competitors; i.e. they are (in various groupings) mutually incompatible. To adopt a disjunction of such views is tantamount to believing nothing in

particular about the aesthetic because it amounts to accepting anything whatsoever. Such toleration might well verge on vacuity. The view I have adopted in this chapter is a second-order one; viz, it is about the presence of the ideologies themselves rather than an overarching fifth option, which would, I think, be self-defeating.

21 I thank John Baker and John Heintz for their helpful suggestions. Previous versions of this chapter have been read at the Western Canadian Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics (Pacific Division) Conferences.

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7 ART AND GOODNESS Collingwood’s aesthetics and Moore’s ethics compared* T. J. Diffey R. G. Collingwood’s theory of art, which is elaborated on in The Principles of Art1 (hereafter PA), rests on the principle which G. E. Moore also exploits when he sets out his account of goodness in the opening chapters of Principia Ethica2 (hereafter PE). The shared principle is Bishop Butler’s dictum, “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. It is well-known that Moore applies this “law of identity” to the analysis of goodness where he seems to think that it has a particular application; what results is a matter of some controversy. It has not been noticed, however, that with the implicit aid of the same principle, Collingwood produces an account (with substantial implications) of art. Before making good the claim that there is this comparison to be drawn, I shall broach the broader question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics by making a more general comparison between the two books.

I According to Collingwood, art is the subject matter of aesthetics (PA vi) while ethics, as Moore understands it, is “to cover…the general enquiry into what is good” (PE 2). What views do Moore and Collingwood, respectively, take of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics? First Moore: Moore bases ethics on aesthetic enjoyments in the sense that aesthetic enjoyments or appreciations (he uses these words interchangeably) constitute one of the chief goods in life only for the sake of which are duty and virtue ultimately justified (PE 188–9). It is gratifying to find aesthetic appreciation taken so seriously by Moore but unlikely that this extraordinary claim gets the connection between moral and aesthetic values right. One might suppose that if aesthetic appreciation has a foundational role in ethics, the study of it should be subsumed under ethics. This would be a mistaken inference, however. Aesthetics, Moore sees, is a distinct branch of *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. V, No. 1–2, 1982, pp. 25–39.

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philosophical enquiry, the task of which is “a classification, and comparative valuation of all the different forms of beauty” (PE 200). By aesthetic enjoyments, Moore means the enjoyment of beautiful objects, among which he distinguishes three sorts of cases: beautiful works of art, beautiful natural objects, and what is beautiful in human affections. Collingwood rejects this view of aesthetics. Aesthetics is the theory of art, not beauty; for the theory of beauty belongs not to aesthetics but to “the theory of love”. To regard beauty as the object of aesthetic enquiry will result in “an attempt to construct an aesthetic on a ‘realistic’ basis”. This, Collingwood says, is the attempt to explain away the aesthetic activity by appeal to a supposed quality of the things with which, in that experience, we are in contact; this supposed quality, invented to explain the activity, being in fact nothing but the activity itself, falsely located not in the agent but in his external World. (PA 41) PE is an excellent example of what Collingwood is attacking here: realist assumptions at work in the philosophy of beauty. Moore, more typically of aesthetics than Collingwood, which is not to say correctly, places the spectator not the artist at the centre of aesthetic theory. To compare Moore’s ethics and Collingwood’s aesthetics is to bring into view the fact that we do not have only two concepts, art and goodness, to consider, but three: art, goodness and beauty. If aesthetics is to be more than the piecemeal analysis of standard topics, it will have to explain how they are all connected.

II According to Collingwood, “The words ‘beauty’, ‘beautiful’, as actually used, have no aesthetic implication. We speak of a beautiful painting or statue, but this only means an admirable or excellent one” (PA 38). And later, “The word ‘beauty’…connotes that in things by virtue of which we love them, admire them, or desire them” (PA 40). According to Moore, “The beautiful should be defined as that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself” (PE 201). Strictly speaking, these accounts should not be compared since Collingwood claims to be reporting how the word “beauty” (and its equivalents) is used in “the common speech of European civilization”, whereas Moore is interested in the real definition of beauty. A comparison between the two accounts is nevertheless instructive. (1) Moore confines beauty to admiration, which looms large in Collingwood’s view too, but Collingwood is less restrictive than Moore. In his definition of beauty, Collingwood also includes that in virtue of which we love or desire things. (The inclusion, in Collingwood’s account, of desire is 92

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interesting, given the dominant Kantian insistence in our aesthetics on distinguishing beauty and desire, but not much can be made of this since Collingwood also denies the Kantian assumption that beauty belongs to the subject matter of aesthetics.) (2) Good is more important in Moore’s account of beauty than in Collingwood’s. Collingwood accepts a connection between beauty and goodness in so far as he thinks that to say that something is beautiful is to recognize its excellence, but he is no farther interested in what good is involved in beauty. Moore, by contrast, is exercised by the nature of the connection, which is widely recognized to exist, between goodness and beauty and endeavours to explain it. For Collingwood, beauty presumably means certain sorts of excellence, or excellence that is valued in certain sorts of ways, so that there may be kinds of goodness or excellence that are not beautiful – namely, anything which is excellent but not admired, loved, or desired. How plausible this is depends on whether it is taken exclusively or inclusively, disjunctively or conjunctively. There are excellent things which we do not admire, excellent things which we do not love, and excellent things which we do not desire, but is there anything excellent which is not the object of these, not loved and not admired and not desired? Conversely, we may think against Collingwood that there is excellence which we admire but which we do not describe as beautiful – academic excellence for example. Moore rightly thinks that it is “a strange coincidence, that there should be two different objective predicates of value, ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ which fire nevertheless so related to one another that whatever is beautiful is also good” (PE 201). He thinks that his definition of beauty can account for the connection. It makes “good” the only unanalyzable predicate. Then…to say that a thing is beautiful is to say, not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element in something which is” (PE 202). The “something” Moore means is a complex organic unity which includes seeing not merely the beautiful qualities, say, in a picture but also feeling and appreciating the beauty of what is seen and the true belief that the beautiful qualities cognized in the object are beautiful. Errors of judgement arise when objects which are not beautiful are judged to be beautiful; errors of taste arise when feelings appropriate to beautiful objects are felt for what is not beautiful. (3) Moore takes for granted what from the outset Collingwood denies – namely, that the enjoyment of beautiful objects is aesthetic enjoyment. According to Collingwood, the aesthetic implication conveyed by the phrase “a beautiful statue is not conveyed by the word ‘beautiful’ but by the word ‘statue’” (PA 38–9). By “aesthetic activity” Collingwood means creating and responding to works of art, whereas by “aesthetic enjoyment”, Moore means enjoyment of the beautiful in art, nature, and personal affections. 93

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III Someone says, “Ruskin writes good prose”. What, if anything, do I believe when I accept it on somebody’s authority that Ruskin’s prose is good? The answer to be had from the earlier chapters of PE is that to call something good is to ascribe to it ownership of some peculiar part, property, or quality. (Moore’s critics have rightly noticed that parts, properties, and qualities are by no means equivalent, but I do not go into that complication in this chapter.) Moore says, time and time again, though not always in the same words, that “good” denotes a simple, indefinable, non-natural quality. However, when he comes in the latter part of his book to write about the ideal, he seems to set aside this account of goodness and to write about intrinsic wholes as if he had never written in atomistic terms about the peculiar property of goodness. Moore, I think, simply tires of his atomistic account of good as his book unfolds and tacitly drops it in favour of his notion of organic wholes. One tradition in moral philosophy since Moore, anti-cognitivism, has drawn approvingly on Moore’s critique of ethical naturalism while explicitly rejecting the idea that “good” is a property – denoting the term in favour of the view that its function in moral judgements is to galvanize or guide persons to whom the judgement is addressed as action. These remarks are a bad oversimplification but must suffice here. Their relevance to the present enquiry is twofold: First, the cognitivist versus anti-cognitivist dispute in ethics has implications for aesthetics too; secondly, whereas Moore is a cognitivist, in value theory, there is some evidence that Collingwood is not. Suppose we are told, “Ruskin writes beautifully. If you don’t read him you don’t know what a fine writer you are missing”. Or someone says, “You should see Vienna. It is a beautiful city”. A question for aesthetics is this: Should we follow the cognitivist in maintaining that “beautiful” describes the character of Ruskin’s prose or of Hapsburg’s city? Or should we follow the anti-cognitivist in regarding such terms as “beautiful” as devices for reinforcing the injunctions Read Ruskin! Visit Vienna!? An anti-cognitivist account of aesthetic judgements must presumably treat them as exhortations to attend to the subject of the judgement. Anticognitivists will argue against the cognitivism to which Moore seems to be committed by maintaining that to judge something is beautiful is to urge that it has a claim to attention without including the further thought that there is some/one distinctive feature or property, in virtue of which the thing deserves attention, in virtue of which beautiful things are beautiful, and which if X possesses it, this entails that X is beautiful. Cognitivism in the case of Moore takes both a metaphysical and an epistemological form: there is metaphysical commitment to the idea that “good” denotes a non-natural property and epistemological commitment to the idea that value judgements are truth assertions. If a particular aesthetic judgement gives rise to a dispute, the cognitivist will say that what is in

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dispute is its truth. For example, it may have been doubtfully asked, Is Ruskin a good writer (“I thought he was a manufacturer of purple prose”, someone might add)? Is Vienna a beautiful city (isn’t it really somewhat heartless?)?’ Such disputes will not worry the cognitivist who can say that what is in dispute here is the truth of particular judgements; therefore, what cannot be in general doubt is the possibility of aesthetic judgements as such being true. To doubt then that Vienna is a beautiful city is not, as an anticognitivist account of aesthetic judgements must seem to imply, to refuse to visit the place.

IV The old question of whether God approves of good things because, antecedent to his approval, they are good or whether things that are good are good only by virtue of the fact that God approves of them has its parallel in aesthetics: Does our admiration of X constitute its beauty, or is it that, antecedent to the act of admiring it, X is beautiful? Moore’s aesthetics follows the second alternative, whereas in Collingwood’s aesthetic theory, the question cannot arise since, as we have seen, Collingwood excludes from aesthetics the topic of beauty. For him, the aesthetic question would not be whether something is beautiful but whether it is a good work of art. Collingwood is not especially interested in the meaning of expressions, such as “X is a good Y”. His philosophy of art is more comprehensive than this. But it is not difficult to see what his account of the expression “X is a good work of art” must amount to. First, he treats judgements of good and bad art as judgements of success and failure in art. Secondly, what he is interested in, and this it could be argued is in the spirit of Moore’s anti- cognitivist, imperativalist successors in ethics, are grounds or criteria, in this case, the grounds or criteria of success and failure in art, what it is that makes for artistic success and failure. On the general issue of the meaning of value predicates, Collingwood, I think, is more on the side of the anti-cognitivists, such as Stevenson and Hare, than of the cognitivists, such as Moore. “There is no sense”, he says, “in using terms like good and bad except of persons or things, that come into practical relations with one’s will”.3 We ought not, for example, call the past better than the present or worse “for we are not called upon to choose it or to reject it, to like it or to dislike it, to approve it or condemn it, but simply to accept it”.4 This is interestingly in the spirit of the anti-cognitivist followers of Moore; their account of “good focusses chiefly on its function guiding choices. There is no suggestion then that Collingwood would side with Moore in thinking of “good” as a predicate denoting some peculiar property. However, Moore’s aesthetic realism is not to be written off too easily. There is something in the second possibility, mooted at the beginning of this section, that a thing is a beautiful antecedent to an act of admiring it. It is counter-intuitive to suppose, moreover, that “Vienna is beautiful” or

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“Ruskin’s prose is good” means something like, or no more than, “Visit Vienna!” “Read Ruskin!” One harbours the suspicion that “being beautiful” is the reason why one should see Vienna or read Ruskin, so the beauty of something cannot, therefore, consist of or be wholly analyzed in terms of the injunction or the resolve to attend to it.5 Indeed, something which Moore says is helpful in explaining why it would be mistaken to identify value predicates with injunctions to attend to what is thereby valued – namely, when he points out in his pursuit of idealist errors that “what is good?” is not identical with the question “what is preferred ?” (PE 132). Moore says, “The fact that you prefer a thing does not tend to show that the thing is good; even if it does show that you think it so”. Nor, more strongly, can Moore think that “what is good” is to be identified with “what ought to be preferred” if Moore’s talk about whether a non-natural quality or property is taken seriously. For as has been noticed, that X possesses a certain property is no reason for preferring X. There does not seem to be any intelligible connection between, on the one hand, “X possesses property Y” and on the other “X is preferred (or ought to be preferred)”. Since Collingwood’s anti-cognitivist instincts in the matter of value predicates are, I think, sound, and since in apparent contradiction of this Moore, I think, is right to distinguish between what is good and what is preferred, it is scarcely surprising that I should find the nature of value predicates in ethics and aesthetics to be a philosophically unsolved problem. The problem is to explain how “because it is good” and “because it is beautiful” may function as reasons that do not merely rhetorically reinforce injunctions to attend to the subjects of the judgements the reasons support while not making the assumption that the terms “good” and “beautiful” denote properties, whether or not metaphysical.

V Having considered how Moore relates aesthetics to ethics, we should now enquire what place Collingwood finds in aesthetics for ethics. This will require us to elaborate upon Collingwood’s account, already touched on, of what makes for goodness in art. Neither Moore nor Collingwood rigidly separates aesthetics from ethics. Just as there is an aesthetic element in Moore’s ethics in that one of the goods on which duty is founded is the enjoyment of beauty, so there is an ethical element in Collingwood’s aesthetics to the effect that the goodness of a work of art is ultimately a sort of moral goodness in some broader sense of “moral” than perhaps we are accustomed to seeing used in modern academic philosophy. By this I mean that Collingwood’s theory of art rests on Spinozistic and Freudian notions of uncorrupt or truthful consciousness. For what modern jargon calls “psychological diseases” – these include corruption of consciousness – Collingwood uses the old-fashioned term “moral disease” (PA 95). The question of good and bad art is, according to Collingwood, the question of whether an artist is pursuing artistic labour successfully or 96

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unsuccessfully (PA 281). Since in Collingwood’s view what an artist is trying to do is express a given emotion, a “bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails…. A bad work of art is the unsuccessful attempt to become conscious of a given emotion…a consciousness which fails to grasp its own emotions is a corrupt or untruthful consciousness” (PA 282). Moore’s approach to ethics (and aesthetics) is from the directions of metaphysics and epistemology; Collingwood’s approach to aesthetics (and ethics) is from the directions of psychology and the philosophy of mind. Among other merits, Collingwood’s position exposes the oversimplification of supposing that a person either is or is not responsible for an action and the related oversimplification that evils are only of two kinds: those that we do and those that we suffer. The symptoms and consequences of corrupt consciousness “are not exactly crimes or vices, because their victim does not choose to involve himself in them” (PA 220), but nor are they “exactly diseases, because they are due not to functional disorder or to the impact of hostile forces upon the sufferer, but to his own self-mismanagement. As compared with disease, they are more like vice; as compared with vice, they are more like disease. The truth is that they are a kind of sheer or undifferentiated evil, evil in itself, as yet undifferentiated into evil suffered or misfortune and evil done or wickedness” (PA 220). Not surprisingly, Collingwood does not say much about ethics in PA any more than Moore says much about aesthetics in PE, and what Collingwood does say is in danger of being overlooked on account of its debt to Spinoza and so not in the orthodox run of modern moral philosophy. Indeed, given Collingwood’s unusually wide-ranging interests and the fertility of his contributions to philosophy, the paucity of his contribution to ethics, as ethics is commonly understood, is remarkable. But it is after all easily explained if we recognize that what Collingwood takes so seriously is a problem not often discussed in ethics: the problem of self-management. The “problem of ethics…is the question how man, being ridden by feelings, can so master them that his life, from being a continuous passio, an undergoing of things, can become a continuous actio, an undergoing of things, can become a continuous min, or doing of things” (PA 219). And in words which should be inscribed by law on the title page of every book on ethics, Collingwood says, “When we really begin to understand the problems of morality…we find that…they have to do with changes to be produced in ourselves. Thus, the question whether I shall return a book to the man I borrowed it from… raises no serious moral problem. Which of the two things I shall in fact do depends on the kind of man I am. But the question whether I shall be an honest man or a dishonest one is a question that raises moral problems of the most acute kind” (PA 289). Morality, Collingwood says, is both theoretical and practical: theoretical in so far as it consists of finding out things about ourselves, practical in that it consists of “putting our thoughts into 97

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practice”. It may seem that Collingwood is too conservative a thinker here, that his thought is of the change-the-self-to-fit-the-world variety and not of the revolutionary or reformist let-us-remake-the-world kind. (If the implication of conservatism in Collingwood’s thoughts were true, which it isn’t, it would make an interesting head of comparison with Moore’s ethics, the conservative nature of which has been well described by G. Warnock.6) But Collingwood, who is good at challenging dichotomies, observes that making changes in one’s character changes one’s environment too, “for out of the new character which I shall acquire there will flow actions which will certainly to some extent alter my world” (PA 290). Truthful consciousness is important not only in relation to the ethical problem of self-management and self-direction but also in relation to the creation of and reception by an audience of works of art. Its importance for aesthetics is the role it plays in helping us to understand art – namely, that artistic consciousness is uncorrupt consciousness. An audience, Collingwood argues, does not have the role of passive spectator of a work of art but that of collaborative agent; it provides through what we would now call feedback (a word not available to Collingwood in 1938) some response to the artist’s question, Have I expressed my emotions? Unless he sees his own proclamation, “This is good”, echoed on the faces of his audience – “Yes, that is good” – he wonders Whether he was speaking the truth or not. He thought he had enjoyed and recorded a genuine aesthetic experience, but has he? Was he suffering from a corruption of consciousness? Has his audience judged him better than he judged himself ?” (PA 314). The book closes with the words, “Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness” (PA 336). The criterion of success in art is the expression of emotion; to the extent that the artist’s consciousness is false, corrupt, or bowdlerized, expression must misfire. The psychological character of Collingwood’s aesthetics is clear then. We should also note that Collingwood goes to some trouble to explain the nature of psychology. In particular, he criticizes the attempt to model psychology on (what were assumed to be) the methods of the natural sciences. Thus Moore and Collingwood both prove to be trenchant critics of naturalism, though perhaps this point of comparison cannot be much more than a pun: for Moore’s target is ethical naturalism, the identification of goodness with something other than itself, say psychological states. Whereas Collingwood’s quarrel is with the identification of psychology as a natural science. Moore, by contrast, writes as if he subscribed in psychology to the sort of thing Collingwood objects to – namely, an old-fashioned, mechanistic, positivistic view of psychology. This, however, is scarcely to the point since Moore’s concern, of course, was to make progress in our understanding of ethics, not psychology. Nor is it surprising that his psychology 98

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is pre-Freudian. Collingwood, on the other hand, when he was working out this aesthetics, was in the vanguard of psychological thought; that is, he endorsed certain aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis. The qualification of “certain aspects” has to be made since Freud himself, Collingwood thought, was a prisoner of the untenable view that psychology is a mechanistic natural science. But whereas psychology and ethics are sharply distinguished in Moore’s thought, there is not to be found in Collingwood any such sharp separation of psychology from aesthetics (or ethics). Indeed, as should be apparent, quite the reverse is the case.

VI Moore’s famous open-question argument is founded on the idea that it is always intelligible to ask of any complex proposed to be identical with goodness is it good, thus showing that the complex asserted to be identical with goodness is not, after all, identical with goodness (PE 15–16). Good “is a simple, indefinable unanalysable object of thought” (PE 21). The property denoted by the term, “good”, by reference to which the subject matter of ethics must be defined, is itself simple and indefinable (PE 36). Moore, as is well-known, attacks approaches to ethics which consist of substituting for “good” some property other than good – for example, a property of a natural object, such as pleasure (PE 40). Collingwood uses a similar strategy in his aesthetics when he refuses to allow that art is anything other than itself. This truism underlies his attempt to distinguish “art proper” from things often but falsely confounded with art, such as craft, magic (in his special sense of this term), amusement, puzzle, instruction, propaganda, and exhortation. These things wrongfully usurp the name of art (PA 32), just as, according to Moore, many things such as pleasure are put forward falsely in ethics as being identical with goodness. At the heart of Collingwood’s aesthetics is the notion that art is not to be identified with things which are often mistaken for it but which in fact are not “art proper”. At the heart of Moore’s ethics is the similar notion that things such as pleasure are mistakenly identified with goodness. And just as Collingwood allows that a work of art can also be representational, amusing, etc., but is not a work of art in virtue of any of these other things, so Moore, too, avows that pleasant things, for example, can be good while fiercely denying that goodness and pleasure are identical. A thing is not good in virtue of its being pleasant any more than a work of art is a work of art in virtue of its being representational, etc. Collingwood’s root notion that what makes something a work of art is not what makes it craft, magic, amusement, etc., and conversely something that is craft, magic, or amusement is not in virtue of that fact a work of art. One does not entail the other, although, and this is commonly overlooked, something may be both. Indeed, it is generally the case that something is both art and craftsmanship. Moore’s view, similarly, is that things which are 99

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good do not owe their goodness to their possessing any other property, such as pleasure (PE 38), while at the same time, certainly good things may be pleasant. Pleasure is not goodies then but can occur in good things or in complexes that are good. Whenever we are inclined to confuse art with something else, such as representation, which is not art but can occur in art, we run up against Collingwood’s principle: “A representation may be a work of art; but what makes it a representation is one thing, what makes it a work of art is another” (PA 43). Moore says the naturalistic fallacy “consists in identifying the simple notion which we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion” (PE 58) the naturalistic fallacy is “the failure to distinguish clearly that unique and indefinable quality which we mean by good” (PE 59). But “good is good and nothing else whatever” (PE 144). If we substitute “art” for “good” here, we transform Moore’s account in ethics of goodness into Collingwood’s account in aesthetics of art. Both philosophers rely on the principle “X is X and not Y” and “what makes X X is not what makes X Y”. To get Moore’s central tenet in ethics, “good” may be substituted for “X” and “pleasure” for “Y”, and to get Collingwood’s central tenet in aesthetics, “art” may be substituted for “X” and, for example, “entertainment”, “amusement”, or “representation” for “Y”. There is then the same refusal on the part of Collingwood to allow art to be anything other than itself as there is by Moore to allow that goodness is anything other than goodness. The difference is that while Collingwood does find something to be identical with “art proper” – namely, the expressions of emotion, Moore does not find anything unless it is a non-natural property to be identical with goodness. Moore’s ethics is somewhat less illuminating, therefore, than Collingwood’s aesthetics.7 Moore holds that that “which is meant by ‘good’ is in fact, except its converse ‘bad’, the only simple object of thought which is peculiar to Ethics” (PE 5). He says, “My business is solely with that object or idea, which I hold, rightly or wrongly, that the word is generally used to stand for” (PE 6). Moore’s answer to the question, “What is good?” is “that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked ‘How is good to be defined?’ my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it” (PE 6). Collingwood’s theory of art runs parallel to this account of good but only so far. For the parallel to be complete, Collingwood, having distinguished “art proper” from things wrongly confused with it, could not have gone on to give an account of art in terms of the expression of emotion. He would have had to have rested his case on some such statement as “that art is art and that is the end of the matter”. That Collingwood does not halt in his account of art here in the peremptory manner of Moore’s on goodness is not unconnected with the fact that Collingwood, perhaps going back to Locke’s distinction between the civil and philosophical uses of words, has a more satisfactory account than Moore of the role of definition in philosophy. Moore is interested in “definitions of the kind…which describe the real nature of the object 100

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or notion denoted by a ‘word’ and which do not merely tell us what the word is used to mean” (PE 7). Collingwood too is interested in the real nature of art, though his philosophy is, of course, more historically aware than Moore’s (“I do not think of aesthetic theory as an attempt to investigate and expound eternal verities concerning the nature of an eternal object called Art”; PA vi). But the major difference is that whereas Moore is wholly uninterested in the verbal meaning of “good”, Collingwood believes that philosophical definition can only begin after the verbal uses of the term in question have been surveyed and appraised (PA 1–2). Moore, however, rejects verbal usage as devoid of philosophical interest (“Such a definition can never be of ultimate importance in any study except lexicography…my business is not with its proper usage, as established by custom” (PE 6)); whereas Collingwood believes that where words such as “art” are in common use, the philosophical task is “to clarify and systematize ideas we already possess; consequently there is no point in using words according to a private rule of our own, we must use them in a way which fits on to common usage” (PA 1). There is in Collingwood’s view, therefore, no point in the philosophical proceeding until he has gotten questions of usage sorted out, not, as in Moore’s case, rejected. Secondly, we must proceed to a definition of the term “art”. This comes second, and not first, because no one can even try to define a term until he has settled in his own mind a definite usage of it: no one can define a term in common use until he has satisfied himself that his personal usage of it harmonizes with the common usage. (PA 2) Moore’s view is that real definitions “are only possible when the object or notion in question is something complex. You can give a definition of a horse because a horse has many different properties and qualities, all of which you can enumerate. But when you have enumerated them all, when you have reduced a horse to his simplest terms, then you can no longer define those terms. They are simply something which you think of or perceive” (PE 7). A real definition of good is not possible, therefore, because good, unlike horse, is not a complex notion: “My point is that ‘good’ is a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion” (PE 7). So far as the meaning of “good” is concerned then, Moore offers three possibilities and chooses the first himself: (1) “Good” denotes something simple and indefinable; (2) it is a complex, a given whole; (3) it means nothing to all (PE 15). This then is the theory of meaning that Moore brings to bear on his account of good. It is not the theory of meaning Collingwood brings to the theory of art. If we had to describe Collingwood’s enterprise in Moore’s terms (which there is no reason to do – Collingwood somewhere warns philosophers against allowing their positions to be expressed in the language of their opponents, for that is to lose the argument), we might say that 101

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Collingwood writes as if art were complex, not simple. But the complexity of the idea of art is owing to its being relational, not to its being an aggregate of simple qualities or properties, for art is not, or does not denote, a simple property or quality, and the definition of a complex does not consist, contrary to what Moore asserts, of the enumeration of, or reduction to, the simple properties or qualities that constitute the complex (When Moore switches his attention from definition to value and develops his notion of an organic whole, he drops his optimistic assumptions concerning properties or qualities for something more sensitive to the holistic organicism of idealism: “The value of such a whole bears no regular proportion to the sum of the values of its parts” (italics removed; PE 27)). In place of a Moorean view of definition as the enumeration of properties, Collingwood holds to the importance of a philosophical understanding of stressing relations. “Definition necessarily means defining one thing in terms of something else” (PA 2). Moore, of course, does not dispute this but draws the opposite conclusion. There is nothing else in terms of which good can be defined because it is a simple notion. Good, therefore, is indefinable. We might imagine Collingwood’s retort to this as being something like whatever the case may be with good (and there is no reason to suppose that he would accept Moore’s account of this and some reason, as I have argued, to suppose that he must reject it); in the case of art, since art is definable, then art is not a simple notion. We may conclude, what in any case has long since been established by Moore’s critics in ethics, that the distinction between simple and complex objects of thought has no privileged alignment with the “law of identity”. For trivially, anything is what it is, whatever it is, whether simple or complex. So in Moore’s ethics, good is good and is a simple notion not to be confused with anything else; in Collingwood’s aesthetics, art is art and is not to be confused with anything else, say amusement, but art is not in Moore’s sense a simple notion. There is a more important point. Although I have shown that Collingwood is as eager to distinguish good from things mistakenly confused with it, Collingwood clearly grasps that we have to be able to see one thing in terms of another to understand it at all. But this “seeing” is understanding relations, not spotting properties. Moore thinks that goodness is a property and that understanding it consists of identifying it with some other property, which he rightly sees is impossible. But he draws the wrong conclusion. He concludes that goodness is indefinable, whereas what is mistaken is his property theory of understanding. Collingwood gets away from this not by looking for the identification of art with something else (though he finds that in the fact that art is expressive) but by looking for what is relational between art and other things. In order, Collingwood says, to define any given thing, one must have in one’s head not only a clear idea of the thing to be defined, but an equally clear idea of all the other things by reference to which one defines it. People often go wrong over 102

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this. They think that in order to construct a definition or (what is the same thing) a “theory” of something, it is enough to have a clear idea of that one thing. That is absurd. Having a clear idea of thing enables them to recognize it when they see it, just as having a clear idea of a certain house enables them to recognize it when they are there; but defining the thing is like explaining where the house is or pointing out its position on the map; you must know its relations to other things as well, and if your ideas of these other things are vague, your definition will be worthless. (PA 2) Moore’s account of good in the earlier parts of PE is a fine example of recognizing the house without explaining where it is, coupled, indeed, with blindness to the fact that the question of position could ever arise; for to have a clear idea of goodness in Moore’s sense is to deny that there could be other things by reference to which it is to be defined. That would be to introduce an impurity into the account of goodness, but without it, there can be no account.

VII This is not altogether risible. At any rate, it is not bad as an unintended description of the situation modern art finds itself in. For if Collingwood’s views on definition are philosophically superior to Moore’s, then culturally, Moore’s account of goodness unintentionally anticipates certain striking developments in 20th-century art. Moore’s account is not a bad model for depicting the avant-garde in art, whereas Collingwood’s theory of art is commonly regarded as romantic and, therefore, out of date. To suggest that Moore’s account of goodness may offer some sort of characterization of modernism is perhaps a new way of stating the old and familiar truth that Moore belongs to Bloomsbury. In aesthetics, this means formalism. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to develop in any detail the suggestion that Moore’s account of goodness serves as an account of the way many artists and their apologists have treated the idea of art in this century. The basic idea is that modernist artists have proceeded as if art were a simple notion, and of many of their works, it is a somewhat mysterious fact about them that they are works of art – mysterious because nothing can be said about the sense in which they are works of art. They just are. As Moore seems to have stripped goodness down to itself, thereby making it unintelligible, for the result is that nothing is left, artists likewise seem to have been occupied in expelling from their works the representational, the illusionistic, the expressive, or indeed any other feature or property that might be seized upon by the contemplative spectator and predicated of the work. Instead, we seem to be presented, say in minimal art but not only here, with works whose only interest seems to lie in the fact that they are works of art. They 103

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challenge us to see them as art while at the same time we cannot appeal to any hitherto established sense of art since all traditional expectations of art are ruled out. The concept of art no less than the work that confronts us seems emptied of sense or content. To expect of a work of art that it should be beautiful, expressive, representational, or any of the things in the past valued would be the aesthetic equivalent of committing the naturalistic fallacy. Art is art and not another thing. Of minimal art Edward Lucie-Smith says, “It consists either of a single unitary object or of series of identical unitary objects”.8 How is this different from Moore’s account of goodness? We have to accept that good things are good because they possess a property of goodness we cannot explain. A minimal work similarly confronts us obtrusively with the question, “Am I art ?”, for there is no other interest to which it can appeal; where there is nothing to delight the heart, mind, or senses, there is no other question it can raise. In these works, there is nothing to attend to but the bare fact, as it were, that they are art, if they are. But to the question so posed – Is this art? – there seems to be no satisfactory answer. Minimal art thus leads us into an aesthetic dead end, as non-natural properties lead to an ethical dead end. Contemporary moral philosophy, in the development of which Moore was so influential, displays the desire, Bernard Williams has observed, “to reduce revealed moral commitment to a minimum”9. I would say of many contemporary works of art that there is a similar desire to reduce aesthetic commitment to a minimum.

Notes and References 1 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (London: Oxford at Clarendon Press, 1938). 2 G. E. Moore, “The Subject-Matter of Ethics”, “Naturalistic Ethics”, “Hedonism”, and “Methaphysical Ethics”, in Principia Ethica (London: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 3 R. G. Collingwood, Essay, in Philosophy of History, ed. W. Debbins (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 76. 4 Ibid., p. 85. 5 I have discussed implications of anti-cognitivism for aesthetic evaluations in “Evaluations and Aesthetic Appraisals”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 7, No. 4, October 1967. 6 G. Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 8. 7 On the unilluminating nature of Moore’s ethics, see Warnock, op. cit., p. 16. 8 Edward Lucie-Smith, “Minimal Art”, in Concept of Modern Art, eds. Tony Richardson and Nikos Stangos (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 247. 9 Bernard Williams, Morality, An Introduction to Ethics (England: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 10.

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8 ON THE CHALLENGE OF ART TO PHILOSOPHY Aesthetics at the end of epistemology* Gianni Vattimo Is there a visible sense in which art represents today a challenge to philosophy more specifically and strongly than at any other time in our history? This challenge seems to have existed in every period of the history of our Western culture, from ancient Greece onward. I, nevertheless, think that in our epoch, this “eternal” challenge has assumed specific traits. To recognize this fact – if it is such – means also to proceed a step forward in the position and discussion of our problem. In fact, if we recognize that in our time the challenge of art to philosophy is taking place in new and specific forms, we shall have to recognize also the profound transformation undergone by philosophy itself. All this means that there is no “eternal” or natural essence of philosophy and art, which by nature would be opposed to each other. To put it in Heideggerian terms, art and philosophy, like any other sphere of activity, or kind of being, have an essence only in the verbal sense of the German word Wesen: each one West such and such a thing at this particular moment of the history of being. Now, the change in the meaning of “essence”, which is marked by Wesen, is exactly the transformation of philosophy in relation to which we are trying to re-think the position of works of art. It may be interesting here to recall that the first essay in which Heidegger develops his idea of the “history of being”, of a possible plurality of Wesen, is precisely the essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art”1; at least in one of the decisive thinkers of our century, the discovery of the verbal-historical and eventual meaning of “essence” takes place in connection with the reflection on art. Let me try to summarize the first hypothesis: The challenge of art to philosophy, no matter which sense it had in previous epochs within our tradition, takes place today in a situation marked by the transformation of philosophy; this transformation, I maintain, is describable in terms of the “eventuality” of being and of the “verbal” meaning of Wesen developed by Heidegger in his later writings. *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. XVI, No. 1–2, 1993, pp. 9–16.

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This same situation, leaving aside for a while the “vagaries” of the philosopher of the Black Forest, can also be described in other terms: those of Richard Rorty’s book Philosophy and the Mirror Nature (1979).2 Rorty’s thesis, very roughly summarized, is that the transformation of philosophy with which we are confronted today is the end of its “epistemological” form, the end of philosophy thought of in terms of epistemology. This most recent form of philosophy was the last echo of the Prote philosophia, which Aristotle had put at the basis of all human knowledge. Prote philosophia meant to Aristotle a knowledge which catches the totality of being by catching the first and most general causes and principles (and Nietzsche called it “the main”). In modem times, no specific field of being, as the first principles or causes, is left for philosophy; philosophy, therefore, has tried to keep its supremacy by means of the “critical” analysis of knowledge as such, transforming itself into epistemology and methodology. But also, this last disguise of metaphysics has undergone a crisis in contemporary thought, for reasons and in forms that I do not want to (and cannot) analyze here. This crisis has also involved that part of philosophy which, under the name of aesthetics inaugurated in its present sense by Kant, had imagined its task as that of describing the “conditions of possibility” of the experience of art and beauty. Aesthetics too, at least in a large part of its modern development, has been a sort of “epistemology” or methodology of art and beauty. Almost all of the texts on which aestheticians were educated and still work (except, of course, Hegel’s aesthetics) are methodological and epistemological: under the dominating influence of neo-Kantianism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what aestheticians generally discuss is the problem of defining the specific traits of aesthetic experience. As I said, I am not trying to discuss here the reasons and meaning of the end (if it is, as I believe, an end) of the epistemological determination (Bestimmung: vocation, definition, configuration) of philosophy. In the field of aesthetics, the end of epistemology is not the mere consequence of what has happened in the rest of philosophy; it has some specific characteristics which I shall try to analyze in order to understand the meaning of art’s challenge to philosophy and the possible task of philosophical aesthetics in this situation. The end of epistemology in aesthetics, in our century, is deeply related to the experience of the historical avant-garde of the beginning of this century with all its consequences until now (until postmodernism). It was avantgarde which violently challenged the tranquil certainty of philosophical aesthetics at the beginning of the 20th century. While academic philosophers (like the German neo-Kantians and phenomenologists, the Italian neo-idealists, but also realists and pragmatists like Dewey) engaged in defining aesthetic experience, which was generally thought of in terms of Kantian disinterestedness, avant-garde art conceived of itself as a full experience of truth: This is the case, in different senses, of Futurism and Surrealism, Expressionism and Dada, and of the poetics of political engagement 106

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(Brecht), as of the “abstract art” of Klee and Kandinsky. Poets and artists refused to accept the “insulation” in which philosophical aesthetics, and social conventions too, confined them. I am perfectly aware of the risks involved in proposing a general interpretation of the meaning of the artistic avant-garde of the beginning of this century. But Ernst Bloch, si licet parva…, did just that in one of his first illuminating works Geist der Utopie (1918 and 1923),3 which is one of the sources of the Kritische Theorie of the Frankfurt School. What Bloch, himself strongly influenced by expressionism, called the self-assertion of the rights of the spirit, and the emerging of the “Gothic” assertion of the rights of the spirit, and the emerging of the “Gothic” essence of art can also be called, less emphatically, the claim of art to represent an experience of truth. Artists who claimed that automatic writing (ecriture automatique) revealed the depth of inner life; artists who wanted to catch objects in movement in an epoch in which the whole world was put into a general movement, by the spread of technology; artists who looked at the forms of the objects of the so-called primitive cultures in order to find more essential ways of representing their own reality; and again, artists who, by the very nature of the “products” they exhibited as works of art (Duchamp’s Fountain) obliged people to re-examine all their preconceptions of art and of its social framework – all these artists could not conceive of themselves as being engaged in a “disinterested” activity; they felt deeply committed to an experience of truth. I do not intend to discuss whether or not this is still the atmosphere in today’s art; it is certainly not from various points of view, as postmodernism can be understood as the “claim of art to truth”, provided that we develop all the consequences which, for the notion of truth itself, are implicit in the avant-garde experience. I mean that the challenge of avant-garde art to (academic) philosophy from the beginning of this century was a challenge to a specific notion of truth, which – as Gadamer in Truth and Method has shown it merely in terms of art – philosophy had to revise its “scientific” notion of truth. We can, I think, describe the situation of philosophy after the fall of its epistemological Bestimmung in terms of Dilthey’s essay The Essence of Philosophy, 1907.4 Dilthey thinks that his, and also our, position in philosophy is characterized by the accomplished dissolution of both the ancient idea of metaphysics (Aristotle’s prote philosophia) and the modern one (metaphysics in Cartesian and Kantian terms: self-evidence of reason as the basis for all truth). As Dilthey has a sort of cyclical view of the history of philosophy, what is happening in our epoch is analogous, for him, to what happened at other moments of the dissolution of metaphysical systems, like late antiquity and the end of the Middle Ages. As in those epochs, in ours too, philosophy, having left its systematic structure, tends to become what Dilthey calls Lebensphilosophie, philosophy of life, which has nothing to do with the sort of vitalistic metaphysics usually denoted by this term but is simply a kind of thought intimately related to “lived experience” and – this 107

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is important – which expresses itself in literary and artistic forms rather than in the form of scientific demonstrations. Dilthey retraces the origin of this current in Schopenhauer (who is, incidentally, one of the inspirers of his own interpretation of Kant) and sees its developments in authors such as Ruskin and Emerson, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Maeterlinck. In other works of these “poet-philosophers”, says Dilthey, “the methodological claims to universal validity and foundation weaken, while the process which, from the experience of life, draws an interpretation of it, takes on ever freer forms” so that life “receives an explanation in the form of apercus unmethodical but full of “impressivity” (eindrucksvoll)”.5 It is this kind of thought, says Dilthey, “which represents the center of the interests of the new generation”. Within the global context of Dilthey’s essay, this form of philosophy is considered a provisional one, which should prepare a new, more powerful, and logically rigorous form of philosophy. But if one considers the themes of this essay in connection with the numerous problems Dilthey left open in his work and the final incomplete state of many of his writings, a reasonable hypothesis might be this: Although Dilthey strove to build a “systematic” philosophy in the form of a transcendental psychology of the Weltanschauungen – i.e. of all possible apercus which build different philosophies around a specific interpretation of life, he never succeeded in persuading himself and his readers that this philosophy was really better than the poetic, unmethodical expression of Erlebnisse, which so much interested his contemporaries. One of the reasons for the incompleteness of so many of Dilthey’s works is, in my view, the difficulty he found in defining this ideal of a systematic philosophy once he had recognized that the metaphysical essence of philosophy was no longer a practicable path. The sometimes-enthusiastic description he gives in The Essence of Philosophy of the Lebensphilosophie, which he considers characteristic of his epoch (preferring it, one should note, to other possible references) shows that he was, at least, deeply divided as to the evaluation of the task of philosophy. Dilthey’s essay on the essence of philosophy can help us to understand, perhaps in a less “prophetic” but more useful way, the sense of the dialogue between poetry and thought, which Heidegger considers a sort of destiny of philosophy at the moment of the end of metaphysics. Let us not forget that the connection of Heidegger’s work to Dilthey’s is very substantial: Heidegger says in a page in Sein und Zeit that, in his own researches, he only wants “to develop and enlarge the views of Dilthey and to favour their assimilation by the present generation, which has not yet assimilated them” (paragraph 72). What I am suggesting is that we can improve our understanding of Heidegger’s idea of Gesprach between thinking and poetry by referring it to Dilthey’s notion of Lebensphilosophie. Of course, Heidegger is a severe critic of any reduction of philosophy to Weltanschauunq and the expression of Erlebnisse; no one doubts this. But the more he develops, after Sein und Zeit, the consciousness of the destiny of metaphysics and the problem of its Ueberwindung, the more too he develops a conception and practice of 108

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philosophy as dialogue with poetry (and not in order to build a “system of Weltanschauungen”, as Dilthey still believed, but in order to expose himself to the experience of the truth which speaks in poetry). What I want to emphasize is that Heidegger’s interest, as a philosopher, in poetry was not at all the interest of an “aesthetician” in the “epistemological” sense of the word, nor the interest which, at least problematically, was Dilthey’s – i.e. of a thinker who hoped to build a sort of system out of “the given” of the poetical views of the world. His interest, rather, may be described as a dialogical one. What is involved in Heidegger’s notion of a dialogue between philosophy and poetry is that they speak as partners, and poetry is no longer an “object” to philosophy. This dialogue, I suggest, is possible only at the end of metaphysics and is the only way given to philosophy at the moment in which it is no longer conceivable as epistemology. Among the many questions which remain open at this point, I shall try to discuss the following three: (a) Why should philosophy be a dialogue with poetry and not, or rather at the same time, with the sciences? (b) What kind of truth can be found in poetry and art? (c) Should philosophy merge completely into poetry and art, and if not, why? As one can see, these questions arise directly from what I have been maintaining in this chapter and can be taken as introducing possible alternative conclusions. To come, then, to the first question: Why should the only way out for philosophy at the end of metaphysics be the dialogue with poetry instead of that preferred by positivists – with science, be it the natural sciences or the human sciences? I don’t think that Heidegger’s position on this point is inspired by a generic preference for the humanities, for the humanistic tradition, and so on. As one can also see in the essay on Dilthey, the end of the metaphysical dream, which was also a dream of objectivity, orientates philosophy towards a dialogue with what Hegel called the forms of absolute spirit. At the moment in which it is no longer conceivable as the knowledge of a specific field of reality (the first principles) or as a foundational metaknowledge (epistemology, methodology, analysis of language, etc.), philosophy has to recognize its kinship with the forms of the interpretation of the world – then, in a very broad sense, with Weltanschauung – and cannot try to recover its metaphysical – i.e. objective, cognitive – content via a privileged dialogue with the sciences. Not, at least, until the “aesthetic” character of the sciences themselves is not made completely explicit; it is clear by now that after Kuhn and Feyerabend, the sciences have become more and more “aesthetic”, forms of interpretation and not (or not only by this means) forms of “knowledge” in the positivist sense of the word. At this point, which is mine and not Heidegger’s, it is possible for science to become also a dialogue-partner for philosophy. This is, in my view, the ultimate sense of the difference between epistemology and hermeneutics proposed by Rorty: It is no longer a difference between knowledge and interpretation but rather between two kinds of interpretation: normal and revolutionary (in the terminology Rorty borrows from Kuhn). The essence of poetry, 109

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wrote Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, is Dichtung, invention; philosophy, then, can choose its partner “poetry” wherever it finds Dichtung, invention and consequently in “revolutionary” science as well. The two final questions (final for this chapter) are, as usual, the most difficult and, in my view, meaningful. If we assume that, at the moment of the final dissolution of metaphysics, the only chances remaining open to philosophy is to expose itself to the truth which is experienced in poetry and art, what kind of truth may we expect to find – or better, to experience – in this dialogue? As I noted earlier while speaking of Gadamer, when philosophy admits the very possibility of an experience of truth off the path marked by scientific methodology, the way is open for a re-definition of truth itself. It is not only a question of names, which could be dissolved by stipulating that we call truth only propositions that have been verified (or not falsified, given the possibility of that occurring) by controlled scientific experiences. Artists will, nevertheless, continue to call their experience “truth”, indicating by this a relation which philosophy, obedient to the stipulation I mentioned, would simply leave aside, with a completely “unscientific” escamotage. I think it is more constructive for thought to consider the double meaning of truth which Heidegger discusses in Vom Wesen der Warheit. In that lecture, Heidegger opposes truth qua orthothes or adaequatio intellectus et rei – i.e. the proposition that pictures the state of affairs to truth qua openness, freedom, i.e. the opening of a horizon within which res and intellectus can relate and can be compared in order to control the correspondence of the proposition to the state of affairs. Heidegger thinks that truth as correspondence is made possible only by truth as openness; we can call a proposition true or false only by the application of a set of rules which can be called true or false in the same sense but are given to us with our Dasein and which are radically historical in the sense that they are not a “structural” Kantian a priori of human reason. When Heidegger speaks of the work of art as in Werk setzen der Wahrheit (the putting of truth into the work), he unquestionably has in mind truth in the sense of openness. But it seems, then, that we are back here at a notion of truth as Weltanschauung, as a general “view” of the world, vague and pervasive, within which other more specific truths, in the propositional sense of the word, become visible. Such a reduction of truth to Weltanschauung cannot easily be attributed to Heidegger because he is much more radical than Dilthey: For him, there is no “objective” view of the world compared to which poetry would be “only” Weltanschauung. Nevertheless, although Heidegger never considered his dialogue with poetry, to which he dedicated too much of his meditation in the later years, as a reduction of philosophy to the level of Erlebnis and Weltanschauung. What remains of his Gesprach with poets such as Holderlin, Rilke, George, Trakl, but also Sophocles, is not a set of philosophical propositions. The question, What truths, ultimately, did Heidegger find in poets? is unanswerable. Unanswerable too, in my view, is the question concerning the 110

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results of the application of a Heideggerian “method” (and the word here required many quotation marks) in the field of literary and art criticism. In poetry, there is no truth which can be put into the form of a proposition. The truth which is at work in poetry is the background truth which Heidegger distinguishes from the adaequatio in Vom Wesen der Warheit. We can say the truth of an atmosphere, of a sound in the air, of a shared prejudice, of an intermittence du coeur – the truth of Proust’s madeleine. We can call it truth because it determines, bestimmt (gives tune and voice, also) to our experience in a sense which is deeper and more pervasive than the sense of the specific “truths” we are faced with within the world. In a certain way, this is a weak notion of truth – which could refer to a beautiful page of Heidegger at the end of the lecture on Das Ding,6 where he speaks of the ring of the world and the Ge-ring, the marginal, poor, etc. To point it out might help us to read Heidegger in a less “romantic” and emphatic way than we usually do. This, I admit, is something that may be interesting only for Heidegger’s readers, be that as it may, but the weakening of the notion of truth is probably a more general problem. At the moment of the dissolution of its metaphysical Wesen, philosophy experiences a sort of new kinship with poetry: It is the Lebensphilosophie of which Dilthey spoke. This experience, once Heidegger has radicalized Dilthey by dissolving the metaphysical element remaining in his theories, leads to the discovery of the background essence of truth. It is truth as background that is at work in works of art. Only on the basis of this notion of truth can art become a challenge to philosophy. This leads us to a concluding question, which was also Dilthey’s problem: If philosophy is no longer metaphysics, neither in the classical nor in the Kantian epistemological sense, and truth reveals itself to be more “background” than thesis and propositions, why does not philosophy merge completely into poetry? Does philosophy still possess specific characteristics on the basis of which the Gesprach between Denken and Dichten can still have a sense? I don’t have – and neither, I think, does Heidegger – any answers to this question, except, perhaps, some negative hints, which can also be taken as the mere description of the present situation. Philosophy cannot simply merge into poetry because both poetry and philosophy are still defined in terms in which the metaphysical has bestimmt (defined and determined) them. A merging of philosophy into poetry would only mean, in these conditions, a reversal, with philosophy assuming the limits of its “counterpart” (Weltanschauung instead of system) without any transformation of the “essence”, the Wesen. Dialogue, Gesprach, means both more and less than this: less because each of the partners remains faithful, sticks to its own specific and technical tradition (philosophy thus remaining an argumentative form of discourse, with its own vocabulary, syntax, and rhetorics), and more because what is at stake in the dialogue is precisely the re-examination (de- and re-construction?) of the inherited 111

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Wesen of both philosophy and poetry and of the very notion of truth, which through the dialogue of philosophy and poetry begins to lose its metaphysical traits.

Notes and References 1 “The Origin of the Work of Art” is an essay from 1936, published in Heidegger’s Holzwege, Frankfurt, Klostermann, 1950. 2 Cf. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 16. 3 E. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Errte Fassung, 1918), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1971. 4 The essay “The Essence of Philosophy” (Das Wesen der philosophie) was published in volume V of W. Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (1914–36), pp. 339–416. 5 Cf. “Das Wesen der Philosophie”, cit., part II, sect. III. 6 Cf. “Das Ding” in M. Heidegger, Vortraege und Aufraetze, Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954.

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Section II ART, ARTEFACT, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART

9 ARISTOTLE AND FREUD ON ART * Milton Snoeyenbos and Robert Frederick It is a critical commonplace that Aristotle and Freud present quite distinct accounts of art. And indeed, there are important methodological differences between the teleological framework of the former and the causal orientation of the latter. Emphasizing such differences, however, tends to mask important similarities in the content of their theories, in particular the central role of the concepts of pleasure, imitation, and knowledge in both accounts. In this chapter, we provide interpretations of both theories and argue that their content is remarkably similar. We begin, in Section I, by briefly calling attention to certain important features of Aristotle’s general account of art. The lengthier Section II elucidates Freud’s theory of art and draws detailed parallels with Aristotle’s account. Section III develops our analogy with respect to the artistic species of tragedy, a central art form for both writers. We offer an interpretation of the Aristotelian concept of catharsis that points up its close kinship to Freud’s account of tragic pleasure.

Aristotle on art Aristotle starts the Poetics with the claim that all the arts, including music, are modes of imitation, and he goes on to assert that the objects imitated are humans in action (1448a1).1 It is not solely the external or behavioural dimension of human actions that art imitates but, as Aristotle puts it, “character, emotion, and action” (1447a28); art imitates the inner motivational factors of human action as well as the overt dimension. Furthermore, unlike the historian, who is concerned with particular events and actions, the artist “tends to express the universal…how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity” (1451b:6–8). And, whereas the historian merely mentions facts that have actually happened, the artist relates what may happen (1451a37–9); he or she focusses on situations that are possible irrespective of whether they have actually occurred. The artist may make use of historical events, for “what has happened is manifestly possible” (1451b18), but if he does, he *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. II–III, 1979–80, pp. 49–63.

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abstracts what is typical or universal from the accidents of place and time. Assuming certain types of humans in a certain type of context, the artist traces out the probable or necessary course of events. Now if the arts imitate the inner motives and behavioural dimension of human actions, and if they capture what is universal in such actions, then they essentially represent psychological laws. Aristotle stresses that tragedy, for example, imitates human actions, but an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought; for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves, and these – thought and character – are the two natural causes from which actions spring. (1449b37–1450a4) A drama represents human actions as the necessary or probable outcome of thought and character. In representing the actions of a number of interacting individuals, the global events of the play are structured. Thus, in focussing on actions and their motivational basis, in stressing that the arts imitate universals of human action so that, for example, a tragic plot unfolds with necessity or probability, Aristotle is claiming that the arts essentially involve psychological laws. It follows that there are basic similarities in the activities of scientists and artists. The psychologist abstracts laws from actual human behaviour, but such laws do not simply apply to what has happened; they are subjunctive in form. The scientific law “all As are Bs” does not merely involve the claim that the particulars which have been observed to be As are Bs but also that if one were to encounter another A (even though one may never actually encounter it), then it would also be a B. Similarly, the artist does not imitate the accidents of what has actually happened; he or she abstracts a subjunctive psychological law (a universal) from actual human actions. Unlike the scientist, however, the artist places this universal in a hypothetical context. The artist is free to set this context. He assumes certain things about a type of situation and the type of persons involved and within that hypothetical context delineates the probable or necessary course of action. Schematically, if we assume such and such type of situation (even though this may “never have occurred and perhaps never will occur”), and if one were to encounter in this context such and such types of human agents, then such and such types of human actions would result. For artistic purposes, then, subjunctive psychological laws or universals are placed in a hypothetical context, but Aristotle also stresses that these laws are exemplified in a medium. From the standpoint of the scientist, the medium is largely irrelevant. It is, for example, irrelevant whether a quantitative scientific law is expressed in Arabic or Roman numerals. Media are, however, essential to the various art forms, and Aristotle builds them into his definitions of artistic species. Imitation is the genus of art, but media, 116

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such as colour and shape, or language, serve to partially differentiate the species of art. Tragedy, for example, is an imitation of a human action that is “in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament” (1449b25). In art, then, the universal is not totally abstract; it is placed in a hypothetical context but is also embodied in a medium. This ties indirectly with Aristotle’s account of the function of art. Humans imitate actions because they seek enjoyable activity, and artworks provide a distinct sort of pleasure. In accordance with his emphasis on artistic media, Aristotle says that humans derive pleasure from the specific media of the various sorts of imitations. For example, there is an instinctively based pleasure derivable from colour itself, and harmony and rhythm are natural to man and hence pleasurable (1448b18–22). But artworks are necessarily imitations, and in virtue of that fact are also pleasurable. Aristotle claims that imitation is instinctive to humans and that everyone naturally enjoys imitations (1448b5–10). The pleasure obtained from imitations is distinct from that derived from media and materials for he says that if one is not acquainted with the object represented in a picture, then “the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause” (1448b18–20). While he leaves unexplained the pleasure obtained from materials and media, Aristotle does provide a reason why humans naturally enjoy imitations. Experiencing an imitation is a way of coming to learn or know, and the activity of knowing is pleasurable. The artist embeds a universal law of human action in a medium, and, for Aristotle, universals, not particulars, are the objects of knowledge. The spectator can then infer the universal law from the particulars of the medium. In doing so, he or she gains knowledge of the universal, and knowing is a pleasurable activity. Thus, Aristotle says that “to learn gives the liveliest pleasure…the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring” (1448b13–7). Now, the direct experience of certain human actions, such as murder, arouses fear and/or pity, both of which Aristotle regards as species of pain and hence unpleasant (Rhetoric 1382a20–4; 1385b:3–6). But humans do obtain pleasure from the imitation of actions that normally produce pain: “Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity” (1448b11–2). He makes the same point more explicitly in the Rhetoric: Since learning and wondering are pleasant, it follows that such things as acts of imitation must be pleasant – for instance, painting, sculpture, poetry – and every product of skilful imitation; this latter, even if the object imitated is not itself pleasant; for it is not the object itself which here gives delight; the spectator draws inferences (“That is a so-andso”) and thus learns something fresh (Rhetoric 1371b4–10; trans. Roberts) 117

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Thus the “liveliest” pleasure art affords is obtained through imitation; for example, “the pleasure which the (tragic) poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation” (1453b13–4). Even if the action imitated would normally produce pain, inferring the universal embedded in the imitation is a form of knowing, and knowing is pleasurable. To summarize, the arts afford what we might call “aesthetic” pleasure, derivable from the nonrepresentational properties of the various artistic media. But there is also a sort of pleasure that arises through imitation, and artworks are imitations, representations of what is universal in action and character. They capture, in a medium, laws that are essentially psychological and thereby enable humans to procure the pleasure that attends understanding.

Freud on art Turning to Freud, we find it clearly stated that pleasure is the central aim of life (XXI, 76).2 But the program of the pleasure principle – i.e. the direct gratification of instinctive wishes – is at loggerheads with reality. Suffering is the ultimate lot of humanity, and the best that can be hoped for in the long run as a corollary of the pleasure principle is the avoidance of pain. Furthermore, civilization demands that the individual sacrifice his or her instinctive and selfish pleasure-seeking for the common good. The result is that wishes that run counter to the demands of civilization are repressed and embedded in the unconscious. Freud views the human organism as a system which seeks to equilibrate and economize the expenditure of energy (VIII, 127). The effort to repress a wish involves an accumulation of energy, which is experienced as unpleasant or painful (V, 598). Since the repressed wish is in the unconscious, the individual cannot voluntarily bring it to consciousness. However, it manifests itself in consciousness in the form of a disguised substitute – e.g., a dream, neurotic symptom, joke, or artwork. Manifestation of the wish is accompanied by a discharge of the bottled-up energy, an equilibration of the energy system, which is experienced as pleasurable. Taking dreams as an example, Freud posits a dual structure: There is a latent dream content which is formed in the unconscious and is based on a repressed wish and a manifest content – i.e., the dream as experienced. Via the psychological mechanisms of condensation, displacement, representation, and secondary revision, which are theoretically expressible as psychological laws, the latent dream content is transformed into a manifest form in which the repressed wish is not directly recognizable. Experiencing the manifest dream involves a discharge of accumulated energy, an equilibration of the energy system, which is pleasurable. The experienced dream is thus a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Although dreams are generally innocuous, neuroses can be disabling, yet they share essentially the same structure. A neurotic symptom is akin to a manifest dream; it is the end product of a repressed wish that emerges by 118

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somewhat similar transformation mechanisms. Experiencing the symptom yields an immediate, albeit temporary, relief – a substitute satisfaction. It does not, however, completely terminate the wish that is the origin of the symptom, for the wish, embedded in the unconscious, repeatedly gives rise to the symptom. Nevertheless, for Freud, the laws governing the transformation of the wish to the overt neurotic symptom are deterministic. Via these laws, the psychoanalyst can start with a manifest symptom and uncover the hitherto repressed wish. Bringing the wish to consciousness entails that it is no longer repressed, and, hence, there is no causal basis for the symptom; in Freud’s words, “symptoms disappear when we have made their unconscious predeterminants conscious” (XVI, 280). In accordance with the corollary of the pleasure principle, the pain attendant upon the effort to repress the wish is avoided. Through the self-knowledge fostered by psychoanalysis, the person gains a measure of control over his or her neuroses. In doing so, he or she gains permanent relief, for he avoids the suffering that accompanies the neuroses. Now Freud claims that artworks are manifest products of the same sorts of instinctive but repressed wishes that generate manifest dreams and neurotic symptoms (XVI, 376; XX, 64–5). But dreams and neurotic symptoms are generally asocial mental products. A dream, for example, produces only private satisfaction (VIII, 179), and a neurotic symptom is repulsive. In contrast, artworks are social in nature; they afford pleasure to the artist and are “calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people” (XX, 65). The artist has techniques that enable him or her to make his or her wish-­ phantasies enjoyable to spectators. Let us examine these techniques, for this is where the parallels with Aristotle begin to surface. We noted Aristotle’s claim that the media and materials of art can give rise to a pleasure that is distinct from the pleasure obtained from imitation. But his remarks on the pleasure obtained from colour or rhythm and harmony are brief, and he does not explain why we find these aspects of artworks to be pleasurable. Freud also asserts that, quite apart from the sense or meaning of words, there is “the pleasurable effect of rhythm or rhyme” (VIII, 125). In general, he grants that the formal or nonrepresentational properties of an artwork can produce what he calls “aesthetic” pleasure (IX, 153; XX, 65). In contrast to Aristotle, however, Freud provides an explanation of the function of aesthetic pleasure based on an analogy with his account of the pleasure obtained from jokes. In studying pleasure and the genesis of jokes, Freud accepts Fechner’s principle of aesthetic intensification – i.e., when distinct pleasures are combined, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (VIII, 135). Freud notes that we obtain pleasure from the syntactic or formal features of jokes, but claims that this pleasure, which he labels “fore-pleasure”, is not sufficient to account for the quantity of pleasure obtained from tendentious jokes. He argues that the fore-pleasure of jokes often serves to release a greater and deeper source of pleasure from repressed wishes. Via Fechner’s principle, the combined yield of pleasure is 119

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greater than the two separate pleasures. Thus, Freud says that “tendentious jokes…put themselves at the service of purposes in order that, by means of using the pleasure from jokes as a fore-pleasure, they may produce new pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions” (VIII, 137). Analogously, he claims that “all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind” (IX, 153). The formal techniques of the artist enable us to obtain a satisfaction of instinctive wishes that would often be repulsive if they were not masked by and combined with aesthetic fore-pleasure: “The essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us…. The writer… bribes us by the purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies” (IX, 153). Thus both Aristotle and Freud acknowledge what we have called “aesthetic” pleasure. Both also subordinate it: Aristotle by claiming that to learn (via imitation in the case of art) gives the “liveliest” pleasure, Freud by claiming that aesthetic fore-pleasure gives rise to the greater pleasure associated with the gratification of repressed wishes. A second technique whereby the artist can make his or her repressed wishes enjoyable to others involves the creation of imitations. We have noted Aristotle’s account of the pleasure derived from imitation, and Freud’s explanation of this pleasure, which is basically similar to Aristotle’s, can be grasped if we take a closer look at his account of the psychical apparatus (V, 565–8). Freud assumes a person is an energy system that seeks equilibration. Considered in a primitive stage of development, this system seeks to remain free of stimuli; it is structured as a reflex apparatus so that a stimulus input, and consequent build-up of energy, is discharged along a motor path. Apart from external stimuli, there are also internal somatic needs that generate an energy build-up which seeks discharge in movement. The hungry baby, for example, kicks. His or her kicking, however, does not itself resolve the need, which continues until it is terminated in an experience of satisfaction. An ingredient of the typical experience of satisfaction is what Freud calls a “perception” – e.g. nourishment. When the baby is nourished, a mnemonic image of this perception is then associated with a memory trace of the energy build-up produced by the need. When the need arises again, the energy build-up triggers the memory trace, which is associated with the mnemonic image of the perception. In this way, the subject seeks to “reevoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction” (V, 566). The entire “current of energy”, which starts with the unpleasantly experienced build-up of energy produced by the need and which aims at satisfaction, is the wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfilment of the wish. The shortest path of wish fulfilment starts with an energy build-up and terminates in the mnemonic image of the perception in which case we have a hallucinatory wish fulfilment. The focus is on an image of the situation of the original satisfaction, not the real thing. There is a temporary pleasure 120

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associated with hallucinatory wish fulfilment, but if this primary system were the only mechanism of the psychic apparatus, the organism would soon come to grief. If such hallucinating were constantly repeated, it would result in a series of temporary pleasures, but since this would not effectively terminate the need, the organism would soon exhaust itself (V, 598). Thus Freud posits a secondary psychic system through which it becomes possible to experience a real non-hallucinatory-based satisfaction (V, 566–7). Nevertheless, the primary system is psychically fundamental, and it plays a central role in Freud’s account of the pleasure obtained from artistic imitations. An artwork is, for Freud, a “reflection of reality” (XII, 224). In one sense, an artwork, such as a picture, is a physical object. But, qua picture of, say, President Carter, it is a reflection or image of Carter; it is not merely physical, and, of course, it is not Carter himself. A picture of Carter, like a reflection in a mirror, may “look like” Carter, and in some cases, as with a Trompe l’ oeil, we may mistake one for the other. Thus, there is a basis for saying that a picture, as a reflection, presents an illusion of reality. Freud, in fact, often regards artworks as illusions. He says that art “does ‘not seek to be anything but an illusion…it makes no attempt at invading the realm of reality” (XXII, 160). Furthermore, he claims that the pleasure obtained from art, apart from aesthetic fore-pleasure, is “based on an illusion” (VII, 306). We then have an analogy: Just as the unnourished baby may hallucinate nourishment, and its hallucination is based on a wish, so a spectator experiences a reflection, an illusion, which for Freud is also based on a wish-phantasy. Both the hallucination and the artistic illusion originate, in Richard Sterba’s words, “in a very early phase of psychic development at which the individual still looks upon himself as omnipotent because wishes are experienced at this period as if their fulfilment in reality were achieved by the mere act of wishing”.3 And an artistic illusion, as well as a hallucination, is doubly governed by the pleasure principle. The basic cause of either product, a repressed wish, is tied to the pleasure principle. Furthermore, both provide only temporary satisfaction, for the wish, in either case, terminates in an image that is linked with a mere substitute satisfaction of the wish. In places, Freud indicates that, aside from aesthetic fore-pleasure, the only pleasure art affords is that akin to the pleasure attending hallucinatory wish fulfilment. Where he draws a sharp distinction between art (= illusion) and reality, he often claims that art can, at best, yield a substitute satisfaction (XXI, 75), an imaginary satisfaction (XX, 64–5), or a “mild narcosis…a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs” (XXI, 81. But an artwork is, for Freud, not merely a reflection (illusion); it is a reflection of reality. He explicitly states that artworks enable one to “find a path back to reality” (XI, 50; XVI, 376; XX, 64–5). The artist, like everyone else, has repressed wishes, but he “finds the way back to reality…from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality” (XII, 224). The reality art reflects is, for Freud as well as Aristotle, psychological. The 121

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artwork is, in Freud’s words, “a faithful image of (the artist’s) phantasy a representation of his unconscious phantasy” (XVI, 376). Thus a repressed wish generates the artwork, and the artwork, in turn, represents the wish. Furthermore, Freud maintains that the wish represented by the artwork is not uniquely the artist’s but is common to all humans.4 The Oedipus complex, for example, is ubiquitous to humans, and Freud concludes from his studies of Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Rosmersholm, and Macbeth that these works represent “a universal law of ‘mental life’… in all its emotional significance” (XX, 63). An artwork, like a dream, is generated by repressed wishes, yet artworks differ from the “asocial, narcissistic products of dreaming in that they (are) calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people and (are) able to evoke and to satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too” (XX, 65). But an artwork does not merely enable the spectator, as well as the artist, to engage in hallucinatory wish fulfilment. Since his or her work represents a universal psychological law, an artist can, through his or her work, enable all of us as spectators to “recognise, our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found” (IV, 263, our emphasis). As reflections of reality, then, artworks are not mere means to hallucinatory wish fulfilment. A manifest artwork is a disguised representation of a repressed wish that is common to humanity. As such, it embeds general psychological truths about mankind. Because it captures general truths, an artwork has the potential for providing a “path back to reality”, for through it the spectator may recognize a suppressed truth about himself. Now, according to Freud, the artist’s repressed wish is transformed by the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, representation, and secondary revision into a manifest artwork. The transformation laws representing these mechanisms are deterministic. Therefore, given a knowledge of psychoanalytic principles derived from the study of phenomena such as dreams, jokes, and neuroses – that is, a knowledge of repressed wishes and transformation laws – it should be possible to understand manifest artworks.5 Conversely, artworks themselves can be a source of psychoanalytic knowledge. We can start with the observed artwork and, by inductive inference, gain knowledge of the repressed wishes and transformation laws. Freud clearly maintains that psychoanalytic principles can be employed to reveal the real or deep meaning of an artwork. He claims the deep meaning of Hamlet was effectively concealed until revealed by psychoanalysis (VII, 310), and he provides a “deeper reason” for the attraction of the Mona Lisa’s smile than those preferred by the standard interpretations (XI, 110). He allows that artworks are open to more than one interpretation but claims that psychoanalysis, with its access to the “deepest layer of impulses” in the artist’s mind, yields the deepest, most profound, interpretations (IV, 266). Freud also maintains that artworks can be a source of psychoanalytic knowledge. In discussing Jensen’s Gradiva, he remarks that 122

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creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science (IX, 8, our emphasis) Since the repressed wish represented by an artwork is, as we have noted, common to humanity, this knowledge is universal, not particular. The artist has an instinctive or intuitive grasp of psychoanalytic laws, which he or she exemplifies in his works and which can then be grasped by the spectator. Freud’s primary example is Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, which “seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he feels its existence within himself. Each member of the audience was once, in germ and in phantasy, just such an Oedipus” (I, 265, our emphasis). An artwork, then, exemplifies or presents “a universal law of mental life” (XX, 63) through which the spectator may uncover, and come to know, his hitherto repressed wishes. Experiencing an artwork fully is, in a sense, like undergoing psychoanalysis; the spectator, like the patient, comes to recognize his own repressed wishes. Of course, whereas the psychoanalyst has explicit knowledge of psychoanalytic laws and is able to bring the wish fully to consciousness, the artist and spectator have an intuitive, implicit grasp of those laws (IX, 8–9, 92; XI, 165) and, hence a repression may only be partially lifted by the recognition afforded by an artwork. But the effect is similar. Freud explicitly allows that recognition is pleasurable (VIII, 120–2), whether it be by artistic or scientific means. When a repressed wish is partially or fully brought to consciousness, pleasure is experienced, for, in accord with the corollary of the pleasure principle, the pain attendant upon the effort to repress the wish is avoided. Artworks, then, as “reflections of reality”, produce a complex form of pleasure. As reflections they are like mirror images, not “real”. Like the mnemonic image of a perception, an artwork arises from a repressed wish and provides a pleasure akin to that attending hallucinatory wish fulfilment. But as reflections of reality, artworks exemplify universal psychological laws which when recognized by the spectator enable him or her to at least partially lift the repression and avoid the pain accompanying the effort of repression. Furthermore, it is through the creation of an artwork qua reflection, representation, or imitation that this latter pleasure (or avoidance of pain) arises. It is the artwork that represents the repressed wish, and it is through the artwork that the wish is brought to consciousness and the repression lifted. Thus, Freud’s account of art turns out to be very similar to Aristotle’s. Both acknowledge an “aesthetic” pleasure obtainable from the nonrepresentational aspects of artistic media. Both also subordinate this pleasure to that afforded by the representational or imitative dimension of art. According to Aristotle, 123

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an artwork represents a universal pattern of human action. In inferring the universal from particulars of a medium, the spectator recognizes or comes to know the universal, and knowing is the central pleasurable activity for a rational animal. For Freud, aesthetic pleasure is a species of fore-pleasure that serves to release a greater source of pleasure from repressed wishes, and this latter pleasure derives from an artwork’s status as an imitation or reflection. As a reflection (= illusion), an artwork provides a deep but temporary pleasure akin to that accompanying hallucinatory wish fulfilment. As a reflection of reality, however, an artwork is a disguised representation of an unconscious, repressed wish that is universal to mankind. Because it embeds a universal law, an artwork can provide a path back to reality from the domain of pure hallucination. Through it, the spectator can recognize a suppressed truth about mankind in general, including himself or herself. Recognizing the suppressed wish, coming to know it, raises it to the conscious level. Having brought the wish to consciousness, the spectator avoids the pain that accompanies the expenditure of energy necessary for repression. The recognition of psychological truths through artistic images is thus a pleasurable activity. For both Aristotle and Freud, then, the deepest pleasure art provides is obtained through imitation. According to Freud, insofar as art leads one from mere hallucinatory wish fulfilment back to reality, it must represent, or imitate in disguised form, a universal wish. It is through the artwork as a reflection of psychological reality that the wish is brought to consciousness, the repression lifted, and the accompanying pleasure experienced. For Aristotle, it is through imitation that the artist represents universals, the objects of knowledge. Art affords the pleasure of knowing in virtue of being imitative. Even if the action imitated would, in the normal context, produce pain, recognizing a psychological universal via imitation is a form of knowing and hence pleasurable. Since the central pleasure art affords is obtained through imitation, this holds true of the species tragedy. Indeed, it is this point, common to the theories of Aristotle and Freud, that is the key to understanding their accounts of tragedy – the central artistic genre for both theorists. I. Aristotle and Freud on tragedy Aristotle claims that a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper [catharsis] of these emotions. (1449b24–8) He does not elucidate “catharsis” in the Poetics, but in the Politics (1342a6– 17), he says that the religious enthusiast is purged of his or her feelings by 124

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the sacred melodies. The music excites the person to a frenzy and enables him to give vent to his emotions, thereby returning him to a normal state and providing him with a pleasurable relief. This notion of catharsis, transferred to the Poetics, is the basis of the standard interpretation of the tragic catharsis. Originally advanced by Bernays, it is nicely summed up in S. H. Butcher’s words: Tragedy excites the emotions of pity and fear – kindred emotions that are in the breasts of all men – and by the act of excitation affords a pleasurable relief. The feelings called forth by the tragic spectacle are not indeed permanently removed, but are quieted for the time, so that the system can fall back upon its normal course. The stage, in fact, provides a harmless and pleasurable outlet for instincts which demand satisfaction, and which can be indulged here more fearlessly than in real life.6 There is evidence in the Poetics for this interpretation since Aristotle does say that tragedy “inspires” (1453a5) and “arouses” (1453b1) fear and pity in the spectator. But in the Rhetoric, Aristotle claims that fear and pity are species of pain. Fear is defined as a “pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future” (1382a21–2, trans. Roberts). Pity is defined as a “feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon” (1385b13–6, trans. Roberts). The difficulty, then, the tragic paradox, is how the arousal of pity and fear – both species of pain – can produce pleasure. Aristotle himself does not clarify the notion of tragic catharsis in the Poetics, and Butcher’s claim that in tragedy the “painful element in the pity and fear of reality is purged away; the emotions themselves are purged”,7 seems inconsistent. If tragedy produces fear and pity– i.e. species of pain – how can it purge the “painful element” in pity and fear? In our interpretation of Aristotle, artistic imitations enable us to engage in the activity of learning or knowing, which is pleasurable. Each artistic genre aims to produce its own specific pleasure, thus “we must not demand of tragedy any and every kind of pleasure, but only that which is proper to it…the pleasure which the [tragic] poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation” (1553b10–3, our emphasis). As an imitation, a tragedy enables us to infer a universal concerning events that would normally arouse fear and pity. Inferring a universal from the particulars of a medium is a type of knowing and, hence, is pleasurable, even if the events imitated are themselves unpleasant. Now, several classical scholars have suggested that the tragic catharsis is simply the process of inferring or learning via imitation when the events imitated are such that they would normally arouse fear and pity.8 Leon Golden, for example, notes that “catharsis”, in addition to signifying physical purgation or purification, can mean intellectual clarification; it is “the act of 125

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‘making clear’ or the process of ‘clarification’ by means of which something that is intellectually obscure is made clear to an observer…. The process of inference described by Aristotle ‘clarifies’ the nature of the individual act by providing, through the medium of art, the means of ascending from the particular event witnessed to an understanding of its universal nature, and thus it permits us to understand the individual act more clearly and distinctly”.9 Golden then suggests that the final clause of the definition of “tragedy” that Aristotle offers at 1449b24–8 in the Poetics should be translated as follows: “Tragedy is an imitation of an action…achieving, through the representation of pitiful and fearful situations, the clarification of such incidents”.10 Thus, the tragic catharsis is synonymous with the process of learning or inferring that Aristotle discusses at 1448b4–20 in the Poetics. There are several advantages to this interpretation of catharsis: (1) it avoids the basic inconsistency of the purgation interpretation; (2) it is consistent with Aristotle’s claim at 14-49b22–3 that the definition of “tragedy” he offers is a consequence of his previous discussion, for that discussion focusses on the medium, the objects, and the manner of imitation, along with its aim – knowing or learning; (3) it is also consistent with Aristotle’s assertion at 14-51b7 that poetry expresses the universal in human action; and (4) it is consistent with his claim at 1453b13–4 that the proper pleasure of tragedy comes from the imitation of fearful and pitiful events. Freud offers a similar account of tragedy in his article “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage”, written in 1905–6 but never published during his lifetime. He starts the article with a comment that is in the tradition of Bernays’s purgation account of catharsis: “If, as has been assumed since the time of Aristotle, the purpose of drama is to arouse ‘terror and pity’ and so ‘to purge the emotions’, we can describe that purpose in rather more detail by saying that it is a question of opening up sources of pleasure or enjoyment in our emotional life … the prime factor is unquestionably the process of getting rid of one’s own emotions by ‘blowing off steam’; and the consequent enjoyment corresponds…to the relief produced by a thorough discharge” (VII, 305). From his subsequent discussion, however, it is clear that Freud is not claiming that tragedy arouses fear and pity in the spectator. We must remember that the pleasure connected with a wish that terminates in an artistic product, like the pleasure derived from a wish that ends in a mnemonic image of a perception, is based on an illusion. Artistic wish fulfilment is grounded in a regression to the primary psychic system where pleasure is obtained from an illusion that substitutes for reality. The pleasure in artistic imitations, or illusions, only corresponds, as Freud puts it, to the pleasure one obtains from the normal nonhallucinatory gratification of a wish. Thus, Freud adds that the theatregoer’s enjoyment is based on an illusion; that is to say, his suffering is mitigated by the certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on the stage, and secondly, that after all it is only a game. (VII, 306) 126

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In fact, Freud adds that it is a precondition of tragedy that “it should not cause suffering to the audience, that it should know how to compensate, by means of the possible satisfactions involved, for the sympathetic suffering which is aroused” (VII, 307). As we have previously noted, this compensation is in part obtained from the formal fore-pleasure of art, which in turn releases deeper sources of pleasure from repressed wishes via hallucinatory wish fulfilment. But an artwork is not a mere illusion; it reflects reality; it is a disguised representation of the wish that generated it, and that wish is universal. In discussing Hamlet, Freud says, The repressed impulse is one of those which are similarly repressed in all of us, and the repression of which is part and parcel of the foundation of our personal evolution, it is easy for us to recognize ourselves in the hero: we are susceptible to the same conflict as he is. (VII, 309) Similarly, we noted his claim that “everyone recognizes” the conflict in Oedipus Rex “because he feels its existence within himself. Each member of the audience was once, in germ and in phantasy, such an Oedipus” (I, 265). Recognizing the repressed wish, coming to know it, is pleasurable because the pain attendant upon repression of the wish is avoided. The central similarities between Aristotle’s and Freud’s accounts of tragedy are thus: (1) tragedies are imitations or representations of psychological reality; (2) they embed universal psychological laws; (3) we do obtain aesthetic pleasure from the formal features of tragedies, but; (4) the central pleasure tragedies afford is that which attends learning, knowing, or recognizing such laws; (5) this pleasure arises through imitation; representations are enjoyable even though the actual experience of tragic events is painful, consequently; (6) neither theorist accepts the purgation theory. Finally, it is perhaps not surprising that Freud’s theory of art turns out to be a variation of a theme of Aristotle’s; the continued influence of the Poetics: over the centuries inclines us to believe that Aristotle was close to the truth about art.11

Notes and References 1 S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th ed. (New York: Dover, 1951). Butcher’s translation is cited throughout this chapter, and additional references are incorporated into the text. 2 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1966). Additional references to these volumes are incorporated in the text. 3 Richard Sterba, “The Problem of Art in Freud: Writings”, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2 (April 1940), p. 265. 4 The artist’s repressed wish, while common to humanity, may contain egocentric and personal details. But Freud stresses that the artist “understands how to

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work over his daydreams, in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them and repels strangers” (XVI, 37). 5 Freud allows that in its present state, psychoanalysis enables us to provide only a partial understanding of artworks (XI, 132), but, given his deterministic assumption, it is theoretically possible to give a more complete account. 6 Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 245. 7 Ibid., p. 254. 8 Leon Golden, “The Purgation Theory of Catharsis, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 31, no. 4 (Summer 1973), p. 478, In. 2. 9 Leon Golden, “Catharsis,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. XCIII (1952), p. 57. 10 Ibid., p. 58. 11 That Freud’s theory can be regarded as an extended footnote to Aristotle was first suggested to us by Professor Herbert Hochberg.

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10 ART AND MORALITY * John Hospers What is the relation of art to morality? We could spend a great deal of time at the outset trying to define the words “art” and “morality”. Instead, however, we shall evade these trying questions, and assume that we already attach some common meaning to these terms. Paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, poems, plays, and novels can all be works of art; we shall not stop to argue which works in these media succeed in being works of art. We shall be concerned with discovering what the effect of these works is on the moral conduct of the persons who see, hear, or read them – whether, for example, it leads them to violate any of the Ten Commandments or other rules that would generally be called moral and what is to be done when aesthetic values, which we experience primarily through works of art, conflict with moral values.

I Let us consider first the most prevalent conception of the relation between art and morality – what we may call the moralistic conception. According to this, art is, at least, a harmless interlude in the serious business of life and at worst a menace to society and morality. Art is so considered because it gives people unorthodox ideas; it disturbs them; it emphasizes individuality rather than conformity; it may be dangerous in undermining beliefs on which (it is thought) our society rests. Art is a kind of gadfly stinging at the body of established beliefs, often at precisely those places where custom does not wish to be disturbed; art is always at work, breeding discontent, rebellion, individual difference, conformism – and it seems as if art is always being directed against the established mores of the day, never in their favour. Witness the complaints of Life magazine and others about 20th-century American writers who for the most part make heroes out of rebels and emotionally “maladjusted” people and refuse to sing the praises of the solid citizens without whom industry and technology could not progress. Because of this, art is looked upon with suspicion by the guardians of custom. When *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. I, No. 1, Summer 1978, pp. 27–54.

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art does not affect people much, it is considered a harmless pleasure, an escape, a luxury, something which is unfortunately there and has to be put up with because some people seem to want it – but which may become, at any moment, insidious and dangerous, gnawing at the substructure of our most cherished beliefs and attitudes. The most famous historical representatives of this view were Plato and Tolstoy, and this is the more surprising since both of them were great artists. Plato was no moralist in his less famous works in which he discussed art – in the Ion, the Symposium, the Phaedrus. But in his most renowned work, the Republic, Plato takes a highly moralistic view of art. There he is concerned with setting up an ideal state, or republic. Everything hinges on the kind of ruler that is at the helm of the ship of state, for the rulers are all-powerful and not subject to popular vote. Plato spends many pages describing in detail the training of these rulers-to-be. If their morality is to be pure and undefiled, they must be kept away from all undermining influences, however subtle. They must not be permitted to listen to sensuous music, or to witness stage presentations in which bad people triumph, or in any way exposed to art which would loosen the moral fibre of the impressionably growing children or cause them to swerve from the path of austerity which must be theirs if they are to remain incorruptible in their future position in the state. We could spend considerable time, if we had it, debating whether or not Plato’s stricture upon art, in the interests of the future rulers of state would (if adopted) make the rulers more capable or less so than they would otherwise have been. Personally, I find this extremely dubious: A ruler-to-be should know the full facts of life as early as possible, and it would seem that the only way to combat evil is first to know something about it. But whatever we may decide about this, we should note that all these strictures are imposed for a reason; the delights of art are sacrificed, reluctantly but firmly, not because Plato had no respect or love for art but because he was convinced that the most important thing of all, even more than art, was the welfare of the entire state – a state in utter chaos or corruption could produce nothing, including art itself. Where the welfare of the state was involved, even so great a price as that of art was not too great a one to pay. For no lesser reason would so great a thing be sacrificed. And for the masses of humanity, where the education of future rulers was not concerned, there was to be no limitation of art at all. Tolstoy’s condemnation of art was more sweeping. After he had written War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and almost all of his great fictions, he underwent a religious conversion which caused him to condemn all art except that which, as he put it, “tends to deepen the religious perceptions of the people”. Art which did not have a religious theme was still acceptable as long as it tended to unite humankind into one great Christian community. But art which concerned itself with the political squabbles of a particular time or place, or sexual conflicts and disturbances, or with the life of the upper classes and their ensuring triviality and boredom, all this Tolstoy condemned without further ado. Even more sweeping, all art which was not simple 130

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enough to be understood and enjoyed at once by all people, even the simplest peasant, was given the axe. Thus Shakespeare, Milton, Beethoven, Wagner, and countless others, together with almost the entire corpus of 19th-century literature, including Tolstoy’s own great novels, were all, at one stroke, thrown into the trash heap. One cannot accuse Tolstoy of inconsistency or of shrinking from the task of applying his own principles. One can, however, question the principles that implied such a wholesale condemnation as this. But to do so here would require a detailed critique of that form of early and rather primitive Christianity which Tolstoy embraces at this period of his life, and that is far removed from our subject here. Tolstoy, like Plato, condemned art for reasons of morality, being convinced that when it comes to a conflict between them, it is art that must go. From the point of view of morality, art is the enemy, and this enemy must be utterly squelched. For Tolstoy, art is not merely the harmless pleasure of an idle moment – art (most art, at any rate) is a disturber and uprooter of the true morality. Art, in order to be permissible at all, must be used completely and utterly in the service of morality. Not all of us would go along with the special twists given the moralistic theory by Plato and Tolstoy, but many people, including perhaps the majority of Americans, tend to accept the general position of moralism. They may not think that art and morality conflict as readily or as often as Plato and Tolstoy believed, but they think that art is a servant of morality and that in cases of conflict between art and morality, it should always be morality that is the victor.

II Let us, however, turn to an exactly opposite kind of view, which often goes by the name of aestheticism. According to this view, art is above all other things of significance in this world and nothing should interfere with its freedom to do whatever it pleases. If morality disagrees, so much the worse for morality. If the masses fail to understand art or to appreciate its enormous power to receive the sublime experiences it can give, at least to the select few, well then, so much the worse for the masses. As an extreme example of this, let us listen to the poet George Moore: What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh’s lash or Egypt’s sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramid to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one among us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some 16-year-old maid was the price paid for Ingres’ La Source? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital is nothing when compared with the essential that should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence. 131

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We may also remember Mussolini’s son-in-law waxing lyrical in his description of a bomb exploding among a crowd of unarmed Ethiopians. Most of us would feel revolted at such an extreme version of the aestheticist’s hypothesis. And, of course, we need not go so far. But before attempting to dilute the force of such remarks as those of George Moore, let us see wherein lies the power and the peculiar force of the aesthetician’s position. What is the goal of life, the aestheticist asks, if it is not to be as fully, as richly, as intensely alive as we can possibly become – or in Walter Pater’s words, “to burn with a hard gemlike flame”? or to choose one crowded hour of glorious life, to seize experience at its greatest magnitude? And this is precisely our experience of art; it is living in the best way we know how. Far from being a hand maiden to other goals, art gives us immediately, and richly, the best there is in life, intense awareness – it gives us what life itself aims at becoming, but seldom achieves outside of art. (Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 563) So if there are any morally undesirable side effects of art, they do not really matter besides this all-important experience that art can give us and nothing else can. Art and art alone can make us really alive; art and art alone can give us an experience of unmatched richness, unity, intensity, ­complexity – all at the same time. Art and art alone can give us in miniature, in capsule form, the characteristic values of existence, all concentrated in one aesthetic object; it can draw all the loose and varied strands of human experience into a sharp and vivid focus. Great works of art alone are capable of giving us this experience, which can be at once sublime and ecstatic in its beauty and shattering in its intensity. Only in art do we really come alive; in all the rest of life, the waters of experience run sluggishly and turgidly, but in art, we find them pure and distilled. What can compare with the value of this experience? What is even fit to be mentioned in the same breath with it? I think we can shorten our discussion by granting everything that the aestheticist claims here about the nature of the aesthetic experience and the value of the aesthetic object, except the last sentence. Aesthetic experiences are very worthwhile indeed, as only those who have had them can know; perhaps they are the most worthwhile of all experiences in this netherworld, but they are not the only experiences there are. Even though the skyscrapers of Dubai are the tallest buildings in the world, they are not the only buildings in the world, and we do have to consider the others. Aesthetic values, though far greater than most people are aware, are still just a few among many. This being the case, we can hardly behave as if the others did not exist. We must examine the relation of the aesthetic values in life to all the other values that life has to offer.

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III So let us turn to a third possible position – not that art is the servant of morality or that morality is the servant of art but that the two are coinhabitants of the same world, each with its specific function in that world but neither fulfilling its function in the independence of the other. We must try to see what the relationship is between them, and this will take us to the heart of our problem. Morality is not, on the whole, particularly enjoyable. Moral codes are devised in order that people may be able to live in peace and security with one another. Morality is required because people often trespass upon one another’s rights. As for art, it has a different role to play; it has much more to do with pleasure and enjoyment – that very which civilized life (indispensable without a certain degree of morality) makes possible. But “pleasure” and “enjoyment” are pallid words; we would prefer to say that art gives us (in accordance with our description of a while ago) in a highly concentrated form an experience of great richness and intensity – an experience which we may well enjoy but which may also simply move us, or prick us, or shock us, or change our whole outlook upon the world around us; it may simply please us, or it may shatter us by its power. This great potency of art is felt because art does not deal merely with a fantasy world, it is not simply an amusement to while away an idle hour: It deals with the world of everyday experience, the same world over which morality legislates. The very experience which we treasure in art draws its significance from the world and life outside of art. Thus already we see that they are related. We shall try now to examine some of the strands of that relationship. (1) First, then, art sometimes does teach us lessons that we need to learn if life is to be nobly, or even tolerably, lived, and thus it may enter directly, at times, into the service of morality. Art can sometimes be didactic, even great art can be didactic, as Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Areopagetica will show. I do not wish to deny this value to art; it undoubtedly exists. Sir Philip Sidney devoted a long essay to extolling this value of art. But I fear that it is all too easy to overemphasize it, and those who place much emphasis upon it are apt to be those who do not see the other things which art is in a far better position to give us – even to morality itself. Those who praise art because it teaches or preaches or edifies by its message, or because works of art sometimes have a moral or a lesson, do not speak falsely, but if this is all they have to say about the value of art for morality, they are using art for far less than it is able to give. To use a figure that Clive Bell employed in another connection, the didacticists in art are like people who use a telescope for reading the news or who try to chop blocks with a razor. A telescope can, with some difficulty, be used for reading the news, but this is not what a

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telescope is built for, and if they use it for this purpose alone, they are using it to do jobs that far less subtle and valuable things could do much better. High school teachers of Shakespeare who tell their pupils that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to prove that crime doesn’t pay are unwittingly putting Macbeth on the same level with the most ordinary cops-and-robbers movie. It is no wonder that after a year or two of literature courses taught in this way, the pupils come to hate Shakespeare for life and would almost rather perish than approach his works again. Art does teach us, but not by explicit preachment. As John Dewey once put it, art teaches as friends and life teach – not by preaching but simply by being. The variety of situations presented, the human characterizations, the crises, the struggles, and the other experiences through which these characters pass, these alone, when set before us by the writer, are sufficient to produce a moral effect. Why do we need preachment as well, a moral tagged on at the end? If the tag were all that was needed, the author might have done better to write an essay or a tract instead. (2) But how then does art achieve a moral effect if it does not state its moral? Literature, at least, does so by presenting us with characters in situations, usually situations of moral conflict or moral crisis in which we can enrich our own moral perspectives by deliberating on their problems and conflicts, which usually have a complexity and a richness which our own moral situations seldom possess. We can learn from them, in the school of experience, without having to undergo in our personal lives all the moral conflicts, or make the moral decisions, which they (the characters) must do; for we can view their situations with a detachment which we can seldom achieve in daily life when we are immersed in the stream of action. And by viewing these situations and reflecting on them, we are enabled to make our own moral decisions more wisely when life calls upon us in turn to make them. It is difficult, for example, to see how one could read Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Othello or Macbeth without the exercise of one’s own powers of moral reflection. We see these characters in situations of moral crisis in which they must make important and often agonizing decisions, and we can hardly follow their careers without ourselves going through some of the processes of moral reflection which are required of them. And in doing this, we surely grow ourselves in moral insight. It happens when we follow Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Anna Karenina in Tolstoy’s novel, or Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to name but a few. Literature is often a stimulus to moral reflection and one not equalled by any other, for it presents the moral situation in its total context, with nothing of relevance omitted and nothing less than this is required, of course, in making a moral decision. (3) We have already expanded our notion of the moral impact of literature considerably beyond the rather crude didacticism with which we began. 134

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But we can go still further. I want to bring out an aspect of art and morality that we have not yet touched upon, though perhaps it is implicit in that which has already been said. The chief moral effect of art, I would like to say, lies in its unique power to stimulate and develop that most important human faculty, the imagination. This answer to the problem of the moral potency of art was given more than a hundred years ago by Shelley in his essay, “A Defense of Poesy”, and it stands unchallenged to this day. Shelley said, “The imagination is the great instrument of moral good, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the causes”. Through great literature, we are carried far beyond the confines of our narrow provincial world of daily life into a world of thought and feeling more profound, more varied, than our own and in which we can enter directly the experiences, the thoughts, and feelings of people far removed from us in space and time, and we are enabled to share these feelings in a way that no other medium enables us to do. It is not science but art that engenders in us a universal human sympathy and understanding for it enables us to enter directly into the affective processes of other human beings, often with mores and cultures far different from our own. Once having lived in the world of Dostoyevsky’s characters, we can no longer condemn or dismiss in toto a large segment of humanity as foreigners or strangers who are therefore wicked or beneath us; we can no longer use the customary slogan-thinking on them and treat “Russians” or “wastrels” simply as a mass, for they live before us now as individuals, animated by the same passions as we are, facing the same conflicts, and tried in the same crucible of bitter experience. Through such an exercise of sympathetic imagination, art draws all humankind together in mutual respect and togetherness. Far more than preachment or moralizing, even more than descriptive and scientific discourses of psychology and sociology, art tends to unite mankind and reveals the common human nature which exists in all of us behind the facade of our divisive doctrines, political ideologies, and religious beliefs. We realize that to condemn those depicted in novels is to condemn ourselves also. And from this, if nothing else, we learn the lesson of tolerance. This is not to say, of course, that those who read great works of literature are always tolerant or sympathetic human beings. Reading literature alone is not a cure for human ills, and people who are neurotically grasping or selfish in their private lives will hardly cease to be so as a result of reading works of literature. Still, there is an undeniable effect of a wide and serious reading of literature: people who do it, no matter what their other characteristics may be, are more understanding of other people’s conflicts, have more sympathy with their problems, can empathize more with them as human beings than people who have never broadened their horizons by reading literature at all. No one who has read great literature widely and for a considerable period, so as to make it an integral part of his or her life, can any longer share the 135

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same provincialism and be dominated by the same stupid prejudices which unfortunately seem to characterize most people most of the time. Literature, more than anything else, is a leavening influence on the bread of morality. It loosens us from the bonds of our own position in space and time; it releases us from exclusive involvement with our struggles from day to day; it enables us to see our own local problems and trials (in Spinoza’s phrase) under the aspect of eternity; we can now view it all as if from afar or from an enormous height. And through this exercise of the imagination, art enables us to do these things more than anything else does. To have moral effects, it is not necessary that a work of art presents us with a system of morality, much less a true system of morality. It need not present us with any system at all; in fact, its moral potency is greatest when it presents us, not with systems, but with people and situations, preferably those quite different from our own, so that through the imagination we can see our own customs and philosophies as we see theirs, as one among many of the endless proliferations of adjustments and solutions to human problems which varying circumstances and our endlessly varied and resourceful human nature have produced. Works of art, then, develop more than anything else the human faculty of the imagination. And, as Shelley says, the imagination is the greatest single instrument of moral good. Perhaps this sounds like an absurd overstatement. But let us consider. Consider what morality is like without the imagination. Consider the average morality of a small community, relatively isolated from centres of culture and unacquainted with any artistic traditions. Their morality is rigid and circumscribed; the details of a person’s life are hedged about with constant tiny annoyances, and everyone’s life is open to the prying eyes of the others who are unfailingly quick to judge with or without evidence. Outsiders are looked upon askance; people of a different religion, a different race, or different culture are looked upon with suspicion and distrust; and anyone who does not subscribe down to the last details of whatever moral code and religious belief are dominant in the particular community is condemned and ostracized. No doubt these people are all very sincere; they are dreadfully sincere, deadly sincere, killingly sincere. That is just the trouble; sincerity without enlightenment can be as bad as intelligence without wisdom by political leaders playing around with hydrogen bombs. These people have not known the leavening influence of art. Their morality is rigid, cramped, and arid. What is needed in their lives is not more morality and more religion – they are surfeited with that already – but the fresh breath of art. If these same people had been exposed from early youth, in the right way, to great masterpieces of human literature and learned through them to appreciate the tremendous diversity of human mores and human beliefs that go along with the same degree of sincerity that they possess, plus the complex workings of the inner heart as portrayed by a Tolstoy or a Henry James, they surely could not find it in them to be as harsh, as intolerant, and as ungiving as they are. 136

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Such is the nature of morality without art. Art alone may seem like a meagre influence – that we are making too much of it in the moral life. But I do not think so. I don’t mean to say that if you read Shakespeare you will then go out and do good deeds for your fellow men; the influence is not as direct as that. It is a slow steady influence, like the continuous rain that falls into the ground and all of it is absorbed; it cannot be absorbed in a few fitful cloudbursts. It leavens the whole personality, but it is not traceable to the influence of any one artist or to any one encounter with art in their lives. To illustrate this, let us try to imagine what human life today would be like without art. Imagine the world without Shakespeare, without Shelley, without Beethoven, without Da Vinci, without any of the (say) hundred major figures of the world’s art. I do not mean without just one of them – I mean without any of them. Try to think of the enormous influence which these artists have made, not only on other artists but also upon the great mass of humankind, one generation after another, filtering down into the life of everyday humanity, even when the people themselves do not realize where the wisdom (or even just the quotations) they are using comes from. Try to imagine, I say, a world without art, and you have a scene of such barren and awful desolation and sterility that it would not be too much to say that life would hardly be worth living. At least, if I had to choose between life without any of the great works of art of the last 3,000 and life without any of the great advances of science in that same period, I would reluctantly but unhesitatingly choose a world without science. Without modern bathrooms and finned automobiles and heated swimming pools, we could still get along, but without the great art of the ages, we would surely die of poverty of the spirit. People are far too inclined to separate art and morality into two hermetically sealed compartments. People talk as if morality were already complete and self-sufficient without art and that art, if it is to be tolerated at all, can grudgingly be admitted provided that it conforms to the moral customs of the time and place of those judging it. But this is surely to conceive the relationship between art and morality in far too one-sided a manner. If art must take cognizance of morality, then equally morality must take cognizance of art. Indeed, almost everything that is alive and imaginative about morality comes from the leavening influence of art. Take our examples from Greece alone, what would morality be today without the influence of Aeschylus and Sophocles, without Socrates as described in Plato’s dialogues, without even Herodotus and Thucydides with their quiet humour and gentle prodding scepticism and tolerance for other customs and other views? It is through great works of art that we get our greatest vision of the moral life itself. What is it about other times and other places that we most remember? Is it their political squabbles, their wars, their economic upheavals? These are known in general to intelligent people and in detail by historians, but even then, they do not usually make the dent on our personal lives that art does. What is alive today about ancient Egypt is its sculpture and its pyramids; what is alive today about the Elizabethan period, even more than 137

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the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the reign of Queen Elizabeth, is its poetic drama with its rich and vivid characterization and boundless energy. Other civilizations and other cultures may be sources of facts and theories which may fill our heads, but what makes us feel within ourselves the same vibrant life they felt is not their politics, not even their religion, but their art. Art alone is never out of date; science is cumulative, and the science textbooks of even ten years ago are now out of date: We study the science of the Greeks and the Elizabethans only as historical curiosities; as facts, they have long since gone out of date. It is only their art that is not dated; it can still present to us its full impact, undiminished by time. Shakespeare will never be out of date as long as human beings continue to feel love, jealousy, and conflict in a cruel and troubled world. It is the art of a nation that is timeless. To paraphrase a saying in the Gospels and apply it to past cultures, we can say, “By their arts shall ye know them”. The artists whose works we now revere may have died unsung, and most of them even if appreciated in their lifetime, were considered far less important than the latest naval victories or the accession of the current king, and yet today, these things have all passed into history, but their art alone survives and stands with undiminished vigour. The art of the past moulds in countless ways the attitudes, responses, dispositions of our daily lives, including our moral ones. This is how art injects life into morality, and it is because of this that a morality that has lost contact with art is dead and sterile. And yet people tell us that art is the slave of morality!

IV Thus far, in tracing the relationship between art and morality, we have considered the moral effects of the characters and situations upon our own moral lives through the imagination. And perhaps this is the most important moral function of art. But it is not the only one. If it were, we would have to conclude that literature, virtually alone among the arts, has a moral effect. Indeed, some writers are convinced that this is so. And it may well be that literature has a more marked moral effect than any of the other arts since it deals with human beings in action in a way that the other arts cannot do. Still, it is not literature alone that has relevance for morality. Let me list briefly some of the ways in which all the arts can be said to bear upon morality. (1) First, there is an effect upon the artist himself or herself. The creation of a work of art of individuality and complexity must necessarily occupy a considerable portion of an artist’s waking hours; as such, it imposes upon him or her a self-discipline which can well be used in other areas of his or her life. Even if it isn’t the self-discipline in itself is a considerable moral influence. Not only must the creative artist discipline himself or herself in submitting his or her will to the difficult requirements of his or her artistic medium; he or she must also use that medium to 138

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express feelings and ideas from life – and to do this, he or she must appreciate these values in life, whatever values he or she is expressing in his or her art. This activity, which is too easy to state but so difficult to do, must exercise upon the artist a profound moral influence. At first, this may seem to be refuted by the fact that many artists lead immoral lives. But I do not really think that this proves what it is supposed to: (a) It is true that many artists do not lead moral lives if by morality we mean conformity to the moral codes of the local time and place. Being citizens of the universe and spectators of all mankind rather than of a particular nation or community, artists tend to ignore or even trample upon some of the moral ideas and institutions that are held sacred in their particular time and place, even though they may be exonerated in the court of morality by their descendants. (b) Besides, the charge of immorality against artists, even by standards of conventional morality, applies not to art as such but only to some individual artists, just as it probably does to some engineers and some ditchdiggers. Many people, especially those who do not have real artistic ability, like to live what they romantically think of as the life of artists while not giving society in return the works of a real artist. This bohemian kind of existence is, more than anything else, a pose – not integral to art as such but put on by certain artists or would-be artists who are greatly influenced by the Romantic tradition. “Since society won’t recognize me as an artist unless I live like one, I’ll live a profligated life and pull my hair and in general play the role of the mad artist, and maybe they’ll think I really am one” – this seems to be the formula. Now, some genuine artists, such as Wagner, doubtless fulfilled rather well in their own lives this ideal of the artist. But prior to the Romantic era, this was not at all characteristic of artists. Think of Bach, a hard-working organist and choirmaster who lived a conventional life, almost a dull life, with his wife and large family, a solid citizen of his community, who declared with too much modesty that anyone who worked as hard as he did would be able to write music as good as his. Or think of Haydn, employed throughout most of his life in the palace of the Esterhazys, who considered himself an artisan among other artisans, in no way different from his peers except that he was playing a different trade and who fell on his knees each morning and prayed sincerely to his Maker for strength to create fine music during the course of the day. No Romantic pose for these artists. (c) Even those who did in their personal lives embody the Romantic conception of the artist, however “immoral” they may have been in other aspects of their lives, were not so in the creation of their art. Whatever the personal life of Byron may have been like, and it was full of Romantic posturing and overdramatization, when it came to 139

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his poetry, there was not a whit of dishonesty or charlatanism about him. He laboured for exactly the right words and exactly the right effects, as every true artist does, and he never allowed a line to be published if it was less perfect than he was able to make it. In any case, when we weigh whatever immorality an artist possesses in his or her personal life against the great value of his or her work for his or her age and for generations to come, surely there is no doubt that the latter weighs far more heavily in the total balance. What if Wagner was unfaithful to several women, hypocritical, domineering, and generally unpleasant to live with? This occurred, but it has long since passed. Wagner was intent upon creating music whose fame and value (at least at first) were unknown and unsuspected by those who were around him, and we can only be thankful that he did compose and complete it, even if the achievement of this prodigious creative effort meant some distress to the persons around him. Those whom he injured are long since dead and gone, but his music lives in undiminished splendour. One more word about the morality of artists. It is usual to think of artists as selfish, egotistical, demanding, and insensitive to the feelings of those around them. I have tried to show that for the most part, this picture of the artist is false, but even if it were always true, we could still reply, so what? Some artists are selfish and egotistical – very well, but most of the people in the world who are selfish and egotistical are not artists – in fact, they contribute nothing to the world’s culture or the world’s productivity. They are simply selfish people, and that’s all. If anybody is to be condemned, why pick on the artists? The artists, at any rate, are adding something to the world’s worth by their existence, something that far outweighs the consequences of their own personal idiosyncrasies. Psychoanalysts tell us that artists are products of undigested infantile conflicts having to do with exhibitionism, voyeurism, and misdirected libido. This may well be so. But even if certain emotional and temperamental character traits that we may consider undesirable occur in artists more frequently than they do in ordinary people, it does not follow that the undesirable character traits occur because they are artists. This is a popular superstition which we should do everything in our power to squelch. The truth is rather that their being artists and their having certain temperamental characteristics (which are held, at any rate, to be undesirable by the uncreative middle class) are both effects of a common cause – namely, certain unconscious predilections which were developed in the first two or three years in their lives. It is not true that their emotional instability and other personal characteristics were caused by their being artists. If they were, then if these people ceased to be artists, they would no longer be selfish, emotionally unstable, and so on. But this, of course, is not true. If they stopped writing or painting or composing, they would still have the same character traits as before, only now they would have no works of art to show the world to compensate for the traits of character which are found so annoying to some of the people around them. 140

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(2) So much for the morality of artists. We should also mention the moral effects of art upon the secondary artist – that is, not the original creator of the work but the performer. There was a violin teacher I knew as a child who told his pupil, “Keep up your violin playing, no matter what else you do; it is the best moral influence you could have”. Perhaps he was exaggerating; certainly, very few people who undertake the violin do so in order to improve their morality. Still, the music teacher was not quite talking up his sleeve. The moral influence may have been subtle, and a sociologist compiling statistics on the student’s subsequent moral life might have been quite unable to distinguish him from non-musical performers in the number of times he violated one of the Ten Commandments. Yet I am sure that a moral influence was there, subtle but pervasive, and that the coming to grips with the works of creative genius, together with the constant training and discipline required to master and perform expressively the works of that genius, cannot be without effects upon the subsequent temper of his existence (“the fibres on his soul”), which in a broad sense can be called moral. At least, it is the doing of what is both difficult to do and greatly worth doing – and this can hardly help having some effects. (3) So much for the moral effects of art upon the creating artist and upon the performing artist. Now, what about its effects upon the consumer, the person who reads or listens to or views the work of art and for whom it was created in the first place? Historically, the most famous theory about the moral effect of art upon the audience is Aristotle’s Theory of Catharsis. According to Aristotle, tragedy in particular – though it has often been extended to art in general – acts as an emotional cathartic, a purgation of the emotions. Specifically, certain emotions – which need not be limited to Aristotle’s examples of pity and fear – are generated during the course of daily life, which we would be better off without and which we should try therefore to expel from our system. Art is the principal agency that helps us to do this. By witnessing a powerful drama or reading a novel or hearing a symphony, we can work off these emotions instead of letting them fester inside of us or taking them out in unpleasant ways on our fellow men. “Music hath charms to ease the jaded soul”– especially the soul that is so full of pent-up inner disturbances that it must find some channel for their release. Art affects this release, and herein lies a moral value – not the positive production of anything, but the negative value of siphoning off undesirable inner states and working them off innocently through the experience of art rather than letting them grow rancid within us or venting them destructively on our families or friends. As it stands, this view is undoubtedly somewhat crude, especially in the light of modern psychology. We are offering a picture or model of the psyche as a vessel containing an accumulating quantity of liquids which must be drained off if there is not to be an increasing inner turmoil or even an 141

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explosion. And undoubtedly the psyche is not a vessel of liquid, and the parallel between emotions and liquids is far from complete. Yet at the same time it is, I think, considerable – notice how far Freudian theory carries out the analogy between emotions and liquids. We may wish to argue at points with details of the Aristotelian Theory of Catharsis, yet, somewhat restated, I am sure there is something in it. Perhaps we do not work off specifically the emotions of pity and fear when we witness a tragedy; at least, to students who have witnessed many tragedies, the Aristotelian theory usually comes as something of a surprise. But let us make the view a bit more general. The experience of reading, viewing, listening to a work of art does give a peculiar relief, a release, a feeling of freedom from inner turbulence and disturbance. It is no accident that many people find surcease in listening to music when they are troubled in spirit. The mere act of plunging ourselves, for a few hours, into an entirely different world when we go to see a play is often enough to help heal our wounds, to renew our spirits, and give us a new lease on life. It is not merely that for a few hours we can forget all our troubles: This is true, but any form of entertainment, however worthless, can do this, and in any case, alcohol helps many people to do it too. No, the cathartic effect of art is more than this; it does not merely provide a break or interruption in the course of our worried lives, at the end of which they are exactly what they were before – or worse than before, in the case of alcohol. It is through the aesthetic process itself, in the very act of concentrating our energies on an art object of unity and complexity, that our spiritual state is improved; there is a release from tension, an inner calm, a kind of inner clarification that was not present before. Professor Monroe Beardsley describes it as follows: Suppose you are in a restless frame of mind, faced by several obligations that all seem to demand attention, but no one of which predominates to give you a singleness of purpose. Sometimes, under these circumstances, you may read a story, or fall into the contemplation of a picture, or hear a piece of music, and after a while, when you go back to your problem, you may find yourself in a very different state of mind, clearer and more decisive. This is the exhilaration, the tonic effect, of art. (Aesthetics, p. 574) We may extend this concept even further. Taking our cue from William James’s essay “The Moral Equivalent of War”, we can say that human beings harbour within themselves many hostile and aggressive impulses which, if not permitted some release, will lead to destructive activity against other human beings, often in the form of the mass aggression we call war. Now, there are some things, but unfortunately a very limited number of them, which enable us to work off those natural impulses of aggression in ways that do not mean distress or destruction to others. One of them is the 142

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excitement of the hunt – and in the hunting and fishing stage of man’s development, when man’s very life depended on the outcome of the chase, this channel for the release of energy was probably sufficient. But this source of release is not open to most of us now in the state which we euphemistically call civilization, save only occasionally on a vacation or along weekend away from the office when we can set out for the woods and hunt down the innocent creatures of the forest for sport. But most people most of the time must find some other outlet. Competition is one – in sports, in industry, in the professions. This often provides a real release, but when unsuccessful, it may only increase further the course of our frustrations. The most promising outlet lies in creative endeavour – creative activity particularly in the sciences and the arts. Even if our paintings are not very good paintings, they may provide great personal satisfaction. And since it is not competitive, and since it does not carry with it high financial stakes, and since we can do it to suit our own mood and proceed with it at our own pace, it is not frustrating in the way that business competition may be. Here, then, is one “moral equivalent of war”. (4) But perhaps we have bled Aristotle’s Theory of Catharsis long enough. In any event, it is not the only moral effect of art. Here is another. Imagine what life would be like if we could constantly be surrounded by beautiful buildings, beautiful streets and avenues of trees, and have our houses filled with beautiful works of furniture and china. Would this not provide a moral uplift to help lighten our daily burdens and see us through many trying situations that confront us from day to day? It would certainly be a moral tonic. The greater part of our daily environment, at least in the city, is just the opposite of the aesthetic ideal just sketched. And what is the result of this? We are more irritable, more borne down by the daily burden of cheerless chores, than we would be if we lived in an environment that was aesthetically pleasing. The presence of pleasant shapes arid colours and sounds, in and of themselves, helps to soothe and smooth our personalities in such a way that we are better prepared for the daily round of practical activities with which we all have to be more or less continuously concerned. (5) Along the same lines, the experience of us giving ourselves to an aesthetic object itself has a moral effect. If we are really concentrating on the details of a work of art, and not just passively letting it play upon our senses, this effect, the heightening of our sensibilities, of refining our capacities for perceptual discrimination, making us more receptive to the world around us, is again a moral effect in the broad sense; it heightens the tone of our daily lives and helps to make the experience of the world we live in richer than it was before. Most of what passes for the aesthetic appreciation does not begin to do this, but this is only because it is not aesthetic at all – it is a kind of tired reverie 143

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rather than an intense absorption in the aesthetic object. Hanslick said that most people, when they hear music, simply allow themselves to be inundated by the sheer flow of sound. Many people automatically turn on the radio as soon as they enter their rooms – not that they ever really listen to the music, but it is there as a background, soothing the mind possibly warding off the horrifying experience of being alone with themselves. For most people, music is simply a soothing background. They do not really listen to it, they are not even aware of even the most elementary kinds of ebb and flow that take place within it; they passively receive it instead of actively participating in it. They do not listen to the music; they only use it as a springboard for indulging in an emotional debauch of their own or a private reverie for which the music is merely a backdrop – a reverie which has very little to do with the nature of the music itself. Beyond taking in the general mood effect, they are aware of almost nothing that takes place in the music, only of what takes place in their own psyches. And this, of course, is not an aesthetic effect; it is more like an aesthetic effect. Santayana’s ironic definition of music is “a drowsy reverie interrupted by nervous thrills”. I am not contending that just hearing the music will have a moral effect (snakes and toads hear it too). I am saying that the aesthetic ­experience – which involves nothing less than a total concentration on the perceptual details of the aesthetic object – is something which, by heightening our whole consciousness, by toning up our capacity for perceptual awareness and discrimination, by helping us come alive to the beauties in the world around us, has by this very fact a strong moral effect – or at least it is, again, a moral tonic, one avenue to mental health, one toning up of the psyche, which artists and aesthetically sensitive observers have open to them, whatever else may be their weaknesses and troubles and whatever other vicissitudes may mar or dull the course of their daily lives. (6) But perhaps we have said enough about the instrumental values of art – that is, the good things towards which the appreciation of art is an effective instrument. Aesthetic experience is, first and foremost, not an instrumental value at all but an intrinsic value. Most of the things we value in life are valuable not in themselves but only for other things that we can get by means of them, so it is with money, with fame and fortune, even with morality itself – for morality is primarily an instrument for the promotion of a happier society. But the value of aesthetic experience is different from most other values in that it is not instrumental but intrinsic. Art provides us with experiences which, whether or not they have further consequences in our daily lives (and as we have just analyzed in detail, they do), are intrinsically valuable – worth having for their own sake, quite apart from the results they may lead to or the goal they may enable us to attain. Like jewels, they shine by their own light; they do not depend for their worth upon goals which they help to realize or anything whatsoever outside themselves to give them value. In all our talk about 144

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the moral effects of art, let us not forget that moral values, whether crude or subtle, whether incidental or integral to art, are instrumental values. And in this respect, art goes morality one better: It is not merely instrumental to the achievement of things which are intrinsically worth attaining; it is itself (or the experience it provides) something of intrinsic worth – perhaps the most intense, concentrated, and worthwhile of all the intrinsically worthwhile things that exist in this workaday world.

V We have examined how, in some detail, the positive ways in which aesthetic and moral values are interrelated. But now, in conclusion, I want to examine one final problem concerning the relationship between art and morality: What happens when aesthetic values and moral values clash? Granted that the two are related and tend to vitalize one another, may there not be times when the one is absent and the other is nevertheless present in a high degree, or when the promotion of the one means (to some extent at least) the destruction of the other? The usual view is that in such cases, the work of art should be suppressed or censored. Is this conclusion justified? Let us take some sample cases: Case 1: For years, James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in the United States until, in a famous court decision, Judge Wolsey admitted the book, saying that in spite of certain passages, the predominant intent was not in any way pornographic and that the book, being primarily an aesthetic object intended for a comparatively small number of sophisticated readers, would work no ill moral effects. However, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in the unexpurgated edition) continued to be banned in this country (United Kingdom) until recently (it is still banned from the mail). Case 2: In Los Angeles, a few years ago (Seldes makes mention of it in his foreword to the 1934 edition of the play), police raided a performance of Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata, demanding the arrest of the author. Case 3: F. J. Mather in his book Concerning Beauty cites the case of a male student in his elementary art class who complained to him about the erotic quality of the female nudes in some of Botticelli’s paintings. The professor smiled and told the student that he’d just better get used to it. Case 4: When the French motion picture Rififi was shown in Mexico City, it had to be withdrawn by local authorities because there were so many cases of attempted robbery, copied after the robbery scene which takes up almost one-third of the picture. In Paris, however, the showing of the movie had no such bad effects: The Paris police said that by the time the movie appeared, this method of robbing department stores was already out of date. Case 5: Large numbers of adolescent thugs have been asked by the authorities after their capture where they got the ideas for the crimes they 145

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committed, and some of them cited certain television programs and comic books (mostly the latter) in which crimes exactly like theirs were planned down to the last gruesome detail. Well, these are a few examples; they could be multiplied indefinitely. Now, what are we to say about them? Should the works in question be banned or censored because they affect some people in a morally adverse way? Or should they be permitted to continue, accompanied by severe tongue-­ lashings and moral excoriations and expressions of righteous indignation on our part? Or should we simply ignore the conflict entirely and let the aesthetic object proceed on its uncensored way? I cannot attempt here to examine each individual case of censorship to see whether it is justified; for this, we would have to examine a great many more details of each individual situation than we can do here. All I can hope to do is to present a few principles and observations which may help to guide our thinking in this important matter. The first point I want to make is that it is hard for me to conceive of any really worthwhile aesthetic object, certainly any great work of art, as being morally objectionable enough to ban, if one approaches it in the right way – and what I mean by “the right way” is the aesthetic way, which is the way the artist intended his or her work to be taken. If one views the work of art aesthetically, with one’s full power of concentration directed upon the work of art to reveal its aesthetically rewarding characteristics, this task already requires so much attention that it tends to cut off all undesirable side effects. If one views Joyce’s Ulysses as the work of art that it undoubtedly is, the fourletter words and the passages some readers find indelicate if not indecent shade into insignificance; they are absorbed at once into the total organic unity of the work of art, and even the severest critic of Ulysses could not honestly say that the work taken as a whole is morally objectionable. The same is doubtless true of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Indeed, there are passages in the Bible which could be taken as far more objectionable than any part of these novels – and if these portions of the Bible were to be sent to a publisher today in manuscript form, there are many publishers who would deny them publication for fear of outraging the moral sensibilities of the public. A great work of art, simply because it does give us an aesthetic experience, is practically immune from adverse moral effects; its aesthetic power tends to paralyze any incipient “immoral” tendencies. The aesthetic way of approaching a work of art is incompatible with wholesale practical effects, such as going out and committing immoral deeds or setting out to change the world. When someone objects on moral grounds to an admittedly fine work of art, one usually finds that the person is not approaching the work in anything like an aesthetic way – he or she is using it for some other, alien, purpose. The best example that comes of mind of an admittedly great work of art being objected to on moral grounds, not by an ignorant yokel or even an aesthetically sensitive untrained person but by a person of great aesthetic 146

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sensitivity, in fact, a professional literary critic and aesthetician, is the attack on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra by Professor W. K. Wimsatt. His charge is that this play celebrates voluptuousness and sensuous abandon. Here is a bit of his description: What is celebrated in Antony and Cleopatra is the passionate surrender of an illicit love, the victory of this love over the practical, political, and moral concerns, and the final superiority of the suicide lovers over circumstances…. There is no escaping the fact that the poetic splendor of this play, and in particular of its concluding scenes, is something which exists in closest juncture with the acts of suicide and with the whole glorified story of passion. The poetic values are strictly dependent – if not upon the immorality as such – yet upon the immoral acts. Even though, or rather because, the play pleads for certain evil choices, it presents these choices in all their nature interest and capacity to arouse human sympathy. (From his essay “Poetry and Moral”, in Thought, pp. 281–299. Reprinted in Vivas and Krieger, The Problems of Aesthetics, pp. 541–2) Now, one might question at length this interpretation of Shakespeare’s drama. But let us leave Wimsatt’s interpretation unquestioned and ask, supposing that it is correct, would this justify us banning or censoring the play? And I think the answer is surely no. I cannot reply in this case, as one could in most of the others, that the person in question is insensitive to the aesthetic values in the play or is approaching it in a non-aesthetic way. But I can adopt another line of defense: I can say that until there is some evidence that the play actually has (or has had) an undesirable moral effect on a considerable body of readers (such as causing them to do likewise), I can see no reason whatsoever for depriving mankind of a supremely valuable object of aesthetic experience. For where is there evidence that people who read the play will behave like the two lovers because they read the play to in any other way be demoralized thereby? On the contrary, if they read the play right, they will not be minus any moral stature – in fact, the play is, at the very least, another example of a complex moral situation which they can reflect on – and they will be plus the aesthetic experience of a great drama to which they can return again for scenes of acute characterization, dramatic splendour, and poetry which is among the most sublime in our language. And this aesthetic experience is (as we have already tried to show) something of intrinsic value. To ban this play, then, would be to deprive ourselves of a source of intrinsic value and not to gain an instrumental value – a very bad deal indeed. I am inclined to think that this is true in general, though not always as clearly so as in the Antony and Cleopatra case. We are told, for example, that American youth has been demoralized by such writers as Hemingway 147

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and Faulkner and that although these men are excellent writers, their views of life are demoralizing, and they have set a bad example for the young. But I see no evidence of this. (1) To say that Hemingway or Faulkner or James Joyce or even Shakespeare is capable of demoralizing a generation of human beings is to attribute to these writers far too great a direct moral (or immoral) influence. How can they have demoralized our youth when very few of our youth, comparatively, have even read them, and most American youth have never even heard of them? Art has moral potency, but not, I think, that much. (2) Even among the intellectualist few who do read serious literature these days, I cannot see any harmful effects. What I do see is that they are better off, yes even morally, for having read the works of these writers; their horizons have been expanded to include other views of life than those they have previously known, and this acquaintance has been brought about through works of fine writing, sometimes even splendid writing, which they would do well to emulate and which should have given them, in the reading of it, experiences well worth having for their own sake. And, finally, I must add, parenthetically, that those who are incited to lives of sensuous abandon by reading Hemingway or Faulkner must have been very much inclined in that direction to begin with – else the reading of a few novels could hardly have triggered off such a great response. Again, it is said that novels of crime and detection should be censored because reading them may cause people to commit murders and thefts themselves. Again, I can see that this might have been the case, but I can see no evidence that it is the case. People whose favourite bedtime reading is mystery or detective novels are, on the whole, extremely law-abiding people who are in no way incited to commit robberies or murders no matter how many of them they read about in Agatha Christie or Mickey Spillane. In fact, if anything, the shoe is on the other foot: the reading of these things probably helps the reader to work off any aggressive tendencies he or she may have to begin with; it helps to discharge innocently in the experience of the novel itself any tendencies which might, if unreleased, have become dangerous. Here we may put Aristotle’s Theory of Catharsis to good use against those who say that art is morally dangerous. It would seem, then, that no case at all can be made for the censorship or suppression of works of art. But let us consider two factors which we have not yet mentioned: (1) There are many works which may have bad moral effects, which can hardly be called works of art at all, no matter how generously we try to extend the use of this term, and (2) even great works of art, though not morally harmful, if taken in the right way are often not taken in the right way. Thus, our elementary art student, though he was confronted with great works of painting, was not concentrating on them in an aesthetic manner, and perhaps at that time, he was unable to do so. But in time he would, and the professor’s advice was probably wise: “You’ll just have to get used to it”. But the professor might have gone on to tell the student what he should 148

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look for in the painting, and by the time the student succeeded in doing this, he would find that what bothered him initially no longer played any part in his response to the total aesthetic object. In the case of the Botticelli, this is easy, but perhaps it isn’t always. No matter how great something is, it can always be misused by other people who have little appreciation for its true source of value and no conception of what the world can give them. There is nothing so wonderful in the world that it cannot be used, misused, and abused by other people who are alien or hostile in spirit and who will not or cannot seek in it the values which it has to give but will attempt to eke out of it other, and wholly foreign, values (or disvalues) instead. This is unfortunate, but it is a fact, and it remains a possibility that we have to censor certain works because there exist in large numbers people who will always persist in doing bad things to good works of art. At least this is so in principle, whether there are ever actually cases in which the evil accruing from misinterpretation and distortion far outweighs the good (both instrumental and intrinsic) that the work of art is capable of perpetuating if it continues to enjoy public and uncensored perusal. That is one factor, but the other, and far more important, is that most of the works from which people get their alleged cue to immorality are not works of any aesthetic value at all. Consider the case of the hoodlums who imitate the acts of crime they see pictured in comic books. Here there is not even the pretense of aesthetic value to compensate for the undesirable moral effects. And for my part, I would experience not a tremor of regret in seeing every existing comic book thrown into the trash heap – good riddance of bad rubbish. If youngsters can’t read anything better than that, they might as well not read at all. There are, then, times and places in which it would be much better if certain works (though usually these are not works of art) did not exist or were not shown. Should we say, therefore, that they should be censored? But this does not follow. It is one thing to say that something is bad in its influence on some people or even on everybody; it is quite another thing to say that therefore it should be banned or censored. It is one thing to know that the influence of something is undesirable, that certain people would be better off without it, and even to advise or preach against its being read or heard or seen, but to forcibly prevent someone from reading or hearing or seeing the work in question is to play God with other people’s lives. Shouldn’t they be free to make up their own minds whether they should see or read it or not? How can a person’s character ever develop if he or she is not permitted to make his or her own decisions, for better or for worse, but must have them made by others while they yet affect his or her life? If a movie or novel is banned before I get to see it, I do not know from personal experience what it is that I am not permitted to see; I only know that a group of other people have by their action prevented me from making the choice myself – and I do not even know whether their choice was a good 149

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one or that the novel or movie in question would have influenced mine for the worse. I am supposed to take someone else’s word for it, and the assumption underlying this is that I am so weak as to be unable to make the decision for myself. Indeed, the assumption is that the censors are better able to make it than I am, and how does either the censor or I know that this assumption is correct? The censors themselves, after all, are not gods; they are finite and fallible human beings just as I am. When censorship occurs, one body of human beings is sitting in judgement over another body of human beings, telling them what they may and may not read or see. And who are they to tell me what I shall or shall not see? What guarantee is there that they are worthy to do this? And even if they are, is not every such act of censorship a loss to my own freedom? Perhaps I would be better off not reading the book, but is it not better for me to take that chance, than to have the opportunity to exercise my own freedom of choice to be taken away from me without even so much as my consent? Viewed in this way, every act of censorship is an immoral act involving some people who sit in judgement upon others and so do not permit other people to exercise their own human power of choice. The good that is achieved by some people not reading certain books is now counterbalanced by the evil involved in dictatorship – in one human being or group of human beings refusing to permit other human beings to make choices for themselves. This last evil is so great that I am tempted to believe that, for this reason alone, the evils of censorship always outweigh the benefit. However, I do not want to assert this dogmatically for all the cases that might ever arise: There may be cases in which the people affected are extremely immature and unable to make wise choices and in which there is an undeniable “clear and present danger” to morals in permitting the reading or showing of the works in question so that even the great evil involved in censorship is more than offset by the evil resulting from the public availability of the product. I am not convinced that such cases exist, but I do not deny that they may. But human nature must be a weaker thing than I am inclined to think it is if such a procedure is ever justified on a large scale. If someone is a mouse rather than a human being, I would rather see this shown by his or her own behaviour than to see him or her prevented by the edict of others from exercising the choice that would show what manner of creature he or she is. Moreover, when one work is censored, there is a much greater chance that others will be; it is so easy to ban things at the source that the habit grows and increases like a bodily infection until it covers all of life’s activities. Even if one act of censorship is justified in extreme circumstances, other acts of the same kind will follow inevitably in its train, until the rivulet becomes a river; one act of censorship, justified by extreme conditions, will lead to other acts of censorship which are not thus justified. As for the censorship that does exist in our society, it seems to me to be wholly misplaced. We make a big fuss over a few passages from D. H. Lawrence or Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, and it never 150

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occurs to us to condemn the tremendous output of trashy literature that does not contain objectionable four-letter words of over-descriptions of immoral acts but does contain a cheap, oversimplified, sentimentalized, and thoroughly misleading picture of what life is like. If anything is objectionable, it seems to me that it is superficial characterizations which make people out to be far simpler than they actually are and Pollyanna endings which give the growing child (or even the immature adult) the rosy impression that there is always a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and that everything always comes out all right for the people who are good and that if your heart is in the right place and you are an American you simply can’t lose. This attitude, I am sure, is extremely dangerous for our society, and it is exemplified – most of all – in Hollywood movies, which unfortunately happen also to be the medium most consumed by the impressionable and aesthetically untutored. The Legion of Decency and other organizations condemn many fine motion pictures which contain a few eyebrow-raising words or amorous situations or refer to some subject which the respectable members find offensive to their pure and unsullied sensibilities, but at the same time, they see nothing objectionable in the judge and endless mountains of trash that issue from the film capital of the world, which give the naive consumer of this trash the impression that the victory always goes to the man who can draw the fastest gun, that Americans always win over their enemies because they are more virtuous, that the people in the world are divided into the goodies and the baddies, and it takes only a minute or two of casual acquaintance to tell which is which. Here are the harmful effects of mass media – I shall not say of art for, of course, this stuff isn’t art; here is the stuff consumed by youngsters ad nauseam, which will send them into our next world catastrophe with completely empty minds, thinking that victory is certain because we are good, and they are bad or that (on the other hand) you might as well rock and roll because the world is going to the dogs anyway, and there’s nothing that anybody can do about it. If anything should be censored, it is the literature that promulgates this utterly false picture, this ignorance, this slick and oversimplified distortion of human nature and the world. But our censors are even more stupid than those who endlessly consume these hideous movies and television melodramas. They strain at the gnat and swallow the camel. One more word about censorship. I have talked as if censorship, if imposed at all, should be imposed on morally inflammatory material dealing with sex and crime. But there is something else that is, surely, even more important: the intellectual content of works of art, the ideas they contain (and of course not all works of art do). Much as I deplore the censorship of movies and plays for the things they are now censored for, I would rather see a hundred of them banned for indecency than to see one banned because it contained new or foreign ideas which the censors found disturbing or subversive. I do not say that it should never be done but that it should be done only under conditions of the most extreme danger and abolished the moment the danger lessens. As we have already observed, censorship of 151

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ideas deprives us of one of our most precious freedoms, the freedom to make up our own minds and arrive at our own decisions, even if in doing so we make mistakes. This freedom of decision is vitally necessary in a democracy. In this connection, I can do no better than to remind you of one of the famous passages in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind…. To call my proposition certain, while there is anyone who would deny it if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty and (are fit to be) judges without hearing the other side. (Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 2) And this is true even if the idea that is squelched is false. For how are we to know whether it is false if it is never permitted to be freely and openly discussed? How are we expected to know that Soviet Communism is bad if as some have suggested, we should not permit such views to be discussed in our colleges and universities? If an idea is false, then a free and open discussion in the full light of day should reveal this fact. If it is false, we should not be afraid to discuss it openly, to discover its falsehood for ourselves, and expose the reasons for it publicly, but if the powers-that-be simply say that it is false and then clamp the lid on it, then we have reason to be suspicious that perhaps the view is true after all, and it is only to their interest to make us believe that it is false. Besides, true views are appreciated only when they are contrasted with false ones; a false view is eminently worth discussing and of having sincere proponents so that we can discover and appreciate a new in every generation the worth of a true view. Once a view, however true, is taken for granted, people come to give only lip-service to it and no longer appreciate it as did those who fought to preserve it. This is what has happened to democracy in our day: It was a living thing to Washington and Jefferson, but it is so taken for granted by 99 percent of our population now that we are not even concerned enough to defend its tenets rationally against opposing views which we believe to be false. And what if the idea or view that is being suppressed is true? Then, even more, mankind is being deprived of something of inestimable value, perhaps for generations. Generations later, perhaps, the same truth will be rediscovered by someone and not be banned or censored the second time, but meanwhile, mankind will have been deprived of something that may be vitally important to its progress or welfare. Unfortunately, there is nothing about truth per se that makes it come out triumphant, and countless times in the history of the world, the ruling powers have kept truths from the people and thereby cheated not only their people but also generations of posterity. Even where the political power permits the truth, if the people are allowed to 152

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remain in ignorance or somnolence or are so fearful of public opinion that they dare not openly defy it, the truth may once again be caused to die. Never in the history of the world were we more in danger from this source than now. We live in a dream of indifference and a tyranny of public opinion. And while we sit at our television sets absorbed in the latest escapist melodrama, systems of thought are arising around us in the world which, if they could, would impose on our freedom of thought the total suppression of a police state. The worst feature of such a system would not be its autocracy – Italy during the Renaissance was ruled by a series of autocrats who left considerable freedom of private life and creativity to the people. Even worse than this autocracy would be the rigorous suppression of all ideas opposed to the regime, through brainwashing and other techniques which are now being so thoroughly perfected that if the regime triumphed there would be no way of opposing it, for it could soon stamp out all opposition, even in thought. All works of the mind, including all works of art, which failed to conform to these ideas would be mercilessly suppressed and all its proponents exterminated or psychologically conditioned into a passive acceptance of the ideas of the regime. In the light of such a threat, it is all the more essential that we be constantly sensitive to new and different ideas, subjecting them (whether true or false) to the fierce light of open and public discussion. If we do not do this, if we continue in our lassitude, then history may still write on the tombstone of our once-great nation. “Here lies a government that was of the cattle, for the cattle, and by the cattle, and therefore it perished from the earth”.

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11 THE ARTEFACTUALITY OF ART * Ronald E. Roblin

It is commonplace among aestheticians that a work of art is an artefact and that any attempt to define the expression “work of art” presupposes the notion of artefactuality. A comparatively recent statement of this view is to be found in George Dickie’s Art and the Aesthetic.1 Dickie, rebutting Morris Weitz’s contention that an artwork need not be an artefact, maintains that artefactuality is a defining condition of art.2 In fact, Dickie proposes a definition of art which contains artefactuality as its genus, although he does not attempt to clarify this idea. In what follows, I will argue that the conception of artefactuality, upon close inspection, is complex in nature and that the identification of artworks with artefacts, as maintained by Dickie, Margolis, and others, is open to question. At the very least, the notion of artefactuality deserves a more detailed analysis than it has commonly been afforded in the literature. Before investigating the concept of artefactuality, it may be useful to distinguish between two important senses of the term “work of art”; these, according to Dickie, are the classificatory and the evaluative senses.3 In everyday talk about art, the evaluative sense prevails, for in referring to something as a work of art, we ordinarily mean to praise it. Thus, the judgement that Picasso’s Guernica is a “work of art” most likely intends to ascribe artistic value to this painting. On the other hand, we may use the expression “work of art” merely to identify an object which is purported to have artistic value. In referring to Jim Dine’s Shovel as a “work of art”, we may intend only to identify it as such without thereby raising the question of its artistic merits. Thus, a work may be considered art in the classificatory sense whether or not it possesses artistic value. It would appear then that artefactuality may be advanced as the genus of the definition of “work of art” when this expression is understood in either of the two senses. For example, it is in the descriptive or classificatory sense that Dickie defines a work of art as an artefact upon which an agent, acting on behalf of the art world, has conferred the status of the candidate for appreciation.4 Similarly, however, art in the evaluative sense could be defined in terms of a theory of artistic value which applies to a certain class of “objects” *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. IV, No. 1–2, 1981, pp. 71–80.

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– i.e. artefacts. In either case, artefactuality is being proposed as a defining condition of the term “work of art”.5 In what follows, I will argue that artefactuality is neither necessary nor sufficient for certain groups of artworks and therefore cannot be a defining characteristic of art. This will require, first, an account of the conditions under which it is appropriate to consider anything an artefact and second, a classification of the arts which helps to clarify the different and complex ways in which artworks stand to artefacts.

The artefact as a product of craftsmanship Historically, the notion of artefactuality has been tied to the idea of craft or technical skill.6 The existence of a craft or body of related technical skills presupposes the existence of an agent whose conscious activity is directed towards the production of an artifact. Thus Aristotle defines craft or art (techné) as a habit or “state concerned with making, involving a true course of reasoning”.7 Notice that Aristotle is not speaking of what in later centuries were called the “fine arts”; for him, no distinction exists between the fine and practical arts. The artist is conceived simply as a craftsman and the arts as species of craft. Because an art or craft is concerned with making, it can be defined in terms of the utilization of a set of skills operating on a pre-given material. Because art involves a “true course of reasoning”, its existence presupposes an ability on the agent’s part to reach a deliberate, reasoned conclusion about the product of his or her activity. An artefact, therefore, may be provisionally characterized as the result of an agent’s reasoned, productive activity. There are four conditions required for the existence of craft and, therefore, for the production of artefacts. These conditions can be clarified in terms of a corresponding set of logical distinctions which apply to them.8 (1) The distinction between means and ends: The means consist of operations which are traversed in order to reach the end and which are left behind when the end is reached. These operations consist of a set of logically ordered actions which bring the end into being. (2) The distinction between planning and execution, which parallels that between means and ends: the employment of craft involves the maker’s foreknowledge of the results to be obtained. Without such planning, the production of an artefact would be a mere accident. (3) The distinction in works of craft between raw materials and finished product: In order to exist, a craft requires raw or ready-made materials which are worked upon and transformed into something different – the artefact or finished product. (4) A distinction between form and matter, as applied to the object produced or made: Matter is what is identical both in the pre-given material and in the finished product, while form is that which the exercise of the craft changes. Form is what is different, what has been altered in the self-same material. 155

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It is not claimed that these four conditions exhaust the notion of techné or craft. It seems, however, that together they constitute a set of necessary conditions for its existence. These conditions are of two kinds: conditions (1) and (2) apply to the agent who practices the craft: It is the craftsman who as the efficient cause is responsible for planning and executing the ordered series of operations which bring about the production of an artefact. Conditions (3) and (4), on the other hand, pertain to the “object”: It is the artefact which has been transformed from raw material to finished product by the craftsman’s exercise of techné; it is the artefact which results from the imposition of form upon pre-given material. This account of the production of artefacts can, I believe, be applied to our understanding of the major arts with the aim of determining whether they meet the essential conditions of artefactuality. This task will be facilitated by a classification of the arts into three groups, which is intended to clarify the sense in which works of art may be artefacts. In the course of the discussion, we will suggest certain qualifications of our account of artefactuality which accord better with our understanding of differences among the arts. Finally, George Dickie’s claim that artefactuality can be conferred upon a natural “object” will be examined. I will argue that Dickie’s view conflicts sharply in at least one important respect with the traditional account of artefactuality.

A classification of the arts The intent of our classification of the arts is to clarify the sense or senses in which works of art can be considered artefactual, according to our previous characterization. The arts can be seen to fall within three broad groups.9 First, here are the “plastic arts”, including painting, sculpture and architecture. These arts are distinctive insofar as their pursuit terminates in the production of an artefact, narrowly conceived as a material object. This artefact or material object is not synonymous with the artistic object but is distinguishable from it as its material substrate. It is, as its material embodiment, an indispensable condition of the artwork’s existence. Thus, there is only one Mona Lisa: If the original painting is damaged or destroyed. The plastic arts clearly fit our earlier description of craft or techné. They presuppose a human agent who is literally a craftsman or producer.10 As a craftsman, the artist engages in a process of making whose terminus ad quem (goal) is a picture, statue, building, etc. We will refer to artworks which are thus embodied in material objects as A-works. Second, there is a class of artwork which are not strictly artefactual, although they may sometimes appear to be so. This class, referred to here as C-works, includes such “compositions” as poems, novels, and stories. A C-work exists when it is read, heard, remembered, recited, or even composed in the artist’s mind. The book or manuscript in which a C-work is recorded is merely a vehicle by which the “composition” can be reconstructed. 156

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It is not itself an artefact in the strict sense, for even if all copies of a certain poem were lost or destroyed, the poem itself would not of necessity cease to exist. At the same time, the manuscript may exist but gives no access to the “composition” since the tools for reconstructing it are lost. An example of this would be undeciphered hieroglyphics. Thus, the criteria for the existence of C-works differ from A-works since C-works can exist without the existence of a single artefact or group of artefacts with which they can be identified. Moreover, as we have seen, the existence of an artefact does not ensure the existence of the artwork which it “supports”. Finally, a third class of artworks, which we will designate as P-works, arc distinguishable from both A-works and C-works. Although the arts which comprise this third type are quite heterogeneous, all are performance of “interpretative” arts. Further, these arts are essentially temporal; a performance is an event in time, a temporal whole. Music, dance, and theatre are the primary arts which fall into this group. Each of these arts requires an interpretive artist who seeks to realize the conception of the composer, choreographer, playwright, or film script writer. Consequently, the performing arts require both an artist-creator and an artist-performer in order to fully exist. The criterion for the existence of P-works is the performance itself, which must adhere to certain basic requirements in the case of each specific art. How does the notion of artefactuality, considered in relation to craft, apply to the three types of artworks in which we have distinguished P. As we have seen, the traditional notion of artefactuality is clearest in its application to A-works, for such works presuppose the existence of pre-given materials upon which the artist acts in order to construct an artefact. All four of the conditions of craft are present in the plastic arts, those which apply to the artist, as well as those which apply to his work. In the case of C-works, the requirement that the artwork be literally “embodied” does not hold. A poem or story may, of course, be written or otherwise expressed in material form, but this does not appear to be essential to its existence as a work of art. This point can be supported merely by appealing to the oral traditions of both primitive and civilized societies. A considerable body of myth, legend, etc., exists without the societies in which it is created being able to cast it in any written form. Aside from this fact, we have rejected any attempt to identify C-works with their embodiments in material form. A novel is not identical with the volumes in which it is recorded; a poem is not identical with the marks on paper which constitute the means by which we are able to reconstruct it. Quite simply, a poem or story becomes a work of art only when it is perceived as such; otherwise, it is aesthetically dumb. If, however, our account of craft is modified in certain respects, it is possible to view C-works as artefacts. A poet or novelist who has mastered the art of writing will have created a work in which style, sense of form, mastery of language, etc., reveal his or her technical skill. Thus the condition pertaining to the craftsman under (2) above applies to the creation of C-work, for the poet or novelist may execute a preconceived plan. Still, the poet or 157

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storyteller does not traverse anything like a logically ordered series of actions which constitute means to the actualization of the artwork as an end. Our conclusion, then, is that the first condition of craft a parte subjecti, involving the relation of means to ends, need not be realized in the case of C-works and that only the second condition a parte subjecti involving planning and execution applies generally to them. Even here, a poem or (possibly) story which has been composed without the benefit of forethought or deliberation constitutes an exception to this second condition of craft. When we turn to the character of the performing arts (P-works), the notion of artefactuality again becomes problematic. What artefact or artefacts can be identified with a ballet or symphony? Clearly, the artefact must be equated with the performance itself, considered as an event or occurrence of a specific kind. What is required is an extension of the concept of artefactuality from the case of material ‘objects’ in the plastic arts to performances of a certain duration in the performing arts. If this extension is permitted, P-works can be subsumed under the traditional notion of craft, for the performer utilizes his or her technical skill as a means to produce a “bodily work of art”; he or she carries out a logical sequence of actions which constitute the means to the end of performance and which ordinarily require planning. In addition, the art of interpretation presupposes mastery by the artist of a certain “instrument” according to the requirements of his or her individual craft.11 The situation with respect to P-works is further complicated by the division of labour in the performance arts between creative-artist and performer. While the performer commonly meets the two conditions a parte subjecti in our characterization of craft, the two conditions a parte subjecti do not properly apply. When we consider the artistcreator of P-works, the same difficulties arise as in the case of C-works. The composer, playwright, or choreographer does not make a specific material product as the result of his labours, nor need he engage in a series of ordered actions which constitute means towards the realization of that end which is the play, dance, or musical work. Moreover, a tune, like a poem, may be composed not only without the use of certain materials (pen, paper, etc.) but also without any conscious plan of design. Certainly, any large-scale work of art requires planning, but this need not be the case at all for works of a very modest character. As a result, we are obliged to conclude that none of the four conditions of artefactuality apply unequivocally to the artistcreator in the performing arts.

Can artefactuality be conferred? George Dickie has proposed that the status of artefactuality, like that of candidacy for appreciation, can be conferred upon natural objects as well as products of human making.12 According to him, a work of art is an artefact upon which has been conferred the status of “candidate for appreciation” by an agent or agents acting on behalf of the art world. Dickie claims 158

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that artefactuality and candidacy for appreciation may both be conferred in one and the same action. As an example, he cites the case of a piece of driftwood lying on the shore.13 The driftwood may be appreciated either in its natural environment or moved to a place where it can be exhibited, such as a home or art gallery. Clearly, the driftwood becomes an aesthetic object in virtue of its being exhibited for the purpose of appreciation, but it is no less an aesthetic object when viewed in its natural setting. Up to this point, we have no quarrel with Dickie: The driftwood in either a natural or artificial setting is constituted as an aesthetic object simply through our appreciation of it. However, it does not follow from this fact that it is thereby an artefact or that artefactuality is conferred upon it in the act of appreciation. The driftwood remains a natural object whether or not it is removed from its environment. Neither its material composition nor its form is changed from its natural state through the actions of a maker or craftsman. The same principle holds for natural phenomena like rainbows or sunsets. The conferral of the status of candidacy for appreciation does not transform them into artefacts if we understand that artefactuality means the product of some kind of human making. What are we to say of animal paintings? Under Dickie’s schema, the paintings of chimpanzees may be allowable as artworks, at least if they are exhibited in art galleries as opposed to museums of natural history. But are they also artefacts? The answer, I maintain, is “no”, for they have not been produced under the concept of artefactuality. The efficient cause or agency responsible for their production did not engage in a conscious activity involving any of the four conditions stated earlier. Dickie, I believe, has confused the notion of an aesthetic object with that of a work of art. If every aesthetic object were a work of art, any natural object would be transformable into an artwork by the simple expedient of regarding it appreciatively. Dickie has in effect fastened upon a crucial feature of aesthetic experience: its capacity to create values where none existed previously. He has then extended the notion of creating artistic value through a kind of performance (conferring the status of candidate for appreciation) to include the possibility of conferring artefactuality itself upon things. But is the creative element in aesthetic experience alone sufficient to give birth to an artefact, as well as to a new artistic creation P? Clearly not, for the following reasons: (1) Artefactuality as such cannot be conferred because an artefact is a product of making which requires work or labour on the part of the maker. Artefacts are produced by transforming a raw material and not merely by appreciating an object from a distance or even by moving it from one place to another. (2) What distinguishes works of art which are artefacts from artefacts in general is the creative dimension which pertains to art proper. An artefact can be mass-produced while an artwork cannot because mass-production is the antithesis of creativity. Even a painstaking copy of the Mona Lisa, distinguishable from the original only by experts, is rejected as a work of art. (3) Our discussion of artefactuality, as it pertains 159

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to the three classes of artworks, has shown that an artwork may, of course, be an artefact, as in the case of A-works, but that art is not per se artefactual. Thus there is no necessity for the conferral of artefactuality on an object before it can be granted the status of an artwork, and the rationale for Dickie’s position no longer holds. Recent developments in the arts themselves appear to lend support to this conclusion. Such recent developments as minimal art, junk art, found art, etc., have undermined the traditional conception of the artist as a kind of craftsman. Technical proficiency is not required in these new art forms, for a piece of junk can be removed from a junkyard and exhibited as a work of art without any technical skill whatsoever being demanded of the “artist”. The four conditions of artefactuality discussed earlier are invalidated: There is no pattern of actions whereby an agent traverses certain means in order to realize an end; there need be no execution of a preconceived plan on the artist’s part; there is no transformation of a raw material into a finished product and no imposition of form upon a pre-given matter. What is new in much recent art is the emergence of a concept of art presupposing a certain view of creativity without craftsmanship. In this regard, the concept of art has undergone a significant transformation, while the concept of artefactuality has not. The technical theory of art has been superseded by a novel account of artistic creativity which dispenses with the idea of art as craft. On this view, there need be no process of making or fabricating on the part of the artist which terminates in the production of an artefact. The artwork is thus a factum because it is the result of a constructive human activity but is not an artefactum because no labour has been undertaken in its creation.

Notes and References 1 Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.) 2 “It is now clear that artifactuality is a necessary condition (call it the genus) of the primary sense of art.” Ibid., p. 27. Dickie’s definition of the classificatory sense of art is governed by his conception of the necessary and sufficient conditions of art. However, as one critic of Dickie points out, a definition which satisfies the requirement of stating features of art which are necessary and sufficient may yet fail to capture “philosophically rewarding” characteristics of its subject. Without an in-depth analysis of the concept of artefactuality, however, it is impossible to determine whether Dickie’s definition produces insight into the concept of art. Cf. Timothy W. Bartel, “Appreciation and Dickie’s Definition of Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics (Winter 1979), p. 52. A useful discussion of the problem of defining art is T. J. Diffey’s “On Defining Art” in the same issue of British Journal of Aesthetics, pp. 15–24. 3 Art and the Aesthetic, Chapter 1, cf. also George Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 105–113. 4 Art and the Aesthetic, pp. 33 ff. According to Dickie, “A theory of art must preserve certain central features of the way in which we talk about art”, Ibid., p. 40. Apparently, Dickie is not offering a mere stipulative definition of art, but it is unclear whether his definition is meant to be a real or essential definition or

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merely an elucidation of certain important aspects of the way in which the concept of art is used in every day speech. 5 The question will not be raised in this chapter whether there is indeed a descriptive function for the expression “work of art” which is not parasitic on its evaluative function. 6 “The idea (of craft) is just that of an organized body of knowledge and skills directed to the production of some work that may be judged by definite technical and non-moral standards”. Francis Sparsho tt, The Concept of Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 22. The context of Sparshott’s statement is a discussion of the work of literary criticism as artefact. 7 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 3. 1139b14. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. 1906. 8 This account of the logical conditions of craft is based upon R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 15–41, Collingwood discusses a further characteristic of craft which will not be dealt with here: the hierarchical relation among the various crafts. 9 This threefold classification of the arts differs in certain respects from that of Harold Osborne in his book The Art of Appreciation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 167–9. 10 There may be, of course, a division of labour between the artist-creator and the agency responsible for executing his design or plan. This occurs frequently in the plastic arts. 11 For a fuller discussion of the role of the “instrument” as a medium in the performing arts, cf. Ronald Roblin, “On Media and Materials in Art”, International Studies in Philosophy, IX (1977), pp. 121–5. 12 Art and the Aesthetic, pp. 22–7. Cf. also Aesthetics: An Introduction, pp. 98–101. Also relevant are the critical comments on this question by Joseph Margolis in his review of art and the aesthetic in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Spring 1975), pp. 341–5 and Dickie’s reply in the Winter 1975 issue, pp. 229–30. Dickie here admits that his centention that artefactuality can be conferred upon found objects is “tentative” and that the use of “tools” may be a necessary condition of artefactuality. But he does not retract his earlier claim that artefactuality is the genus of a definition of art. 13 Art and the Aesthetic, pp. 22–7. Aesthetics: An Introduction, pp. 97–101. The example is borrowed from Morris Weitz’s well-known paper, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Fall 1956), pp. 27–35.

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12 REPRESENTATION, REPRESENTATIVENESS, AND “NON-REPRESENTATIONAL” ART * Charles Altieri

I Kazimir Malevich spoke of his Suprematism as offering a mode which “represents the signs of a force” and of his representing “the energies of black and white” so that they serve “to reveal the forms of action”. Piet Mondrian made similar statements about representing “balanced relations which are the purest representation of universality, of the harmony and unity which are inherent characteristics of the mind”.1 If we were to take such statements as naive or desperate evocations of neo-Platonist spiritualism, we would have a good deal of company among art historians. But we would ignore both the distinctive conceptual intelligence of these artists and the challenge they offer us to develop a concept of representation capacious enough to incorporate what we usually consider to be “presentational” strategies. The aesthetics developed as a response to these presentational features – in Suzanne Langer, in the British tradition inaugurated by Fry and Bell, and even in much Heideggerian discourse about immanence (some of it mime?) will not suffice in itself. At best it pertains only to the Romantic heritage. And while it explains the immediacy of response and the effects of form, it has no interpretive category for the various rhetorical aspects which distance us from what is presented and guide our interpretive reflections on it. It is thus all too obvious that neither conventional ideas of representation nor of presentation will suffice as a general account of art’s powers to implicate extra-textual dimensions of experience. Both concepts, I think, are too concerned with the direct relationship between sins and the world – either *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. V, No. 1–2, 1982, pp. 1–23.

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as a resemblance or as a direct experience. I shall propose instead a rhetorical view which emphasizes the self-conscious use of signs as mediations defined by possible uses, some of which involve conventional representation and others conventional presentation. Both uses share at least one basic function: They invite an audience to identify with some feature of the work on its mimetic or authorial level so that the work can be experienced as representative. The representative work is one that exemplifies in a way that allows members of an audience to see that each of them can participate in the life of the work while recognizing that the same possibility holds for others. Kant saw this state as the image art gives of the moral order, but I will be content if it helps us avoid the mental cramps that develop when we strain to see art, always in a two-term, work-referent model. If I am correct, the theory of representation makes sense as a comprehensive theory of art so long as we recall the connection of mimesis with rhetoric, which gets lost once philosophy develops empiricist standards for judging the “­accuracy” of a representation. Representation makes sense and includes presentational elements so long as we take a rhetorical stance equating representation with the way a work becomes representative for an audience connecting it to some area of experience. I understand “representation” as a use of signs to “make present” phenomena from which the sign differs and yet, in and as its difference, confers certain characteristics on the phenomenon or places it in a set of practices. A flag does not represent a flag, but it can represent a nation or, in another register, a kind of cloth. Exemplifications are representations because they alter the mode of presence – they use particulars to elicit a sense of class terms not typically associated with the entity. Theories of representation are theories of how the sign which differs from what it represents can take on that additional signification and how it can be itself and a figure within a larger practice. Those influenced primarily by empiricist theory, even if not in its cruder “pictorial” models of the sign, will define that signification primarily in terms of resemblance or how the sign stands for a phenomenon. My rhetorical approach must also treat this as standing for a relationship, but it subordinates the static parameters typically invoked to define resemblance to concerns based on possible use values. Thus acting for becomes, in my view, a more inclusive and more flexible class of relations than standing for. This is why representativeness, a condition of actions and examples, strikes me as a concept that can subsume what is valuable about representation theory. Thus I shall try to understand the representativeness of art as a process within our cultural practices, whereby we are invited to identify with a variety of stances – from simulacra of experience projected within the mimetic level of a text, to conditions “representing” possible worlds, to the overall attitude displayed on the authorial level as the work’s most comprehensive compositional purposiveness.2 We then can treat “uptake” as a matter of reflecting on the possible use of what is represented or exemplified in a text whether or not it fits the present criteria of “truth”. 163

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Representation and presentation lose their oppositional qualities and become means to the same end, while the emphasis on possible worlds provides a theoretical space for understanding why art as exemplification has so often been considered a means of instruction or vehicle for idealization. So long as we remain, however covertly, obsessed with the “truth” of art as in some sense a documentary of external states of affairs, plausible psychology, or realms of ideal universals, we will find its engagement in projection and idealization an embarrassment.3 A rhetorical concept of representativeness, on the other hand, precisely fits these desires of artworks to extend beyond the boundaries of the specific action they display. Such extensions need not involve truth claims and a hypothetic–deductive model of enquiry, yet they do allow us to speak of several modes of possible significance. The old dichotomy between referential ideas of representation and aestheticist models of autonomy is not our only framework.

II I shall use as the vehicle for my arguments a visual example, Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: Red Square and Black Square because what significance the work has clearly eludes both representational and formalist aestheticist categories. We need the terms of presentational aesthetics, but they do not suffice for the intellectual and affective complexity inherent in Malevich’s simplicity of surface. Because my concerns are theoretical, I shall treat the painting schematically and shall somewhat simplify, although I hope not to distort, Malevich’s intentions.4 Moreover, my reading will be perhaps excessively “literary,” but the painting invites such thematizing. I by no means assume that other non-iconic works sustain the same style of enquiry, but I do consider my arguments about mind, movement, and elements metaphors for what takes place in Kandinsky as a musical notation of colour and in Mondrian as the relation of literal forces held in balance. All the major first-generation, non-iconic painters sought ways of making art embody the sensuality of the mind while insisting that as an act of the mind, the very processes objectified retained what Malevich called a principle of non-objectivity. What draws us to the elements leads us to an elemental sense of force and movement no materialist language can describe or account for. If we provisionally treat the painting in three conceptual stages, we will be able to see just how this movement emerges and signifies as “representation” of “the forms of action”. The first stage consists of a series of dynamic principles involved in subverting a potential domination of black. Imagine this work upside down. Everything would achieve rest in the black square, and all the movement and openness would be negated. Here, instead, everything denies resolution by that single shape. As the eye moves down to the conventional place of rest, it finds sharp contrast and reversal. The smaller square is by far the more active because its tilt denies the coordinates

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established by the black square, while its primary colour leaps forward from the canvas. The tilt, in turn, opens out into white space, and it asserts, in its small but almost weightless presence, a powerful refusal to echo the black squares echoing the shape of the picture frame. The red’s projection forward is duplicated then by its horizontal movement as each denies an order of repetitive form. The very elementariness of these relations invites us to bring thematic analogues into our visual experience. Too bare to be decoration, the work must signify. And its contrasts fulfil this expectation. Thus on a second level, we reflect upon the “meaning” of the tilt. In simple movement, a separate world is born. Elements themselves project intentionality because the red square introduces the possibility of the canvas enclosing more than one world: the red produces spatial coordinates which entail a different schema, a different model for processing information, and relations to other phenomena. Autonomy becomes a visual experience. In fact, autonomy rendered spatially becomes a remarkably complex visual experience because we see of what it is made –namely, opposition and difference. The bareness of the canvas virtually reduces to the semiotic categories of opposition that make the assertion of autonomous identity possible. For the red square to establish its force, colour requires non-colour, smallness a corresponding larger shape for contrast, new space an old set of coordinates, singleness duality, and freedom or difference a sense of imminent norms and perhaps immanent oppression. All these forces, we must remember, are at once extremely abstract and yet absolutely literal. Our thematic reflections do not depend on some virtual drama interpreted from the painting but simply describe the force of a concrete set of relations staged as art and hence as inviting us to reflect upon what they can be said to display. Thus on a third level, the painting can be seen as directly addressing the idea of what sustains and grounds the relations and the reflections they allow. But I have been too abstract to capture the significance of these meta-reflections. We must attend to the range of lyrical effects created by the specific way the red square tilts. Visually, it at once leads us out to the surrounding white space and, by that relation, creates or restores a delicate balance with the very figure of order whose demands for repetition it had denied. In studying theosophy, Malevich also learned the dynamics of Hegelian logic. By negating one form of order, the black square’s, the red tilt makes the eye seek out larger contexts. In these contexts, we recover a new balance; indeed, we recover a new principle of balance. Instead of balance based on the repetition of shape, we have a balance that in or as movement integrates all the diverse elements. The very pull among the competing coordinates and forms literally produces a sense of their interdependence, while that interdependence has as its ground the white space of canvas. This ground, like the mind and like infinite space, holds all by allowing what is held to become manifest as force and as relationship: “Tranquility itself is defined by movement”.5

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I allow myself the luxury of citing Malevich because statements like these justify taking such complex presentations of balancing force as thematic – that is, as self-conscious figurings of how the painter can understand the powers he has practiced or brought into being. Here the very process of reading this painting in levels allows us to reflect on the strange ontological properties of its elements. Because there is nothing virtual about the painting, it can be said to signify nothing beyond itself. It simply is – as a structure of shapes, colours, and movements. We cannot read these as means intended to represent or stand for something else. Yet as we meditate on the painting, we also cannot treat its literalness as simply physical. What we see, what is only physical form and movement, nonetheless grows in sense so that sense itself becomes an elemental condition bridging the mental and physical. At each level of the painting, its elements signify while never taking any of the allegorical or representational forms of our typical signifying codes. It is as if we were in the presence of a pure form of signification – of the mind in elements and elements in mind – which needs no specific structure of representations. One might say that Malevich sought a form of meaning or something like a Kantian schema which captured semantic force without any of the positivities of semantic content, which are subject to historical displacements.6 The meaning of this painting is simply its structure as a force. Yet its force involves both the series of physical movements we have been discussing and the process of mental movements that recover that literal force. I border here on mysticism, on Malevich’s “meaning,” so perhaps the best I can do is offer a simple emblem for what I am trying to say about sense in spirit and spirit in the literalness of sense. We must be spiritually moved by the painting in order to experience its physical movement as fully present in its elemental concreteness. Change and meaning become conditions of re-appropriating the life in what we normally see only as already constituted for interpretive sight. Now we are asked to step back and reflect upon the mystery of sense in sensation and the sensation of sense. As we step back, two further figural extensions of these movements appear possible. They will not be necessary for my argument, but they should help extend its analogical force, so I will briefly indulge in spelling them out. Malevich, we know, desired to produce through paintings a condition of non-objectivity whore art that captures the permanent conditions of “spiritual” force. As one version of the non-objective, “consider” again the nature of the tilt which breaks repetition, creates new coordinates of sense, and opens the possibility and necessity of new forms of balance or coherence among conflicting forces. The tilt itself can be equated with a fundamental force of differentiation; itself never locatable except in the movement it imposes by making us seek new balances. I allude, of course, to Derrida. But here a picture is worth a thousand philosophers: The visual example enables us to see what Derrida imagines – indeed what all thinkers of the self as negation from Hegel to Sartre have imagined. The principle of autonomy is in essence a principle of the tilt of the possibility of new 166

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coordinates of desire and interpretation entering an objective, cognitive world. The analytic philosopher and conceptual artist John Perry provides a concrete basis for such attributions in his indexical definitions of self. Self, in my somewhat reductive version of his argument, is not a property agents possess but a function or condition of experience whereby the use of the indexical “I” makes possible “a crossing of life and cognition”.7 The “I” takes up the world from a point of view: The world does not change, but the investments it allows and sustains do. We approximate here Lacan’s “imaginary” – that is, an inescapable source of erotic energies and of an ego ideal/ideal ego which has, in effect, no content but can be characterized as a demand to produce investments allowing an agent to make identifications within positions he occupies in language. If this tilt will figure the self as a principle of difference, if it figures the imaginary, will it not also present (or represent) the nature of the artwork itself in its non-objectivity? The movement of sense and signification is insistently physical yet entirely dependent on the painting as an organizing point of view. The objects as they take meaning here cannot be substituted, even though each element is infinitely reproducible. So in their very affirmation of the objective sense, the force of this painting in balance insists also on their non-objectivity or untranslatability. The painting is at once within the world and not congruent with it – as is perhaps indicated by the way my attempts at critical description border on the parodic. Roland Barthes coined the concept of textualite in order to indicate how certain relations in an artwork resist all naturalizing interpretations. Malevich’s point is more general: Even what invites figural elaboration in its ideal specificity as a locus of self-­generated forces and stimulus to audience meditation remains ineluctably different from all our efforts to appropriate it. The artwork must, to be an artwork, retain its own control over the coordinates that generate its sense of sense.

III I must now face my own problem of representativeness. How does so obviously an extreme example allow us to make generalizations on the subject of representation in art? On one level, the challenge is clear: Malevich’s stylistic strategies are presentational, while his language for them is representational. So he focusses the question of how we can correlate presentational elements – the signifying force of what artworks display in actions or movements – with representational elements that allow the work to stand for non-aesthetic properties of experience. The problem is complicated, however, by the fact that we do not normally govern our critical practice by clear and distinct ideas of either presentational or representational elements. Yet the practices betray biases and assumptions that are often reductive in what they take as central and problematic in the links they draw between art and the world. I hope, then, to use my reading of force and exemplification in Malevich as a way of bringing to the surface confusions 167

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or limitations of the assumptions often underlying representational theories. As these become clear, we will see why deconstruction seems so appealing an alternative but from a perspective which I think can lead us to concepts not so dependent upon the oppositions deconstruction feeds upon. My intention is not to refute deconstruction (one does not refute a practice) but to show how it is one limited way of serving the end I call representativeness. We must ask first what views of representation are incompatible with Malevich’s work and the modernist strategies it typifies. Clearly, the work does not picture states of affairs – whether they be facts in the world, states of mind, or some version of universals or types. Yet while ideals of descriptive resemblance often creep into our critical practice and evaluations, they are not central to any sophisticated theory of representation in art. Gombrich’s work is typical. Representation is not a matter of producing replica but of constructing salient resemblances which “suggest” or “evoke” a referent. Representation works when it “retains the efficacious nature of the prototype” because it preserves the relevant “context for action”. These contexts, I take it, can be either realistic (questions of how something appears) or symbolic (questions of what universal conditions are illustrated).8 From my point of view, this idea of contexts for action is an extremely promising one. But Gombrich’s dislike of expressionism and noniconic art make it appear that he confines the idea to contexts constructed as ideas or tonal qualities of depicted worlds which pre-exist and thus authenticate the representation. Thus while Gombrich denies a simple copy theory of representation, his values, his sense of what is salient in paintings and what authenticates them, suggests that he retains from that theory its hierarchy of fit: representations are tested by their power to evoke some truth within a culture’s beliefs about the “actual” world (which can be an abstract, mythic one). Malevich’s painting challenges these assumptions primarily by the emphasis it puts on representation as itself a condition of action in the process of interpreting itself and thus of making special demands on the ways an audience understands the directions of fit between the work, its activity, and the world. More important than any state of affairs evoked or suggested by the configurations of the image is the nature of the process displayed by the work. What links to the world is less some condition symbolized than the processes displayed in the art act, which evoke qualities of mind that can transcend art. As Maurice Denis put it in one of the texts most influential in modernism’s challenge to older aesthetic, our overwhelming impressions need not “emerge from the motif or the objects of nature represented, but form the representation itself, from forms and coloration”.9 Malevich’s painting, for example, uses its non-iconic properties to make the entire work a pure display of the very energies its shapes allow us to treat as significant. Picture and picturing are correlative. And because of this, the specific portrayal seems inseparable from an abstract schema 168

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exemplifying the very ideas of creativity it elicits. The painting is simultaneously a display, a metacommentary, and an invitation for us to take it as a pure schematic form applicable, as shape and as movement, to a wide variety of particulars. Moreover, the work’s significance lies not only in this complex presentation but also in the ordered movement of reflective discovery it invites from its audience. The control of temporal movement is a feature of artistic experience which no spatial model of resemblance will capture, especially when the sense of unfolding in time reinforces and extends the state of being displayed in the work as its authorial act. Similarly, I can imagine no way to describe in traditional theories of representation the way Malevich’s work insists on its own condition as difference, at once within the physical world and negating it. Finally, theories which ignore such phenomena have great trouble explaining the way interpretation actually functions in art. If works represent states of affairs, then it makes sense to focus interpretation on the specific ways something is represented. The interpreter wants us to notice how the work treats some feature of the world and allows us to make predictions about it. But with works like Malevich’s, and I think with most great works, interpretation is more Whiteheadian. Rather than emphasizing the ideas we get about objects, we treat those ideas as lures for feelings which deepen our appreciation of the specific action taking place in the entire structure of relations held in specific tensions by the work. It is the dynamics of interpretation which constitutes a complex condition of action in relation to display, and this conjunction produces or can produce genuine originality. Such works require a theory of representation that takes into account the conditions of possibility they display and evoke. This theory will use the display function as a way of preserving the realm of meaning in the text. The invitation is not to make just any response but to fill out the configuration the text offers and to attempt identifying with it. Then, because provisional identification is possible with what the text displays or schematizes as meaning, we have a way of moving from the author’s meaning to the use of such meaning in possible worlds. This is a plausible measure of significance.10

IV Expressionist or presentational theories will explain some of these phenomena. But such theories involve serious problems of locating the source of expression – in the work or in the maker – and they repeat the same problem on the level of response. What does one do with an expression – try to repeat the original experience or emphasize one’s immediate reactions to the work’s expressive properties? In either case, Gombrich is right to insist that expressionist theory has difficulty coming to terms with the rhetorical features of expression that, as mediations, require interpretation of structures and meanings which cannot be reduced to responses to the work’s manifest qualities. As evidence for Gombrich’s views, we need only note 169

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how the brilliant observations of British art historians from Roger Fry to Harold Osborne rarely produce a full semantic account of a picture’s import. Similar problems plague the expressionism that extends from Dewey and Collingwood to Guy Sircello: Emphasis on experience never quite coincides with a full discourse about meaning. Some expressionist theories do isolate my central concerns – the quality of display in the art act, the power of movement in and through the work, and the understanding of interpretive fit as a relationship between examples and possible worlds. But so long as they must define their terms in sharp opposition to the reductionism that often accompanies resemblance views of representation, they are likely to lapse into psychologism or formalism. When faced with Gerald Graff using an ideal of representation to dismiss most literature in the Romantic tradition or with Gombrich’s dislike of non-iconic art, it is tempting to base one’s counterarguments simply on the features of form or the evocativeness they ignore. However, we then keep repeating the same oppositions. For this, I have a strong antidote. It may not cure, but it should help us enjoy the disease while we come to see what elements must be integrated if there is to be a comprehensive theory of representativeness adequate to what Malevich displays. I want to spend a few moments on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of how the conventional poles of presentation and representation are condemned to undermining one another’s lives while deferring one another’s deaths. The following passage seems to me Derrida’s most concise trooping on the topic: A entendre le mot de Cezanne, la verite (presentation ov representation, devoilement ou adequation) doit etre rendue “en peinture” soit par presentation, soit par representation, selon les deux modeles de la verite. La verite, le modele du peintre, doit etre rendue en peinture selon les deux modeles de la verite. Des lors, l’ expression abyssle “verite de la verite”, celle qui aura fait dire que la verite est la non-verite, peut se croiser avec elle-meme selon toutes sortes dc chiasmes, selon qu’ on dcterminera le modele comme presentation ou comme representation. Presentation de la representation, presentation de la presentation, representation de la representation, representation de la presentation.11 If we abstract from Derrida’s playful spirit, we can see him identifying four specific problems reinforcing and paralyzing the traditional oppositions I have been speaking of – the force of signification seems always to evade representation and yet elicit it; the artist’s model of truth conflicts with her model of art; the power to claim “truth” confuses the adequacy of representations with the force of rhetoric; the desire to represent that force creates an endless regress of signs in search of a source they endlessly supplement and displace. The “ground” for such deconstruction appears in Wittgenstein. Where the Tractatus thought of representation in the pictorial form ArB,

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the Philosophical Investigations led us to view any description of such acts as entailing an agent S, a special sense of r in terms of the as or specific kind of equivalence established and a sense of some conditions of uptake Q, which we can treat loosely here as symbolizing all the intended effects the work may have on an audience and for the artist’s psyche and career. Thus we need to identify in our account of representation how S ArB Q can be accomplished. Derrida points the way by contrast, for he shows that each symbol identifies a point of slippage which renders representation a problematic, but probably inescapable, concept. Let me spell out only the problem of intentionality, the condition of agency S in representation, as an example of what Derrida recognizes and what artists like Malevich grapple with. Derrida tries to make us see that intentionality cannot be the purely transcendental openness Husserl dreamed of and analytic thought tried to secure by strategies modelled on Russell’s theory of types. As Sartre demonstrated, representation takes place from a position and a desire always surpassing or placing elsewhere what it attends to. The re in representation must be taken seriously because it calls our attention to an act of purposive presentation inseparable from the desired process of impersonal description. The S will prove to never be a neutral observer’s stance but instead will combine roles of projection and depiction. And this means that the entire representational process will always be at once overdetermined (by the force of presentation) and undetermined (by carrying insufficient evidence for deciding on the tasks the representation is actually intended to do). Understanding art as the imitation of models confuses ideals of description and constructing works of art that satisfy aesthetic standards, and the pursuit of truth demands rhetorical efforts to displace other dominant versions of the subject. These problems are not merely epistemological delicacies teased out of the tantalizing ambiguity between subjective and objective genitive in the expression “sign of”. Rather they implicate many of the emotional issues of the relation between positions and descriptions which one might say has become the central topic of contemporary thought. Political cases of representation most clearly illustrate the complexity – for example, in what might be called the dilemma of the politician in a representative government.12 We expect standing for and acting for to be congruent features of representation: The politician should manage in a disinterested way to act on behalf of interests which are in effect objectively determined by elections. Yet even deciding whom she represents involves two models – the empirical or actual interests of their constituents and the “real” or ideal interests that in her best judgement serve the “true” public interest. Yet the choice of whom to represent is very difficult to separate from how the representor’s interests might at once be served and remain hidden. Whom she represents depends on what self she chooses or needs to present, and that need may, in turn, involve representations which mask it.

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We might put the same case in more general terms by saying that treatments of representation by thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Goffman conceive descriptions as more “like” letters of recommendation than like accounts conventionally idealized as scientifically objective. They see idealization and description as interdependent and thus as generating conflicting notions of truth. Consider as a philosophical parable the case of the student who asked a famous professor for a letter of recommendation but was told he could have only a letter of description. In this parable, the object, the social practice, and the representing force are all at odds, and each has a different interest in the process of description. The professor wants his authority properly represented in his act, so he hopes that his picture will reflect his (idealized) character by showing how he refuses to idealize at least this student. (For many of us, all our descriptions of our students have qualities of recommendation because they are our students and “must” represent something of us.) Yet the professor’s “honesty” in one dimension becomes dishonesty in others –not only because another fantasy shapes the presenting energy but also because the refusal to recommend can be more severely marked as negative by the institutional “model” (everybody writes “recommendations”) than the agent intends in picturing his “model”. Finally, consider the poor candidate for description, cast in his powerlessness as merely an object not worth the effort to falsify which guarantees the “truth” of the message. He experiences the painful vulnerability of having to recognize that description may not capture his “truth” but instead is, from his point of view, distorted by the very authorial act which should guarantee his distinctiveness.

V Given the luscious ambiguities in concepts like representation and mimesis, it is not easy to say why we should not simply trace their various ways of folding into and displacing one another. Here, by what Geoffrey Hartman calls reading against the text, we can even construct a benign deconstruction that preserves one form of the complexity of spirit. Yet such a choice would condemn us to leaving unexplored two significant alternatives. If we assume that artists honoured by our traditions are generally wiser than most of their critics, of whatever persuasion, it is likely that we will see the problems, and perhaps even possible solutions, more fully if we read with or read through the text than if we read against it. Certainly, Malevich’s tilt reflects a profound meditation on precisely these problems of understanding how art can “represent” its own presentational force. Thus, second, it might be possible to construct from such artworks a view of the concept of representation capacious enough to preserve the vitality and complexity of fascinating fields of play like Derrida’s without itself being so thoroughly subject to the endless play of vacillating oppositions. Perhaps one can see presentation and representation, or idealization and description, less as oppositions than as 172

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complementary ways of pursuing a single end. Such an account can also have an important historical dimension because it should be able to explain why presentational aesthetics developed precisely at the time when the tension between the idealizing and descriptive features of representation could no longer be concealed by symbolic and mythic strategies. I wish to show that a rhetorical view of representation as representativeness can accomplish such a reconciliation. First, we must distinguish representation as a question of how the mind relates to the world from the specific conditions of art where signs stand in what can be a culturally grounded relationship to a sense of realities outside, beyond, or through the work.13 In this latter context, representation can be a matter of representativeness – not a function of how signs project resemblance to states of affairs but a surrogate inviting an audience to take it as something to be identified with by projecting a possible world. The work uses aesthetic conventions to focus attention on the process of provisionally identifying with the stances, movements, or qualities of perception it constructs so that one can reflect on how they might relate to a variety of existential conditions. The signs in art must still stand for some elements of ordinary experience, but the idea of invitation puts the emphasis on how they act for or act as what they elicit. Malevich’s force depends on our accepting the work as potentially schematic and, hence, as a set of conditions of action or relation we all share. When we ask, “Schematic of what?”, we begin to see that artworks often reverse the normal standing-for-acting for the relationship we find in politics. To the extent that artworks exemplify new configurations, we project what they stand for largely by construing how they act. And acting for is not a relation to an already existing community but a relation to a community one projects through the construction of a world one can identify with.14 Representativeness can be a property of any features of the work which allows projective identifications. Nonetheless, the fullest constructed world will obviously be created by our putting together the entire art symbol as a hierarchical organization of meanings. By identifying the authorial stance we establish the richest parameters for identifications. Thus a novel like Anna Karenina represents on one level the possible feelings of an adulteress and on another a complex stance towards domesticity and self-discipline. If one follows up on my comments to ask what specific condition of acting for takes place in Red Square and Black Square, one begins to get at the profound metaphysical shift Malevich inaugurated and the complexity of what I call critical situating required to get at this shift. As pure elemental relations, the painting acts for some transpersonal shapes and movements which in their materiality implicate and display conditions of creative intentionality set in the process of a self-contextualizing balance. The most important achievement of this definition is that it avoids all temptations to collapse the epistemological force of art into any single relation of resemblance or standing for some existing state of affairs. And that means dispelling the myth of foundationalism for literature. I take as my 173

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motto for representativeness Wallace Stevens’s dictum, “The measure of the poet is the measure of his sense of the world and of the extent to which it involves the sense of other people”.15 From this, we can see why various forms of realism and resemblance models of representation have strong appeal in art and philosophy. If a description is true of a state of affairs, it is transpersonal and in effect compels us to acknowledge that it has representative force for all those who subscribe to the system of evaluation involved. Yet this view of description leaves unresolved the old bugaboo of empiricist theory: how to give a perspicuous account of questions of perspicuity and relevance or richness of fit. My view does, I think, account for this matter of the possible farce of representations. We find them producing significant possibilities for reflecting on conditions of actions. And this view enables us to treat “realism” as having force less on descriptive than on loosely ethical or pragmatic grounds. Fidelity of resemblance matters to the extent that it can be shown to facilitate significant identifications. Graff and Lukacs are wrong in rooting a work’s authority in the descriptive accuracy of its signs. Rather, the relevant question is Brecht’s: What can this configuration of signs enable us to project in self-reflection about our lives, and how can it show that such identifications matter? Description is only one of many ways to connect signs and worlds, and empirical models of coherence control only some modes for appealing to representativeness. By shifting to projective and pragmatic terms, we obviously run the danger of tempting critics to impose a single “authentic ethic,” just as others try to impose a single “reality”. But an emphasis on identifications also allows us to specify how criticism can serve ethical ends that do not collapse into any single dogma.16 By proposing as its basic value the possibility of significant identifications, my view at least implies a preference for preserving texts as different from one another and us. Identifications grow feeble if they repeat themselves. So there are strong pragmatic grounds for insisting on principles like intentions in the text as our means of saving ourselves to some extent from projecting our own already constituted identities upon it. There are other available strategies, but, as I have suggested, the ideas of masterpieces and authority suggest that authors will do better for us the job of constructing possible worlds than we will do by critical deformations worked out according to our own powers and guidelines. Conversely, the possibility of rich identification serves as a useful, if not very rigorous, guideline for resolving critical knots or evaluating competing critical perspectives. The measure of a critical stance – in general and in relation to particulars – becomes how fully it allows us to recover whatever force led readers we respect (or wish to identify with) to value the work as they did. If this goal is acknowledged, the practice of criticism involves trying out various paths to this representativeness. Treating Malevich as a formalist, for example, simply blocks the possibility of understanding how he, and we, could conceive abstraction as a philosophical drama. Some critical paths lead to dead ends or to mere repetition, others allow us to see how the elements of a work establish rich 174

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possibilities of identification. “Rich” remains a contested term, but we at least know what kind of argument we must employ to justify its use.

VI Once we adopt a rhetorical stance towards representativeness, we put ourselves in a position where many of the conventional oppositions lose their force, and it becomes possible to describe without endless vacillation some of the social roles art and criticism can play. We still need distinctions between representation and presentation, but since the aim is not description the two need not be in pure conflict. Both are means for achieving the same end – possible self-conscious identifications in specific works as representative of human possibilities. Therefore, an aesthetic theory can try to combine elements of each in its overall design. Theory can hope to account for the force of expressive acts and authorial presence while also adapting itself to questions of structure and deliberate mediation hard to reconcile with presentational theories. The process of untangling and re-tangling old oppositions is a complex one. Here I can only indicate some of the possibilities that I think follow from the overall shift I propose. Most important is the different attitude we are allowed to take towards the expressive or presentational force. Conventional models of representation as mimesis tend to share the distinction in analytic philosophy between propositional attitudes and the actual proposition. Only the latter easily lends itself to their principles of assessment. Similarly, mimetic theory concentrates on what the text’s argument or plot captures. It is paralyzed by authorial investments which change during the course of a work or, more generally, by the action of an authorial sensibility within the structure of resemblances to the world. These are too much like letters of recommendation. If, on the other hand, we emphasize the possible representativeness of a work, the attitude or stance displayed becomes a crucial factor. What links the work to the world is less what it says than what it demonstrates itself as doing in relationship to the world. The presenting activity has representative consequences. For movement, as in Malevich, is precisely what allows the work to have force as a possible display of conditions for acting and reflecting on actions. The work can interpret the very processes of its own rhetorical construction. My move to rhetoric only holds off Derridean oppositions on one level, although quite a significant one. What can be presented without the displacing energies of descriptive representation remains a matter of degree. Any discussion of intentions opens on to endless regress: We can ask about intending to intend or needing to represent what is presented. Nonetheless, it is precisely against the backdrop of this regress that we can see how much the rhetorical view gains for us. So long as we must represent the presentational act in another medium, we will have translation problems and undeterminations that invite deconstruction. But we can still distinguish from 175

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the translational aspect of interpretation, the process by which interpretation serves simply as a means to fill out the lures for feeling engendered by the display function of the art object. As we saw in terms of the invitation in Malevich’s painting, interpretation can be content with two senses of reading through a work. The interpreter brings dialectical pressure on the work so that its internal movements become purposive, and she tries to see through that movement what can be exemplified as a possible state of being in the world to be reflected upon. There is in principle, and as a possibility of critical practice, no need to translate the exemplified art into some overall meaning stateable in other terms. It is sufficient to identify possible ramifications in what is displayed.17 Much depends here on the account of the display one can produce for a theory of representativeness. I have discussed various features of the topic in my work on literature as performance, so I will confine myself here to two features of the display made basic and coherent within the view I have been arguing. First, the display becomes a prominent distinguishing feature between epistemological and rhetorical or artistic concepts of representation. In epistemology, thinkers like Wittgenstein, Quine, and Rorty have argued that one can do without the concept of representation entirely.18 What we need to test warrantable assertions is not some putative resemblance between pictures in the mind and facts in the world but simply some measure of how linguistic formulations affect practices. No discussion of mediation will have any authority or role to play independent of actual stimuli and results. Or to put the case the other way around, it is very difficult to imagine an account of mental representation since virtually anyone will prove compatible with practical experience. So why bother with representation at all? S ArB collapses into the equivalence of Q. But such an account does not fit any view of art that emphasizes the specificity and ideality of the work, the state of difference it produces, or the practices of interpretation attentive to qualities not reducible to hypothetical-deductive reasoning. All these attributes depend on our concern for preserving the work as a particular idea or model to be reflected upon, and we want to locate its ideality in its capacity to exemplify as a specific configuration of experience general enough to apply to a variety of contexts. Wittgenstein elicited the distinctive sense of experience I am after in his remarks on “sameness” in art. For example, “You could select either of two poems to remind you of death, say. But supposing you had read a poem and admired it, could you say: Oh, read the other, it will do the same”.19 If we are to have such specificity, we cannot collapse the object into a range of stimuli equivalent to some relevant practice. This would collapse forms or ends into means and make irrelevant the artist’s effort to create a type, or exemplification, which is appreciated in part because it produces shareable identifications we can discuss as particular models. We need to preserve the specific shape of the mediation. What matters is not Q but the exemplification established by the SArB relation. We are concerned not with the motion Malevich’s picture causes but with the 176

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distinctive qualities of the specific way the work presents relationships demonstrating and interpreting processes of balancing. At this point, it becomes necessary again to resist the temptation to treat an art picture as a description. The representational structure need not refer to existing states of affairs precisely because we preserve all of its configurational elements. The display is thus free to apply to possible situations: The work becomes an element of our grammar, not of our stock of truths. And as such an element, there is no problem with idealization or with closure. Idealization is simply built into art by virtue of the fact that it invites us to try on possible attitudes. We come to art knowing that it can project a variety of presentational modes – from pure fantasy to pure description – and a variety of ways of accounting for its own rhetoric as a means for developing the mode. Artworks can be dialectical engagements with precisely the tensions Derrida articulates. But they neither need deconstruction nor deconstruct themselves because they offer themselves simply as conditions of possible identifications. Malevich, in fact, has his work exemplify precisely the condition of ideality which is the state of difference art produces in its refusal to be subsumed under any specific existential description. Yet even this has representative functions that lead beyond art, that suggest basic possible attributes in any condition of ecstasy or of intentionality. Often, the work will project both a condition of possibility and a plausible way of testing those possibilities. This I take to have been the project of many 19th-century novelists. Middlemarch projects a model of reading society and human actions which in turn is imaginatively tested by its events. The book’s concern, then, is less with resembling states of affairs than with inviting us to try on what the text exemplifies as an ideal in order to explore a better way of reading than we ordinarily practice. The descriptive adequacy is rhetorical means, not a thematic end. Yet we ignore this point constantly in our fear of closure by acting as if the work wanted to impose its descriptive categories as exclusive interpretive ones. It is, of course, possible and sometimes necessary to idealize counter-ideals and to exemplify attitudes devoted to resisting the imposition of types. Yet it is equally possible and necessary to try out possible forms of totalizing interpretation. Closure, in other words, is a projected ideal to be tested as such. We can take the effort as a description and exalt it into a dogma. But we can carry anything to extremes. We come much closer to the way works project identifications if we take the effort to produce closure as simply a rhetorical, imaginative test of how far a given stance will take us. The end is not to close off other ways of reading but to project the possibilities inherent in one attitude or mode of integrative thought. To stress only resistance to closure is like reading Malevich’s painting only for the tilt, without attention to its quest for a composing balance that idealizes a presentational force capable of regathering what desire sunders. I do not intend to suggest that because art is an invitation to provisional identifications that it is culturally benign. Art has culturally constructive 177

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roles. Of this, we occasionally need reminding. But all invitations have their demonic features. Representativeness, like representing, involves wills to power. But by stressing representativeness we can preserve the extensive and rich features of the work of art which function as display and allow us to judge in terms of our identifications the nature and value of the power projected. Artists can give audiences credit for recognizing and using in their own ways what gets exemplified as forms of power. There remain, of course, forms of power which are not exemplified, not self-consciously displayed by a work but hidden in it or hidden by it. Of these, I can only say that a rhetorical approach to representation puts suspicion back in the right place or at least in the dramatically most interesting place. Stanley Cavell argues that philosophy’s mistake is assuming that scepticism is only a philosophical problem rather than one deeply embedded in difficulties of establishing human trust and shareable projects.20 Similarly, much of modern theory errs by treating the source of suspicion in art as an epistemological condition located in signs and a problematic of description. Art’s danger is far more serious – we must suspect the very condition of agency, which offers the work to us as a structure of possibilities. Only by such extreme measures can we at once defend ourselves against being taken in and recognize the full joy of finding a community based on invitations that resist our attempts to discredit them. The condition of resistance is precisely the condition which allows us to surpass tests of description and to explore what imaginative identifications with a range of works will produce as criteria of judgement.

VII Because so much of this chapter is obviously addressed to problems most pressing upon literary critics, I want to conclude by stating why Malevich seems to me so useful a representative for my case. (I might add that if La Verite en Peinture is a sign, art critics will soon face the same problems their literary brethren do.) The primary connections are historical. Non-iconic painting has qualities of literalness and immediacy which allow it to exemplify better than any literary work the properties most important to the presentational aesthetics of modernism. It is fairly easy to show how these properties become important because of the painters’ and poets’ profound distrust of a representational heritage no longer able to hide problematic transitions between empirical descriptions, type universals, and idealizing recommendations of human powers. But my concern here is with the historical dialectic one can construct in relation to those presentational strategies. Malevich did not share my theory. There is no one less likely to have accepted a rhetorical view of art than Malevich. He saw art as a compulsion, not as an invitation. Indeed, he accepted the dominant ideal of empiricist representation – that a structure of signs, properly fitted to the world – should and could compel universal assent. He differed from that 178

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tradition in where he located the compulsion. Aware of the duplicities inherent in description, Malevich turned to a neo-Kantian strategy. He would impose compulsion not by the force of resemblance but by producing literal schema that in themselves captured the essential truths of our mental powers of construction. Abstraction, then, seemed a form of compulsion deeper than any description because descriptions are only historical positivities, while abstraction captures what remains constant for everyone’s mind in a variety of descriptions. In this light, modernism is reduced to abstraction because its scepticism about the duplicity inherent in traditions of representation that could combine realistic and idealistic (or religious) elements forced it to take mental structures as the only possible ways of compelling representativeness. All other art forms were masked letters of recommendation. Yet in that very act of abstraction, modernists like Malevich enable us to recover what is perhaps the most typical classical attitude towards representation. From Aristotle’s ‘probable impossibles’ to Reynold’s ‘universals’, artists and theorists rarely had to grapple with the epistemological framework that equated representation with description.21 So they were free to understand representation as the production of possible schema for imaginative stances. But schema in a preKantian universe are not candidates for expressing the essence of the mind so much as specific displays which can function to indicate typical possibilities of identification. The schema displayed in artworks function simply as rhetorical invitations. At our culture’s most self-critical and reductive moment, it may have rediscovered the ideas of art as projection which sustained its most generous and capacious spiritual ideals. And if this is even half-true, there is a good deal not to despair about in the current emergence of a variety of philosophical perspectives that replace positivist ideals of compulsion by description with invitations to explore possible worlds.

Notes and References 1 Malevich, Essay on Art, 1915–1928, vol. 1, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillan (Copenhagen: Bergen 1968), pp. 123–5. For Mondrian, see “Natural Reality and Abstract Reality” in Herschel B. Chipps, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 322–3. The best work I know on how these “representations” have “content” is Leo Steinberg Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 289– 306 and Marcelin Pleynet, “Mondrian vingt – cing ans apres,” in his Systeme de la Peinture (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), pp. 133–43. And for my understanding of specific concepts related to abstraction, I am indebted to Harold Osborne, Abstraction and Artifice (London: Oxford University Press, 1979). 2 In using an idea of coherence, I refer simply to an attitude we take towards a text as we attempt to integrate its salient features. We may find them incoherent or a coherent analysis of incoherence, etc. I also wish to acknowledge here that some of my terms and specific formulations derive from the following lecturers at an International Association for Philosophy and Literature Meeting on the subject of representation: Geoffrey Hartman, Linda Dittmar, William Grimes, and Gerald Bruns.

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3 For the best summary I know of versions of realism, which also reveal the quest for grounds of resemblance, see Marshall Brown, “The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach,” PMLA 96 (1981), pp. 224–30. 4 I hope that this one quotation from Malevich, Essays, vol. 2, pp. 138–9, will suffice to indicate the nature of his intentions: “In the case of Suprematist contrast it is the different scales of the form, i.e., the sizes (dimensions) of Suprematist Elements in their mutual interrelations that have the greatest significance. In this case color in no way corresponds to form like form to color, but it is only combined by means of the dimensions and scales of space…. The creation of these sensations may really be an expression of the essence of phenomena in the non-objective functions of the universe.” “This essence of phenomena is sensed non-objectively, since that is the nature of its reality. This reality will never be consciously realized, since the consciousness of form is contained in the object, in something concrete, and man strives to understand it”. “The world which is understood by sensation is a constant world. The world which consciousness understands as a form is not constant. Forms disappear and alter, whereas sensations neither disappear nor alter. A ball, motor, aeroplane or arrow are different forms, but the sensation of dynamism is the same.” “Thus, the investigation of phenomena by purely formal method brings us to forms…, but after that we must rely on sensation which should complete that which cannot be shown by the formal method “Only the formal approach to the universe still does allow complete: fusion between man and the universe.” “The formal method discovers the forms of phenomena, but not their reality or spirit…. For form, colour and spirit are phenomena with different states of energy. The total combination of their states in the universe in which my life is determined is a constant link with or in constant sensation of the spiritual aspect of the forces of the universe, both with and without image. This link in its turn calls for the activity from one which is expressed in the creation of a new phenomenon; the creation of these phenomena will depend on the quality, or capacity to conceive the image, its stableness will depend on the power of the imagination. Thanks to this striving there arises a mass of things that ought to determine my ideas.” 5 Malevich, The World at Non-objectivity. Unpublished writings, 1922–25, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976), p. 16. 6 Alexander Gelley uses the idea of schema to handle specific “mimetic” representations on a level more abstract than most commentators on realism do. See his “Metonymy, Schematism, and the Space of Literature” NLI-I 3 (1980), pp. 46–88. Gelley provides a framework within which we can see non-iconic artists taking a more radical Kantian step in an already established direction of enquiry. 7 I cite from Perry’s “Perception, Action, and the Structure of Believing” forthcoming in a feitschrift for Paul Grice edited by Richard Grandy and Richard Warner. 8 For Gombrich on representation, see especially “Meditation on Hobby Harse” in Meditation on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (New York: Phaidon, 1678), pp. 1–11; and Art and Illusion (Princeton: Bollingen Press, 1960), p. 1, quote from Art and Illusion, pp. 38, 111. I distinguish symbolic from realistic in accord with Gombrich’s discussion of Egyptian’s treating the Pharoah’s size as representing status while the Greeks read the painting as the actual story of a hero, larger than life (cf. pp. 135–6). For Gombrich’s dislike of expression theories and of abstract art, see in Meditations, pp. 56–69, 143–150. 9 Maurice Denis, “Definition of Neo-Traditionism, in Chipp, ed., p. 99. 10 G. Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), especially Chapters 1, 2, 6, 8. I analyze specific problems in his arguments – for example, what can be said to represent what in a

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story – in my Act and Quality (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), a work which also provides a general account of the rhetorical or “dramatistic” perspective I develop here and which clarifies how I use Goodman on exemplification. I should also note an increasingly popular contemporary perspective on representation as resemblance which seems to combine expressivist and descriptive categories in a way absolutely opposed to my own. From Bahktin on the one hand, Paul de Man on the other, we find emerging a realism based on negative rather than positive categories: A “true” representation is one that shows the failure of all our interpretive categories and leaves a residue we take as full or recognizable human reality. For this applied to the drama, see Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), and for an idealized application that makes the novel a privileged form (and reveals Felperin’s bias), see Michael Holquist and Walter Reed, “Six Theses on the Novel—and Some Metaphors,” NLI-I 3 (1980), 413–24. These seem to me profoundly Pyrrhic arguments, like new critical versions of the non-discursive because they give literature a content which transcends and cancels any predications the medium might allow us to make about non-textual experience. 11 Derrida, La Verite an Peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 10. 12 My use of ideas like “standing for” and acting for are strongly influenced by Hannah Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California, 1967) pp.60, 92, 119, and 121. 13 For my purposes, it does not matter whether we ground the art function or purpose in illocutionary conventions, aesthetic attitudes, art worlds, or authorial intentions. And I claim adequacy only within traditions that grant some distinctive attitude to how we examine an aesthetic object as a significant particular. These are compatible with a wide variety of theories on how we use what is so constituted. 14 For an analytical account of artworks as not bound by Kripke’s causal view of names and hence as providing a range of imaginative identities, see Mary Bittner Wiseman, “Identifying Subjects,’ forthcoming in American Philosophical Review. And for a radical literary account of Romanticism as the projection of possibilities rather than description, see Donald Pease, “Blake, Crane, Whitman and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility” PMLA, 96 (1981), 64–85. 15 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 123–4. 16 My alternative is a pluralism of means that I do not think necessarily entails an individual supporting a pluralism of ends. See on this subject my essay “Taking Ends Seriously: Criteria for Discussing the Purposes of Literary Criticism”. 17 This, I realize now, is what Wittgenstein means by displaying one’s critical grasp of a work by performing it or showing someone how to go on with it. See his Lecture and Conversations an Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). And for an attempt to generalize this criterion of going on, which I now see (from Henry Staten) misses the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s questions but works for practical cases, see my “Going on and Going Nowhere: Wittgenstein and the Question of Criteria in Literary Criticism,” in William Cain, ed., Literature and Philosophy. 18 For a good summary of the arguments against using ideas of menial representation in epistemology, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), Chapters 1–3. 19 Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 34. 20 Stanley Cavell, The Claims of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), Parts 1 and 4. 21 W. J. T. Mitchell makes a similar point about the change in the status of image from being largely verbal to being largely pictorial once empiricism takes hold. His essay, “What Is an Image” overlaps with mine, I think, in several supportive ways.

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13 IMITATION AND ART * Göran Sörbom As far as we know, humankind has always danced, told and performed stories, made paintings, drawings, sculptures, songs, pieces of music, and poetical manifestations and used these activities in a large variety of situations as entertainment, political propaganda, magical rites, religious ceremonies, etc. Some of these uses were of great importance both to individuals and to societies. Thus it is natural that man also reflected over the nature of these activities and the results of them. The first big and well-known attempt to characterize and collect all of these activities and the results of them under one head is called the theory of imitation (mimesis). It is commonly regarded as the oldest theory of art and as such as superficial and inadequate. At a closer look, it is not, however, a theory of art proper but a theory of pictorial representation which was one of the foundations from which the concept of (fine) art and theories of fine art grew in the 18th century.

Imitation as the production of a distinct kind of mental image The theory of imitation does not provide criteria in order to distinguish art from non-art but to distinguish imitations (mimesis) from “real” things. A house, for instance, is a “real” thing, whereas a painting of a house is an imitation or an image of a house. Ajax’s killing of the sheep was presumably a real act, whereas Homer’s account of it is an imitation. The painting and the text (heard or read) are imitations in the sense that they bring forth mental images of a distinct kind in the mind of the beholders, listeners, or readers. Mental images are basically similar in that they show that sensuous qualities of particulars can occur as perceptions, illusions, hallucinations, memories, dreams, imaginations, and daydreams. They differ from each other in vivacity, consistency, and in their judged relations to the assumed existing world. Perceptions are lively, consistent, and true to the world which causes the perceptual “imprint” (perception is very often described as the world’s *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. XII, No. 1–2, 1989, pp. 1–13.

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stamp on the mind through the senses like the impression in wax by a signet ring1). If the mental image is incorrect in relation to its origin but is believed to be correct, it is called an illusion. If the mental image is the result of no outside perceptual “imprint” at all but is believed to be so (maybe caused by drugs or sickness), it is named a hallucination. Dreams have regularly no perceptual counterparts in the outside world. But when asleep, we believe they do. Memories, as mental images of sensuous particulars, go back to perceptions of them but they are past perceptions, or we would call them hallucinations or dreams. Daydreams and imaginations may be lively and consequential, but we always know the difference from perceptions. If not, they would haunt us as illusions or hallucinations. The activity of the perceptual apparatus to produce, on its own accord, mental images of sensuous particulars, whether they are memories or new images composed out of elements the beholder has sensed before, is called imagination (fantasia) Further, humankind has developed skills for the communication of imaginations. It is the skill of rendering the mental image created by imagination in an outward form, and this skill is sometimes called imitation2 (the term “imitation” denotes both the activity to make the outward object according to the mental image and the result of this activity). The sole function of an imitation (mimesis) is to create mental images in the minds of its beholders, Plato says, and he calls them dreams for those who are awake.3 Essential to the perception of an imitation is that the beholder knows that the mental image caused by the imitation is just similar to perceptions of the kind of thing represented in the imitation. If not, the beholder has an illusion. He or she would believe that he or she stands in front of a house or that he or she sees Ajax killing the sheep. The (correct) perception of an imitation contains thus the awareness that the thing perceived is not a real thing but an imitation. Imitation can, of course, be used to cheat people. But as a matter of fact, this is not very common. Most often, the purpose of making and using imitations includes the awareness that it is an imagination. In most cases, it is important that the beholder of imitations can tell the difference between “real things” and imitations in order to act and react properly to the imitation – i.e. according to the further purposes of the imitation. A part of the “non-reality” of imitations resides in the basic purpose of imitations to provide humankind with this distinct kind of experience and that this is its sole purpose compared to “real” things. A painting of a house cannot be used for anything else than to call forth a mental image of a house, but in its turn, the calling forth of this mental image can be used in a large variety of situations and for many secondary purposes. The “non-reality” of imitations is thus related to the fact that the mental image caused by the apprehension of the imitation or image is not an ordinary perception in which there is a more or less correct relation between percept and perceptual object. The imitation causes an impression in the 183

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mind of its beholder, which is similar to impressions caused by things it represents, and the beholder knows that it is nothing but similar. Paintings and texts are, of course, real things in the sense that they are objects in the world we can hear and touch. But the point is that the mental images created in the mind of the listener, reader, spectator by the painting and the text are not perceptual images of something existing in the world of the same kind as the thing represented in the imitation. The painting of a house is perceived as a house-like thing – i.e. it creates and the beholder knows that it is just similar and that this is the basic purpose and use of it. Homer’s description of Ajax killing the sheep results in a mental image of this event, a mental image the listener or reader knows is just similar to the actual perception of this kind of scene.

Similarity, mental image, and imitation It is evident that the relation of similarity is important to the theory of imitation but it is not, as it is commonly thought, the relation of similarity between the thing imitation and particular things in the world – for instance, between a painting of a house and houses in the world, which is the central one. There is a cluster of relations of similarity that are not always kept apart: (1) the epistemological similarity between percept and perceptual object, (2) the expressive similarity between the mental image (fantasia) in the mind of the imitator and the imitation, (3) the actual and representational similarity between the (thing, imitation and things in the world), (4) the memorial similarity between the mental image created by the imitation and (mental images of) things in the world stored in the memory, and (5) the communicative similarity between the mental image of the maker and the beholder. (1) A basic assumption of the theory of imitation is that the perceptual knowledge of the outside world is based on a similarity between the thing perceived and the mental image which is the result of the contact between sensuous organs and objects in the world. In the perceptual process, the sensuous organ adapts itself to the perceptual objects, and the adaption is always in the form of assimilation to the perceived object.4 This assumption also entails a specification of the kind of knowledge characteristic of the perceptual apparatus. It gives the outward qualities of particulars: green to green, round to round, etc. – i.e. there is an isomorphic relationship between percept and perceptual object. (2) The imagination creates, on its own accord, mental images of perceptual characters that are known to be fictitious – i.e. the perceiver knows that they do not have any counterparts in reality as in perception. To imitate often is the realization of this mental image in an outward form  so other persons can share it. In painting, sculpture,  theatre 184

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performance, dance, and, perhaps also, music, the making of the imitation (the outward object) is based on a similarity between mental image and imitation where the imitation is formed to be similar to the mental images. In a way, this process is the reverse of perception in which the mental image is formed by an assimilation of the sensuous organ to the outward object; in making the outward image, the object is formed by the skill (technê) of the maker into a similarity of the mental image. It is possible to talk about a similarity between the mental image and the imitation provided you assume the epistemological similarity between percept and perceptual object. What is in the imagination must have possible counterparts in the outside world, not necessarily whole objects but their elements. It is also possible to imitate something by making it similar to things in the world either by using these things as models or to make casts from them, but then it is a case of representational similarity not of expressive similarity (as the terms are used in this context). The creation of mental images by means of words is different. The text is not similar to the mental images, but when heard or read, the result is a mental image of a perceptual character. Words, refer, it is often maintained, by means of convention not by similarity, but they can, nevertheless, occasion mental images of a perceptual character. The words (heard or read) do not resemble Ajax’s killing of the sheep, but they create a mental image of this situation in the mind of the listener or reader. Joseph Addison comments, Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things themselves, The Reader finds a Scene drawn in Stronger Colours, and painted more to the Life in his Imagination, by the help of words. than by an actual Survey of the Scene which they describe, In this Case the Poet seems to get the better of Nature; he rakes, indeed, the Landskip after her, but gives it more vigorous Touches, heightens its Beauty, and so enlivens the whole Piece, that the Images which flow from the Objects themselves appear weak and faint, in Comparison of those that c0me from the Expressions.5 (3) Sometimes there is a similarity between the imitation and actual things in the world which it represents. This kind of similarity is not a necessary condition for something to be an imitation – i.e. a man-made object that causes a distinct kind of mental image (as described earlier) to occur in the mind of the beholder. Sometimes, as in the case of paintings and sculptures, there are similarities between the painting of a house and houses in the world with regard to particular sensuous qualities. The imitator can use such similarities in order to reach the goals he 185

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or she has in mind: a portrait to remember someone’s look, a map to find your way, etc. But not so in the case of texts. Basically, the painting and the text do the same job (ut pictura poesis): they stimulate a mental image which is perceptual in character to occur in the mind of the spectator or reader/listener. But they do so by different means. (4) It is a prerequisite that both the makers and beholders or readers of imitations are acquainted with the things represented, although not necessarily the actual things themselves: It is sufficient, that we have seen Places, Persons, or Actions, in general, which bear a Resemblance, or at least some remote Analogy with what we find represented. Since it is in the Power of the Imagination, when it is once Stocked with particular Ideas, to enlarge, compound, and vary them at her own Pleasure.6 A perceptual experience is necessary, stored in the memory, and the power of imagination to “enlarge, compound and vary” according to resemblance or analogy. This is neither a recognition of similarity between particular things nor a seeing something as something else but an apprehension that something is like something else but is not of its kind; a painting of a house is “nothing but” a house-like thing. The beholder knows that it is not a house but that it is a house-like thing, and he or she knows this because of his earlier experiences.7 (5) The essential relation of similarity for the theory of imitation is, then, not the one between the material thing imitation and other existing things but the one between the particular kind of mental image produced both in the mind of the maker and in the mind of the spectator. No distinction between them is made because they are supposed to be basically similar, provided both maker and beholder have normal perceptual apparatuses and similar background knowledge in order to make the mental image occur. The essential thing is that humankind has the ability to imagine, that some persons have learnt and developed the skill to express these imaginations in an outward form so that they are communication means that the perception of the imitation in all essential respects is similar to the imagination of its creator.

The causes of imitations A sculpture which is a kind of imitation has, according to Seneca who attributes this view to Plato and Aristotle, five “causes” for its existence: The material, the agent, the makeup, the model and the end in view….. The material is the bronze, the agent is the artist, the make-up is the form which is adapted to the material, the model is the pattern imitated 186

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by the agent, the end in view is the purpose in the maker’s mind, and, finally, the result of all these is the statue itself.8 The material has qualities of its own. Bronze is different from marble, and an aulos has another sound than a khitara. The material has inherent limitations and virtues which have to be respected and used. It is a part of what we see and experience when we look at a sculpture and the material in itself can give rise to pleasure. This materiality is also important for another reason. It helps us to see that it is an imitation, not a “real” thing. When we look at a sculpture, we normally see that it is made of bronze, for instance, and thus we see the difference to the “real” things it represents. It is one of many indicators to distinguish it as an imitation – i.e. that it is a man-made thing purposely made to be just similar to something but not to be of its kind. The material is the formless stuff from which the imitation is made. When the imitator makes, he or she imitates the forms of the material into its actual shape. He or she makes it into a whole with all its interrelated parts. Material and form constitute the thing imitation which is perceived by the beholder. The material and form can be given measures – i.e. the rhythm and harmony of man-made things which are experienced as pleasurable. This also holds for the cases in which the mental image is occasioned by words. The text (heard or read) has its own sensuous qualities and proportions which participate in the apprehension of the text. The agent (the maker of the imitations) is equipped with knowledge and skill, which also contributes to the final result, the imitation, the bronze sculpture in Seneca’s example. These preconditions are partly innate and partly acquired in the maker’s learning of the trade. The skills are gained by practice, sometimes aided by teaching or by reading handbooks (teknai and artes) in which the making of paintings, poems, tragedies, etc., are described and regulated. An important innate precondition of the maker is that he or she has a vivid and lively imagination and that he can conceive “great thoughts”. This has to do with the model used in making the imitation. “It does not matter,” Seneca says, “whether the maker has the model within or without”. But it is obvious if you look at paintings, sculptures, read poetical texts, etc., that the important models are within the artist. There is no point in making a bad copy of some real, existing thing. “Art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough”9 was true also in antiquity.10 The imitator learns from a study of nature, but he or she does not copy nature very often. He can do so for certain purposes, but these are mostly of small interest to art history. In most cases, the maker creates a mental image in his mind, and it belongs to his trade to transform it into an outward object, an imitation, which can communicate his inner vision to other persons. Let us call this the internal purpose of making imitation: The creation of mental images of a distinct kind in the minds of the beholders. Whether this chain of communication is successful or not depends also on the skill of the 187

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imitator to “squeeze out” (exprimere) the mental image in an outward form and on the possibility and limitations of the material (matter) to “carry” such forms. Most man-made things and actions have a purpose. They are made in a context of a given sort to be used instrumentally to reach given goals. “Now what is this purpose?” Seneca asks with regard to sculpture (but the question is applicable to all kinds of imitations), and he answers, It is that which attracted the artist, which he followed when he made the statue. It may have been money, if he has made it for sale; or renown, if he has worked for reputation; or religion, if he has wrought it as a gift for a temple.11 Besides the internal purpose of communicating the mental image created in the mind of the agent, there are a number of external purposes: fame, money, religious service, etc. Aristotle makes a distinction between things that are instrumentally good and such that are good or ends in themselves. In the Politics,12 he mentions music and drawing as two kinds of activity that under certain circumstances could be regarded as ends in themselves; they are both included in leisure (skole), the activity of the free individual as the end of human existence. An institutional confirmation of this outlook is the fact that poetry and drawing, as well as music, were included in the education of the freeborn. In most cases, however, imitations were tied to social or cultural purposes: religion, politics, entertainment, and relaxation, for instance. A question often discussed is whether it is possible to teach people useful things by means of imitation, particularly poetry. The “utile dulce” of Horace13 is imitations’ ability to teach lessons in a sweet manner. But what can we learn from imitations? Plato was partly very severe in this matter. Imitations (first of all poetry and music) are very useful because they can create habits in people who cannot acquire the right kind of behaviour through a knowledge of what is right and wrong. We can learn to behave rightly or wrongly through imitations, but we cannot learn what is right and wrong from them. This is so because the very nature of imitations as perceptual images ties them to the world of multiplicities and particularity; imitations must show individual things and actions, not universalities, and true knowledge resides in the latter. Aristotle maintained that we could learn some universal truths through imitations. We can learn what is typical and universal through concrete examples presented to us in imitations,14 and, Aristotle says, men enjoy learning things.15 Further, the fact that the beholder or listener knows that it is just an imitation and not a real thing makes it possible for him or her to learn and enjoy it more since the situation does not call for action, only contemplation. 188

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Art as imitation for its own sake Even if Aristotle maintained that the apprehension of some imitations under certain circumstances was an end in itself as a part of leisure (skole), it is not, however, until the 18th century that a group of imitations was separated from the rest of the imitations because the apprehension of them was seen as different and regarded as an end in itself. Of course, many imitations continued to be used in human contexts of different kinds to earn money, to reach fame, for religious purposes, for entertainment, for sexual excitement, etc. But the important thing is that some imitations were pointed out as ends in themselves and a realm or “world” was established in order to manifest this distinction and what it implied. They came to be set off from all other kinds of imitation that served other and given purposes. The ones separated began to be called works of art and the activity of making them as fine art. The fine arts were described as human skills and activities that produced objects for disinterested perceptual pleasure for its own sake. Why this distinction between some imitations as instrumental and some as ends in themselves? There is, of course, a myriad of factors contributing to the establishment of such a distinction: social factors like the rise of the bourgeoisie and its need for an identity of its own to be articulated in different ways; economic factors as new forms of producing and selling imitations; the development in philosophy and psychology, the new institutions to support the new and autonomous art as museums, concert halls, theatres, the book market; and public libraries and many other things which all participated in the establishment of these new ways of making and using imitations. But here only the reassessment of human emotions, pleasure, and perceptual knowledge will be hinted at. In the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle, the knowledge we find in universals was considered to be far better than the knowledge we get from perceptual intercourse with particulars. The world of particulars is eternally changing, is never complete, appears differently from time to time, from place to place, and from person to person. It consists of the contingent qualities of things, whereas the world of universals is unchanging, complete, and not dependent on time, place, and circumstances and contains the essence of things. In the 18th century, a reassessment of the role in human life of the “lower faculty of knowledge” takes place. It is now treated as an independent and important part of human existence. To exercise the lower faculty of knowledge, to meet the world of senses in all its variety and concreteness, was now seen as an activity in its own right and not only as the first steps towards more secure and universal knowledge. Further, it is a pleasure in its own right to perceive the world in all its concretion and to react emotionally to it. The soul needs exercise, as well as the body, Abby Dubos writes,16 and to him, any pleasure was preferable to no pleasure at all, but it was common to distinguish between different kinds of pleasure and to value them differently. Sight is, Addison says, “the most

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perfect and most delightful of all our Senses”, and what he calls the pleasures of the imagination are “such as arise from visible Objects, either when we have them actually in our View, or when we call up their Ideas in our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion”. The pleasures of imagination, Addison writes, “are not so gross as those of Sense, nor so refined as those of the Understanding. The last are, indeed, more preferable, because they are founded on some new knowledge or Improvement in the Mind of Man; yet it must be confessed, that those of the Imagination are as great and as transporting as the other”.17 To discriminate between the better and worse pleasures of imagination, a special faculty was needed. Taste, both as a concept and as a praxis, was developed. It is also possible to claim that pleasure can rise because you are interested in the thing you behold. It is, for instance, a pleasure to look at a maturing cornfield which is your own because it will secure the life of your family for the coming season. But this is not the pleasure of imagination that Addison has in mind. You have to put such considerations into the background and promote the pleasure that arises from the mere sight of the cornfield apart from any personal interests. Pleasure is often mentioned in connection with imitations in antiquity. It is pleasurable to learn something, the beauty of the material can give pleasure, as well as the rhythm and harmony of the shape of imitations. But these pleasures do not rise from the mere exercise of the lower faculties of knowledge within a disinterested mental attitude and are not as such regarded as ends in themselves; they attend other goals of the imitations. Imitations are particularly well suited for the stimulation of our lower faculties of cognition partly because of their detachment from contexts in which you are involved and expected to act. We know, says Fontenelle according to Hume,18 that the play (imitation) is not real, and thus we can enjoy the thing represented, even if it is awful. We know that the mental image is just imaginary or fictitious and has no counterpart in reality to which we are invited or forced to react by action; in reality, we act out some imitations we contemplate in order to maximize our perceptual, disinterested pleasure. You can, of course, get the same pleasure from other things than imitations – views and sounds, for instance – but imitations, compared to other kinds of things, are particularly well suited for the arousal of such perceptual pleasures, not least because of the possibilities of the free play of the imagination. The imagination is not tied to the limitations of the existing world. It is free to compose within the range of perception anything it wants. Horace claimed that propriety (decorum) was a necessary regulating principle in the work of the imagination.19 You cannot compose whatever turns up in your mind into a unit. But this regulating principle is not the same taste as a faculty for the discernment and judgement of differences in the disinterested pleasures of imagination. It is not necessary that objects that are suited for aesthetic experiences of the kind just described – i.e. works of art – have to be imitations, although 190

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historically they were so. But during the 19th century, these ties started to loosen up, and in our own century, not very much remains of it. The theory of imitation has lost most of its power and influence as perhaps also the 18th-century idea that the ability of a man-made object to arouse an aesthetic experience is a good reason to call it a work of art. The emergence and growth of the art world as a detached area of human activity and the reassessment of the world of particularities’ as something important in human life is, probably, also connected with the process of secularization. It has to do with the practised and conceptualized ultimate goals of human life. Grossly simplified, for a Christian, everything and every action is but means and preparations for the eternal life beyond. When this extraterrestrial goal for human existence is criticized, doubted, and, for many persons, dissolved, something has to be put in its place in order to avoid personal collapse. Art in the new sense of sensuous objects for contemplation for its own sake – i.e. for the sake of the experience it gives – became one of the fundamental intrinsic goals of human life. In this way, art could complement religion or replace it, which is far from being its servant. Thus one of the most important innovations of the 18th century is the establishment of art as a “world” of its own with its newly created role as an end in itself, as a part of man’s ultimate goals of existence. This new area of human activity was institutionalized and given a central position in the lives of many persons, groups, and societies. In the heart of this institution is the aesthetic experience as an intrinsic goal for human existence. Of course, not all imitations were regarded as works of art in this sense – i.e. as sensuous objects were recommended for aesthetic contemplation as an important end in itself, just some of them were made, used, and named for this new purpose. Most of them were continuously made for other purposes, and the contemplation of these imitations was not regarded as an end in itself. Further, other things than imitations could be made and used for sensuous contemplation as an end in itself and the use of the term “work of art” was extended to include other things than this new and particular kind of imitation. In this century, the art family has proliferated enormously by the acceptance into the family of, as it seems, many other kinds of things and experiences than the traditional ones just hinted at. Often, this extension was made in opposition to and defiance of the traditional outlook. Among other things, the institution is founded on the fact that, although the aesthetic experience is particular and not the same from time to time or from person to person, it is to some extent at least permanent and possible to communicate, influence, and share. It became a social concern that the aesthetic experience was not regarded and treated as totally subjective and private but shared along certain lines agreed upon or practised. It is not only a basic, intrinsic value to have aesthetic experiences; it is also a basic intrinsic value to share them with other persons. The art community became an important part of the cultural heritage; in fact, it became an important part of the intrinsic goals of human life. 191

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A traditional role (and goal) of criticism in its many forms is to participate in the establishment of this community of aesthetic experiences and to prepare its members for the (correct) personal aesthetic experience of a work of art in individual cases. Since the aesthetic experience is particular and subjective, it is not possible to communicate it directly by means of conceptual language. You cannot describe the aesthetic experience, but you can influence it by means of what you say and do. You can point out situations in which it is likely that aesthetic experiences occur – i.e. you can exemplify the aesthetic experiences; you can compare things and experiences and by so doing you can build up a resource of experiences to be used in future aesthetic situations, and you can describe and refer to circumstances around the making and beholding of the work of art. These are basic forms of critical approach in its traditional form, and they are all directed towards the (true or correct) communication of the aesthetic experience. It is also important in many situations that you make as clear as possible that you do share the aesthetic experience. Tolstoy, for instance, regarded it as a basic and intrinsic value that the artist was sincere in his or her expression of the aesthetic experience and certainly the same was demanded of the beholder. True communication implies sincerity from all its participants. This is also true over time. When we communicate with past individuals, groups, and generations we often think it important that true communication is established and the rules of (traditional) criticism are intended to secure true communication.

Notes and References 1 Aristotle, On the Soul 424 a 17–25. 2 This skill has received many names through the ages, but the thought is essentially the same from Plato to Batteux and Sulzer. 3 Ploto, The Sophist 239 D-240 B and 266 C. 4 Aristotle, On the Soul 417a 20–21 and 418 a 3–6. 5 Spectator no. 416. 6 Ibid. 7 Cf Flavius Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana II. 22. 8 Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales 65 8_9. Transl. by R-M, Gum- mere, Loeb Classical Library, London, Cambridge, MA, 1965. 9 Attribute to Virginia Woolf in Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art London: Oxford Univ. Press 1969. p. 3. 10 Cicero comments (Orator II 9) on Phidias’s work in the following manner: “Surely that great sculptor, while making the image of Jupiter or Minerva, did not look at any person Whom he was using as a model, but in his own mind there dwelt a surpassing vision of beauty; at this he gazed and all intent on this he guided his artist’s hands to produce the likeness of the god” Trans. by H. M. Hubbell in Loeb Classical Library, London, Cambridge, MA, 1960. 11 Seneca op. cit. 65. 8–9. 12 VIII. 3. 13 Ars poetica, 343. 14 The poetics ch. IX. 15 Ibid. ch. IV, (1448 b 8–9) 15.

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16 Reflexions critiques sur la Poesie et sur la Peinture. (1719) I. 1. Nouvelle ed, 1760, p. 5. 17 Op. cit. no. 411. 18 The Philosophical Works of David Hume, Vol. III, “Of Tragedy”, Edinburgh 1826, pp, 247–8. 19 Ars Poetica 1–39.

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14 THEORY OF IMPERSONAL ART * A. C. Sukla The purpose of this chapter is not to trace any history of the idea of impersonality in art, nor does it aim at offering any “final solution” to the problem. It proposes to make an attempt at clarifying some of the intricacies in the views of the latest pleader of this theory by throwing some light on the arguments of the ancient Indian critics.

I In continuation of the anti-Romantic movement of Hulme and Pound, in rejection of the Romantic concepts that poetry expresses the personal feelings and emotions of the poet, that the poet the creator is very much present in his or her poem the creation, that there are specific emotions, feelings, and subject matter suitable for poetry and analysis of poetry needs an analysis of the “genius” of the poet Eliot gave a final shape to the modern classicistic idea of the impersonality of art; i.e. the poet is as impersonal as the scientist and poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics “which gives us equations for the human emotions”.1 In spite of the highly eclectic character of Eliot’s mass of critical writings and a number of knotty and confusing critical phrases and jargons, it is not difficult to summarize systematically the basic ideas of his poetics from some major portions of his writings, particularly his essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “The Metaphysical Poets”, “Perfect Critic”, and “Imperfect Critic” and the essay on Hamlet. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” gives us the keynote to his critical assumptions, which he tries to justify in other essays. He stresses two points there: A poet is not an isolated individual, as no other individual is, from others of the society or country or from humanity as a whole. Each and every moment of the immemorial and unending time is interdependent; thus, the past is not buried in the dead past, nor is the future something new and uncertain. Past, present, and future are in a way causally and logically related though without losing the significance of each moment in the eternal flux of this time. Thus a poet as *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. II, No. 2, Winter 1978, pp. 69–79.

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an individual and as a part of his tradition must be assessed simultaneously at the time of judgement. The second point deals with the material, the process, and, finally, the nature of poetic creation and thereby of all artistic creations in general. The material for all art is emotion, but it is not the personal emotion of the artist. Logically, it follows from Eliot’s major assumption stated earlier that as the artist is not an isolated person from the whole tradition, the emotions that are the materials of his or her art cannot be also strictly personal. They must be impersonal in the sense that they must represent the emotions of the whole tradition (the typical emotions) of which he or she is an organic part. Thus the Romantic view that the poet directly expresses his or her own personal emotions – i.e. his or her experiences of sorrows and miseries, happiness and suffering – is rejected by Eliot. He terms his impersonal emotions as significant emotions. Now the poetic process or the method of artistic operation: it is neither a recollection of the emotions in tranquillity, nor a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings – thus straightly a rejection of the Wordsworthian formula. The artistic operation involves three principles – the principles of correspondence, or transmutation; coherence; and comprehensiveness.2 This operation takes place in the mind, but unlike the Romantic critic, Eliot disbelieves in the substantial unity of soul or mind – i.e. the suffering mind – of the poet cannot be identified with his or her creative mind; hence, there is no question of the recollection of the poet’s personal sufferings and joys. Mind is a medium – a medium of operation. The divorced feelings and emotions of the poet are identified here (principle of comprehensiveness) and, all the parts being integrated into a whole (principle of coherence), are finally transformed into completely a new thing, which is poetry (principle of transformation). Though there is some affinity of this operation with the Romantic concept of the secondary imagination, there is nothing mystic in it. The operation is just a technical one quite common in chemical sciences. The mind of the poet is a catalyst, which itself being neutral and unchanged like a filament of platinum, which combines oxygen and sulphur dioxide into sulphuric acid, transmutes the raw material of poetry (i.e. emotions neither powerful nor something new or specific, just ordinary ones). Emotion thus transformed is significant, is impersonal, and, when expressed in the form of a poem (or art), has its life in the poem itself, not in the history of the poet. But how to express this transmuted emotion in the form of art? “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience are given, the emotion is immediately evoked”.3 Eliot’s ideas about the impersonality of art and particularly his theory of “objective correlative” have been variously criticized by critics like René Wellek, Susanne Langer, Ranson, Praz, Eleseo Vivas, S. E. Hyman, and 195

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others. But the Indian thinkers, who debated on a parallel problem centuries ago, would have raised the following points: Eliot is not precise as regards his idea of emotions and feelings, i.e. whether they are the states of our mind – permanent or transitory and in what way they are related to experience. Sometimes emotion, feeling, and experience appear synonymous and interchangeable; at other times, the distinction is rather confusing and unconvincing: that emotion signifies the responses of the poet’s mind to the external and internal stimuli which furnish the poet with the raw material which he or she transforms in poetry, and feeling stands for the responses of the poet’s mind, which originate not in the external or internal stimuli but are occasioned by the study of literature. Secondly, the poetic process – i.e. the transformation of personal emotions into the impersonal poetic emotions – is also obscure. Without giving any logic of this transformation, Eliot gives an analogy which may be very alluring but is surely invalid. A  living human mind can never be as neutral as a filament of platinum, which is simply a piece of lifeless matter, and this analogy from chemical science is incapable of explaining a sensible affair like the process of poetic creation. Besides, why should art approach the conditions of science at all? Finally, the method of objectification of the impersonal emotion and its implication that aesthetic enjoyment necessitates the evocation of this (impersonalized?) emotion in the connoisseur appear misleading from its application to one of the masterpieces of world literature (Hamlet) judging it as an artistic failure.

II In Indian aesthetics, too, emotions (bhāva) are the materials of poetry, drama, music, and all other arts; poetry is the objectification of the impersonalized emotions of the poet. This means that (1) emotions will transcend the personal afflictions or interest of the poet himself or herself; i.e. it must belong to all so that (2) others will take interest in them without being personally attached to them because of their generalization or impersonalization (sādhāranya). (3) This generalization takes place as none – neither the poet nor the reader – takes any utilitarian interest in these emotions, their causal efficiency (arthakriyākāritva) being lost. This is known as the transformation of bhāva (personal emotion) into rasa (impersonalized or generalized emotion) or poetry through a medium which is a complex of character, their actions, and transient emotions or feelings (Vibhāvānubhāvavyabhicā risamyogah).4 This needs a little elaboration. Emotions are defined by the Indians as mental states (cittavrtti), which may be of two types – permanent or primary (sthāyī) and transitory or secondary (vyabhicāri) that depend upon the former. Permanent emotion is defined as “the emotion which is not swallowed up by other emotions whether friendly with it or unfriendly, which quickly dissolves the others into its own condition like the salt-sea, 196

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which endures continuously in the mind”.5 The permanent emotions are nine in number – love, mirth, sorrow, anger, courage, fear, aversion, wonder, and serenity. The transitory states of mind accompany the durable states emerging from it and being again submerged in it, and they cannot endure for any length of time without attaching themselves to one of the durable states. They are as many as 33 in number like indifference, doubt, jealousy, pride, inertia, patience, passion, and shame, etc. It appears that the transitory emotions may be roughly identified with the feelings of Western psychology, though the permanent emotions are something different from the emotions. They are the qualities and activities of both sense and intellect, and they form the whole of one’s experience inherited or rather evolved biologically from last lives and are on constant modification and purification until their final extinction when one achieves liberation, sacrificing all one’s desires, sensual or intellectual. The Sāmkhya exegetes plead for a subtle body or an ethereal form, the material of which is ego (ahamkāra) that contains these primary emotions as conditioned by the activities (karma) of humankind. This ethereal form is the substratum of all the essentials that humankind inherits from its continuous tradition (samskāra) from time immemorial, from the very day of its birth – soul’s confinement in a corporeal body. Thus the permanent emotions differ in their degrees and intensity from person to person, though they are the same in kind – a combination of three gunas – sattva, rajas, and tamas. The root of the poetic process is only one permanent emotion (out of nine) or an emotional complex when a single emotion is predominant. The process involves a stimulant which strikes a particular emotion in a man with strong sensibility. When thus struck, the man who is called a poet, expresses that emotion in language, which again evokes the same emotion in another man who reads the poem. Two points are to be noted carefully here: (1) there may be a personal element in the poet being struck by the stimuli, but the moment the poet attempts an expression of this emotion, it must be impersonal, as it loses its personal attachment with the stimuli or with the effect thereof. Otherwise, expression would be simply impossible. Common sense will prove that a lover who is overwhelmed by the sorrow due to the death of his beloved cannot express his emotion in poetry. The Indian critics would not agree with Wordsworth that a recollection of the emotion in tranquillity will explain logically this state of impersonality. Recollection of a powerful emotion may rather sometimes move the man much more than before. The only logical explanation of such impersonalization is that the stimulant losing its causal efficiency lacks the utilitarian impact upon the poet. The loss of causal efficiency is proved by the fact that instead of moving the poet bitterly, an emotion like sorrow gives him a wholesome pleasure. The reason for the striking of the stimulant is not its personal relation with the poet but the poet’s extraordinary sympathetic power. It is this sympathy (sahrdayatā), the root of all aesthetic appreciation, which makes the poet’s emotion roused by the stimuli and the reader’s emotion evoked by the poet’s expression of the emotion. 197

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The second point to note is that the intensity and degree of the movement of the emotions of the poet and the reader may vary from case to case as the traditional modification (samskāra) of their emotions are necessarily different. Hence the impact of the same stimuli will strike different poets with varying intensity, and again the intensity of the same emotion in the readers will also vary accordingly. Ahhinavagupta (10th century) gives a very brilliant analysis of this poetic process in his commentary on the Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana.6 The origin of the Rāmāyana, the great Indian epic written by the first Indian poet, sage Vālmīki, is the lamentation of a he-crane for the death of its shebird due to shooting by a hunter at the time of their erotic meet. The sage of the purest heart noted it and was deeply touched by the sorrow of the bird for which he cursed the hunter to remain unhappy forever in his life. Thus the permanent emotion in this sage struck by the lamentation of the bird is sorrow (śoka) and, when expressed in language, this emotion is manifested as poetry (śloka), the central theme of which is the separation of the hero and heroine ending in pathos. Abhinavagupta asks, whose sorrow is manifested in poetry? Is it the poet’s personal emotion? And answers in the negative. It is not the personal emotion of the sage poet; had it been so, there would be no question of poetic activity obviously because a man personally afflicted by sorrow cannot write poetry. The lamentation of the bird, of course, stimulated the permanent emotion of sorrow in the sage poet. But Abhinava suggests that an artist’s observation is different from others in so far as his is an impersonal or detached but sympathetic one. The artist observes things and events as if he is witnessing a drama. Hence, he is always compared with a yogin in Indian aesthetics because both of them observe and experience the worldly phenomena indifferently without any personal involvement (tāthastya). They share others’ sufferings and happiness by an identification (tādātmya) with others which is based on sympathy only. Taking it a step further, it is not only the sorrow of the bird that they identify with. The bird is only an instrument of this stimulation. Through the bird’s sorrow, they identify with the emotion in its universal form. It is very interesting to note here that according to Abhinavagupta, a poet is primarily an aesthete who first relishes the events of the world drama and then only expresses this relish in his poetry. In the previous case, the hunter opens the drama by hunting the bird. The he-bird is the principal character (vibhāva) who expresses its permanent emotion of sorrow by lamentation; its symptom (anubhāva) and the sage perceive the whole scene as the audience of this drama. The sorrow of the bird touches the sage and being sympathetic hrdayasamvādī he identifies his emotion with that of the bird and thus by this process of generalization sādhāranikarana, the identified (or generalized or impersonalized) permanent emotion (sorrow) of the sage is transformed into Karuna rasa (or tragic joy), which he relished himself, and when it became abundant, it overflowed in the form of poetry (śloka) being 198

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regulated by the compositional principles of prosody, etc.7 Thus the epic Rāmāyana is the verbal manifestation of this generalized (or depersonalized) or aesthetic emotion of sorrow (Karuna rasa). It is by the same process, again, that the reader’s permanent emotion of sorrow is evoked and generalized (or depersonalized) which he enjoys finally. Two questions may be raised here: (1) Is the reader’s enjoyment of poetry inferior to that of the poet as it is twice removed from the perception of the world drama or, in other words, is it an enjoyment of enjoyment? (2) If emotion is the source of poetry, should its intensity and degree condition that of the creation and enjoyment of poetry? That is to say, can we admit that a poet with more powerful emotion of love can write love poems better than others and, similarly, a reader with intense passion enjoys it better than others? Abhinavagupta would answer that though the reader perceives through the perception of the poet, it does not mean that his enjoyment will be inferior to the other’s. The intensity of the enjoyment depends upon the intensity of Samskāra and upon the degree of identification or generalization of the emotion concerned. Thus the reader’s enjoyment may be even sometimes more than the poet’s while less at others. As the poet, as well as the reader, enjoys the same emotion, there is no question of any removal of this enjoyment. Similarly, the answer to the second question is that the creation and the appreciation of art do not depend only upon the intensity of emotion. With the more powerful factor being identification and generalization of the emotion by the power of sympathy sahrdayatā, it is meaningless to say that a lusty man can write and enjoy love poems, or a buffoon can write or enjoy comedies, or a hero can write and enjoy heroic poems better than others. The method of impersonalization of emotion in Indian aesthetics is, then, based on logic and common psychology. There is little mysticism of the Romantic and symbolist thinkers or any scientific technicality of the modern classicists in it. Though the Indian thinkers talked of a poetic genius (pratibhā), it meant a power of varied perception and ability for novel creations, and the idea of supernaturality (alaukikatva) of the poetic genius differs from Coleridge’s sense of the term. Art is supernatural in the sense that all the natural phenomena—emotions, ideas, impulses, and events when transformed in their generalized form lose their causal efficiency or the power of personal affliction. Love loses shame, its immediate reaction is aversion, hatred, and sorrow pain – and all in their impersonalized form to give the poet and the reader a wholesome joy.

III Some Indian scholars have paralleled Eliot’s idea of “objective correlative” with the idea of rasa. The emotion here is Rasa, the set of objects, the vibhāvas, the situation their patterned, organized presentation and the chain of events include 199

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not only the episodic stream but also the stream of emotive reactions of the characters to them the (anubhāvas and the samcāribhāvas).8 But the first objection to such a view is that vibhāva, anubhāva, and samcāribhāva must be taken together as a complex whole to produce rasa, whereas Eliot’s objective correlative does not demand such a complex. For him, it appears, any one of the three – objects, situation, and a chain of events – may serve the purpose. Besides, a set of objects may be a parallel for vibhāva, a situation for uddipana, but a chain of events is never a parallel for the Indian idea of anubhāva and vyabhicāribhāva. Abhinavagupata’s idea of the relishable (āsvādayogya) state of the impersonal emotion in the poet, which he expresses in poetry, and similarly its evocation of the same impersonalized emotion in the form of rasa in the reader is foreign to Eliot and other propounders of the theory of impersonal art in the West. Abhinavagupta’s analysis of the problem is far more subtle and precise than Eliot’s. Eliot’s application of the objectification of the impersonal emotion to the judgement of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Abhinavagupta would argue is a great failure. Eliot’s arguments against the success of the play are as follows:9 (1) Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion of disgust, which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the external facts that have to express it. (2) Hamlet’s disgust is occasioned by his mother, but his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. (3) It is a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it, therefore, remains to poison life and obstruct action. (4) The poet Shakespeare did not understand the experience which he wanted to express. It is the buffoonery of an emotion which he could not express in art. And Abhinava’s answers to these arguments would have been: (1) No emotion as such is inexpressible, nor is it in excess of the facts. The truth is that in poetry, facts, etc., do not state the emotion directly. They suggest it by indirection. This point needs a little elaboration: Ānandavardhana pleads for an indirect way of expression or the suggestive use of language (pratīyamānārtha or dhvani) as the soul poetry.10 Words have two meanings (a) the etymological or direct meaning used in all informational statements, such as in history, philosophy, and in all sciences (b) and the indirect meaning which is otherwise called dhvani (or vyañjanā). When the direct statement is subordinated to the new oblique, this means the impersonalized mental state or emotion emerges into view. Take, for example, two expressions regarding the reactions of maidens on hearing talk about their marriages: 200

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“When there is a talk of bridegrooms, maidens hold their heads down in bashfulness but there is a perceptible thrill in their bodies, which indicates pleasure in listening to such conversation and their willingness to the proposal (sprhā)”. Here the reaction, the willingness of the maidens being directly stated is just information where the poetic value is negligible. But in another case in Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhvam when Pārvatī listens about her marriage from sage Angīrā in front of her father, the same reaction of her is stated indirectly. “As the sage made this proposal, Pārvatī, who was sitting beside her father, hang her head clown and began counting silently the leaves of the lotus she was playing with”. Her hanging down of the head and absorption in a trivial occupation are suggestive of her willingness and rapture at the prospect of being married to the great Lord Śiva, whom she loves and adores so much. This is the type of expression necessary for poetic emotion. (2) Hamlet’s mother, who caused the emotion of disgust in him may not be an adequate equivalent or means of expressing this emotion. There is no need that the cause or stimuli should be the means of expressing the emotion. (3) Rasa or aesthetic emotion does not require a clear understanding of an emotion or feeling in the vibhāva. Confused feelings and emotion can be very well transmuted (or generalized) aesthetically when expressed obliquely. Ānandavardhana gives a very striking example of such a type.11 Knowing that the husband has been attracted by some other lady and has already enjoyed her and guessing again the state of agitation and anxiety in her husband for a meeting with his beloved, the wife is confused about whether she should request her husband to cut off all his relations with the beloved or tolerate this extramarital love of her husband. This confused feeling has been very successfully suggested in her speech. “You go (to your beloved). Let me alone suffer from long sighs and lamentations. You have betrayed me, but I don’t want that you should also suffer, like me, for your separation from her”. Though the wife allows her husband his meeting with the beloved, her intention is not so, for how can a wife tolerate willingly the free love of her husband? Nor can she refrain him from going also because when he has already betrayed her, how can she expect that he would care for her request? Rather she would feel more offended if he avoids her request again. Thus a confused feeling is not beyond the poetic expression; rather, it enhances the poetic beauty camatkār when expressed through suggestion. (4) In Hamlet, Shakespeare fully understands the emotion that he wants to express. It is a version of Hamlet which is strengthened and enriched by 201

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other mental states and has been fully revealed to us by the significant actions anubhāvas and drifting thoughts (samcāribhāvas). Prof. S. C. Sengupta, a very renowned Shakespearean critic in India, has very brilliantly exposed that Shakespeare has very successfully projected Hamlet’s aversion largely through this dhvani – i.e. through Hamlet’s character – his sporadic activity, his deep disgust, his subtle but confused logic, through the descriptions of the court of Elsimore, situations in Denmark, Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost and Ophelia, etc.12

IV All this having been said, an important point of argument raised by T. S. Eliot for the readers and critics of poetry still requires examination: “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry”.13 In spite of the fact that poetry is the manifestation not of the personal emotion of the poet but the emotion impersonalized, how far can we exclusively depend upon the text or the verbal structure without any reference to the poet whatsoever? In answer to this question, the Mimāmsā – philosopher’s argument – is very suggestive. Apadeva (17th century) states that the absolute verbal autonomy or impersonality is possible only in those cases where the author is unknown. This is possible only in the case of the Vedic texts, which are simply visioned by the sages and not written by anyone. Thus the impersonal Vedic texts can be said to contain the absolute impersonality, and in reading them, we have no business to seek for their authors in any way.14 Other philosophers of the same school support this view that the scriptural word alone is impersonal, external, and self-sufficient, whereas human language depends upon the intention of the author. The problem of “intention” in the meaning of texts is a complicated one and should be postponed to another occasion of discussion, but apart from that, it is reasonable to conclude that it is illogical to search for absolute impersonality from personal writings or texts written by definite persons. If that would be so, then the very excellence of poetry – the novelty and varieties of poetic vision – would be meaningless. Impersonalization of an emotion, for example, love being the same everywhere, would make poetry utterly boring. In rejecting the evolutionary process of the artistic perfection, Eliot very remarkably states that art never improves, though its material changes.15 With art’s materials being emotions, we may say that this change in emotions is due to the personal or individual vision of the poets. An honest critic need not, of course, search for the biographical data of the poet, but his studies and appreciation will certainly remain incomplete if he does not realize the distinguished personal spirit of the poet that permeates through the whole vision of the poetic creation.

Notes and References 1 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of the Romance, London: J. M. Dent & Sons. 1910, p. 5.

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2 F. P. Lu, T. S. Eliot; The Dialectical Structure of His Theory of Poetry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, Chap. 2. 3 Eliot, Hamlet (1919). 4 Bharata, Prose after Kārikā 31. 5 Dhanamjaya, Daśarūpaka IV 34. 6 Op. cit. I. 5. 7 Ibid., see also Abhinavabhāratī VI. 15 and the same on rasasūtra for a detailed analysis of the manifestation of rasa. 8 Krishnachaitanya, Sanskrit Poetics, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965, pp. 19–20. 9 Hamlet (1919). 10 Dhvanyāloka I. 4. 11 Ibid., gloss to I. 4. 12 Sengupta, Aspects of Shakespearean Tragedy, O. U. P. Calcutta, 1972, P. 158 ff. 13 S. W. p. 53. 14 Apdeva, Mimāmsā-nyāya Prakāśa, Bombay: Nirnaya Sagar Press, 1943, p. 2. 15 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in SW; for a distinction between the concepts of “personal” and “individual”, see Bradley, Appearance and Reality, London: Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930, pp. 127–8. Eliot might have been influenced by his views.

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15 EAST AND WEST IN COOMARASWAMY’S THEORY OF ART * P. S. Sastri Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s theory of art is the outcome of his commitment to philosophia perennis, a philosophy that draws heavily from the varied religions, mystics, systems of philosophy, cultural traditions, and schools of art. A product of two cultures, he was able to present a theory succinctly, though there appear certain minor inconsistencies and contradictions. Coomaraswamy rejected the word “aesthetics”, a word coined by Baumgarten from the Greek. The original Greek word refers to the sensations which represent an organism’s reactions to the external world. Such reactions are also noticeable in the world of plants and animals. Since art is “an intellectual virtue”, he refused to accept the expression “disinterested aesthetic contemplation”. As Plato said, “We cannot give the name of art to anything irrational”.1 Art is rational and it is also a ritual in which the body, mind, heart, and soul are fully involved. “Art has to do with cognition”, as Aquinas stated. Bonaventura remarked that “it is knowledge that makes the work beautiful”. Beauty is intelligibility, and it has claritas.2 Coomaraswamy traces the various stages in the history of a work of art. These are (1) “an aesthetic intuition”, (2) the “internal expression of this intuition”, (3) the “indication of this by external signs for the purpose of communication”, and (4) “the resulting stimulation of the critic or rasika to reproduction of the original intuition, or of some approximation to it”. On this view art “is always the externalization of an already completed cycle”. Here the critic follows the questionable analysis given by Croce. This is a serious drawback in an otherwise valuable exposition of the nature of art and beauty. The source of intuition is any aspect of life. The artist intuits in a moment of contemplation. “Creative art is art that reveals beauty where we should have otherwise overlooked it, or more clearly than we have yet received”. Intuition, pratibhā as the Indian aestheticians would say, is a *  This chapter was first published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. I, No. 1, Summer 1978, pp. 1–11.

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valid phase. Pratibhā is a form of wisdom (prajñā), which is revealed in the expression of the newly arising and awakened intuitions. But does art originate merely from intuition? The Indian critics have stressed also the importance of scholarship and practice. Coomaraswamy’s infatuation with Croce’s theory made him ignore these valuable aids. Yet he corrected himself even though he stated, “There is always perfect identity of intuition – expression, soul and body”.3 This should not lead one to believe that Coomaraswamy was merely following Croce; for he gave new meanings to these terms. “Works of art are reminders; in other words, supports of contemplation”. In this context, he used the word “intuition” to mean an intellection of eternal reasons, a contemplation. By expression, he meant a begotten likeness. Without contemplation, one is only a skilful workman, not an artist.4 The practice of art is a form of Yoga. The artist is called a sādhaka, mantrin, or Yogin. Art is Yoga. “The purpose of Yoga is mental concentration”, which puts an end to “all distinction between the subject and the object of contemplation”. The artist too has the same kind of concentration. As the Śukranītisāra says, let the imager establish images in temples by meditation on the deities who are the objects of his devotion. “For the successful achievement of this Yoga the lineaments of the image are described in books…. In no other way… is it possible to be so absorbed in contemplation, as thus in the making of images”.5 Śankara observed that the arrow-maker perceives nothing beyond his work when he is buried in it.6 In the Bhāgavata we read, “I have learned concentration from the marker of arrows”. This is of utmost importance since intuition arises only from an intense moment of concentration – what Kalidasa termed samādhi with reference to the painter. Agni Purāna asks the maker of images to go through ceremonial purification on the night preceding his work and to pray: “O thou Lord of all the gods, teach me in dreams how to carry out all the work I have in my mind”.7 This approach is intended to emphasize a valid distinction between art and the work of art: “The thing made is a work of art, made by art but not itself art; the art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made”.8 As Kuo Jo Hsu of the 12th century said, “The secret of art lies in the artist himself”.9 This is not a return to the biography of the artist but to the nature and tendency of his or her abiding, eternal consciousness. “Art is that by which a man works, supposing that he is in possession of his art and has the habit of his art”. Art then is not the end of the artist’s work. “Art remains in the artist”.10 This is because the work is assumed to be completed before the work of transcription is begun.11 Basing this view on the example of Vālmīki, Coomaraswamy quotes Croce’s statement that the artist “never makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination”.12 Accordingly, Coomaraswamy states that beauty “does not exist apart from the artist himself, and the rasika who enters into his experience”.13 It is debatable whether the artist has a full and complete vision before he begins his work. One can admit that the artist has only a general vision 205

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which seems to embody a value. Even in the case of Vālmīki, the poet had only an experience of sorrow (śoka) when he saw the hunter killing a Kraunca bird. It may be that the story of Rāma, he heard from Nārada, assumed after contemplation a symbolic transformation. Coomaraswamy’s earlier statements betray his predilections towards an aesthetic mysticism which Croce followed even as he brushed it aside. His later pronouncements were in tune with his concept of the impersonality of art and beauty. The artist employs symbolic language because symbols are the universal language of art. The Hindu artist was interested in ideal types and symbols, and even individuals are “symbols of general ideas”. The content of the symbol always refers to the metaphysical. Thus dance is “the manifestation of primal rhythmic energy. Śiva is the Eros Protogonos of Lucian”.14 The symbolic forms have a spiritual significance because they transmit knowledge of cosmic analogies.15 The symbols come to the artist all of a sudden, enabling him to discover connections and relations which eluded him till then. Then “art is the involuntary dramatization of subjective experience”, which is crystallized in images. The symbolism of a work of art is “the technical language of quest”. It is the supreme quest for freedom, Moksa, as the Hindu would say. Art yields spiritual freedom, which has to be won again. The vision of even the original artist may be rather a discovery than a creation. If beauty awaits discovery everywhere, that is to say that waits upon our recollection (in the Sufi sense and in Wordsworth’s): in aesthetic contemplation…. We momentarily recover the unity of our being released from individuality. Aesthetic contemplation is thus disinterested, and “the spirit is momentarily freed from the entanglement of good and evil”.16 Earlier we noticed his opposition to the expression “disinterested aesthetic contemplation”. This freedom has a specific characteristic. On the one hand, it arises from contemplation, from Yoga. On the other, it is determined by the traditional discipline from which the artist should not or would not escape. “The artist does not choose his own problems: he finds in the canon instruction to make such and such images in such and such a fashion”. The artist has to follow the traditional approach without sacrificing his originality or individuality, and this is to be accepted by every critic. The ten-armed Mahisāsuramardinī of Jāvā is not cruel, not angry, but sad with the sadness of those who are wise, and we notice tenderness and peace in the movement of the figure. The death of Hiranyakaśipu carved at Ellora, the lay worshippers at a Buddha shrine of Amarāvati, the Dryad of Sanci, the standing Buddhas of Amarāvati and Ceylon, the monkey family of Mamallapuram, and the like express “by their action their animating passion”.17 This interpretation does not follow the

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doctrine of empathy blindly. It departs from this theory even though Coomaraswamy subscribed to such a view at one stage; for, as he held, art is a form leading us to the realization of oneness with the Absolute, Brahman, who appears as the God of religion. Absolute Beauty is synonymous with God.18 This is in line with the Hindu view that the Absolute is sat, cit, ānanda – truth, consciousness, and bliss. “Most of these works of art are about God, whom we never mention in polite society”. The Indian architect was asked to visit heaven through contemplation or in a dream and there note the forms which he has to imitate. This cosmic pattern was followed in traditional architecture. Art is “the embodiment in material of a preconceived form”.19 Such a form is presented in the image of Natarāja, “an image of that Energy which science must postulate behind all phenomena”.20 The great artist does not seek hedonism (preyas) but spiritualism (śreyas). The basic problem of art is to give an enduring form to the fleeting visitation of the divine. This approach is nearer to Hegel’s. Clive Bell spoke of “significant form” as the essential characteristic of a work of art. Coomaraswamy modified this expression when he said that the works of art possess significant form in the sense “that they possess that kind of form which reminds us of beauty, and awakens in us aesthetic emotion”. It is “such form as exhibits the inner relations of things; or, after Hsieh Ho ‘which reveals the rhythm of the spirit in the gestures of living things’”. The four-armed Natarāja figure reveals the “primal rhythmic energy underlying all phenomenal appearances and activity: here is perpetual movement, perpetually poised with the rhythm of the spirit”.21 That is, the work of art must be complete in itself, and yet it must point to something beyond; it must lead us to a transcendental experience. The Rajput drawings present “a world of imagination and eternity”.22 Here is a conception of art and beauty based on the hieratic or symbolic art of India. Hegel argued in this fashion and yet he condemned the so-called symbolic art of India and the Far East without understanding its meaning. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “That figure is most worthy of praise which by its action best expresses the passion that animates it”. According to Hsieh Ho, “The work of art should exhibit the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of living things”. The work must possess, says Holmes, “in some degree the four qualities of Unity, Vitality, Infinity, and Repose”. Stating these views with approval, Coomaraswamy observes that “a work of art is great in so far as it expresses its own theme in a form at once rhythmic and impassioned: through a definite pattern it must express a motif deeply felt”.23 This rhythmic activity, which is a melody, is called Līlā. Hence Coomaraswamy could reject Hegelian distinctions of art into symbolic, classical, and romantic. All art is one and it shows no progress. The Indian approach accepted by Coomaraswamy is from the theory of rasa. Rasa is identified with beauty, rasāsvādana is equated with aesthetic

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emotion. The aesthetic experience, as Viśvanātha explains, is pure, indivisible, self-manifested, compounded equally of joy and consciousness, free of admixture with any other perception, the very life of it is supersensuous wonder. Yet Coomaraswamy argues that the expression rasāsvādana is fictitious because rasāsvādana is rasa, and vice versa. In the aesthetic contemplation, subject and object are identical and so are cause and effect.24 Are they? At most, there can be a similarity, a correspondence, or a transformation. Beauty is not an object of knowledge because its perception cannot be separated from its very existence. It has no existence apart from perception. Still, this experience is not eternal in time, but it is timeless. It is “supersensuous, hyperphysical (alaukika) and the only proof of its reality is to be found in experience”. This view is similar to the one expressed by Indian critics who saw a similarity, not an identity, between the aesthetic and the religious experiences. But Coomaraswamy treats similarity as identity. “Religion and art are the names for one and the same experience – an intuition of reality and of identity”. This is a view accepted by the Neoplatonists, Hsieh Ho, Goethe, Blake, Schopenhauer, and Schiller, and it is not refuted by Croce. Here Coomaraswamy quotes Clive Bell, according to whom pure form is “form not clogged with unaesthetic matter such as associations”.25 We differ. The aesthetic experience cannot be the same as the experience of the Absolute. The latter experience has no element of sense, and it is formless, while the former has a concreteness, and it does involve the activity of the senses. The Absolute is not an object of experience for it is said to be one with the subject. On the other hand, the aesthetic experience arises from a given objective existence. To this extent, the beauty of the object and the emotion it gives rise to must be inherent in the object. Otherwise, we will have a solipsistic theory of art, a theory akin to Croce’s, and such a theory cannot insist upon the external existence of a work of art either in the act of composition or in the act of experiencing. Coomaraswamy, however, accepts the external existence of the work of art since he applies the doctrine of empathy to explain the significance of the work. He even quotes Whitman’s lines in defence of his advocacy of empathy: All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it…. All music is what awakes in you when you are reminded of it by the instruments. Elaborating this idea he observes, In the works called beautiful we recognize a correspondence of theme and expression, content and form…. It is our own activity, in the presence of the work of art, which completes the ideal relation (of identity), and it is in this sense that beauty is what we “do to” a work of art rather than a quality present in the object…. In the stricter sense of completed internal aesthetic activity, however, beauty is absolute and cannot have degrees. This leads him to argue that “the vision of beauty is spontaneous…. It is a state of grace that cannot be achieved by deliberate effort”.26 But if the 208

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beauty of a work of art is determined by what we “do to” it, we have to deny objectivity and universality to the experience. Croce and Clive Bell led Coomaraswamy to this solipsistic position whence he could argue that the external signs possess significant form and that this form “reminds us of beauty and awakens in us aesthetic emotion”. Elsewhere, he referred the signs to the shape and form to the idea or content. This is a serious selfcontradiction. Volkelt and Basch spoke of a subconscious, spontaneous, immediate fusion of the percept and the concept. Their theory of sympathetic symbolism would have helped Coomaraswamy in steering clear of the fallacies inherent in Croce’s theory. The problem of sympathetic symbolism in interpreting the concept of beauty is closely related to the general problem of the meaning of art. Indian critics spoke of three main functions of a sign, symbol, or word. These are the primary (abhidhā), inferred or implied (laksana), and suggested (dhvani, vyanjana) meanings. The last was taken to be of utmost importance. Coomaraswamy defends the Indian theory of dhvani or vyanjana (artistic suggestion) when he argues that it is “an improvement of Croce’s definition that ‘expression is art’”. Poetry, as Viśvanātha said, is a sentence ensouled by rasa – Vākyam rasātmakam kāvyam. It is a sentence in which one of the nine rasas is suggested or implied. It is “the savouring of this flavour, rasāsvadana, through empathy, by those possessing the necessary sensibility”. This is the condition of beauty. But empathy in his view makes beauty appear as a subjective state. Then a work of art is beautiful only when we impute beauty to it. In such a situation, beauty becomes a quality, not the being of the object. This standpoint runs counter to the entire traditional teaching of India by which Coomaraswamy swears. “The true critic (rasika) perceives beauty of which the artist exhibits the signs”. He “knows without reasoning whether or not the work is beautiful, before the mind begins to question what it is ‘about’”.27 Then the critic too must be credited with intuition. In such a case, the distinction between the poet and the critic disappears, and this is not borne out in actual experience, particularly with reference to natural beauty. Moreover, it rejects any empirical approach. We should rather agree with Volkelt in holding that we must begin with the empirical data, employ whatever methods are fruitful, and then take up a metaphysical stand. Coomaraswamy apparently begins with the metaphysical like the Idealists. “The concept of beauty originated with the philosopher, not with the artist; he has been ever concerned with saying clearly what has to be said”.28 This may be true with reference to the traditional Hindu art, where doing well mattered most. The artist seeks to do his job right, while the philosopher brings in the word “beautiful” and lays down its conditions in terms of perfection, harmony, and clarity. Beauty can be said to be the “perfection apprehended as an attractive power”. In the Middle Ages, beauty was said to add “to the good an ordering to the cognitive faculty by which the good is known as such”. Beauty implies cognition, and yet it moves the will, for it is “specifically human”.29 Then beauty must be an 209

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existent which the artist seeks to reveal to others. It cannot be an adventitious feature of the good or the true. Coomaraswamy himself stated, “Beauty is reality as experienced by the artist”. Then does beauty become purely subjective? Coomaraswamy rejects such a view by bringing in a non-cognitive element. The world of Beauty, like the Absolute, cannot be known objectively … The mere intention to create beauty is not sufficient; there must exist an object of devotion… We can no more achieve Beauty than we can find Release by turning our backs on the world…. The artist reveals this beauty wherever the mind attaches itself; and the mind attaches itself, not directly to the Absolute, but to objects of choice.30 Beauty is to be sought in the world in which we live, even if it were said to be transcendental. It cannot be merely subjective, nor can it be a quality. There appears then to be an inherent contradiction, which could have been resolved. On the nature of beauty, again, we find some difficulty in understanding the views of Coomaraswamy. Is beauty an intrinsic or an instrumental value! Is it a slate of mind or a quality of the object? “The beauty of anything unadorned is not increased by ornament but made more effective by it. Ornament is characterization; ornaments are attributes”.31 Here Coomaraswamy evidently follows Kalidasa’s famous lines in Vikramorvaśiyam and Abhijñāna Śākuntalam. The beauty of a work of art depends on the perfection achieved. Then it must be integral to the work. If it is a form of perfection, we cannot speak of one work as being more beautiful or less than another work of art. “There are no degrees of beauty…. There cannot be any continuous progression in art”. This again is Croce’s argument; the second sentence alone is valid. Plato and Aristotle had divergent views regarding the relative artistic values of the epic and the tragic. Even in the process of creation, we do notice different levels of complexity. But Coomaraswamy argues from another point of view: Art is an imitation of that perfect spontaneity – the identity of intuition and expression in those who are of the kingdom of heaven, which is within us. Thus it is that art is nearer to life than any fact can be; and Mr. Yeats has reason when he says that Indian music…is not an art, but life itself.32 Likewise, the Rajput painters knew that their art had to make human life truly and fully significant. Even in the portrait of a “Dying Man” we have the Muslim “reverence for humanity, and humanism attains an intensity of expression which can only be called religious”. Rajput paintings, however, reveal “a profound sense of sympathy for all natural life and a sense of fundamental unity of all created things”.33 This art is aimed at “leading out man’s thought from self into the universal life around him”.34 This approach is largely eclectic, and yet it does not deviate from the traditional Indian framework. 210

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Coomaraswamy’s account of the Indian theory of beauty was based largely on Sāhitya Darpana, Agni Purāna, Vyakti Viveka, Dhanamjaya’s Daśa Rūpaka and Śukra Nīti Sāra.35 This attitude was also influenced by the writings of Aquinas, Lipps, Croce, and others, though he differs to some extent because he held that art is cognitive. Beauty has to do with knowledge and goodness, of which it is precisely the attractive aspect; and since it is by its beauty that we are attracted to a work, its beauty is evidently a means to an end, and not itself the end of art; the purpose of art is always one of effective communication.36 Then beauty becomes an inevitable accident, an indeterminate end, for it is “perfection apprehended as an attractive power”. It is inseparable from truth. This position can be held only with reference to hieratic art. “To do well is to do sacred things”.37 A work is beautiful in terms of perfection, of truth, and aptitude, for then alone can it be said that it is well and truly made.38 We read that “Vedic aesthetics consisted essentially in the appreciation of skill”.39 This is an understatement, for he did not analyze some significant statements made by the Vedic seers who were also poets. Aesthetic emotion or rasa “is said to result in the spectator, though it is not effectively caused, through the operation of determinants (vibhāva), consequents (anubhāva), moods (bhāva), and the eight involuntary emotions (sāttvika bhāva)”. This statement is based on Bharata and Dhanamjaya. vibhāvas include the aesthetic problem, plot, theme, hero, characters, and the like which are, as Croce would say, the “physical stimulants to aesthetic reproduction”. Still, the aesthetic emotion is identical “with that felt when the self perceives the Self”. The consequents are the “deliberate manifestations of feeling”. The moods include the 33 emotions and the nine permanent ones (sthāyī bhāva).40 One of the permanent moods must form a master – motif to evoke rasa. To this mood are subordinated the expressions of emotion.41 As Bharata said,42 the first essential of a work of art is unity. If a transient emotion is the master – motif, the work ceases to have rasa.43 “Pretty art which emphasizes passing feelings and personal emotion is neither beautiful nor true”, for it confuses loveliness and beauty.44 Loveliness refers to will and emotions, while beauty is intellectual, metaphysical, and intuitive. Beauty as such has a reference to man’s awareness of the ultimate metaphysical nature of reality. It is rasa. Aesthetic emotion is rasa, according to Coomaraswamy. “The tasting of rasa – the vision of beauty – is enjoyed, says Viśvanātha, only by those who are competent there to”. Dharmadatta, as quoted by Viśvanātha, held that “those devoid of imagination, in the theatre, are but as the wood-work, the walls and the stones”. But “the capacity and genius necessary for appreciation (of poetry) are partly ‘ancient’ and partly cultivated (contemporary): but cultivation alone is useless, and if the poet is born, so too is the rasika, 211

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and criticism is akin to genius”.45 This is a return to the method of Pater, and Coomaraswamy rejected the theory of art for art’s sake. The rasas accepted by Indian critics are nine. These, says Coomaraswamy, are “arbitrary terms of rhetoric”. Here again, he follows the unfortunate doctrine of Croce, though he could get some support also from Indian aestheticians and critics. “The external signs – poems, pictures, dances, and so forth – are effective reminders”.46 What do they remind? If they remind something, does the aesthetic value reside in what we are reminded of? There is no answer. Following etymology, Coomaraswamy states that “rasa is tasted – beauty is felt – only by empathy, Einfuehlung (sādhārana); that is to say by entering into, feeling, the permanent motif; but it is not the same as the permanent motif itself”.47 This doctrine of empathy as accepted by the author, denies by implication objectivity to the work of art. If beauty is not present in the object, it must be in the mind. Coomaraswamy’s statement that “beauty is a state” cannot be accepted because beauty is what is not only felt but also experienced objectively. The Daśa Rūpaka declares that “beauty is absolutely independent of the sympathetic – Delightful or disgusting exalted or lowly, cruel or kindly, obscure or refined, (actual) or imaginary; there is no subject that cannot evoke rasa in man”. This is a valid point. But Dhanamjaya follows the doctrine as developed by Bhattanāyaka who fused the Yoga and Advaita positions. Coomaraswamy appears to be unaware of the developments initiated by Abhinavagupta and perfected by Jagannātha. His interpretation of rasāsvāda is questionable. Moreover, Einfuehlung is not the same as sādhāranikarana since the latter is a term expressing universalization brought about by the imaginative activity (bhāvanā vyāpāra) of the artist. Quoting Daśa Rūpaka, 4.47, Coomaraswamy observes that “many works which have aimed at the production of aesthetic emotion, that is to say, which were intended to be beautiful, have failed of their purpose”. Why did they fail? It is because they ignored the nature and value of the experience and held fast to the transient emotion. The emotion as such is neutral because it is in itself neither beautiful nor ugly. Yet Coomaraswamy observes, “The conception of beauty and the adjective ‘beautiful’ belong exclusively to aesthetic and should only be used in aesthetic judgment”. By beautiful objects we generally mean those that are congenial to us either in a practical way or in an ethical way. But many times, we judge a work of art as beautiful “if it represents some form or activity of which we heartily approve, or if it attracts us by tenderness or gaiety of its colour, the sweetness of its sounds or the charm of its movement”. In such judgments, we should not use the language of pure aesthetics. When we speak aesthetically, we can speak of the presence or absence of beauty, and we can call the work rasavat or otherwise. This approach is not far different from that of Croce. What should we say about a work which is not ugly and yet not beautiful? Coomaraswamy’s theory does not have a place for such a situation. Yet a work of art is 212

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good or bad with reference to its aesthetic quality; only the subject and the material of the work are entangled in relativity. In other words, to say that a work of art is more or less rasavat, is to define the extent to which it is a work of art, rather than a mere illustration.48 Here he is actually supporting the doctrine of the degrees of beauty which, on theoretical grounds, he rejected.

Notes and References 1 Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1956, pp. 16, 11, 22. 2 Christian and Oriental, pp. 48, 102. 3 The Dance of Shiva, Asia Publishing House, Third Printing, Bombay, 1916 (originally published by the Sunwise Turn, New York, 1918) pp. 65, 69, 70. 4 Christian and Oriental, pp. 10, 35, 37. 5 The Dance, p. 43. 6 Vedānta Sūtra Bhāshya, 3.2.10. 7 Agni Purāṇa, Chap. 43; The Dance, pp. 43–4; cf. Yoga Sūtra, 1. 38; Kathopaniṣat, 5.8; Brihadāranyakopaniṣat, 4.3.9–14, pp. 16–18. 8 Christian and Oriental, p.18. 9 The Dance, p. 193. 10 Christian and Oriental, pp. 97, 111. 11 The Dance, p. 45. 12 Croce, Aesthetic, p. 162. 13 The Dance, p. 66. 14 The Dance, p. 83. 15 Christian and Oriental, pp. 73–9. 16 The Dance, pp. 68–9, 153. 17 Ibid., pp. 98–9. 18 Ibid., p.70. 19 Christian and Oriental, pp. 20, 32, 69. 20 The Dance, p. 94. 21 Ibid., pp. 67, 99. 22 Rajput Painting, 1.7. 23 The Dance, pp. 97–8. 24 Ibid., pp. 58, 193. Cf. Sāhitya Darpanaḥ, 3, 33, 51, 53, 54. 25 Bell: Art, p. 54. 26 The Dance, p. 65. 27 Ibid., pp. 57, 68. 28 Ibid., p. 67. 29 Christian and Oriental, pp. 76–7, 92. 30 The Dance, p. 59. Cf. The Gītā,14. 31 Christian and Oriental, p. 18. 32 The Dance, pp. 69, 112. 33 Art and Swadeshi, pp. 81–4. 34 Rajput Painting, 1.71. 35 See The Dance, p.192. 36 Christian and Oriental, p. 17. 37 Hinduism and Buddhism, pp. 33–4. 38 Christian and Oriental, p. 76. 39 The Dance, p. 40.

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40 Ibid., pp. 53. 41 See Daśa Rūpakam, 4.1, 4. 46. 42 Nātya Śāstram, 7.8. 43 Daśa Rūpakam, 4. 45. 44 The Dance, p. 54. 45 Ibid., p. 55. 46 Ibid., pp. 54, 67. 47 Ibid., pp. 54, 153. 48 Ibid., pp. 57, 63, 64.

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INDEX

Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes number Abhinavagupta xxiii, 46–51, 198–200, 212 absolute spirit 109 Ackerman, J.S. 75, 77n18, 82, 90n10 act of generation 72 Addison, Joseph 185, 189–90 Adorno, Theodor W. 24n39 aesthetic activity 93 aesthetic appreciation 78, 84, 91 aesthetic attitude 88 aesthetic comprehension of reality 10–11 aesthetic connoisseur 84 aesthetic contemplation 206–7 aesthetic emotion 54 aesthetic engrossment xv aesthetic enjoyments 92–3 aesthetic experience 53–7, 61, 80–8, 207–8 “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” 54 aesthetic ideologies 78, 89 aesthetic intuition 204–5 aesthetic judgements 95 aesthetic object xvi; aesthetic character 36; “aesthetic point of view” theory 36; aesthetic qualities vs. aesthetic values 38–51; art object 38; creative imagination/delusional vision 36; definition 34; embodied intention 37; natural objects 36; non-­aesthetic object 36; in objectivist terms 34; “self-­expressive,” 37; in subjectivist terms 34–5; value-­bearing qualities 38; works of art 37 aesthetic pleasure 118–9, 123–4 “aesthetic point of view” theory 36 aesthetic qualities 53, 59–61 Aesthetics and Aesthetic Perception xv Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, The Analytic Tradition xiv

aesthetics-­artistics restrictions 17 aesthetics, definition 3 aesthetic supervenience 53, 58, 60 aesthetic terms 58 aesthetic theory 101 aesthetic traits 59 Aesthetic Value 58 aisthanesthai 3 aisthesis 3, 14, 19–20 aisthetos 3 alienation, xvi Altieri, Charles xiv, xxi, 162–81 The Ambassadors 64 Ambrose 72, 77n9 “American Psycho,” 65 “Analytic of the Beautiful,” 57 Anna Karenina 130, 173 anti-­cognitivism 94 Aquinas xiii Areopagetica 133 Aristotle xvii, 69, 71–2, 115–7, 119–21, 123–7, 141, 155, 186–9, 192n1, 192n4, 210 Art and the Aesthetic 154 artefact: classification 156–8; conferral of 159–60; definition 154–5; as product of craftsmanship 155–6 artistic enjoyment 75 art proper 100 Arts-­and-­Crafts Movement 8 artworks 33 assimilating activity 76 Aṣṭādhyāyī xiii attitude theory xviii, 78–9, 81 auditory receptors xii autonomy 20, 164, 166–7 Bacon, Francis 74 Barthes, Roland 167

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INDEX

Bartholomew, Douglas 63, 67n27 Basil of Cappadocia 71 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 4, 15 Beardsley, Mitias xvi Beardsley, Monroe C. 34, 37–8, 42, 45, 50, 142 beauty 81, 92–3 Bell, Clive 54–5, 66n5, 133, 208–9 Berenson, Bernard 25 Bhagavadgita 76 Bharata Muni xii Bishop Butler’s dictum 91 Bloch, Ernst 107 Boersema, David xiv Bonaventura 204 bourgeois approaches 85 bourgeois experience of art 87 Brahmānanda sahodar xii, xxiv Brahmanas 68 British Journal of Aesthetics xiv Bruns, Gerald 179n2 Budd, Malcolm 67n24 Bullough, Edward 56 Butcher, S.H. 127n1, 128n6 Carter 121 catharsis xx, 125–6 Cavell, Stanley 178 censorship xx Chari, V.K. xvi, 33–51 children’s art 31 Christian community 130–1 Christie, Agatha 148 civilization xii, 26 cognition 209–10 cognitivism 94 Collingwood, R.G. xix, xviii, 66n3, 91–93, 95–103, 104n1, 104n3, 170 commitment 78 comparative perspective xvi comparative space xix comprehensive aesthetics 16 contemporary aesthetics 8, 33 Coomaraswamy, Anand K. xiii, xxiii, 204–14 Crime and Punishment 134 criticism and appreciation 81–2 Croce 204–6, 208–9 cross-­disciplinary design 20 Cubism xix cultural values 26–7 Dadaism xix Danto, Arthur C. xiv, 5

“delicacy of taste,” 28 Denis, Maurice 168 De proprietatibus rerum 73 derealization of reality 11–12 Derick de Kerckhove 13 Derrida, Jacques 166, 171–2, 181n11 Dewey, John 134, 170 Dickie, George xxi, 45, 49, 51, 154, 159 Diffey, T.J. xviii, 91–104 Dilthey, W. xix, 107–11 discriminating sensitivity 29 discriminatory acuteness 28 discursive community 82 Dittmar, Linda 179n2 Dubos, Abby 189 Ducasse, C. J. 84, 90n13 Dufrenne, Michael 39 “East and West in Coomaraswamy’s Theory of Art,” xiii elementary aesthetic experience 18 Eliot, T.S. xxii, 194–6, 200, 202 Elysium of beauty 17 Emerson 108 empathy 208, 212 Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 58 epistemological commitment 94 epistemology 112; automatic writing 107; avant-­garde art 107; causes and principles 106; characteristics 106, 111; The Essence of Philosophy 107–8; knowledge and interpretation 109–10; notion of truth 110–1; political engagement 106–7; postmodernism 107; Sein und Zeit 108–9; self-­assertion 107 ethical naturalism 94 evolution theory 87 family resemblances 15–16 father of aesthetics 4 Faulkner 147–8 Feyerabend 109 Fiedler, Konard 15 Fontenelle 190 formalism 103 Foucault 172 Frederick, Robert E. xix, 115–28 Freudian psychoanalysis 99 Freud, Sigmund 115, 118–27 Fry, Roger 170 Geist der Utopie 107 Gelley, Alexander 180n6

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INDEX

genetic engineering 7 George 110 Georgics 70 Gestalt perception 30–1 Glamorama 64–5 globalized aestheticization 7–9 Godlovitch, Stan xviii, 78–89 Goffman 172 Golden, Leon 125–6 Goldman, Alan 58–62, 67n13 Gombrich 168–9 goodness 103–4 Graff, Gerald 170, 174, 180n10 Graham, Gordan xiv Greek speculation 68 Grimes, William 179n2 Groos, Karl 77n19 Guernica 154 Hamlet 134, 194 Hartman, Geoffrey 172, 179n2 Haydn 139 hearing 12 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 15, 23n29, 109 Heidegger, M. 105, 108–1 Hemingway 147–8 Hermeren, Goran 58, 67n13 Holderlin 110 homo aestheticus 7 Horace 188, 190 Hospers, John xiv, xx, 129–53 humankind 26 Hume, David 28, 190 Husserlian analysis of listening to music 63 Hyman, S.E. 195–6 “ideological” barrier 80 imitation theory: actual and representational similarity 185–6; causes 186–8; communicative similarity 186; criticism 192; energy expenditure 118; epistemological similarity 184; equilibration 120; expressive similarity 184–5; formal/ nonrepresentational properties 119; hallucinatory wish fulfilment 120–2; humans in action 115–6; latent dream content 118; “lower faculty of knowledge,” 189–90; manifest dream 118–9; memorial similarity 186; mental images 182–4; neurotic symptom 118–9; pleasure principle

117–21; pleasures of imagination 189–90; psychoanalysis 122–3; psychological law 116–7; “reflection of reality,” 121–4; secularization 191; species tragedy 124–7; works of art 189–91 “immoral” tendencies xx “Imperfect Critic,” 194 Indian aesthetic theory 76 Indian speculation 68 Indian theory xvii, 76, 209, 211 Inferno 133 intellectual inference 30 intricate and subtle interconnections 86 Introspectionist Counterattack 79 the Ion 130 James, Henry 64, 67n29, 136 Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics xiv, 70 Joyce, James 148 Kantian insistence 93 Kantian tradition 57 Kant, Immanuel 57, 66n9, 106, 163 Kelly, Ellsworth 31 kind of imitation 75 King Lear 41 Kivy, Peter 53, 62, 66n1 Kṛśaśva xiii Kuhn 109 Lamarque, Peter xiv Landers, Anne 55 Langer, Susanne 195–6 Langer, Suzanne 162 law of identity 91, 102 Lebenskunst 4, 19 Levinson, Jerrold 53, 58, 60–1, 66n2, 67n23 The Life of Henry the Fifth 73 literary criticism 87 Lucie-­Smith, Edward 104, 104n8 Lukacs 174 Macbeth 134 Maeterlinck 108 Malevich, Kazimir 162, 164, 166–8, 170, 173–5, 178–9, 180n5 Margolis, Joseph 154 Martland, T.R. xvii, 68–76 Mather, F.J. 145 McLuhan, Marshall 13 media 22n21

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INDEX

Mendelsohn, Daniel 64, 67n30 mental images xxii; actual and representational similarity 185–6; communicative similarity 186; daydreams 183; epistemological similarity 184; expressive similarity 184–55; illusions/hallucinations 183; imagination 183; memorial similarity 186; memories 183; “non-­reality” of imitations 183–4; perceptions 182–3 metaphysical commitment 94 “The Metaphysical Poets,” 194 Meyer, L.B. 86, 90n16 Middlemarch 134 Mitias, Michael H. 35, 39 Mona Lisa 156, 160 Mondrian, Piet 162 Moore, G.E. xviii, 91–94, 96–104, 104n2, 131–2 moral disease 96 morality 97, 153; aesthetic values 132–3; Antony and Cleopatra case 146–9; Aristotle’s Theory of Catharsis 141–3; case of Botticelli 149–52; cognizance of art 137; of community 136; cultures 138; individuality and complexity 138–40; instrumental values 144–5, 147; Life magazine 129; Lysistrata 145; moral conflicts 134; moral influence 141; news reading 133–4; perceptual discrimination 143–4; preachment 134; reading literature 135–6; religious conversion 130–1; the Republic 130; sublime experiences 131–2; sympathetic imagination 135; Ulysses 145–6; world without art 137 naturalism 98 naturalistic fallacy 100 nature 82 Nātyaśāstra xiii Nietzsche 108 Nighantūs xiii non-­aesthetic experiences 33 non-­aesthetic qualities 61 non-­ambiguity commandment 16 objective correlative xxiii object-­related conception 80 occidental culture 12 Oedipus Rex 123 “Of the Standard of Taste,” 28

Oldest System-­Program of German Idealism 8 The Oldest System-­Program of German Idealism, 1796 4 “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” 105 organic unity 30 The Origin of the Work of Art 110 ornithological experience 87 Osborne, Harold xiv, xvi, 25–32, 170 Othello 134 pain phenomenology 55 Painting as an Art 62 Pāṇini xiii “Perfect Critic,” 194 performing arts (P-­works) 157–8 Perry, John 167 the Phaedrus 130 Philosophical Investigations 171 Philosophy and the Mirror Nature 106 philosophy of art xiii Philosophy of Art, Aesthetic Theory and Practice xiv philosophy of life xix Philosophy of the Arts, An Introduction to Aesthetics xiv Piaget, Jenn 77n20, 68–76 plastic arts 156 Plato 130–1, 183, 186–7, 188–9, 210 Platonic tendency 69 pleasure 61, 100 Poetics 115, 124–6 post-­coital “melancholy,” 81 Pound, Ezra 194 practical perception 31 primitive cultures 107 principle of coherence 195 principle of comprehensiveness 195 principle of transformation 195 The Principles of Art xviii, 91 Prote philosophia 106 Psychical Distance 56, 66n7 psychological diseases 96 psychological doctrine 85 psychological law 116 “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” 126 quasi-­hedonic approach 81 Queen Elizabeth 138 Rajput paintings 210 rasāswāda xii

218

INDEX

“rasa” theory 46–50 Raskolnikov 134 rationality 71 reconfiguration of aisthesis 12–13 Reductionist Counterattack 79 refinements of sensibility 29 renaissance humanism 73 representational art: aesthetics of modernism 178–9; benign deconstruction 172; conventional oppositions 172–3, 175–6; description 177; epistemology 176; exemplification 163–4, 176–7; expressionist theory 169–72; forms of power 178; identification 173–75; meta-­reflections 165; Middlemarch 177; non-­objectivity 164, 166–7; presentational features 162; problem of representativeness 167–9; realism model 174; reconciliation 173; resemblance model 173–4; visual experience 165 representational painting 62 retention and protention 63 revalidation of non-­electronic experiences 13–14 Rhetoric 117, 125 Rig Veda 68 Rilke 110 Robinson, Jenefer 63, 67n28 Roblin, Ronald E. xxi, 154–61 Rorty, Richard 109, 176 Ross, Stephanie A. xvii, 53–65 Ruskin 108

Sircello, Guy 90n3, 170 sleeping and waking, intermediate states 25 Smith, Leon Polk 31 Snoeyenbos, Milton xix, 115–28 Sophocles 110 Sörbom, Göran xxii, 182–3 Speaking of Art 53 Spillane, Mickey 148 “spiritual” force xxi Stein Haugom Olsen xiv “Style and Personality in the Literary Work,” 63 Sukla, A.C. xxii, 194–203 Suprematist Composition, Red Square and Black Square 164 Surrealism xix symbolic language 206–7 sympathetic symbolism 209 the Symposium 130

sah daya xii Sartre xvi Sastri, P.S. xiii, xxiii, 204–14 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph xiv, 22n10 Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 4 “science of sensuous cognition,” 4 Semantic Counterattack 79 Seneca 186–8 Sengupta, S.C. 202 sensibility 28 sensory perception 27 sexuality implicit 55 Shakespeare 134, 137–8, 148 Shelley 135–7 Sibley, Frank 58–60, 67n11 Śilālin xiii

taste receptors xii theory of impersonality: artistic operation 195; artistic perfection 202; critical writings 194–5; generalization process 198–9; intensity 198–9; objective correlative 195–6, 199–202; permanent emotion 196–9; supernaturality 199; transitory emotion 197 theory of rasa 207–8, 211–3 theory of similarities 74–5 Tolstoy, Leo 108, 130–1, 136, 192 traditional aesthetics 8–10, 14 traditional presupposition: art criticism 5; basic belief of 5; interdisciplinary approaches 5; mono-­conceptual analysis 6; poly-­conceptual art criticism 6 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 194 Trakl 110 “tranquil certainty of philosophical aesthetics,” xix transdisciplinarity 20–21 Truth and Method 107 ultimum bonum 85 Upmā xiii value 62–65 Vattimo, Gianni xix, 105–12 Vedāngas xiii Vedic texts xxiii

219

INDEX

Ventoux, Mont 74 Vienna is beautiful 95 Virgil, R.D. 71, 77n3 visual conceptualizations 31 Vivas, Eleseo 195–6 Wagner 139–40 War and Peace 130 Warnock, G. 98, 104n6 Watt, Ian 64 Wellek, René 195–6 Welsch, Wolfgang xiv, xv, 3–21, 22n17, 24n41 Western empiricism 69 Western knowledge system xiii Western speculation 76 “Whole or Part Relations in Music, An Exploratory Study,” 63 Wilkinson, Marguerite 77n17 Williams, Bernard 104, 104n9 Wilson, Colin 26, 31n1 Wimsatt, W.K. 147 Wittgensteinian 86 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5, 15, 21n7, 24n42, 29, 176 Wollheim, Richard 62–3, 67n26

work of art vs. aesthetic object 29; aesthetic emotion 41, 47–8; aesthetic point of view 38; aesthetic qualities 43; aesthetic value 40; A-­Quality 38, 40; Aristotle’s instinct 45; art emotions 42; attentional focus 45; Beardsley’s formulation 45; expressed value 41; ideal signification 43; meaning-­bearing entity 44; non-­objective forms 43; perceptible property 41; phenomenally objective 38; pleasurability 51; pleasure-­yielding aesthetic value 41; “properties” and “qualities,” 39; pure aesthetic value 45; “rasa” theory 46–50; regional perception 38; representational art 46; representational elements 40; schema 43; self-­rewarding activity 45; sense of “thatness,” 49; tertium quid 39; Western aesthetics 47 works of art: complexity 19; and everyday perception 18; models of existence 18–9; modern breaks 19 Yoga xxiii, 205

220