Artistic Creation: A Phenomenological Account 9781498593540, 9781498593533, 1498593542

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Artistic Creation

Artistic Creation A Phenomenological Account Jeff Mitscherling and Paul Fairfield

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mitscherling, Jeffrey Anthony, author. Title: Artistic creation : a phenomenological account / Jeff Mitscherling and Paul Fairfield. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019005186 (print) | LCCN 2019012331 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498593540 (electronic) | ISBN 9781498593533 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) Classification: LCC BH301.C84 (ebook) | LCC BH301.C84 M58 2019 (print) | DDC 111/.85--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005186 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Gloria and Gwyneth

Contents

Preface: Tracking Intentions

ix

1 2

What Artists Tell Us Some Central Concepts and Theories

3 4 5 6

More Clues from Plato and Aristotle A Model of the Work of Art Structural and Hermeneutic Considerations Implications

Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Authors

1 23 51 71 95 117 137 147 153 157

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Preface Tracking Intentions

To say that the topic of artistic creation is elusive—indeed, highly elusive—is an understatement. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2004, Bob Dylan responded to Ed Bradley’s question, “Where did [‘Blowin’ in the Wind’] come from?” in these words: “It just came. It came from right out of that wellspring of creativity, I would think.” Asked further about some of his era-defining songs of the 1960s, he had this to say: “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Well, those early songs were like almost magically written. . . . Well, try to sit down and write something like [‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’]. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know, it’s a different kind of a penetrating magic.” Artists have always struggled to explain how it is that they do what they do, and philosophers have struggled along with them, often resorting to otherworldly explanations that are hardly preferable to a shrug of the shoulders. How does one write a song, a poem, or a novel? How does one paint a picture, create a sculpture, or design a building? How does one know when a work is finished or decide that it’s good? What’s the process like, and from a first-person point of view? A common opinion has long been that the process by which a work of art comes into being is so unanalyzable that only fools rush in with theories and explanations that any sensible person would want nothing to do with. Is the creative process so utterly subjective and mysterious that it simply defies description? Our suspicion in writing this book is that perhaps it’s not quite as mysterious as we often hear. Perhaps the process by which art is created has a good deal in common with the experience of the audience or the interpreter of a work. Perhaps artistic creativity has to do not with creation ex nihilo but with the discovery of what’s already there, waiting to be seen and to come fully into being. Michelangelo famously said of his later sculpture that he freed the figures from the stone. He was speaking figuratively, of course, but isn’t there a sense in which he was also speaking the truth? Without a doubt, there’s more than an element of mystery here, as artists and philosophers since ancient times have never ceased to remark. There’s no formula or code to crack, no tidy set of procedures to consult, but to say that the matter is mysterious isn’t quite to say that it’s mystical ix

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or wholly beyond the reach of experience. Our theme isn’t ineffable; it’s merely elusive. No appeal need be made to any conception of “genius” that suggests a capacity not found in the mental equipment of ordinary human beings, or to equally otherworldly notions of “inspiration,” and so on. Artists aren’t unlike the rest of us. They’re merely good—on occasion superlatively good—at doing what we all do every day. But what is that? We shall be speaking of this as a mode of following or tracking something or other. The artist is imaginatively tracking what we shall be referring to as an intention. In encountering the work of art as well, in what’s called aesthetic experience, we’re actively following something, some bits of data, colors, shapes, sounds, or words, some perceptual stuff or other. We’re tracing the progress of our gaze, and adjusting our sight as we proceed. We’re establishing relations, getting familiar with the lay of the painted or verbal land. Following, apprehending, recognizing, and discerning are all fitting words here. The familiar saying that “you see yourself in art” is no empty romantic pronouncement but is in a profound sense true. You do see yourself in art. You also become yourself there, in this elusive mode of experience, or you might. Art does far more than merely entertain or provide a certain kind of pleasure. It speaks. More than that, it speaks the truth. It also changes our life, or it might. In this study of artistic creation we shall not be attempting to offer a definitive, comprehensive account of the nature of all art or all creativity, nor shall we try to construct an exhaustive analysis of the practice of artistic creation. Our task is far more modest. We hope merely to identify an essential feature of an activity that’s been cloaked in mystery for as long as history records. And history has been quite busy recording this activity. The earliest pre-Socratic poet-philosophers were already writing about this seemingly divine activity over 2,500 years ago, and with Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BCE the discussion became a systematic analysis. Philosophers have continued to discuss the arts, artistic creation, and the experience of art ever since, and the literature in this area is vast. An overwhelming number of these accounts suggest in one way or another that our experience with the completed work of art seems often to share a fundamental structural identity with the experience of its creation. In this book we record the conclusions we have drawn from our exploration of that suggestion. We should state a few of these conclusions here at the outset, for they have supplied us with the framework for the presentation of the material in this book. First, we believe that the fundamental structural identity of the experience of the artist creating a work and the experience of the person aesthetically engaging with it points to an essential feature of all human experience, namely, its intentionality. Second, we distinguish works of art from other kinds of works and objects—including both natural objects and manufactured products—by virtue of the intentionality inherent in

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their structure. Third, this inherent intentionality in works of art is organic in its nature and its function. And fourth, this organic intentionality of the work of art originates in the intentionality of the natural world as a whole. We shall elaborate upon each of these conclusions, and upon the concept of intentionality, in later chapters. For now, let us state briefly that whatever else may come into play in the creative process, the process itself crucially involves apprehending and following intentional structures that are in the world. Artists don’t create works out of thin air, nor are they inspired in the ancient sense of the word. Plato was perhaps the most important ancient proponent of the inspiration theory of art, according to which the creative act is “a power divine, impelling you like the power in the stone Euripides called the magnet” (533d). 1 As Plato expressed it in the Ion, the Muse . . . first makes men inspired, and then through these inspired ones others share in the enthusiasm, and a chain is formed, for the epic poets, all the good ones, have their excellence, not from art, but are inspired, possessed, and thus they utter all these admirable poems. So it is also with the good lyric poets; as the worshiping Corybantes are not in their senses when they dance, so the lyric poets are not in their senses when they make these lovely lyric poems. No, when once they launch into harmony and rhythm, they are seized with the Bacchic transport, and are possessed—as the bacchants, when possessed, draw milk and honey from the rivers, but not when in their senses. So the spirit of the lyric poet works, according to their own report. (533e-534a)

What artists report, Socrates observed, is that they don’t know how it is that they do what they do. Something comes over them, takes hold of them and works through them, something that is not the artist him- or herself and that is of a divine nature: “the deity has bereft them of their senses, and uses them as ministers, along with soothsayers and godly seers; . . . it is not they who utter these precious revelations while their mind is not within them, but . . . it is the god himself who speaks, and through them becomes articulate to us” (534d). Assuming their work is of some merit, the artists' voices are not their own. They are Hermes figures, messengers of the gods. This, according to the ancient theory, is the meaning of inspiration and the nature of artistic creation. It will come as no surprise that we don’t regard artists in quite such a mythical light. No matter how profoundly moved we often are by their works, artists are not, as Plato put it, “interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage” (534e). Yet artists may well be inspired, or even “possessed,” interpreters in a more thisworldly sense of these words. Above all, artists are followers. The act of following here is nothing as simple as a dog picking up a scent and tracking it to its source, but the image is not wholly inapt. There’s some-

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thing going on in the world—we shall speak of it as an intention—that the artist in their creative moments tunes into and pursues. Speaking phenomenologically or in terms of lived experience, there is an experience of following along which, while it involves a certain forgetfulness of self, is no simple passivity. Artists don’t know at the outset what the final outcome will be, nor do they altogether control the process. Rather, they’re led—allow themselves to be led—by an intention that holds a kind of authority over what they do. This isn’t an intention in the more common sense of the word, a psychological state or intended meaning originating in the artist’s or someone else’s mind, but something that’s happening in the world. The work of art itself contains an intention, some internal logic, which the artist follows in the very act of creating it. When the author writes the novel, she is following the current as she swims, and we readers swim in her wake. There’s nothing simple about this. Tracking intentional structures can call upon resources of mind and body that are of the highest order of complexity, yet it remains that any conception of artistic inspiration that does justice to the experience is one in which the artist takes direction from an intention that originates, as we say, out there. Without knowing where the process will lead or what the final product will be like, the artist and, in time, the audience, becomes completely drawn in by a movement that seems to flow beyond one’s own initiative and control. There’s a sense that we’re being controlled by a movement greater, or other, than ourselves. This is what’s meant by inspiration. What it signifies is nothing else but the movement one undergoes in allowing oneself to be guided by an other. Artist and audience alike allow themselves to be swept up in a process they don’t control so much as imaginatively participate in and follow. Mark Twain described the phenomenon this way: A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No—that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times. And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one. 2

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Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone is actually born with “the novelwriting gift,” but all of us are born with the natural ability to track intentionality—it is this ability that lies at the basis of language learning, for example—and all of us employ and develop this ability throughout our lives. It seems likely to be the case that at least some artists possess this natural-born ability to a higher degree than most of us, with this ability already focused, as it were, in a particular direction. This might explain, for example, how a prodigy like Mozart is capable of writing a symphony at the age of eight. The ability to track intentionality comes naturally to all of us, however, and we all employ this ability in all of our conscious endeavors, in such everyday activities as engaging in conversation, driving our car, or following a recipe, as well as in such complex and highly skilled activities as playing tennis and chess. We become better at all these activities, both the everyday and the highly skilled, with practice— that is, with the inculcation of the requisite skills as habits—and for someone who, as Twain put it, “is not born with the novel-writing gift,” this may take considerable time and effort. But the writer will eventually develop the habit of what Twain called finding out what the tale is by “listening as it goes along telling itself.” What the artist experiences here is that the narrative “goes along” and “spreads itself into a book” in a way that the artist doesn’t quite anticipate, because it’s not the artist’s job to do so. It’s the artist’s job to listen and track that intention, expressing it in artistic form by exhibiting it as relations among words in a narrative, or shapes and colors in a painting, or sounds in a symphony, or contours and textures in a sculpture. The emphasis on listening, on receptivity, is essential here, for the tracking of intentions doesn’t consist in commanding or forcing something to be one thing and not another, but of receiving, apprehending, and following in the wake of something that may suddenly just vanish if we fail to allow it to become what it is to be. Yet this isn’t a matter of mere passivity either; some swimming is involved, but we’re swimming in a wake or a current that pulls us along. The work of the artist (and the audience as well, as we shall discuss later) is to stay on track, to find out where that intention is leading us, and to prepare to be surprised and perhaps even transformed by what is discovered. We often think of the artist as a kind of authority over their work, yet perhaps the real authority here is this movement that one undergoes. Artists no more simply “make it up” than wait for lightning to strike. In a very real sense they take direction. Creative work is a responding to, a thinking along with, something that comes before, on the model of call and response. In much the way that a reader follows where the author leads, the author follows where a line of thought leads, fully immersing herself in a dramatic situation or engaging with a troublesome question until some kind of resolution is reached. The author, or artist of any kind, is guided by something that’s experienced as having authority over one’s activity, and this in no way amounts to unimaginative submission.

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Plato provided an example of this. In the Apology, Socrates spoke of his daimon as a kind of ethical authority which he trusted and followed, and in a way that can’t be described as unthinking or abject. This is an authority that is immediate, instinctive we might say. The daimon didn’t offer reasons but prescribed a directionality to Socrates’s actions that was invariably prohibitive. Don’t do this, it commanded, and in a way that was at once unreasoning and authoritative. Socrates in this respect resembled the inspired poets whom Plato, for all his famous reservations, also greatly esteemed. Socrates was in his own way inspired. Plato had Socrates tell us that throughout his life whenever he was about to make a wrong decision, his daimon informed him of the error he was about to commit. Socrates received instruction from his daimon much in the same way that the poets received their instruction from the gods via the Muses. This wasn’t an intellectual instruction, for it couldn’t be reformulated discursively. Neither the poets nor Socrates could give a rational account of the source or nature of this information. Yet its authority was indisputable. There’s a necessity and an immediacy to this; reasons, if they appear at all, arrive later. The experience is one of being guided, directed, or indeed commanded in a certain way and a corresponding relinquishing of control. Following your nose, or your instincts, is how artists often speak of this, in much the way that a detective follows a hunch or a moral agent follows their conscience even when no arguments can be produced. The examples here are many, and what they’re examples of are intentions which themselves are fundamentally a matter of tending towards something or other. Indeed, all intentionality consists in a tending towards or a directed movement that one undergoes prior to any conscious deliberation. Intentions of this kind are not all in our head. They are substantial; they have being—not the physical, material being that things like tables and chairs have, but also not the ideal being that things like abstractions and numbers have. In the case of sculpture, the shape slumbers within the stone and is freed by the work of the artist. This is more than a metaphor. It’s true, or so artists themselves often tell us. There’s something there that the artist must in a sense get right, apprehend, and allow to speak. In responding to an interviewer’s question in 1991, “Until you record a song, no matter how heroic it is, it doesn’t really exist. Do you ever feel that way?” Dylan answered: “No. If it’s there, it exists.” 3 The work of the artist isn’t to create something out of nothing but to track an intention that’s already there. One way this is done is by a kind of perceptual matchmaking, where a given sound or musical element is found to harmonize or to “go” with another, or in the case of painting one color is seen to cohere with another, not on any kind of rational basis but because it works—it follows along in a process where, as we say, “one thing leads to another” and the work itself takes shape in the way that it needs to. An author who knows what they’re doing writes the book that needs to be

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written, and in the way it needs to be written. They’re following a line of thinking or the course of a narrative and are in no way making it up. So is the painter, songwriter, or poet taking direction from the work itself and what it needs, matching and synthesizing elements into an arrangement that makes sense and indeed that is true. There’s also an incompleteness about the work of art which plays an important role in its reception. The audience carries to completion the very process in which the artist engaged, allowing the work to wash over them while also participating in what they see, hear, or read. The work of the artist precedes and makes possible the work of the audience, but also underdetermines it. Aesthetic experience is a mode of following and responding in much the way that artistic creation is, one that’s not strictly an effect (in a mechanistic sense) of what the artist has done but that follows its trajectory a while further. The audience completes the work in the sense of concretizing or actualizing it, making it come alive in their own experience. Unlike a natural object such as a river that may be regarded aesthetically, a work of art is created for the purpose of producing an experience of this kind and is in this way incomplete. The work of art, that is to say, is essentially something that’s created in order to become an aesthetic object or to produce this kind of experience. Art lovers engage in this kind of process habitually—indulging the senses in ways that the senses themselves come to long for after repeated exposure to a given form of art. One develops a felt need to listen to a piece of music that one completes again and again, perhaps in varying ways and perhaps in collaboration with other listeners. There are people who need art in a profound sense—usually a specific art and perhaps by a specific artist— and for whom the experience is a condition of their existence. “Without music,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “life would be a mistake.” 4 These are the words not of an eccentric but of someone with a cultivated love of music and a will to listen to it repeatedly. The work itself calls upon us to experience it and to complete it. This is why it exists, and it seems a natural thing to do—to listen with an appreciative ear to a piece of music, to touch the contours of a sculpture, or to follow with the eye the inherent direction of a painting. Our sensory apparatus becomes attuned to specific forms of aesthetic stimuli which are craved and habitually delighted in for their own sake. The mystery novel is an obvious example of this, although the examples one could mention are many. Some people have read virtually every mystery novel ever written, and they still crave more. They’re insatiable. This might at first seem puzzling, especially given the formulaic nature of the genre. But when we pause to think about it for a moment, we see that it’s precisely this formulaic nature that explains the addiction: it’s the form—or rather, the identity of the form. It’s the same form: the butler did it. The senses too have their habits and crave repeated exposure to the same form of stimuli. To others not so inclined this can seem a mystery indeed—try explaining your love of

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nineteenth-century Russian literature to someone who hasn’t been exposed to the form and, not coincidentally, doesn’t share your enthusiasm—but it’s a commonplace phenomenon and not limited to the domain of art. The account of artistic creation that we offer requires a good deal of argumentation and support, as well as the sort of critical analysis that defines the task of academic philosophy, and we shall be supplying this in the chapters that follow. We’re not, however, writing exclusively for an audience of philosophers. We’re writing this book for anyone who has an interest in art and artistic creativity and who is curious about the seemingly magical attraction that the arts are capable of exercising on us. This book is for people who want to understand how it is that a tiny painting like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring can draw us toward it like a magnet from forty yards away, or why we might be moved to tears while standing in front of Michelangelo’s Pietá. What’s happening when we’re waiting in line in a store and we suddenly find ourselves tapping our foot, still unaware that Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” is playing in the background? We’ll be dealing with such questions as well, and we’ll be offering arguments and evidence in support of the answers we suggest. We shall attempt, however, to present this material in as acces sible and lively a manner as possible, and with this goal in mind we shall be keeping to a minimum the critical analysis of other authors. We shall be trying to tell a story, and to keep it interesting. The story we want to tell is philosophical, but it’s ultimately based on countless reports from artists themselves who attempt to describe their creative process as best they can, and without losing sight of the mystery that is fundamental to what artists do. There’s a tendency for many who write about art to theorize and to schematize in ways that would pin down the thing itself, and our aim in what follows is to resist this—to shed some light into this dark corner of human experience without reducing the matter to any simple formula. There’s more to art, to artistic creation, and to aesthetic experience than any philosophical account can capture. The mystery remains, even while there is a story to tell. At the center of our story lies the concept of intentionality. Before saying more about this and some related themes, however, let’s hear from some artists themselves—a great many of them, working at different times and in different forms, styles, and genres. Throughout the history of art it has been commonplace to ask artists the dreaded how question, and it has been equally commonplace for them to balk at answering it. Many others, however, have provided remarkably insightful accounts. Whether any recurring themes or patterns emerge from these often brief and enigmatic statements is the question to which we now turn.

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NOTES 1. Plato, Ion, trans. L. Cooper, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 2. Mark Twain, “Those Extraordinary Twins,” in Pudd’nhead Wilson (New York: Penguin, 1987), 229. 3. Bob Dylan, interview with Paul Zollo, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York: Wenner Books, 2006), 380. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 2003), Maxims and Arrows, sec. 33, p. 36.

ONE What Artists Tell Us

Prior to rushing in with theories, we want to spend some time listening to artists’ own descriptions of at least some of what’s involved in creating works of art. Plato’s notion of inspiration was “according to their own report,” or so he said, where “they” were poets. It may be sensible for us to begin here as well, and to cast our net widely to encompass artists working in different media and styles. Serious artists are typically highly intelligent people and a great many of them are more than a little articulate, even when the “how” question comes up, as quite often it does. These are standard interviewer’s questions: How did you do that? How did you know to put this together with that, to put this element here and that one there, to follow convention here and to depart from it there? Where does your inspiration come from, and how did you learn to do that? How does one come by this kind of knowledge which seems so utterly mysterious to the rest of us? Listening to artists doesn’t remove the mystery of what they do and how they do it. It may well deepen it, but let’s see for ourselves. We’ve spent a good deal of time reading and listening to interviews with mostly well-known artists, reading biographies and autobiographies, and also speaking with numerous artists of our acquaintance, with an ear out for any and all descriptions of the creative process. No simple formula emerges from all of this, of course, yet neither is the picture entirely chaotic. Some recurring themes—difficult to discern, ambiguous, and highly variable—do show themselves, however obliquely, and our aim in this chapter is to go some way toward bringing them out. We shall divide this chapter into sections, each of which analyzes briefly while mostly illustrating the recurring theme we have noticed. The more detailed, theoretical analysis we shall provide in later chapters. We begin with an obvious theme which we have already mentioned. 1

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MYSTERY It will come as no surprise that a great many of the artists we’ve read, read about, and listened to place some emphasis on this theme, and perhaps more than any other. Ineffability, silence, and mystery here come to the fore. We have already cited Bob Dylan to this effect and will now do so again. Speaking nearly four decades after writing “Like a Rolling Stone,” the artist remarked: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except that the ghost picked me to write the song.” 1 This artist has often spoken that way, and he’s not alone. That artists should always be taken at their word is doubtful. Some may well have reasons to keep their creative process, or some aspects of it, to themselves. Some trade secrets may need to be protected, and a bit of caginess is often wise. An artist, like anyone else, might also perform an activity at a very high level without necessarily being able to describe how they do it. These are separate and very different skills, after all. Some of the apparent mystery might lie here, but surely not all of it. The sentiment is expressed repeatedly. A typical example comes from John Lennon: “When the real music comes to me—the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding—that has nothing to do with me ’cause I’m just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me and transcribe it. Like a medium. Those moments are what I live for.” 2 Author Pamela Travers said in an interview: “With that word ‘creative,’ when applied to any human endeavor, we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light—by grace one feels, rather than deserving—for it always comes as something given, free, unsought, unexpected. It is useless, possibly even profane, to ask for explanations.” 3 The matter is far more instinctive than cerebral, more felt than understood. Creation is sensual, and too much intellection can kill it. Musicians sometimes report that a good part of their inspiration comes from the instrument itself—the sound it makes, the way it looks, and so on. Wellmade instruments are beautiful, before anyone picks them up and plays them. Jimmy Page describes a guitar as “Like a piece of sculpture. The smell of wood varnish, the whole aroma of it. Like a woman, you know? You caress it like a woman.” 4 Bruce Springsteen reminisces about his first encounter with a guitar this way: There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar. I took it home. Opened its case. Smelled its wood (still one of the sweetest and most promising smells in the world), felt its magic, sensed its hidden power. I held it in my arms, ran my fingers over its strings, held the real tortoiseshell guitar pick in between my teeth, tasted it, took a few weeks of music lessons . . . and quit. It was TOO FUCKIN’ HARD! 5

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3

We suspect we’re not the only authors who would say something similar about writing books and about books themselves. A new book is a thing of beauty. You feel compelled not only to read it but to touch it, to pick it up, turn it over in your hands, and to feel its weight. The inside of a new book even smells good. It delights the senses before a single word is read. A wall of books is mesmerizing. The owner usually hasn’t read them; it’s there for aesthetic reasons. The intellect isn’t wholly banned from this realm of activity, but we constantly hear from artists about the priority of feeling over thinking. “You can’t think about these things,” as Michael Jackson put it, “you have to feel your way into them.” 6 The same artist, when asked by his final stage manager how on a completely darkened stage he’d be able to see the fedora that was to be handed to him in the middle of performing “Billie Jean,” replied “I’ll feel it.” 7 He wasn’t joking. There are things that can’t be explained, or not in so many formal propositions. The heart has its reasons. The heart, the wellspring of creativity, and so on, are metaphors, and to translate them into literal descriptions is difficult and imprecise at best. We are in the land of the Dionysian no less (perhaps more) than the Apollonian. Plato reported that artists don’t know what they’re doing, and there’s a sense in which this is still true—depending on what sort of knowledge we’re asking for. The rationalistic and literal minded will remain frustrated here. “How do you do that?” I just do it. “How did you know how to . . . ?” I just knew. “Where did it come from?” It just came. Many artists still talk this way, and there’s truth in this. We suspect, however, that this isn’t the whole truth. INSPIRATION AND PERSPIRATION We need to look deeper into this mystery. Fortunately, many of the same artists who speak of mystery and ineffability also continue speaking, sometimes in detail, about the very process about which we mustn’t speak. There’s nothing so discussable as ineffability, and discuss it at length artists, art lovers, and philosophers have been doing for centuries. The word that continually comes up remains inspiration, although the Greek gods no longer appear to be the source of this. They have fled, been replaced maybe, but by what? Here the matter becomes further complicated, for there’s no one answer. Artists, so they tell us, find inspiration where they can, which is to say anywhere and everywhere. It’s found in experience, on the street, or wherever one happens to be, but especially it’s found in other works of art. Artists have influences— whether they be predecessors, contemporaries, or both—and usually many of them. It’s common for artists not only to sing the praises of other artists but to learn from them, and often to style their work to some extent on the

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work of others. The idea that “you alone are the wellspring of your creativity,” writes playwright Tony Kushner, is a “myth,” and this point is echoed repeatedly by others. 8 “Invention,” Mary Shelley wrote, “it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” 9 Jimmy Page, long regarded as one of the most original and influential guitarists in contemporary music, states that “[a]s a musician, I’m only the product of my influences.” Speaking of his early years in the 1960s, he notes: “The fact that I was listening to folk, classical, and Indian music in addition to rock and blues was one thing that set me apart from so many other guitarists at the time.” It was far from unusual for a British rock guitarist in those years to borrow heavily from both their peers in the rock scene and from the blues: “we were all trying to do our own take on the blues at that time.” “All of us—Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and our contemporaries—went through the same process. Those early rock and blues records grabbed us hard.” 10 Michael Jackson reported the same: “The greatest education in the world,” he wrote, “is watching the masters at work.” Speaking of his early days, he remarked: “I carefully watched all the stars because I wanted to learn as much as I could. I’d stare at their feet, the way they held their arms, the way they gripped a microphone, trying to decipher what they were doing and why they were doing it. After studying James Brown from the wings, I knew every step, every grunt, every spin and turn.” 11 Works of art neither come out of thin air nor simply echo what comes before. In a word, artistic creation is derivative, from the best to the worst and from the most innovative to the most hackneyed. Creation is an appropriation of the tradition in which one stands. One doesn’t sit around waiting for lightning to strike but listens attentively, appropriates, borrows, and extends at will. This has long been explicit to the selfunderstanding of folk music in particular. As Pete Seeger expressed it, “The moment I became acquainted with old songs I realized people were always changing them. Think of it as an age-old process, it’s been going on for thousands of years. People take old songs and change them a little, add to them, adopt them for new people. It happens in every other field. Lawyers change old laws to fit new citizens. So I’m one in this long chain and so are millions of other musicians.” 12 The observation, if not the metaphor, is something Seeger likely learned from his father, musicologist Charles Seeger, who had written, “conscious and unconscious appropriation, borrowing, adapting, plagiarising, and plain stealing are variously, and always have been, part and parcel of the process of artistic creation. . . . The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism.” 13 Implicit in the word itself, folk music, like all folk art, belongs to everyone and no one. Who owns the duck decoy form, the antique weathervane, the child’s sampler, or the

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quilt? Can one plagiarize works of plagiarism? Every form and element is handed down and varied in ways the artist needn’t even be aware of. It’s an artist’s cliché: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Some version of this has been attributed to everyone from Pablo Picasso to T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and William Faulkner, among others. Here is how Eliot expressed the point: One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. 14

An especially intriguing example of this theme is the abovementioned Mr. Dylan, who has provided remarkably insightful descriptions of his creative process without ever losing sight of the mystery. In discussing this he speaks invariably, at length, and almost reverentially about influences, the list of which in his case is long and not limited to songwriters, folk singers, and poets. Some are household names—Woody Guthrie, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, The Kingston Trio, Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash—others perhaps not. The task for the young artist was to discover how they had accomplished what they had, and to listen and learn, borrow and synthesize elements from each without copying any. Many of these records were hard to find and had to be zealously tracked down, borrowed, and stolen before they could be studied by the unusually diligent student. I copied [Robert] Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them. 15

All these influences came together with a variety of romantic, modernist, and Beat poets, nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, philosophers, and any other writer from whom he could learn some aspect of his art. “I had read a lot of poetry by the time I wrote a lot of those early songs. I was into the hard-core poets. I read them the way some people read Stephen King. I had also seen a lot of it growing up. Poe’s stuff knocked me out in more ways than I could name. Byron and Keats and all those guys. John Donne.” In Greenwich Village at the beginning of the 1960s he was encountering the Beat poets:

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Chapter 1 The idea that poetry was spoken in the streets and spoken publicly, you couldn’t help but be excited by that. There would always be a poet in the clubs and you’d hear the rhymes, and [Allen] Ginsberg and [Gregory] Corso—those guys were highly influential. . . . Someone gave me a book of François Villon poems and he was writing about hard-core street stuff and making it rhyme. . . . It was pretty staggering, and it made you wonder why you couldn’t do the same thing in a song. 16

A major portion of his memoir, Chronicles, deals with influences, to the point of neglecting basic facts about the subject of this strange autobiography. It’s a book mostly about other people. It’s well known that artists—and indeed all those who do creative work in any serious way— have influences, yet what’s striking in the case of this artist is the range and depth of these. The same word that Quincy Jones used to describe a young Michael Jackson—“sponge”—is often used by those who came into contact with Dylan in his early years. So too is tradition, his sense of which is remarkably strong. His palette would become large and his knowledge of the American musical tradition vast. Dylan has repeatedly stated that his work wasn’t written in an aesthetic vacuum but follows a tradition. Nearly all facets of American music—blues, folk, rock and roll, country, gospel, swing—come together in his work, and began doing so well before “reinventing oneself” became the thing to do. “Going electric” in 1965 wasn’t the thing to do in folk music circles, and the condemnation that followed from folk hyper-traditionalists became part of the legend that has long surrounded this artist. Dylan recounts that what famed record producer John Hammond was able to discern in him in signing him to a major label was that “he saw me as someone in the long line of a tradition,” not “some newfangled wunderkind on the cutting edge.” 17 Newfangled wunderkinds—artists (whose work is any good) who are without significant influences—are rare to nonexistent, and we suspect the latter. One name that’s sometimes mentioned as a counterexample is Victor Hugo, who has long been thought of not only as one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century but as a single-minded genius who appeared out of nowhere and was influenced by no one. His biographers say otherwise. Graham Robb, for one, writes that while this author “tends to be seen as the lone trailblazer” of French Romanticism, “[h]is procedures are an object lesson in hijacking a revolution.” In his early days, Hugo engaged in a literary equivalent of asset-stripping. Virtually every new aspect of his work from 1824 until the Romantic putsch of 1830 can be traced back to [Charles] Nodier: the attack on the classical unities, the deification of Shakespeare, . . . parodies of the classical style . . . , an erudite interest in folklore and the supernatural, a subversive sense of humour, and the detection of vanished civilizations in the

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ruins that were being cleared away in the name of progress or for profit. 18

This isn’t a criticism. Hugo, without a doubt, was a (likely the) towering figure in this movement, but he remained a member of a movement—one that he didn’t initiate—while also making it his own. Inspiration can be neither predicted nor planned. It can strike quickly, in any place and at any time, but what is it? We won’t expect any straightforward answer, of course, but it seems to involve a certain way of noticing. One picks out some particular phrase, sound, feeling, or object that strikes the artist as holding a certain significance. Paul Ricoeur wrote that “the symbol gives rise to thought,” but it isn’t symbols alone that can do this. 19 Anything can. What is that, what does it mean, what does it lead to or suggest, and might we see it otherwise are the kinds of questions that are asked, and where “it” will often be something in one’s environment that easily escapes notice. The everyday rush of experience is arrested and one notices—selects, sees, feels, or otherwise pays attention to—something that may be quite ordinary. What one attends to in this way needn’t be grand in scale and usually isn’t. Stravinsky made the point this way: The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation. And the true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note. He does not have to concern himself with a beautiful landscape, he does not need to surround himself with rare and precious objects. He does not have to put forth in search of discoveries: they are always within his reach. He will have only to cast a glance about him. Familiar things, things that are everywhere, attract his attention. The least accident holds his interest and guides his operations. 20

Another common report is that artistic creation is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration (some quibble about the percentages). It was Thomas Edison, an inventor, who said this, and he was speaking of “genius” in general. In the case of art, if inspiration involves a certain capacity and habit of paying attention, or a particular mode of attention, to something that is afforded then perspiration is the work of following through in some way or other, or following in kind, responding to what one sees, and not in just any way but in the way that the thing itself seems to require. Creation is more than raw emoting; it’s work, often hard work, and it requires an enormous amount of practicing, rehearsing, and repeating. Full immersion in one’s medium helps, also a love of it. We see the pattern repeated in the biographies of countless artists: youthful discovery of a particular form of art, a growing fascination and love of it, the emergence of influences, learning from the masters, and a determination

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to follow in kind. It may come more readily to some than others, but nothing about it is easy. BORROW AND VARY Artists are borrowers. Thieves, you might say, but again this is meant not as criticism but as a statement of fact. An artist who doesn’t steal has nothing to say. It’s as inescapable as a philosopher gathering ideas from the philosophical tradition (contrary to popular belief, such ideas don’t spring forth, fully formed, from the forehead) or a scientist following in the tradition of science. It was Isaac Newton who said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Where else would you find ideas but from your predecessors and contemporaries? Where did they find them? Same answer. Does this lead to an infinite regress? Probably. The masters are master borrowers. Consider the ancient Greeks, and not only the artists. How did they come up with all of that? Historians tell us that it was all borrowed—from neighboring cultures, a great many of them, over a long period of time, but that they also worked on, synthesized, and improved upon the innumerable cultural elements that they were taking from wherever they could find them. The “Greek miracle” is a myth. They were links in a chain too, cultural appropriators on a grand scale, although the point is often overlooked. Artists who know what they’re doing don’t borrow in the sense of copy without revision but modify what they find. Variation is crucial here. There’s a sense in which all art is derivative, and there’s another sense in which it isn’t. Creation is inventive appropriation. Musicians and songwriters, for instance, commonly have a voracious appetite for listening to music, in their formative period anyway. This isn’t a casual mode of listening, however—a simple matter of being entertained—but listening in the manner of an inventor, or with an eye to what one can do with whatever one is listening to. The artist participates in a tradition by making it their own. Tradition speaks through the artist if it speaks at all, and it is modified in the same process that keeps it alive. The process is dialectical: an artist who neither knows nor stands in a tradition is bereft of ideas, and tradition without invention is a fossil. This is how Dylan describes the matter in a speech for MusiCares in 2015: These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. . . . It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock and roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them, back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs,

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and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone. For three or four years, all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. 21

Explaining further: What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. . . . I meditate on a song. I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” for instance, in my head constantly—while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song. 22

He provides several examples of this from his early period which are worth quoting at length: If you sang “John Henry” as many times as me—“John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand”—if you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too. Big Bill Broonzy had a song called “Key to the Highway.” “I’ve got a key to the highway / I’m booked and I’m bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin’ because walking is most too slow.” I sang that a lot. If you sing that a lot, you might just write, “Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose / Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes / He asked poor Howard where can I go / Howard said there’s only one place I know / Sam said tell me quick man I got to run / Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun / And said that way down on Highway 61.” . . . “Roll the cotton down, aw, yeah, roll the cotton down / Ten dollars a day is a white man’s pay / Roll the cotton down / A dollar a day is the black man’s pay / Roll the cotton down.” If you sang that song as many times as me, you’d be writing “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” too. If you had listened to Robert Johnson singing, “Better come in my kitchen, ‘cause it’s gonna be raining out doors” as many times as I listened to it, sometime later you might just write “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” I sang a lot of “come all you” songs. There’s plenty of them. There’s way too many to be counted. “Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my troubles on the old Chisholm Trail.” Or, “Come all ye good people, listen while I tell / the fate of Floyd Collins, a lad we all know well.” . . . If you sung all these “come all you” songs all the time like I did, you’d be writing “Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam.” 23

Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” of 1965, an interviewer states, fused folk and blues in a way that made everyone who heard it listen to it over and over. John Lennon once said the song was so captivating on

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Chapter 1 every level that it made him wonder how he could ever compete with it. . . . Where did that come from? Without pause, Dylan says, almost with a wink, that the inspiration dates to his teens. “It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ and some of the scat songs of the ’40s.” 24

The distance between “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is considerable, and traversing it is fully beyond nearly all of us. A fair amount of rearranging is involved, and so much so that until the artist tells us the source of his or her inspiration we’re not likely to notice the connection. A thousand similar examples could be mentioned here—of particular works of art that were based on other works while also varied and reconfigured to the point of being un- or barely recognizable. Simple repetition—copying—won’t do, and art works that approach this are either honest “cover versions,” to use the musical term, or criticized as excessively derivative, or worse. Everything depends on the variation. Poet Cliff Fell writes, “Ovid, himself, stole lines and stories from Homer, as did Virgil. And Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare all stole ideas and lines from Virgil and Ovid. It goes on. It’s a part of the poetic process.” 25 It’s not the whole of it, however. The rest—and the lion’s share of the labor—is making what you steal, or help yourself to, your own by changing it in some way that works, that suits the artist’s taste, or that seems right. There’s a certain kind of intelligence that comes into play here: the art of aesthetic or perceptual matchmaking, stitching together, synthesizing, rearranging, ordering, bricolage, or whatever one wishes to call it. Frank Zappa called it “composition”: “Composition is a process of organization, very much like architecture. As long as you can conceptualize what that organizational process is, you can be a ‘composer’—in any medium you want. You can be a ‘video composer,’ a ‘film composer,’ a ‘choreography composer,’ a ‘social engineering composer’—whatever. Just give me some stuff, and I’ll organize it for you. That’s what I do.” 26 Stravinsky also spoke of composing as “putting in order musical elements that have attracted my attention.” 27 Ordering, matchmaking, or composing is instinctive. In artistic creation one does what feels right, and too much thinking—or thinking of the wrong kind—kills it. When it works, it can happen quickly and seemingly without effort, and when the instincts become blocked they can remain blocked for years. Springsteen offers a similar remark: “First, you write for yourself . . . always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.” 28 Try as we might, life, as it’s experienced by us all, is not especially well ordered or beautifully arranged. For some, it’s barely coherent, but it can become so

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if it’s thought about in a certain way—if its scattered elements and disconnected episodes are arranged by the imagination into some coherent (especially narrative) structure which conveys meaning on the whole and its individual parts. This is one of the reasons we have art—to behold some semblance of order, meaning, or purpose which is capable of being carried over to our own lives and allowing us to understand or reimagine ourselves. The artist’s drive to make sense of things differs from our own drive to do the same only in their choice of medium. We all borrow and vary received cultural elements every time we think, understand, or do much of anything. Creativity isn’t unique to artists. Noticing things, seeing often surprising connections and affinities, perceptual matchmaking, and synthesizing disparate elements in our experience is done by us all, to some extent and in one way or another. None of it is done ex nihilo. TAKING DIRECTION It’s done by taking direction, although from what is not easy to say. Artists, we have said, are followers. What is it that they’re following, and what sort of following is this? We tend to think of following something as not a terribly difficult thing to do, while it’s leading that’s hard. But there’s more to the matter than this. Shakespeare followed Ovid, Ovid followed Homer, Homer didn’t make it up either but borrowed from oral tradition, and so on and so forth. This isn’t, however, a “monkey see, monkey do” kind of following but something far more complex. We can speak of it as imitation—we shall have more to say about this notion later—but imitation is also far more complex than we tend to think. A theme that is commonly repeated by artists is that the creative act is in some fundamental way responsive. Artists themselves have long been thought of as demonstrating a particular kind of sensibility or sensitivity—not necessarily to experience in general but to something specific within it. In the preface we cited Mark Twain’s description of the novelwriting process as one in which the author doesn’t know in advance what the story is or where it’s going but “can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself.” The work of art, in some sense, creates itself, or so artists often report. What is the experience that Twain was speaking of? The artist is following something, listening to something, even becoming something, or so they say. Statements like this from other artists are easily found. Here is Jimmy Page’s description of composing a guitar solo: A solo is like a meditation on the song. You find a piece of filigree and then try to play something in total empathy with everything else that’s going on. You can get quite spiritual about soloing. It’s almost like channeling. It’s not there one moment, but then all of a sudden it is. I’m sure anyone who’s creative has that moment. That point where it just

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Chapter 1 sparks. One minute it wasn’t there and the next minute it is, and you know it’s positive and constructive. 29

Other musicians and songwriters report something similar. Drummer Neil Peart writes, “It is certainly part of the wisdom preached by my late drumming teacher, Freddie Gruber: ‘If the stick want to fall, let it fall. If the stick wants to bounce, let it bounce. Get out of your own way.’” 30 The point was made repeatedly by Michael Jackson: I went down to the kitchen of our house and played “Billie Jean.” Loud. I was in there by myself, the night before the show, and I pretty much stood there and let the song tell me what to do. I kind of let the dance create itself. I really let it talk to me; I heard the beat come in, and I took this spy’s hat [a fedora] and started to pose and step, letting the “Billie Jean” rhythm create the movements. I felt almost compelled to let it create itself. I couldn’t help it.

Again: But once I get to the side of the stage, something happens. The rhythm starts and the lights hit me and the problems disappear. This has happened so many times. The thrill of performing just takes over. . . . And the backbeat gets in my backbone and it vibrates and it just takes me. Sometimes I almost lose control and the musicians say, “What is he doing?” and they start following me. You change the whole schedule of a piece. You stop and you just take over from scratch and do a whole other thing. The song takes you in another direction. 31

A biographer reports, In this creative space, he would become the “embodiment” of each piece. “When you’re dancing,” he revealed, “you are just interpreting the music and the sounds and the accompaniment. If there’s a driving bass, if there’s a cello, if there’s a string, you become the emotion of what the sound is.” This ability to fully occupy the music is what set him apart as a dancer. Many of his moves had been done before, including the moonwalk; but he got deep inside them, understood what they could convey, and made them his own. 32

In The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham used the metaphor of “possession” to describe fictional artist Charles Strickland, himself a character based partly on the life of Paul Gauguin. As the narrator says to Strickland’s wife, You know, I’m not sure that your husband is quite responsible for his actions. I do not think he is himself. He seems to me to be possessed by some power which is using him for its own ends, and in whose hold he is as helpless as a fly in a spider’s web. It’s as though someone had cast a spell over him. I’m reminded of those strange stories one sometimes hears of another personality entering into a man and driving out the old one. The soul lives unstably in the body, and is capable of mysteri-

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ous transformations. In the old days they would say Charles Strickland had a devil. 33

It’s another artist’s cliché: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” The speaker is Michelangelo, of course, and the sentiment has been repeated endlessly ever since, including by the above-mentioned Mr. Jackson: ‘“He’s just freeing it,’ Jackson insisted. ‘It’s already in there. It’s already there.’” 34 The act of “freeing it” is a matter of stripping away what doesn’t belong, and to speak of it as an act isn’t quite right. It’s as much a passion—something that happens to you, something that comes over you—as an activity. Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky wrote: The great difficulty is that the germ [the inspiration] must appear at a favourable moment, the rest goes of itself. It would be vain to try to put into words that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me directly a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form. I forget everything and behave like a madman. Everything within me starts pulsing and quivering; hardly have I begun the sketch ere one thought follows another. 35

As in some other experiences where strong passions are involved, one thing leads to another; we are directed in a certain way, compelled, carried along in a movement that we don’t control but follow. Time and again, artists describe the virtual opposite of any form of activity that is formalizable, linear, or rigidly technical, one where the artist begins with a clear idea of what outcome they want to achieve and sets about planning and calculating means to that end. Technique and problem-solving undoubtedly come into play and constitute much of the work involved, but they fit into a bigger picture in which the artist is far less in command than commanded. It’s the work itself that holds authority here—the imperative to give the work what it needs, to listen to it, and to remove what is extraneous. Any preoccupation with self disappears here. It’s about the work, not the artist; the artists themselves disappear into the thing they’re creating: “When you get the music and lyrics right,” as Springsteen describes it, “your voice disappears into the voices you’ve chosen to write about. Basically, with these songs, I find the characters and listen to them.” 36 The artist is paying attention, focusing, tuning in to something, and in a far more specific and concentrated way than in everyday experience. This narrow zone of concentration is probably not unlike what athletes sometimes report—that at times their ability to see the ball or the puck is enhanced and everything else disappears from view. The concept of vision is central here. An artist, Dylan writes, is “someone who could see into things, the truth of things—not metaphorically, either—but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.” 37 There is

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a look of intensity about artists when they’re “in the zone,” as the expression has it, and it’s an intensity less of feeling than perceiving. Hugo spoke explicitly of the artist as having a certain capacity for seeing. A biographer speaks of “Hugo’s phenomenal vision: an extraordinary farsightedness, with curious distortions of colour and perspective. This useful defect lends an unexpectedly literal nuance to his definition of the genius as a creature with a microscope in one eye and a telescope in the other, ‘rummaging about in the infinitely large and the infinitely small.’” Hugo’s advice to other writers was to “Steep yourself for a few days . . . in the new world whose master you are to become. Lock yourself up with your characters and look them in the eye. Do not be afraid of the vague approximations that come to your mind. . . . The outlines always swim about just before the work finds its feet and begins to walk.” 38 This mode of seeing and working isn’t coldly clinical but the opposite. It’s passionate, wild, and intensely gratifying. Why did Jackson become a professional singer while still a child? His own answer was very clear: “I loved to sing. I wasn’t forced into this business by stage parents the way Judy Garland was. I did it because I enjoyed it and because it was as natural to me as drawing a breath and exhaling it. I did it because I was compelled to do it, not by parents or family, but by my own inner life in the world of music.” 39 Artists commonly speak in this way of the thrill of creation. “When I start to write a new song,” guitarist Joe Satriani writes, it’s as if time stands still. It’s a uniquely private moment, when I’m alone in my studio and all of a sudden this feeling inside me blossoms and I express it musically. At that point there’s no responsibility to turn it into a full song or a recording, or to see how it does on the radio. The music is still mine—it’s free. It’s pure art, and nothing beats that feeling. As soon as that music leaves the studio, there are expectations. 40

Creation is not only intensely pleasurable but instinctive, Dionysian, and descriptions of it tend toward the excessive. It requires strength and independence of mind, boldness of vision, fearlessness, and a high level of energy. ART SPEAKS More specifically, it speaks what artists from ancient times to our own have often called the truth. What could this mean? Is this more hyperbole? Artists, after all, are a passionate bunch. There’s a long tradition of artists using this ponderous word in describing what they do. They’re not merely entertaining; they have something to say. There’s a difference, and what they’re saying, “according to their own report,” is true. Philosophers have long found this claim puzzling, disconcerting even. Works of art, after all, don’t report the facts but do something else, don’t they?

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Novelists don’t tell “true” stories; they make it up. Poets “lie,” etc. What truth are they speaking of? Artists—most of them—aren’t philosophers, so we won’t expect anything so elaborate as a “theory of truth” to emerge from their usage of the word. But there are commonalities. Here’s how Dylan put it in his MusiCares speech: “Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice. He said, ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.’ Think about that the next time you are listening to a singer.” 41 No one has ever described Dylan’s voice as pretty. If the singing works at all, it’s because of what it has to say, not just lyrically but musically. “I’ve got to know that I’m singing something with truth to it. My songs are different than anybody else’s songs. Other artists can get by on their voices and their style, but my songs speak volumes, and all I have to do is lay them down correctly, lyrically, and they’ll do what they need to do.” 42 When he speaks with admiration of other artists, it’s for the truth that their work contains far more than its beauty: “To Woody Guthrie, see, the airwaves were sacred. And when he’d hear something false, it was on airwaves that were sacred to him. His songs weren’t false.” 43 It is truth that makes a song come alive and speak, and it’s the performer’s task to make this possible. The artist is a believer, and not only in the words but in the larger and properly musical intention of the song. Singer-songwriter Dolores O’Riordan, in an interview, put it this way: “A very true, simple love song doesn’t come easy. . . . It has to be genuine. It has to be from the heart, right? So you have to really mean it. You can’t fake it. Because if you fake it, people feel that. You’re faking it.” 44 A love song that is true doesn’t state the facts but speaks in a quite different sense. It’s a kind of saying, revealing, or showing, and if it isn’t “from the heart” then it’s false, or empty. As Federico Fellini expressed it, “I don’t want to demonstrate anything; I want to show it.” 45 Art neither demonstrates nor merely pleases; it reveals what things mean, usually particular things that illustrate some universal themes. It speaks not only in the sense of having something to say; it also means what it says. Works of art don’t resonate—they don’t work—if they’re insincere, contrived, or calculated. The emotional register must be correct—true—or the work doesn’t speak. Hugo stated: “writers must take themselves seriously; always respect the fundamental laws of language, which is the expression of truth.” 46 This kind of truth is personal. You can’t show what you haven’t felt or express what you haven’t understood. An artist needs to mean it, and they probably can’t do that if they haven’t first lived it. There is a saying among many blues musicians that you can’t play music that you haven’t lived. One creates from experience, and a flavor-of-the-month pop star can no more sing music that has some depth to it than your average

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adolescent can perform Shakespeare. Works of art typically have an autobiographical element which is what makes it possible to bring a work to life and to make it speak. Great art, and great artists, have something called soul, and whatever it is, it can’t be manufactured or faked. It comes from within, and an audience knows it when they see it. These notions— soul, heart, meaning, sincerity, showing, truth—are ambiguous and difficult to disentangle, but in one way or another they all refer to the personal dimension of artistic creation. Nothing about it is impersonal—that is, if it works, if it expresses truth. Twain had this to say: If you attempt to create and build a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation, you will go astray, and the artificiality of the thing will be detectable. But if you found on a fact in your personal experience, it is an acorn, a root, and every created adornment that grows up out of it and spreads its foliage and blossoms to the sun will seem realities, not inventions. You will not be likely to go astray; your compass of fact is there to keep you on the right course. 47

It must come from experience, from some autobiographical place, in order to work. “Mood and intensity can’t be manufactured,” says Page. “The blues isn’t about structure; it’s what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.” 48 Springsteen elaborates the point: Your playing can suck, your singing can be barely viable, but if when you get together with your pals in front of your audience and make the noise, the one that is drawn from the center of your being, from your godhead, from your gutter, . . . you’re rockin’ and you’re a rock ‘n’ roll star in every sense of the word. The punks instinctively knew this and created a third revolution out of it, but it is an essential element in the equation of every great musical unit. 49

Music is no different in this way from the other arts. If it works, it emerges from within and speaks first to the artist and then to an audience—not just any audience but “your audience,” some particular group of people whose experience also enables the work to resonate and to mean something to them. Its reception is as personal as its creation. PLAY “I just want to play and tell the truth,” said drummer Buddy Rich. “As I said many times, I don’t go to work at night, I go to play!” 50 Drumming, especially of the kind that he did, is hard work, as are many other forms of art that involve a tremendous output of mental and sometimes physical energy. No chasm separates work and play here. As we’ve noted,

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artists often report that creating is passionate and often intensely pleasurable. It’s called play for a reason. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that there’s something extraordinary about the child at play: they are completely absorbed in their activity and in the present moment, and in a way that adults typically find elusive, preoccupied as we tend to be with our everyday projects and worries. A child at play has no thoughts of the morrow, or of yesterday, or of anything except what they’re doing right now, and it absorbs their concentration totally. Creation is possible here. Nietzsche expressed the point this way: “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes. Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.” 51 Creation is a “sport,” a life-affirming play, a yea-saying of one kind or another. It’s giving birth to something, some work that is then put out there for others to experience. It’s difficult, sometimes extremely so, but it’s hardly drudgery. Springsteen writes, “I’ve left enough sweat on stages around the world to fill at least one of the seven seas; I’ve driven myself and my band to the limits and over the edge for more than forty years. We continue to do so but it’s still ‘playing.’ It’s a life-giving, joyful, sweatdrenched, muscle-aching, voice-blowing, mind-clearing, exhausting, soul-invigorating, cathartic pleasure and privilege every night.” 52 This form of play is characterized by a tension between hard work and joy, between actions and passions that are equally demanding. It requires flexibility and openness of mind, a love of novelty and experimentation, and a readiness for the unexpected. It’s not for the faint of heart, the insincere, the dull, or the cowardly. Psychologist Frank Barron describes the artistic mind as at once open and playful: It is filled with curiosity and wonder. There is something childlike about it. It loves to get off the beaten track, to explore paths that are not the ones taken by social convention. Playfulness is sometimes important. The opened mind likes to play with an idea or object, and enjoys looking at it as if for the first time. It remains open to the possibility that we may not know everything there is to know—and what we do know may be wrong. It challenges assumptions, makes new connections, finds new ways of viewing the world. The opened mind can wander playfully into areas others do not take seriously, and return with creations that must be approached in all seriousness. 53

Creation is serious play—impulsive and controlled at the same time, something emerging from tension. “Creative tension” is a product of discord, the sudden collision of opposites, the union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian which Nietzsche associated especially with Greek tragedy—for him, the high point in the history of art.

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SUMMARY Our hypothesis in this chapter has been that while nothing resembling a formula is discernible amid the innumerable artists’ statements about the creative process that we’ve surveyed—and only a fraction of which we’ve cited here—still, the picture isn’t as chaotic as one might think. Recurring themes do exist, and while they’re both highly variable and ambiguous, our aim has been to illuminate them in artists’ own words before providing more theoretical analysis in the chapters that follow. Among the themes we’ve discussed, none is more central or often discussed than mystery. We’re trying to shed a bit of light into what is in the end a dark corner of human experience. An artist may, and often will, create works of the highest quality without being able to describe in any insightful way how it is that they do it. Artistic creation and analysis after the fact are very different activities, and to excel at one entails nothing about the other. Time and again, what artists tell us is that the process isn’t particularly cerebral but is instinctive and sensual. Too much thinking—or thinking of the wrong kind—can stop it in its tracks. The mind itself is hardly banished here, but feeling has priority of place over intellection. Plato’s report that artists don’t understand the very process in which they’re engaged remains true, at least in part. The same thinker made much of the notion of inspiration, and many artists continue to place this idea at the center of their understanding of what it is that they do. Artists find inspiration anywhere and everywhere, but most notably in other works of art, in the work of selected influences, be they predecessors or contemporaries, and often many of them. Creation is not ex nihilo but is an appropriation of a tradition and is in this sense derivative. Moreover, it would be best to leave behind the image of divine lightning striking the inspired artist. Artists aren’t passive but actively listen and borrow at will, and the cliché that the great ones steal seems well confirmed by artists themselves. Whatever inspiration is, it’s unpredictable and incalculable. We’ve spoken of it as a certain way of noticing—and not just one way but many. An artist notices something— some situation, feeling, event, or whatever—and feels compelled by its perhaps still vague yet intriguing significance to express that significance in art. The remaining 99 percent (or thereabouts) of the creative process consists largely in perspiration. Creating art is difficult work, and it requires full immersion in the form of one’s art, a selective and imaginative borrowing from the masters or from one’s peers. Artists modify what they find and so make it their own. Appropriation—at least when it’s done well—is inventive. It’s no simple repetition of received elements but involves a synthesizing, ordering, and matchmaking of aesthetic elements. Variation is central, and the relation between tradition and invention is internal and dialectical.

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Another central theme is what we’ve referred to as taking direction. Artists commonly report the experience of being led by or following something, and while what exactly it is that they’re following and how exactly they’re doing so remain frustratingly unclear, we can perhaps speak of this as a form of imitation. Artists respond to something specific in their environment, and continue responding to the work itself in the very process of its creation. There’s a sense in which the work of art does create itself. The process is non-linear and unformalizable. One doesn’t set out with a clear idea of what is to be achieved but gives the work what it seems to require. All self-preoccupation disappears into the thing one is creating. A couple of additional themes that artists commonly report are play and what often goes by the name of truth. Art, so its creators often say, speaks, and what it speaks is the truth. Artists are not merely entertainers. They do more than just please an audience; they have something to say, something to communicate to their audience. What truth means in this context isn’t always clear, but it appears to have a connotation of showing rather than telling, and in a manner that’s intensely personal, not clinical. Artists must mean what they are trying to express, not merely blandly “state” it. Creating art is mentally and sometimes physically demanding work, but it remains a form of play in some sense of the word, and this play can be intensely gratifying. The model of the child at play retains a certain authority here, as we’re speaking of an activity in which one is absorbed utterly in the present moment. Creative tension, serious play, hard work and joy, action and passion, the Apollonian and the Dionysian—all of these come together here. What artists say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing may not be the same. At any rate, some theoretical analysis is needed to try to clarify what some of these themes might mean and entail. This will be our task in the following chapters. NOTES 1. Bob Dylan, interview with Robert Hilburn, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York: Wenner Books, 2006), 432. 2. Cited in Michael Jackson, Moonwalk (New York: Harmony Books, 2009), front matter. 3. Pamela Travers, “The Interviewer,” in Creators on Creating: Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind, eds. Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, and Anthea Barron (New York: Penguin, 1997), 42–43. The point was echoed by filmmaker Federico Fellini: “Myself, I should find it false and dangerous to start from some clear, well defined, complete idea and then put it into practice. I must be ignorant of what I shall be doing and I can find the resources I need only when I am plunged into obscurity and ignorance. The child is in darkness at the moment he is formed in his mother’s womb.” Federico Fellini, “Miscellany,” in Creators on Creating, 33. Poet A. E. Housman changed the metaphor only slightly: “so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions

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thus proffered to the brain was an abyss, . . . the pit of the stomach.” A. E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” in Creators on Creating, 51. 4. Jimmy Page, interview in It Might Get Loud, directed by Davis Guggenheim (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2009), DVD. 5. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 42. As Frank Zappa expressed it: “I used to love putting little black dots on music paper. I’d sit for sixteen hours at a time, hunched over in a chair with a bottle of India ink, and draw beams and dots. No other activity could have enticed me away from the table.” Frank Zappa, “All About Music,” in Creators on Creating, 196–97. 6. Michael Jackson, Moonwalk, 217. 7. Michael Jackson, This Is It, directed by Kenny Ortega (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2010), DVD. 8. Tony Kushner, “Is It a Fiction that Playwrights Create Alone?” in Creators on Creating, 146. 9. Mary Shelley, “The Genesis of Frankenstein,” in Creators on Creating, 93–94. 10. Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 84, 13, 11. 11. Michael Jackson, Moonwalk, 49, 47. A biographer reports that “By the time [Jackson] met Quincy Jones in the late seventies, though still a teenager, he already had nearly a decade of experience learning firsthand from some of the most renowned musicians and songwriters in the industry. Jones described him as a ‘sponge.’ ‘He wanted to be the best of everything—to take it all in,’ Jones said. ‘He went to the top model in each category to create an act and persona that would be unequalled.’” Joseph Vogel, Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson (New York: Sterling, 2011), 5. 12. Pete Seeger, interview in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese (Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2005), DVD. Springsteen repeats the metaphor: “apply your trade humbly (or not so!) as a piece of a long, spirited chain you’re thankful to be a small link in.” Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 217. 13. Charles Seeger, “Who Owns Folklore? A Rejoinder,” Western Folklore 21, no. 2 (April 1962). 14. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Company, 1920), 114. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had also remarked that “There is through all art a filiation. If you see a great master, you will always find that he used what was good in his predecessors, and that it was this which made him great. Men like Raphael do not spring out of the ground. They took root in the antique, and the best which had been done before them. Had they not used the advantages of their time, there would be little to say about them.” Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998), 145. 15. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, volume one (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 216–17, 285. 16. Bob Dylan, interview with Robert Hilburn, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 434. 17. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, 5, 18. 18. Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 42, 120–21. 19. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 347. 20. Igor Stravinsky, “Poetics of Music,” in Creators on Creating, 192. Along similar lines, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky remarked: “Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready—that is to say, if the disposition for work is there—it takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches, leaves and, finally, blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any other way than by this simile.” Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, “Composing a Symphony,” in Creators on Creating, 180. W. Somerset Maugham made the point this way: “I have never claimed to create anything out of

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nothing; I have always needed an incident or a character as a starting point, but I have exercised imagination, invention and a sense of the dramatic to make it something of my own.” W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), xv. 21. Bob Dylan, MusiCares Speech, 2015. 22. Bob Dylan, interview with Robert Hilburn, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 437–38. 23. Bob Dylan, MusiCares Speech, 2015. 24. Bob Dylan, interview with Robert Hilburn, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 438. The same artist writes, “I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. . . . I guess it happens to you by degrees. . . . Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain.” Bob Dylan, Chronicles, 51. 25. Cited in Ian Bell, Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2013), 474. 26. Frank Zappa, “All About Music,” 195. 27. Igor Stravinsky, “Poetics of Music,” 190. Italo Calvino put it this way: “The poet’s mind . . . works according to a process of association of images that is the quickest way to link and to choose between the infinite forms of the possible and the impossible. The imagination is a kind of electronic machine that takes account of all possible combinations and chooses the ones that are appropriate to a particular purpose, or are simply the most interesting, pleasing, or amusing.” Italo Calvino, “Visibility,” in Creators on Creating, 104. 28. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 443. 29. Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade, 120–21. Guitarist Joe Satriani, for one, writes that once the initial elements of a song are in place, “the rest of the song just flowed,” at times anyway. Joe Satriani, Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2014), 265. 30. Neil Peart, Far and Wide: Bring That Horizon to Me! (Toronto: ECW Press, 2016), 33. 31. Michael Jackson, Moonwalk, 209–10. 32. Joseph Vogel, Man in the Music, 2. 33. W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (London: Penguin, 1984), 60–61. In speaking of his own practice as a writer of fiction, Maugham cautioned against using a notebook as follows: “I forget who it was who said that every author should keep a notebook, but should take care never to refer to it. If you understand this properly, I think there is truth in it. . . . The danger of using notes is that you find yourself inclined to rely on them, and to lose the even and natural flow of your writing which comes from allowing the unconscious that full activity which is somewhat pompously known as inspiration. You are also inclined to drag in your jottings whether they fit in or not.” W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook, xiii. 34. Joseph Vogel, Man in the Music, 1. 35. Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, “Composing a Symphony,” 180–81. 36. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 401. 37. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, 219. 38. Graham Robb, Victor Hugo, 60, 311. 39. Michael Jackson, Moonwalk, 9. 40. Joe Satriani, Strange Beautiful Music, 263. 41. Bob Dylan, MusiCares Speech, 2015. 42. Bob Dylan, interview with Jon Pareles, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 393. 43. Bob Dylan, interview with Paul Zollo, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 379. 44. Dolores O’Riordan, interview on FaceCulture, 2007. 45. Federico Fellini, “Miscellany,” 32. 46. Graham Robb, Victor Hugo, 251.

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47. Geoffrey Ward, Dayton Duncan, and Ken Burns, Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), xiii–xiv. 48. Brad Tolinski, Light and Shade, 132. 49. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 454. 50. Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz. The Swing Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 255. 51. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), 55. 52. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 186. 53. Frank Barron, “The Opened Mind,” in Creators on Creating, 57.

TWO Some Central Concepts and Theories

TERMINOLOGY AND A COUPLE OF THEORIES Our aim in this book is to shed some light on what’s commonly referred to as artistic creation, and without losing sight of the mystery that remains at the heart of our topic. No theoretical analysis—be it philosophical, psychological, or anything else—will capture in any complete or totalizing way what it is that artists do. There are limits here, and a theoretical investigation of the kind we’re proposing needs to remain mindful of this fact. No code will be cracked and ambiguity, plenty of it, will remain. The artists we have cited don’t pretend to have grasped the whole but only to have something important to say, and it’s no different for philosophers. Before getting into the heart of our argument, let’s first say a little more about the scope of our project. While we do suspect that what we say in what follows about creativity in art will also be true of creativity in some other fields—in the sciences, for example, and in activities where “creative problem-solving” plays a role—the issue of creativity in general is simply too far-ranging to deal with. Our investigation is restricted to the creation of art. But already here we encounter an enormous problem: what exactly is art? What activities count as art, and what sorts of objects count as works of art? People have been asking these questions for centuries, and no satisfactory answers have ever been offered. In the field of philosophy, researchers learned long ago that when a question seems, after extensive investigation, to be impossible to answer, it’s probably because the question has been badly formulated. We believe that’s the case here and that we’ve simply been asking the wrong question. But how could “what is art?” be the wrong question? It’s not as if the grammatical structure of the question is incorrect or even complicated. It con23

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tains just three words; it seems simple and straightforward, and its meaning seems clear. But is it really? We’d suggest that the question isn’t clear at all, and that the source of the problem lies in the little word “art.” This word has been around for a long time. We all use it, fairly frequently in fact, and we all think we know, more or less anyway, what it means. But do we? No, not really. If the meaning of the word were clear, we would be able either to define it satisfactorily or to point at “it” and declare without reservation, “That is art!” The history of art, and of the discussion of art, has demonstrated the impossibility of any straightforward definition, so we won’t attempt that task here. And while many will claim that pointing to individual examples of art should suffice for the purpose of investigating artistic creativity, that won’t work either. In fact, it’s pointing at works and calling them art that seems often to give rise to disagreement about whether particular works are artworks at all. Such difficulties of definition led philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century to reject entirely the traditional and modernist concept of art, according to which all artworks have in common a specific nature or essence, and to suggest some novel ideas and theories along “antiessentialist” lines. The most influential of these ideas was that of the “artworld,” first advanced by philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto in 1964, 1 and “the institutional theory of art,” first formulated by philosopher George Dickie about a decade later. 2 The institutional theory and the concept of the artworld remain dominant today in art schools and philosophy departments as well as in published works by theorists and critics in many different fields. In his 1964 paper, “The Artworld,” Danto maintained that “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry [sic]—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” 3 He referred to the work of “Mr. Andy Warhol, the Pop artist” to explain further: What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting. It could not have been art fifty years ago. But then there could not have been, everything being equal, flight insurance in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan typewriter erasers. The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. It would, I should think, never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they were producing art on those walls. Not unless there were neolithic aestheticians. 4

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What makes something a work of art, on this influential view, is a theory with reference to which we’re able to recognize it as art, that is, as belonging to the “artworld” as opposed to the world of ordinary life. This concept of the artworld was further developed over the years by philosophers and other theorists, by critics and many artists themselves, as well as museum curators, gallery owners, and other such institutional authorities. These people are recognized as members of the artworld, and therefore it is they who have the authority to identify a particular artifact as a work of art, and they do so by granting it admission to their gallery, museum, or other such art institution. This is, in outline, the institutional theory of art proposed by Dickie. This way of trying to answer the question “what is art?” has become remarkably popular. The institutional theory along with the associated concept of the artworld continue to dominate the theory, the practice, and the teaching of art and the philosophy of art today. It’s easy to see the attraction: after some two thousand years of failing to identify whatever it is that makes a particular work a work of art, this approach directs our attention away from the work itself and toward certain theoretical and social conditions that enable us to consider something as art. In other words, we’re not concerned here with the thing itself, but with our thinking about it—or, more precisely, with the conditions that make it possible for us to see something as a work of art. The simplicity of the fiat of the institutional theory is extremely attractive to philosophers who have been banging their rattled heads against the walls of “mysterious essences” for the last two thousand years. Yet despite its academic triumph in universities and its career-making success in journalistic criticism, this magical solution has remained unconvincing to a large number of philosophers of art and laypersons alike, and we’re among them. The claim that simply displaying something in an art gallery magically transforms it into a work of art seems to us simplistic, arbitrary, and authoritarian. Asserting that something—anything—becomes art simply by artworld experts’ say-so, or by being institutionally recognized as such, blindly ignores—and in fact explicitly denies—the nature of art, as well as the skill and hard work of artists who often devote their entire working life to its creation. Misunderstanding of the expression “the nature of art” may well be the source of the confusion that has led to the popularity of artworld and institutional theories. This expression is misleading in its suggestion that there exists one quite special group of entities that we can call “art,” and that all of these entities share a distinctive “essence,” some quality or set of qualities that sets these entities apart from all others and enables us to recognize their quite unique nature. The history of the discussion of art seems always to have assumed this, and the debate concerning “the nature of art” has largely revolved around just what this essence or quality may be and, for at least the last two centuries, whether this essence is

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inherent to the work of art itself—that is, the “object”—or is bestowed upon that object by the perceiver or audience. After centuries of searching for this essence, however, we appear to have lost sight of the very experience that initiated our search so long ago. We have become hypnotized by our own words, confused our words with our thinking, and our thinking about art with what we’re actually experiencing when we encounter this magical beast. And magical it most undeniably is. As we’ll be discussing later, works of art are products of a unique feature of human experience or, more precisely, human consciousness. This feature is present in all our consciousness, but it’s in our encounter with art that it’s most powerfully evident. In both our creative activity of producing these works and in what we shall call (following a suggestion by Roman Ingarden) the “re-creative” activity of our aesthetic experience of works of art, we become possessed by a special magic, a power that mysteriously guides our experience, be it when we’re transcribing the words that seem suddenly, and quite inexplicably, to come to mind (as if they were being dictated to us) when we’re writing something, or when we feel the shiver go up our neck when the chorus breaks out with Schiller’s Ode to Joy in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. For all of us who have had such experiences, they are undeniably powerful and moving, and whether they’re creative or re-creative, their power seems to lie in the way they guide our feelings and thoughts, both immediately, while we’re actively (or reactively) engaged in the experience, and afterwards, as a lingering recognition of the way we should continue to feel or think. 5 This “magic theory” of art was actually one of the earliest attempts of ancient Greek poets and philosophers to identify art’s essential nature. The work of art—a sculpture, for example, as part of a frieze on a Greek temple or monument—might strike the viewer as so lifelike as to be animated and capable of motion, features that belong only to living beings with spirit or a soul. How could such a work be the product of anything but some magical power? And how could the sculptor be anything less than a magician? The same could be said of the power of poetry: the vivid imagery of Homer can work so forcefully on the mind of the listener that she could be transported, as if by magic, to another place and time, and how could this poetic ability be anything less than magical or divine? Ancient Greek thinkers in fact suggested several such theories and concepts, some of which have remained central to the analyses of art and aesthetic experience to this day. INTENTIONALITY One such concept is intentionality, which as we indicated in the preface will play a central role in the account we offer. While the concept itself is

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modern, it has deep roots in medieval and ancient thought, as good philosophical ideas usually do. It’s central as well to what came at the beginning of the twentieth century to be called phenomenology. It is our phenomenological hypothesis that human consciousness or awareness itself arises from intentionality. This includes the particular sort of awareness that is at work in artistic creation. Artists are perceivers; they notice things, often in fresh and unusual ways. To understand what they’re doing we need to get a clearer view of what and how they’re seeing and also what it is to see at all, or to be conscious. It’s here that the concept of intentionality becomes important. Our view is that just as what’s called “sentience” is an emergent feature of organisms less complex than ourselves, consciousness is an emergent feature of human beings. Sentience and consciousness likewise have what philosophers call an intentional structure. The mind apprehends an intentionality that is in the world. In saying this we’re profoundly modifying a standard phenomenological hypothesis regarding what Edmund Husserl, the founder of twentieth-century phenomenology, termed the “intentionality of consciousness.” On his influential view, intentions are a kind of projection of the mind. They originate “in here,” so to speak, and are projected or imposed “out there,” onto the world. Space and time, for example, belong not to the world but to minds. We want to locate intentional structures at least partly in the world, outside of minds or subjectivity. The mind operates, becomes conscious so to speak, when it engages with intentions in one form or another. Our view is that human consciousness consists in the mutual creation of subject and object, these two poles of awareness. To speak of the “priority” of one over the other, either of “ideal” mind (idealism) or of the “material,” external world (materialism), is mistaken. It is equally wrongheaded to deny the existence of either, or to “reduce” one to the other. Both mind and world exist, and they exist independently of each other. What they don’t exist independently of is the relation that gives rise to and dialectically maintains them both. This relation is intentionality at work, and we find intentionality at work everywhere. Consider, for instance, the humble paramecium. When viewed under a microscope, this organism doesn’t just lie there, inert. It tends this way and that, displays movement, directionality, and relations which are not imposed by the mind but belong to the thing itself. Organisms are continually responding to their environment, and in more complex ways as their material structures become more complex. An intention, most fundamentally, is an affair of tending, relating, being in motion, and being directed in one way or another. When we speak of intentionality, we’re speaking more of a kind of activity than any sort of thingly entity which subsequently becomes directed toward an end. We should think of consciousness not as any kind of object but as an activity that crucially involves some form of relating. It is the nature of

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intentional entities to direct activity and awareness in a certain way, to provide them with a bent or direction that is specific, in the way that a conversation or a game directs our thoughts and actions in a particular way. To act here is to respond or follow along in the trajectory that the intentional structure sets forth, a description that applies to the creation and reception of works of art as well as the lion’s share of what minds do. Consciousness itself is learned; it’s a form of activity that invariably exhibits some form of learned directedness and which is governed, as so much of human activity is, by habits which themselves are learned. But what exactly is intentionality? The work of Franz Brentano is commonly cited as the source for the modern understanding of this term, and his students—who included such seminal figures as Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Steiner, and Kazimierz Twardowski—played defining roles in charting the courses of a great deal of twentieth-century philosophy and psychology. While Brentano himself preceded the twentieth-century divorce of academic philosophy into analytic and continental, 6 he found himself deeply embroiled in far broader intellectual and religious disputes that immediately affected his life and career. Born in 1838 to an established and wealthy family—he was the nephew of Clemens Brentano and Bettina von Arnim (Clemens was a major German Romantic poet and novelist, and his sister Bettina was the famous correspondent of Goethe)—Franz Brentano studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Münster before completing his doctoral dissertation at Tübingen in 1862 and then entering the seminary and studying theology, first in Munich and then in Würzburg, where he was ordained a priest in 1864 and subsequently defended his habilitation thesis. Both his doctoral thesis, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, and his Habilitationschrift, The Psychology of Aristotle: In Particular His Doctrine of the Active Intellect, deal critically with the Aristotelian treatment of issues that are both philosophical and theological, spanning the fields of logic, ontology, epistemology, psychology, and metaphysics. Brentano had begun teaching philosophy at Würzburg upon his defense of the Habilitationschrift in 1866, but because he couldn’t agree with the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility, he resigned from the priesthood and was thereby forced to resign from his professorship in 1873. Later that year he was called to a professorship at the University of Vienna, but in 1880 he was forced to give up that position too, as well as his Austrian citizenship, in order to marry. He continued to teach in Vienna as a Privatdozent (an unsalaried lecturer) until his retirement in 1895, and it was during these last fifteen years that his most famous students collected around him, forming the nucleus of what has come to be known as “the school of Brentano” or “Austrian philosophy.” 7 It will be helpful to locate the development of this philosophy in its historical context. In German philosophy, idealism had become the dominant tradition already before Hegel, but it was Hegel’s systematic elaboration of what

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we now call “absolute idealism” that marked the furthest development of this tradition. Indeed, by 1831, the year of Hegel’s death, when one spoke of academic philosophy in Western Europe this was generally understood to refer to “Hegel’s idealism,” and Hegel’s thought largely dictated the course of science and philosophy until around the turn of the twentieth century. All species of idealism entertain a similar view regarding the ontological status of “the real”: the real world is, in some way and to some extent, dependent for its existence upon the ideal, or the “Idea”; the ideal makes the real what it is. If one accepts the basic tenets of idealism, one is granted access to certainty and knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, and the persuasive power of Hegel’s philosophy derives immediately from the logically compelling force and comprehensiveness of his idealist system: the totality of Being and existence (and also nonexistence!) is logically comprehended in his system, and even “the contingent” finds its necessary niche in the whole. Hegel’s system, as set out in the three parts of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, describes this “ideal” movement from (1) logic (which describes the development of the Idea in itself, the Logical Idea), through (2) philosophy of nature (which describes the development of the Idea outside itself, or nature, culminating in human nature), to (3) philosophy of spirit, which describes the development of the Idea in and for itself, or spirit, which culminates in the human endeavors of art, religion, and, finally, philosophy. All of history is, so to speak, the biography of spirit (Geist) becoming selfconscious. Spirit begins this endeavor by manifesting itself as “the Idea,” which exists—that is, which “is” spatio-temporally—first in its purely logical form as “the Idea in-Itself,” and this “logical idea” manifests itself as a series of logical concepts, traced in the science of logic. This series culminates in the recognition of the cognitive incompleteness of the purely logical evolution of the Idea. This recognition marks a transition to the manifestation of the Idea in “natural,” that is, physical, form as “the Idea for-Itself.” This is the sphere of the science of nature, the “natural sciences.” This manifestation of spirit as (embodied) Idea in turn culminates in “the crown of creation,” the natural human being, who is endowed with the highest form of embodied spirit. The human spirit recognizes that the realm of nature is in fact a “mirror” of the logical, the full realization of which can be attained only in the further manifestation of the Idea as spirit, or “the Idea in- and for-Itself.” The culmination of the Idea inand for-Itself is achieved with the final recognition of spirit as spirit, that is, with spirit’s achievement of full self-consciousness. This final moment in the biography of spirit is achieved in the final stage of philosophical development, that is, in Hegel’s system itself. Hegel’s idealism had been challenged already before his death, and after his death these various challenges not only remained unresolved but resulted in the fragmentation of philosophy itself. As a parallel result, philosophy—as a discipline purporting to provide unique access to uni-

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versal, certain knowledge—fell into disrepute. This fall from grace was accelerated by notable advances in the natural sciences, which in fact directly challenged elements of Hegel’s system. For example, Hegel’s philosophy of nature claimed to be systematically complete, as did each “separate” moment of his system as a whole. But either the development of the natural sciences spoke against its completeness, or the discoveries of these sciences, being “outside of” Hegel’s system, would have to be denied as illusory, as not accurately representing “the real world” (because inconsistent with “the ideal”). The tendency of post-Hegelian thinkers was to challenge what they regarded as Hegelian dogmatism and give credence to the sciences, respect for which was growing ever more rapidly as the results of scientific research could be applied to meet the manufacturing and engineering demands of the industrial revolution. In philosophy, as in many other fields of the liberal arts, the tendency was to adopt the new “naturalism” and “positivism.” It was at this time that scholars began to refer to certain disciplines as belonging to the human or social sciences, and these disciplines reformulated their methodologies as far as possible according to the model supplied by the natural sciences. This was the beginning in philosophy of the area of specialization we now identify as the philosophy of science, which many academic philosophers regarded as the only legitimate philosophy, all the rest being little more than idle speculation, and thereby to be taken no more seriously than Hegel’s speculative metaphysics. 8 By the time of Brentano, then, the natural sciences in effect had come to supplant philosophical speculation by formulating non-philosophical, materialist “syntheses” of their own. Here we locate the most recent historical roots of our contemporary trend of “reductionism”—for example: psychology can be reduced to biology, biology to physiology, physiology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, and so on (hence the search for “the smallest particle”). The goal here is to “reduce” or “trace back” everything to the basic material “facts,” a goal that demands the prior accumulation and systematic ordering of such facts, the raw “data.” This attention to the accumulation of data is sometimes referred to as “positivism”—which deals with the immediately posited facts—and the corresponding attitude is sometimes, usually disparagingly, referred to as “scientism.” Such positivism rests upon a physicalist metaphysical presupposition regarding the nature of reality, namely, that all that exists is physical matter. 9 It’s against this backdrop that we have to place the thought of Brentano. As a philosopher, he shared with his contemporaries many of their misgivings regarding the dogmatism and speculative nature of Hegelian philosophy. Brentano also had enormous respect for Auguste Comte’s philosophy of positivism, 10 going so far as to remark that “perhaps no other philosopher of recent time deserved our attention as much as Comte,” 11 and in his Habilitationschrift he even asserted that “the true method

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of philosophy is none other than that of natural science.” Yet as a thinker who had also studied theology and been ordained a priest, Brentano never abandoned his interest in Aristotle, metaphysical questions, and the spiritual dimension of human being. While his synthesis of science and metaphysics remained incomplete and somewhat uneasy, Brentano thought it possible, and indeed necessary, to ground metaphysics in an empirical science of descriptive psychology that drew from Aristotelian insights as they had been formulated in scholastic philosophy, and the most significant of the scholastic terms employed in this task is “intentionality.” Brentano described intentionality in this famous passage taken from his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon included something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. 12

The terms Brentano employed here are technical and require explanation. This includes even the term “scholastics,” which refers to the teachers (literally, the “schoolmen”) of the early universities in Europe, who applied the tools of rigorous critical, logical analysis to the interpretation and exegesis of the writings of the earlier fathers and doctors of the Church. The chief goal of scholastic philosophy—which is usually described as extending from around 1100 to at least the time of the late Renaissance—was to ground and elaborate a Christian theology that was consistent with the logical and philosophical demands of Greek and Roman thinkers. The foremost of these thinkers was Aristotle, who was referred to simply as “The Philosopher.” It was primarily to Aristotle that medieval philosophers and theologians traced back the origin both of their methods of logical analysis (or “dialectic,” as it was called) and of the most fundamental of their philosophical concepts. The most privileged of these concepts pertain to the operations of the human soul, which Aristotle described as first arising from the presentation of some object to the mind of the human perceiver. We shall discuss this in more detail later. What concerns us at the moment is that Brentano, in the passage just quoted, was speaking of this very topic, and that he was indicating that the scholastic thinkers contributed an important term to its discussion, a term that identified a feature shared by all “mental phenomena”: they are all intentional.

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The word “presentation” in the Brentano passage translates the German Vorstellung. In some translations—not only of Brentano’s work, but of the works of the German idealists (including Kant and Hegel)—this word used to be commonly rendered in philosophical English as “representation.” That was a mistake, and one that revealed a deep philosophical prejudice of the translators: Anglo-American philosophy to this day retains allegiance to the philosophy of the early British empiricists, who carved the doctrine of mental representation deeply into the foundations of modern English-speaking philosophy. Without entering into a critical discussion of this doctrine, it’s important that we make it clear that Brentano wasn’t claiming that the mind “represents” external reality to itself. Such a simple claim is already riddled with far too many questionable epistemological and metaphysical assumptions. In attempting to construct a rigorous empirical psychology, Brentano restricted his analyses to that which is immediately presented to consciousness, and this is, precisely, the presentation, that is, the act of placing something before consciousness. Nothing else is implied by the word Vorstellung; nothing is being offered to the mind as a copy or representation of anything outside of the mind or the act of consciousness itself. The act of consciousness is, for Brentano, an exclusively mental phenomenon: it is the act of consciousness being directed toward some kind of content belonging to that act. For example, in enjoying the taste of honey in a cup of mint tea, we may identify “the act” of consciousness as the enjoying, and this act is directed toward not the cup, nor the tea, nor the honey, but the taste. The enjoying and the taste are the two poles of the act of consciousness, that is, the act of being directed (enjoying) toward an object (taste). This kind of analysis belongs to basic phenomenology, and we’ll have much more to say about this when we discuss aesthetic experience. When we do so, we’ll also be suggesting how being directed is not only about the directedness of consciousness but also about the being of things. Before we get to all of that, however, we have to present some more introductory material, focusing on some other ideas that will play a central role in our account of artistic creation and which again go back to the Greeks. IMITATION, PARTICIPATION, AND HABIT FORMATION These three phenomena overlap and pervade a good deal of human experience in general. It’s not only the youthful mind that imitates and that forms and acts in accordance with habits. So do artists and their audiences. Imitation and habit formation both feature prominently in artistic creativity. We need now to clarify how this is so and what these notions mean.

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Plato—about whom we’ll have more to say in Chapter 3—famously worried about the natural tendency of children to imitate their elders on grounds that children become what they imitate. They come to participate, in other words, in the same form of life as their models, for better or for worse. The worry is entirely reasonable. Evidence from contemporary psychology as well shows that environmental factors have a profoundly formative influence on the young. A good part of a child’s earliest education consists precisely in imitating the actions of her elders, and when the child imitates a bad example she may easily herself become bad. It is not only actions that are habitual in this way but consciousness itself, which develops tendencies or becomes directed one way or another as a consequence of the way of being in which it has participated with others. Learning how to speak a language, for instance, involves acquiring through imitation particular patterns of speech which over time become habitual. To form a habit isn’t merely to repeat a given course of action but to acquire or participate in a way of being. A habit itself, we might say, is not only a particular behavioral structure but a way or manner in which one is in the world. Let’s look at this idea more closely. Plato’s classic discussion of art in general occurs in the Republic, although the central concern there is with poetry. Plato had Socrates deal explicitly with poetry in two separate sections of the dialogue, once in Books Two and Three and again in Book Ten. In the former section (376e–403c), the topic of poetry is introduced in the context of a discussion of the education of the guardians, where Socrates expresses his concern that poetry shouldn’t be allowed to exercise any morally deleterious effect on the young. He comes to advocate quite far-reaching censorship, laying out a few general rules, as well as several very specific ones, to be followed by the poets in order that the children who listen to their works not take into their souls, or minds, any opinions which they shouldn’t have when grown to adulthood. The arguments are familiar enough to demand no lengthy treatment here. It suffices to say that the entire discussion revolves around the moral damage that uncensored poetry might wreak upon the audience of prospective guardians and responsible adults-to-be. The commentators have generally attended almost exclusively to the “moralistic” aspect of this criticism, not only because it’s so obvious but also because it makes a good deal of sense—as we see, for example, in the fact that the question of the moral welfare of the audience almost always enters into political discussions of censorship. But by concentrating primarily on the moral aspect of Plato’s criticism of poetry, we’re overlooking an important insight he offered regarding the psychology of aesthetic experience. In Books Two and Three, Plato is not only discussing the moral hazards of “bad” poetry; he is also, and more importantly, suggesting that poetry is capable of exercising such morally corrupting influence because of the psychological makeup of the human being. It is not until

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Book Ten, however, that Socrates is finally able to elucidate this psychological criticism of poetry in any depth, and he does so by recalling his earlier discussions of ontology and epistemology, the description of the relation between “mind” and “world,” found in the central books of the dialogue and which we’ll discuss in Chapter 3. In that discussion of mind and world (or “reality”), Socrates describes each of the three lower levels of the world as being a “copy” of the level that is immediately above it, and as being dependent upon this higher level for its truth and value. In Book Ten, this notion of “copying” is again employed in much the same manner when Socrates speaks of art and poetry. The passage in question (595–607) begins with the assertion that, given the divisions among levels of mind and reality, Socrates and company were quite correct in their previous conclusion, “In refusing to admit at all so much of it as is imitative” (595a). 13 The upshot of Socrates’s argument in this part of Book Ten is that the product of artisticpoetic creation, being an image of an image, is at some distance from truth, and thus can serve no good purpose in the individual’s pursuit of knowledge and truth. In short, “poetry, and in general the mimetic art, produces a product that is far removed from truth in the accomplishment of its task, and associates with the part in us that is remote from intelligence, and is its companion and friend for no sound and true purpose” (603b). For this reason, then, imitative poetry is to be banished from the city-state. Although this ontological treatment of poetry appears later in the dialogue than the moral-psychological, it’s by means of this ontological analysis that we’re enabled to see how mimesis can exercise its psychological effect. That is, while Books Two and Three tell us what imitation is capable of doing to the audience, Book Ten, which tells us just what imitation is, thereby tells us also how imitation can affect the human psyche as it does. We have now to take a closer look at this “affect.” In contemporary idiom we say that a person “mimics” another. A child, for example, mimics her elders when she unexpectedly blurts out a profanity she overheard the day before. This kind of “imitation,” however, is utterly devoid of content. The child doesn’t understand the meaning of the four-letter word, and her first (and quite often last) utterance of the word in the presence of her parents is significant to the child only in the negative response it elicits. Nowadays mimicry is generally regarded as childish, and it’s more than likely that it was so regarded in Plato’s time as well. Some commentators—R. G. Collingwood and Rupert C. Lodge 14 among them—have claimed that (Plato’s) Socrates maintained that all imitation, qua mimicry, is to be avoided, precisely because it’s childish and appeals to what is non-rational in human nature. That Plato, and presumably also Socrates, did argue along this line is undeniable, but there’s more to the argument than this. To begin with, imitation is immediately demanding of censure on at least two counts. First, imitation is “removed” from reality, that is, the imitation itself must always be ad-

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judged as of far less significance and value than that which is imitated. This is a rather straightforward “ontological” criticism of imitation, and the censure itself appears to be little more than an exaggerated statement of the ontological imperfection of the imitation. A second reason for the censure of imitation is that it’s “childish”; it nurtures the undeveloped, non-rational element of human nature. Plato’s intention in levelling this “psychological” criticism of imitation appears to have been motivated not so much by the recognition that imitation itself is non-rational (insofar as it is “removed” from the reality discerned only by means of reason), but rather by the fear that through the imitation of the non-rational one might become non-rational. In other words, Plato recognized that the imitation of the non-rational is capable of leading to participation in the non-rational. As this distinction between the notions of “imitation” and “participation” is central to the analyses that follow, it warrants further clarification. A few etymological observations might prove helpful here. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote: “The realization that speech is an originating realm naturally comes late. Here as everywhere, the relation of having, which can be seen in the very etymology of the word habit (habitude), is at first concealed by relations belonging to the domain of being, or, as we may equally say, by ontic relations obtaining within the world.” 15 The “very etymology of the word” is as follows. Our word “habit,” like the modern French habitude, comes to us through the Old French habit, abit, which derives from the Latin habitus (habere, to have), which means: the way in which one holds or “has” oneself, that is, the mode or condition in which one is, or exists, or exhibits oneself—be it in character, in disposition, in way of acting or comporting oneself, or of dealing with things. In short, then, for one to “have” something is for that something to be among one’s habits, and thus for it to be a mode of one’s being, a manner in which one exists in the world. The cultivation of habit, then, is the development of a particular way of being, or existing. In Plato’s Greek, “habit” translates hexis, which is cognate with the verb echein, which usually translates “to have.” But echein can also translate “to be” (as can the Latin habere). 16 For the Greeks, then, as well as for the Romans and ourselves, a habit is something one “has” by virtue of consistently behaving (be-having) in a particular manner—by virtue, that is to say, of consistently existing or being in a certain way. The Greek word we most often translate as “participation” is methexis, a form combining the preposition meta and the verb echein. In combined forms, meta generally designates a community of, or sharing among, individuals. Thus metechein might literally be rendered the “having in common” of something with another person or thing. Given the context in which it usually appears in Plato, however, it might more precisely be rendered the “being in common.” 17 Regarding Plato’s technical philosophical notion of participation in light of this etymology, we might say that “to participate” means to share the same habit, the same way of being, with another. Thus,

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for example, all physical entities may be said to participate in corporeality in that each of them exists as a spatially extended body. Plato first explored this notion in depth in the Phaedo, where Socrates is said to participate both in tallness and, at the same time, in shortness, depending upon the tallness or the shortness of the person with whom he is comparing himself—depending, that is, upon the manner or mode of existing that he “has” in common with the tall person, on the one hand, and the short person, on the other. Apart from such physical “habits,” there are, more importantly, countless non-physical “ways of being.” For example, an evil character—and “character” here could also translate hexis—is nothing other than an evil way of being. Yet such an “evil way of being” is, of course, made manifest only in outward behavior. That is, we can only judge a person as “evil” if that person consistently acts in a way that we would deem evil. We infer an evil character from repeated, habitual evil deeds. We don’t actually see that character, the hexis, itself; we see only its physically manifested effects. This mention of inference from the physical also recalls Phaedo, where the progression from the physical and sensible to the purely intelligible is described in such a way as to render the sensation of physical objects a necessary preliminary to the recognition of the non-sensible Forms, such as “equality” and “the Good.” It's most important to note that there exists a sort of connection between the physical and the non-physical, and that this connection may be construed as to some extent a causal one. Thus, by repeatedly imitating the physical characteristics or actions of another person, one may develop certain physical habits that have their non-physical counterparts in one’s mental or spiritual “disposition” (hexis). Imitation, in short, may lead to participation (methexis), both physically and spiritually. Recalling now the “mimicry” of the child, Plato’s fear of the dangers of imitation seems quite reasonable. As Aristotle also pointed out, and as contemporary psychologists continue to demonstrate ever more convincingly, a good part of a child’s earliest experience and education consists precisely in imitating the actions of her elders. 18 Yet there is another side to this “criticism” of imitation. The question lies in whether imitation might not be able to inculcate good habits in the child. Although the discussion in Book Three of the Republic concentrates on the negative results of imitating a bad model, Plato clearly recognized that there can also be imitation that is good. At Republic 395cd, we read: But if [the guardians] imitate they should from childhood up imitate what is appropriate to them—men, that is, who are brave, sober, pious, free, and all things of that kind—but things unbecoming the free man they should neither do nor be clever at imitating . . . lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality. Or have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?

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In short, the child will become what she repeatedly imitates; she will come to participate in or to possess the same “way of being” as the model copied, and it’s clearly desirable for the child to attend to only the best of models. This isn’t limited to the moral or practical sphere. All of our behavior develops and is informed in the same manner. Just as our moral behavior is, for Plato and Aristotle, largely the product of the habits, or ways of practical being, that we have developed over our life, so too is our perceptual behavior, our emotional behavior, and our intellectual behavior. In other words, the ways that we perceive, feel, and think are nothing other than the ways that we exist perceptually, emotionally, and intellectually, and these “ways” of our existing are the forms of our behavior. They are the essential structures, the essences one might say, that provide our actions with the formal framework in accordance with which they cohere not merely as the conglomeration of separate physical motions of a body, but as the unified behavior of a self-identical intentional person. Our habits, in directing our actions, make up the forms of our behavior. Actions that manifest or exhibit habits are instances of behavior. We might say that habits are to actions as forms are to matter (and that just as form + matter = object, so do habit + action = behavior). We might, as C. S. Peirce suggested, simply identify habits as rules of action. 19 But at this point the question must inevitably arise: where are these habits? Are they “in” the body? And if they are, then aren’t they material entities? But if they’re material entities, how can they provide the form for the matter? What we’re going to suggest here is that habits are intentional. They enjoy intentional being, not material being, so they don’t “exist” in the same manner as spatio-temporal entities like couches, and they can’t be said to “be” at any physical location at all. To ask “where” a habit is, is something like asking how much the idea of nature weighs; this isn’t merely a “category mistake,” it’s an error of substance, or “being.” Habits subsist, just as do laws of nature or the relations among the parts of an organic unity, and while such subsisting “entities” may persist or endure through time, they cannot be “located” at any one spatial point or in any one temporal moment. This is true of all subsisting entities, all entities enjoying intentional being. William James wrote that “The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter. The laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other.” 20 And just as it is with our habits, so too is it wrongheaded to ask, “Where are the laws of nature?” Where, for example, is gravity? Or inertia? Or causation? With regard to causation in particular, it might help to recall David Hume’s familiar dictum: “Show me the impression.” There isn’t any. We don’t experience causation, or any other law of nature, by way of external perception. Instead, we infer it; we posit causation, and all the laws of nature, as necessary conditions

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of the possibility of the world that we experience through external perception. In short, the laws of nature don’t exist “in” space and time; they “inhabit” space and time, as Merleau-Ponty would say: they provide the ways of existence for space and time, and for all entities existing in space and/or time. The way we prefer to put it, following Aristotle, is that the laws of nature “inform” space and time. They are the habits of the world. PLAY One more concept we need to discuss is that of “play.” We pointed out in Chapter 1 that artistic creation is, or crucially involves, play—serious play. When Buddy Rich said, “I don’t go to work at night, I go to play!” he meant something more than the literal statement that drums, like any musical instrument, are played, or that artists enjoy what they do, sometimes anyway. The idea is often repeated: artists play, but what does that mean? What kind of playing is this, and what is it to play? This notion is central to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical analysis of the work of art, which also draws heavily on Plato. The German word for “play” is Spiel, which is also translated as “game.” This double meaning of Spiel is crucial for Gadamer’s aesthetics, for he maintained that the work of art is similar to a game, which reaches its completion only when it’s being played. This is most clearly the case in what Gadamer referred to as the “transitory arts,” such as music and dance. As he wrote: “In the reproductive arts, the work of art must constantly be reconstituted as a creation. The transitory arts teach us most vividly that representation is required not only for the reproductive arts, but for any creation that we call a work of art. It demands to be constructed by the viewer to whom it is presented. . . . [I]t is something that manifests and displays itself when it is constituted in the viewer.” 21 This act of constitution in and on the part of the viewer demands that he participate in the creation of the work of art. The essential role played by the viewer in the creation of the work of art has clear implications with regard to its ontological status. The work of art isn’t solely, or even primarily, an independently existing object occasionally confronted by an aesthetically conscious subject. It’s not merely a “product” of the creative activity of the artist that can later be used by the viewer for the sake of aesthetic pleasure. Rather, as Gadamer put it: Just as a symbolic gesture is not just itself but expresses something else through itself, so too the work of art is not itself simply as a product. . . . [I]t is something that has emerged in an unrepeatable way and has manifested itself in a unique fashion. It seems to me, therefore, that it would be more accurate to call it a creation (Gebilde) than a work. For the word Gebilde implies that the manifestation in question has in a strange way transcended the process in which it originated, or has

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relegated that process to the periphery. It is set forth in its own appearance as a self-sufficient creation. 22

We can quickly summarize Gadamer’s position, and at the same time establish a link to Plato, by concentrating for the moment on three claims made in the passage just quoted: (1) the work of art is analogous to a symbolic gesture; (2) the work of art is properly to be regarded as a Gebilde; and (3) the work of art is a self-sufficient creation. Let’s look at each of these in turn. To say that the work of art is analogous to a symbolic gesture is to say little more than that it “stands for something else.” 23 This observation is already found in Plato, although its importance has too often been overlooked. According to Plato, art is essentially mimetic, employing images that symbolically point beyond themselves. One of the dangers he saw in art was that these images are capable of being taken for the reality itself. For example, the precocious young child who undertakes on her own to read the Iliad will not, without proper guidance (or perhaps even with such guidance), be capable of recognizing what Plato called the “underlying meanings” (hyponoias) of the text. Instead, she will take the text at face value, adhering to its literal interpretation. 24 Approached with this in mind, his criticisms of art and poetry are seen to rest upon the recognition of the presence of a symbolic function of art. Just as for Gadamer, so too for Plato does the work of art always have the power of pointing beyond itself to that which it’s not. This power is constitutive of the work, or it’s an essential part of its very nature as a work of art. It’s in this sense that we say that the work of art is a “transcendent” object: it transcends not only the process of its original creation but also itself qua imitation. It demands that we properly regard it as more than merely a finished product. It is to be understood as imitative, and as thereby directing the viewer beyond what is immediately, literally given. Its ability to do this derives from its existing not as a mere work but as a Gebilde, and this brings us to the second point raised in the passage quoted above. The translator of Gadamer’s paper has rendered Gebilde as “creation,” which is not an entirely happy translation in this context. Here the term 25 refers to a work that doesn’t exist at only one level, so to speak, but on several levels, and its completion as a work depends upon these various levels being recognized and brought into play by the viewer. One such level consists precisely of the images we spoke of just above. Only by recognizing the images of a work of art as images is the work capable of performing that symbolic function that belongs to its very nature. What this amounts to is that the work of art never fully comes into being until the viewer constructs, or constitutes, it. In this act of constitution, the building up of the Gebilde, the viewer doesn’t act as an independently existing subject encountering an already finished and completed object. Rather, both the object and the subject first come into being as players in

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the game of artistic creation, that is, in the recreation of artistic play. Further, they don’t exist as separate and distinct players but as one and the same creative activity itself. 26 This isn’t, of course, to deny that both the “subject” engaged in aesthetic experience and the “object” confronted retain some sort of independent ontological status, whatever it may be. The point is simply that both the subject and the object take on a new identity; each is now to be identified with the game in which they’re engaged. To take as an example one of the “transitory” arts mentioned above, when we dance we are the dance, and the dance exists as our dancing, in other words, the dancing of the dancer. The same is true of all aesthetic experiences, although the extent of our participation in the constitution of the work of art is often not so clearly to be seen. When, for example, we immerse ourselves in reading War and Peace, no one is liable to walk by and ask himself, how do I tell the reader from the novel? In fact, however, the two aren’t as easily distinguished as is commonly believed. Where, after all, does the novel really exist? It isn’t identical with the physical object, the book one holds in one’s hands. If it were then there would be as many novels as there are books—but we generally agree that there is only one War and Peace. Nor does the novel exist “in one’s head,” for in that case there would be as many novels as there are readers. 27 There is only one novel here, although it allows itself to be constituted, or “concretized,” in innumerable ways by innumerable readers while it remains in some sense always the “same” novel. The very fact that a given work of art refuses to allow certain interpretations already indicates that it’s not merely “in one’s head,” while the fact that it nevertheless allows for various interpretations, and that it demands to be interpreted, indicates that it’s not to be identified with the written text itself. The novel, then, exists neither as the physical object nor as the mental construction of the psychical subject. These two “poles” of aesthetic experience are encompassed by the existence of the novel, but they don’t exhaust its existence. The novel, that is, transcends both the subject and the object, uniting them in an aesthetic activity that consists in the fulfilment, or completion, of the novel itself, that is, the novel as a constituted, concretized work of art. The ontological status of the work of art can be further clarified by considering the third point listed above. To say that the work of art is a self-sufficient creation isn’t to imply that it in any way existed “before” its creation by the artist. The claim is merely that the work of art, once having come into being, proceeds to lead a life of its own, independently of its creator. It’s for this reason that knowledge of the artist’s intention— in the more usual sense of that word—isn’t essential for the aesthetic experience of the work of art. When we read War and Peace, what Tolstoy may have intended to convey is of little or no concern to us. 28 What is of concern is that the characters come alive for us, and that it’s we who love or despise them. Moreover, and more importantly, we do so in accor-

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dance with our own beliefs and convictions. When we read a novel, attempting to enter into its world, we always carry with us our own world, our own values and beliefs, our own emotional and intellectual habits. Since the world of the work first comes fully into being through our participation in its constitution, it’s clear that it derives many of its characteristics and features from us. But the work of art also imparts something to us. It serves as a mirror that reflects to us those values, beliefs, and convictions that we have injected into its world. To describe art as being essentially imitative, then, isn’t to claim that it imitates nature by copying it, but that it imitates human nature by reflecting it. The work of art holds up to the viewer his own beliefs and values and, by thus calling them to his attention, invites his self-critical reflection. As Gadamer wrote, the experience of art “does not leave him who has it unchanged.” 29 When we return from the world of the work, we bring a bit of that world with us, and this opens up to us new ways of looking at our own world and ourselves, and questions arise that we hadn’t asked ourselves before. It’s in this manner that the work of art, as a Gebilde, is capable of playing a significant role in our emotional, intellectual, and cultural development as individuals. 30 Neither Gadamer nor we intend to return to the sort of “subjectivization” of aesthetics that Gadamer criticized in his principal work, Truth and Method. His purpose and our own is merely to stress that the role played by the subject in the experience of art can’t be overlooked. To ignore the subjective element in this experience can only result in a radical “objectivization,” that is, in a view that takes the work of art as existing independently of the viewer. This must be denied in any phenomenological analysis of the ontology of the work of art. The crucial point in this regard is that the viewer contributes something to the constitution of the work of art. That isn’t to say, however, that the work is entirely dependent upon the viewer for its existence. We might say that the “completed” work of art, prior to its being encountered by the viewer, exists potentially but not actually: “it” is already present, awaiting its completion, its constitution qua concretized, “actualized” work of art. In other words, the book, for example, exists as the potential novel, and the novel achieves its actualization through the constitutive activity of the reader. Further, as such actualization on the part of the reader depends upon her interpreting the book “through her own eyes”—on the basis of her own experience and perceptual habits—the “objectivity” of the work of art is thoroughly implicated in subjectivity. This isn’t to return to the subjectivization of the work. Our point again is to emphasize the role of the viewer in any analysis of the ontology of the work. Also not to be ignored is the intersubjective basis of the beliefs, values, and convictions of the individual subject. To see in the work of art a reflection of one’s own values is at the same time to see a reflection of

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the larger context of intersubjectively constituted values in terms of which we come to recognize and define our own. The relation of subjectivity to intersubjectivity is fundamental here. Indeed, the “play” in which the (potential) work and the (actualizing) viewer engage may be regarded as itself a sort of “fusion of horizons,” as Gadamer called it, a “dialogue” between two “subjects” that gives rise to the intersubjective constitution of new values, new beliefs, and new ways of looking at the world. The work of art doesn’t confront us as an object in opposition to ourselves but is something in which we become caught up in an immediate way, as one becomes caught up in conversation, falls in love, or is otherwise taken up in a movement one neither plans nor controls. Gadamer likened this to the dialectical structure of play, where what has primacy is neither the subject nor the object but the movement back and forth. Art itself has a dialectical or play structure, and the actions of artist and audience alike “should not be considered subjective actions, since it is, rather, the game itself that plays, for it draws the players into itself and thus itself becomes the actual subjectum of the playing.” 31 The artist herself, we might say, is “played,” as is the audience. The artist is never in command but allows herself to be drawn into a process that has the structure of a dialectic. No one and nothing is in command here but for the play itself. It’s this from which both artist and audience take direction and to which they must in some way respond. SUMMARY In this chapter we have introduced and sought to clarify some important terminological and theoretical notions and advanced several claims which we shall develop further in the following chapters. The principal themes we have discussed, however briefly, are intentionality, imitation, participation, habit, and play. All of these, we believe, play central roles in the creation of art as well as its reception. We have followed Plato and Aristotle here as well as Brentano and Gadamer, among others. Brentano’s concept of intentionality, which has played such a central role in contemporary phenomenology, is crucial as well to our account of the creative process. Artists, we have claimed, are seers of a kind—not in any mystical sense but noticers, people with the same five senses as the rest of us but whose habits of perception have been trained over time to see the world with different eyes. We’re all perceivers, but we don’t perceive the same things in the same ways— quite the contrary. When those of us who are not artists perceive and come to know a person, for instance, we don’t typically see them with an eye to how they could be depicted or transformed in a painting, a poem, or a novel. We might do this—our perceptual and imaginative apparatus

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allow us to—but typically we don’t. We get on with things, the rush of everyday life, where the artist stops and notices some particular thing, some detail which could easily escape notice but that holds their attention and seems to lead somewhere, to intimate something, to suggest some possibility, to mean something, or to give rise to a question or a thought. We’re surrounded by intentionality—things that tend this way or that, that relate to other things, that are in motion or that in some way or other are directed. Intentions of this kind aren’t mere projections of the mind but belong to the phenomena as they are for us. They are closer to an activity than any sort of thingly entity which subsequently becomes directed toward an end. Consciousness itself should be thought of as an activity that crucially involves some form of relating—of coming into some kind of transaction with a world. It’s a relation in which both subject and object, these two poles of awareness, are mutually created. We all do this, but artists do this in a particular form or medium. An artist comes into relation with and tracks a specific form of intention, following where it leads, listening to it, and taking direction from it. They’re not making it up; they’re doing what the work itself requires. Imitation, participation, and habit are overlapping and pervasive phenomena in human experience. Not only are we natural imitators but we become what we imitate, by coming to participate through time in the same activity or form of life as our models. It’s not only children who do this; all of us mimic in one fashion or another some number of models and learn by doing so, in accordance with habits. Artists in this way are no different from their audiences or anyone else. Imitation leads to participation and habit formation, and all of this features prominently in artistic creativity. Artists imitate—learn from, become influenced by, model themselves in some way on—other artists, especially those who work in one’s medium of choice, but not only them. Such imitation isn’t an end in itself but is important for what it leads to, which is what Plato termed participation. What does it mean to participate, in an art form or anything else, but to come to share in the same (or similar) habits, the same way of doing things and of being, with others? One creates nothing in a vacuum but on the basis of what one has learned, appropriated, and made one’s own—which always includes taking further, extending a chain in some way that is one’s own. Artists do this habitually—and where a habit is itself an intention, something that enjoys intentional, not material or ideal, being. We do see ourselves in art. We see ourselves as participants, with others, in a particular form of life or activity, and as those who adhere to certain meanings, values, and beliefs. Upon examination, we might choose to abandon certain of these if we find them to be of dubious worth. 32 Alternatively, we may choose to retain and to strengthen them as much as possible. In any case, we return from our encounter with a

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work of art with a desire to adopt, retain, or abandon a certain mode of being, a habit. The ability of a work of art to produce profound psychological effects on an audience derives from the ontology of the work itself. This observation is the basis of Plato’s psychological criticism of art and poetry, which Gadamer’s hermeneutic analyses enable us to appreciate more fully. If we are self-critically aware of the imitative character of the work—that is, if we are aware that the work is to a great extent an imitation of human nature, both our own nature and that of our fellow human beings—it provides us with a means by which to achieve a greater self-understanding. If we lack this self-critical awareness, the work may simply foster in us an unreflective adoption of psychological modes of being that may be undesirable. Plato called our attention to the latter possibility, and it’s this which motivated his psychological criticism of art and poetry. Finally, both artistic creation and its reception crucially involve an often serious-minded form of play, where this means far more than that the artist and the audience enjoy their experience. The work of art itself never comes into being—not fully—until the viewer constructs, or constitutes, it. This doesn’t mean that the work is entirely dependent upon the viewer for its existence. We might say that the completed work of art, prior to its being encountered by the viewer, exists potentially but not actually: “it” is already present but awaits its completion as a concretized, actualized work of art. Play here is recreation, a re-creating of the work in one’s own imagination where one can see it, feel it, or otherwise perceive it for oneself. Gadamer cited an example from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: The staircase that Smerdjakov falls down plays a major role in the story. Everyone who has read the book will remember this scene and will “know” exactly what the staircase looks like. Not one of us has exactly the same image of it and yet we all believe that we see it quite vividly. It would be absurd to ask what the staircase “intended” by Dostoevsky really looked like. . . . By not describing the scene in any more detail than he has, Dostoevsky stimulates us to construct an image of the stairs in our imagination. 33

The artist as well plays with, and is played by, an intention that belongs to their particular form of art. Their playing is a participating in a dialectical movement that they don’t control but fall into or become caught up in as a consequence of habit formation. We know that not all people are equally attracted to art, and that those who are aren’t unanimous in their taste or judgment of a given work of art. To the extent that each of us is unique and has had a unique set of experiences, our personal beliefs, values, and convictions will vary, and each of us projects our own personal beliefs, values, fears, desires, and so on, into the work of art when we engage with and concretize it. What any

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individual contributes to the concretization of a work of art will not be exactly the same as what another will contribute, and as a result what comes to be concretized by each of us will be different, to a greater or lesser extent, from what is concretized by others. And because each of us contributes something of ourselves to the concretization of the work of art, each of us is liable to see him- or herself in the product of that cocreative engagement with it. As Plato was fond of noting, “like attracts like.” 34 Whatever its basis, this seems to be a psychological fact, a part of our human makeup, so it should come as no surprise that we are attracted to works of art: the ones we find attractive are like us. To some extent they are us. 35 The urges to play and to imitate are constitutive of human nature, 36 and artistic creation is one of the most profound expressions of these urges. Not only is art—both its creation and reception—a form of selfcreation, but it’s at the same time an expression of what Gadamer called the “play-drive.” 37 In our engagements with works of art, we see what is perhaps the most powerful expression of two basic human drives: to imitate and to play. The product of this most serious of all playful activity is not only the work of art but the human being that we have chosen to imitate, and in whose characteristic modes of being we have thereby chosen to participate. NOTES 1. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964), 571–84. 2. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1974. 3. Danto, “The Artworld,” 580. 4. Danto, “The Artworld,” 581. 5. Regarding the misleading but commonly presupposed distinction between feeling and thinking: we humans are, most fundamentally, sentient beings, like all the other organisms on this planet (and we’ll presume elsewhere as well). As sentient, sensation is always going on throughout our lives, even when we’re not “aware” of it: while we’re sleeping, for example, our body is still sensing the surface it’s lying on, and while we’re sitting in our unpadded wooden chair, typing down all of these words that we wish would come more easily, our body feels the seat of the chair, even if “we” are not aware of this sensation until it becomes painful. At that point we say that we are “conscious” of the pain, but in fact we have been conscious of the sensation all along, for sensation is a basic form of consciousness: our thought is already being directed toward that which we sense, but this primitive thinking remains unfocused and unable to compete with the more concentrated attention we are directing elsewhere. Our languages are really not up to the task of distinguishing themselves from our thought, so we constantly confuse thought with language, and we regard our feelings—which we commonly conflate with our “emotions,” which are actually something quite different—as incapable of linguistic articulation, and therefore as something inferior to our rational, linguistic thinking. Phenomenological selfexamination will always reveal, however—to all of us who are willing honestly to engage in it, and to concentrate and reflect on our own experience—that rationality and so-called “discursive thought” will always be late-comers to the party of human

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experience, and that the philosophical and scientific privileging of “rationality” over non-rational modes of conscious inquiry and examination is akin to the imperialist denial of human rights to humans who aren’t white, or male, or five foot ten. (And we’re not even talking yet about the majority of sentient organisms on our planet.) If we are to resurrect interest in the truly spiritual value of experience, of all experience, we must begin by acknowledging the right of place of sentience and feeling. Reason and our rationalists need not panic, because rationality is unarguably a defining human characteristic, and it belongs to our “essence”—but it doesn’t exhaust that essence, nor does it guide or lead it in any way other than its own (which makes it circular and question-begging). 6. World War II decimated philosophy departments in much of Europe and radically changed the face of academic philosophy in North America, where a split between two traditions has come increasingly to characterize the discipline since the 1950s. On one side is what is called analytic philosophy and on the other side is continental (or “European”) philosophy. To describe the situation most simply: followers of the analytic tradition regard philosophy as directed primarily toward the clarification of concepts and the logical analysis of arguments; as a primarily intellectualist exercise, analytic philosophy accords the highest status to logic and philosophy of science, with mathematics and theoretical physics at the top and the life sciences at the bottom. Followers of the continental tradition regard philosophy as directed primarily toward the examination of issues arising from experience and the analysis of everyday existence; human embodiment and the importance of the history of culture and ideas are of paramount importance, and the sciences are approached from within this existential context. In this conflict of traditions, analytic philosophy has always enjoyed the upper hand. Following World War II, the overwhelming majority of new philosophy instructors in North America had been trained and interested in that tradition; there were relatively very few philosophy instructors who were actually conversant in the major continental areas of research (such as existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics). As is the case in any other profession or career, self-interest is of vital importance, and it is clearly not in one’s self-interest to promote the welfare of the competition. As a result, continental philosophy has always remained seriously under-represented in academic philosophy in North America. 7. See Barry Smith’s Austrian Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). 8. Different authors employ different terms when referring to Hegel’s philosophy, depending on what part or feature of it they are speaking of. So, for example, we might be reading about Absolute Idealism, or Hegel’s speculative metaphysics, or “the System.” 9. This presupposition is common to both analytic and continental philosophy. In the latter, for example, the currently mainstream movement in phenomenology is devoted to cognitive science, where “neurophenomenology” stands at the cutting edge. A good deal of the current literature in this field assumes the reduction, very much in the spirit of late nineteenth-century materialism, of consciousness to cognition, cognition to perception, perception to physiology, and physiology to physics. 10. Positivism, as a philosophical movement, is regarded as having begun with the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857). However, as Karl William Britton explains in his entry on “Positivism” in the 1957 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 18, 302: “The term positivism may be applied to any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. In this sense the term is commonly applied to the empirical philosophers, although in fact reservations ought to be made (John Locke and David Hume accept mathematics, Locke and George Berkeley accept a knowledge of the soul and of God, on nonempirical grounds). John Stuart Mill’s ‘experience philosophy’ is positivistic in this sense.” See also Herbert Feigl’s article in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica article on “Positivism” [https:// www.britannica.com/topic/positivism; accessed 9 February 2018]: “Positivism, in Western philosophy, generally, any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. More narrowly, the term

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designates the thought of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). As a philosophical ideology and movement, positivism first assumed its distinctive features in the work of Comte, who also named and systematized the science of sociology. It then developed through several stages known by various names, such as empiriocriticism, logical positivism, and logical empiricism, finally merging, in the mid-20th century, into the already existing tradition known as analytic philosophy.” 11. Quoted in Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, third edition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 32. The immediately following passage from Brentano’s Habilitationschrift is quoted in Spiegelberg, 31. 12. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995), 88. 13. We should note, in passing, that this was not their previous conclusion, according to which some sorts of imitative poetry were to be allowed. Quotations from Republic in the present discussion are from the Paul Shorey translation, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 14. Speaking of Socrates’s criticism of art, Lodge writes: “As far as the Ionian account of art is concerned, Socrates rejects the realistic view which restricts art to copying, to reproducing and conforming to the factual processes of mere nature. Where there is no idealism, there can be only a secondary mechanical kind of art; and Socrates will have none of it. What is called ‘mimicry,’ the imitative or representative reproduction of the sounds and sights of inanimate nature—e.g., the whistling or whispering of the wind, the crash or roar of surf, the clatter of falling rocks, and the like, i.e., speaking generally everything which comes under the head of onomatopoeia in prose or verse composition—has a certain fascination for the childish, the uneducated, and the unintelligent type of mentality. It expresses the very lowest level of human intelligence, and is at the extreme opposite of the ideal which would satisfy a well developed mind: tending, indeed, toward chaos and downright insanity. It will not do at all.” [Rupert C. Lodge, The Philosophy of Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1956), pp. 128–29. Lodge’s note to this passage (n. 51): “Crat. 422d f., 423cd, 424c f., Rep. 397a f., 596 ff., Soph. 233c ff., Phil. 59a, cf. Laws 700d f. Cf. R.G. Collingwood, Princ. of Art, pp. 46–52.”] 15. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1964; first published in 1962), 174. 16. As at Herodotus 6.39 and Od. 24.245. Plato uses echein in this sense at, for example, Rep. 456d: pos oun echeis doxes. This sense of the verb is also retained in idiomatic modern (Demotic) Greek: ti echeis, “what’s the matter?”, “what’s wrong (with you)?” “Habit” also translates the Greek ethos and ēthos. The three terms seem, as a rule, roughly equivalent in Plato. Plato also seems to regard diathesis, “disposition,” as synonymous with hexis (as, for example, at Phil. 11d). 17. That the term methexis (the word itself, even divorced from any context) does have such a heavy ontological connotation finds indirect support in Plato’s occasional use of it (as in Phaedo) as synonymous with parousia (also translated “participation”). The noun is cognate with the verb pareinai, “to be by or near,” “to be present.” The word is a compound based on einai, “to be,” and thus it too carries with it an ontological or ontic connotation. 18. “Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.” Aristotle, Poetics 1448b; trans. Ingram Bywater, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 19. As Peirce affirmed in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. I, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), see, for example, 129.

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20. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1950), 104. 21. Gadamer, “The Play of Art,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 126. Further references to this paper will be cited as “Play.” 22. Gadamer, “Play,” 126. 23. Gadamer, “Play,” 126. 24. A similar danger is pointed out by Origen (185–254 CE), who distinguished between three sorts of interpretation of scripture—the “somatic” (literal/historical), the “psychic” (moral), and the “pneumatic” (spiritual)—and maintains that an exclusively literal reading is puerile and incomplete. The sort of reading one follows is largely determined by one’s mental and spiritual capabilities. On this point, he’s in agreement with Plato, who argues that a sound education is necessary for the development of the child’s cognitive and spiritual faculties. Without such an education, the “higher” levels of the mind remain asleep, as it were, and one is condemned to approach the work of art on a solely literal level, attending to the representational images not as images of the reality or truth to which they symbolically point, but as themselves the reality. 25. Gebilde in fact enjoys a technical sense in the terminology of phenomenological aesthetics. Roman Ingarden, for example, employed it in his description of the literary work of art, which he regarded as a “formation” constructed of four separate but interrelated “strata.” See The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 26. A similar situation obtains in every event of understanding. As Gadamer wrote in “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem” (in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976], 7): “I am trying to call attention here to a common experience. We say, for instance, that understanding and misunderstanding take place between I and thou. But the formulation ‘I and thou’ already betrays an enormous alienation. There is nothing like an ‘I and thou’ at all—there is neither the I nor the thou as isolated, substantial realities. I may say ‘thou’ and I may refer to myself over against a thou, but a common understanding [Verständigung] always precedes these situations. We all know that to say ‘thou’ to someone presupposes a deep common accord [ein tiefes Einverständnis]. Something enduring is already present when this word is spoken.” 27. These arguments are developed in some detail by Ingarden in The Literary Work of Art, Part I, “Preliminary Questions.” 28. We might here recall Stefan George’s preface to the second edition of The Year of the Soul [trans. Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz, The Works of Stefan George, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 119]: “Even those who very nearly understood what the author had in mind thought that identifying persons and places would make for a better understanding of THE YEAR OF THE SOUL. But just as no one profits from looking for human and regional models in sculpture and painting, thus in poetry too we should avoid so idle a search. Art has transformed them so completely that they have become unimportant to the poet himself and his readers would be more confused than enlightened by a knowledge of the facts. Names should be mentioned only when they serve to indicate a gift or to bestow eternity. And it should be remembered that in this book the I and the You represent the same soul to an almost unprecedented extent.” 29. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 89. 30. This is not, of course, to say that the experience of the work of art must always play such a role. It’s clear that we can, and quite often do, return from that experience without having undergone any profound emotional or spiritual transformation. Yet it’s equally clear that the experience can have this effect upon us, and the above analyses are intended to describe how this effect is possible. Mitscherling discusses the notion of Bildung at a bit more length in “Philosophical Hermeneutics and ‘the Tradition,’” Man and World, vol. 22 (1989): 247–50.

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31. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 385, 365, 490. 32. As Rilke wrote in the concluding verse of “Archaischer Torso Apollos”: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“You must change your life”). 33. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 111. 34. See, for example, Gorg. 510b, Rep. 329a, Symp. 195b, and Laws 716c. We may regard this as a reference or allusion to Od. 17.217–18: “See now how the rascal comes on leading a rascal / about; like guides what is like itself, just as a god does” (trans. Lattimore). 35. Here we detect the distinctly Hegelian flavor of Gadamer’s aesthetics. 36. Indeed, one of the first things the newborn does is imitate. See Maya Pines, “Baby, You’re Incredible,” Psychology Today, vol. 16, no. 2 (Feb. 1982): 48–53. 37. Gadamer, “Play,” 124.

THREE More Clues from Plato and Aristotle

PLATO ON ART AND THE DIVIDED LINE Ancient Greek theories of art tend to focus on its source, describing the “essence” of art in terms of the origin from which it derived or that motivated the artist who produced it. We begin with two brief observations regarding the ancient Greek thinkers. First, prior to the fourth or fifth century BCE, there was no clear distinction between forms of literature. All literature was written in poetic form, including those works that we now refer to as “philosophy.” The pre-Socratic thinkers, including philosophers and natural scientists, were all poets and they were all referred to as poets. This leads to our second observation: the activity in which these writers were engaged was poetry—the Greek word is poesis, from the verb poiein, which means “to create” or “to bring into being”— and the ancient scientists no less than lyric poets were regarded as engaged in an essentially “creative” endeavor. But this task of creative writing was seen to be quite distinct from the tasks performed by painters and sculptors (and, a bit later, by poets writing dramatic works for the stage), tasks that were referred to as “crafts”; the Greek word for craft is techne, the root of the English word “technique.” There was no word for “art” in Greek, and the various creative activities that today we refer to collectively as “art” were distinguished from one another quite sharply, with regard not only to their “essence” but also to the social status of those who engaged in these activities. While the poets were held in high esteem, the “technicians” who produced paintings and sculptures belonged to the lower class of craftspeople, and while their works themselves were appreciated they were rarely accorded any special value. Sculpture and painting alike generally served a practical religious or memorial purpose. The top of the Acropolis was said by the ancients (Pau51

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sanias, for example) to have been so crowded with brightly painted statues that it was difficult to see the Parthenon when entering the sanctuary from the Propylaea, and the best known works produced by the most famous painters (e.g., Apollodorus, Polygnotus, Pheidias, Zeuxis) adorned or occupied temples or public buildings. In short, while poetry and poets were always accorded high status in Greek culture, the other “arts” and “artists” were not generally so successful. While the works of painters and sculptors were on display in temples and public buildings, there were no art galleries or museums, no institutions constructed expressly for the purpose of displaying works of art. While we now display Greek pottery in our museums and delight in the black- and red-figure paintings that adorn the pottery, the painters, potters, and artisans who produced them were for the most part slaves, and they produced their pottery for widespread sale. The more elaborately painted works were more expensive and appealed to a wealthier clientele (although metal tableware was more expensive and highly prized), but they remained pottery to be used either on a day-to-day basis—such as cups, mixing bowls, jugs for water or wine, and vases for oil or perfumes—or as funerary urns or grave goods, such as votive offerings. 1 From the works and fragments that remain today, we can see that the finest of these paintings, sculptures, and ceramic works were certainly of incomparable beauty and power, but they remained first and foremost objects of practical use, not for aesthetic enjoyment. An important observation must be inserted at this point in order to avoid a common confusion. In what follows we shall be defining a work of art as an artifact created for the purpose of eliciting an aesthetic response on the part of the person who encounters it. (We shall later be further clarifying this definition.) However, to say that something wasn’t created or produced primarily or even incidentally for the purpose of eliciting an aesthetic response on the part of the viewer isn’t to say that it’s incapable of doing so. In other words, works of craft, just like natural objects, can most definitely elicit an aesthetic response. Indeed, there’s no reason why works of craft may not at the same time be works of art. The important point here, however, is that this ability of craftwork and natural objects is not what defines them as such, that is, it isn’t essential to them as works of craft or objects of nature. The fascinating question of when the practice of craft becomes the practice of art—when production becomes creation, and the artisan becomes an artist—we shall postpone for a later chapter. This is a question of considerable historical, sociological, and anthropological importance, as well as being central to aesthetics. The transition from one period of art to another becomes provocative in this regard. Historians of Greek art, for example, often call attention to an obvious distinction between the sculpture of the archaic period (extending from around 700 to 500 BCE) and that of the classical period (from around 500 to 300 BCE): whereas the portrait sculpture of the archaic

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period represented the human form as standing upright and still, and usually staring straight ahead at the viewer, the sculpture of the classical period depicted the human form in motion, with expressive poses and attitudes. Archaic Greek sculpture, often described as indebted to the earlier Egyptian sculpture for this feature, is characterized by a formal rigidity and solemnity, reflecting the religious purpose for which this sculpture was produced: it was displayed in temples and sanctuaries to honor and celebrate the gods. In the classical period, sculptors turn to a far more naturalistic style of representation, which some historians have argued reflects the rise of a new humanism and democratic sensibility, particularly in Athens, which quickly became the cultural center of the Greek world after the end of the Persian War. With this turn away from formal rigidity to natural expression in representation—a turn that came quite suddenly in contrast to the gradual pace of most historical development—the people who encountered this new art must have been shocked at its lifelike character. Reports of such a response to this new artistic vivacity, both in sculpture and in painting (which typically develops stylistically prior to sculpture), document the excitement expressed by the viewers at the ability of sculptors like Pheidias and Praxiteles to perform such magical feats, which seemed to be a very short step away from the creation of life itself. Such respected “creators” were nevertheless human, of course, and the Greeks were famously angered by anyone who would pretend to be more than that. Such hubris had always led to tragic downfall, so this magical ability of these creative artists, an ability that was clearly more than simple “technical” skill, had to be explained in human terms. As it happens, there was an explanation already at hand: it had been commonly believed for at least three or four centuries that certain poets were inspired. The gods were believed to speak through them, often with the assistance of the Muses, whom poets had traditionally invoked in their works since the days of Homer and Hesiod. This “inspiration theory of art” is, then, probably almost as ancient as the magic theory, and it has certainly enjoyed a longer life. A variant of this theory would be employed several centuries later by Christian and Muslim theologians, and it would continue to play a role of sometimes greater and sometimes lesser prominence throughout the history of the discussion of art. In fact, we’ll be developing what might be called a “naturalistic” version of this theory in the present book. To take such an old and obviously “superstitious” theory seriously will probably sound strange, so we hasten to add that we’ll also be drawing from several other theories, modern as well as ancient. Before we do so, however, we should call attention to something strange about all of these theories. They have been developed by different authors at different times, and more often than not as part of a far larger, comprehensive philosophical system or worldview. Each of these theo-

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ries was developed to supplement the other theories that work together as parts of that larger system. It’s only to be expected, then, that these theories of art and artistic creation will differ substantially from one another and perhaps even appear to contradict one another in important respects. Nevertheless, when regarded on their own, each of them seems to offer a unique insight into some feature of art and creativity. While it will be no easy task to bring these seemingly conflicting insights into harmony with one another, to ignore them would be to neglect essential features of the subject we are investigating. So if it seems strange that we talk seriously about inspiration, or genius, or imitation, we ask that the reader bear with us, even if the theories and concepts we’re examining appear to be outdated and irrelevant. We intend to demonstrate that they’re not, and that a more accurate account of artistic creation and aesthetic experience requires us to take seriously and consider very carefully these theories and insights offered by our predecessors. Most prominent among those predecessors are, of course, the Greeks, and we shall continue to look back at them throughout this book. For our purposes, foremost among the Greek thinkers are Plato and Aristotle, the two philosophical giants who wrote the first extended discussions of literary theory, poetics, and aesthetics in the history of Western literature and philosophy. Plato, as is commonly known, was a follower of Socrates. The year after Socrates was executed for impiety (399 BCE), Plato left Athens to travel, first to Italy and Sicily, then to Egypt and perhaps to the Middle East and India. Returning to Athens after a decade, in 387, Plato founded the Academy, the largest and most prestigious institution of higher learning in antiquity and a forerunner of today’s universities. Plato remained head of the Academy until his death forty years later. During this time he and the Academy achieved considerable fame, attracting students from throughout the ancient world, and during these four decades Plato taught and wrote extensively. Today we have only fragments of his public lectures, but all of his Dialogues have survived. (At least thirty-five dialogues were attributed to him in antiquity, but several of these are now generally considered by scholars to be spurious.) The most famous of his dialogues is the Republic, which had won widespread fame already in the ancient world; a fragment of the dialogue is even found among the gnostic gospels (the texts of the Nag Hammadi library, discovered in 1945), which suggests an unusually wide readership. It’s in the Republic that Plato depicted Socrates presenting a detailed outline of the ideal polis, central to which is his account of the kind of education that would be most appropriate for the young students of this ideal state. Homer’s great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, had always served as the chief “textbooks” for the schools in Greece, providing the model not only for the study of grammar and orthography but also for the study of proper moral behavior. Homer was in this sense “the teacher of all Hel-

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las,” as Plato had Socrates assert, and the interlocutors in the Republic discuss critically and at great length exactly how the texts of Homer ought to be employed in the schools. This extended, detailed literary criticism famously culminates in the banishment of Homer from the ideal state: not only is Homer himself found guilty of representing the gods and brave men as performing ignoble actions and generally behaving in a morally reprehensible manner, but the very style of poetic representation employed by Homer and similar poets is degenerate and base, and therefore not to be allowed in the schools or admitted at all into their ideal polis. There are two separate theories of art operating here, one moral and the other ontological, and they are combined in a scathing criticism of poetry and art that has troubled artists and philosophers for over 2,000 years. 2 The moral criticism is a version of what’s called the “education theory” of art, according to which the nature and value of art are both to be found in its usefulness and efficacy as a tool for education, particularly for moral education, and it has frequently been deployed in the service of censorship. This theory has been advanced repeatedly over the centuries by moralizing authors—for example, St. Augustine and Leo Tolstoy—as well as moralizing political figures, be they spokespersons for theocracies or simply populist demagogues of one stripe or another (most often on the religious right). The ontological criticism is a far more complicated matter. It’s also more central to our project in this book, so it’s necessary that we present it in more detail. Socrates was famous already in his lifetime for his dedication to inquiry into the nature of moral values. Maintaining that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” he committed his life to searching for the ground of these values and, believing that they must be universally binding, argued that they must be grounded on some universal principle or principles. He held that moral behavior—that which characterized “the good life” or “living well”—consists in living virtuously, with one’s “virtuous actions” being informed by universal moral principles, such as justice, generosity, bravery, kindness, and so on, and he devoted his life to the search for these universals. This search involved the attempt to formulate accurate definitions of the virtues which might then be employed in teaching them, particularly to the young, as discussed in Plato’s Republic. Plato adopted his master’s concept of universal values and extended it to apply beyond the realm of moral behavior to the world in general. According to Plato, just as an action was, for example, kind or just by virtue of its deriving from the universal principle of kindness or justice, so too was every particular entity what it was by virtue of deriving its way of being from a universal principle, which Plato called an “Idea,” or “Form.” The process of this “derivation” consisted in imitation or participation which, as we have seen, became technical terms in the Platonic (and Aristotelian) philosophy. Just as an action is courageous by imitat-

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ing or participating in the universal Form of courage, so too is a circle what it is by virtue of imitating or participating in the Form of circularity, and a tree is what it is by virtue of imitating or participating in the Form of “treeness.” 3 According to Plato, the Ideas or Forms exist separately from the physical world; they had, that is to say, “ideal being,” occupying a “higher” level of being than material, physical objects. To illustrate this, Plato depicted Socrates (again in Republic) explaining to his interlocutors the relation between our soul and the world in which we live by drawing a picture of a divided line in the dust at their feet. Socrates first drew a long vertical line, on the left side of which, he explains, is the realm of the soul (or spiritual and cognitive activity) and on the right side, the world in which we live. At the very top of this vertical line is “the Good,” which is the first principle (and the incomparably highest Idea) from which all things originate, the ultimate ground of all being and thought. Socrates next drew a horizontal line dividing the vertical line into a higher section and a lower section, with the higher section being smaller than the lower, explaining that the higher section indicates the realm of being (the intelligible entities) and truth (our knowledge of them), and the lower section the realm of becoming (physical, visible entities) and opinion (our beliefs and images of them). He then drew two more horizontal lines, one dividing the higher section of the vertical line into two unequal parts, and one similarly dividing the lower section of the vertical line. Each of the four sections on the left side of the vertical line, he said, signifies one sort of activity of the human soul, and each of these spiritual/cognitive activities corresponds to its real-world counterpart located in the section facing it on the opposite side of the vertical line. The “highest” part and function of the human soul is mind, or reason (nous), which performs the activity of mentally “seeing” the Forms. In this act of “seeing with the mind’s eye,” called noesis, the mind stands in direct, unmediated contact with the Ideas, which themselves function as principles in accordance with which all discursive thought must proceed. This logically subsequent thinking is called dianoia (because it proceeds quite literally “through,” or “by way of” [dia], the discursive activity of nous); at this stage of cognition, we apply the principles of thought (the Ideas) in the construction of such “thought-things” (mathematika) as logical propositions, mathematical equations, and linguistic constructions (statements, sentences). Located beneath these two levels of mind and Ideas, on one side, and, on the other, thinking and thoughts—that is, beneath the central horizontal line dividing the vertical line in two—is the realm of becoming, which is also divided into two levels, each of which comprises its own two mind-world sections: the higher level of the realm of becoming is inhabited by physical objects in the world (on the right side of the line) and the cognitive activity that accesses and corresponds to those objects (on the left). The higher level of this realm of becoming and opinion is inhabited

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(on the right side of the line) by the physical things of the world, such as natural objects and artifacts, corresponding to which are (on the left side of the line) the opinions we formulate of those physical things. And beneath this level, at the very bottom of the divided line, are reflections of those physical things in nature, such “images” as reflections in water or in mirrors or in paintings. Corresponding to these images is (on the left side of the line) our imagination, the ability of our soul to apprehend and reproduce or represent these images. The four levels of the vertical line, proceeding downwards from “the Good” at the very top of the line, represent decreasing levels of being and truth, or “reality,” with each of the lower levels said to be a “copy” or “imitation” of the level just above it, from which it derives whatever degree of being, reality, and truth it may possess. The Ideas, then, are the ultimate origin and guiding principles not only of all thought but also of all being, including all action and behavior. Being a copy, or imitation, of the level just above it, each of the levels below the Good is of decreasing metaphysical, epistemological, moral, and aesthetic value, and at the very bottom stand the activity, the objects, and products of our imagination, including, most significantly, works of art. According to the view that Plato had Socrates expound in the Republic, then, since art stands at the furthest remove from the highest functions of the human spirit and intellect and appeals to our irrational imagination, our bodily senses, and our base “appetitive” nature, it should be more than simply censored; it should be entirely banned from the ideal state, and Homer, “the teacher of all Greece” and the leader of all imitators, must be banished. While there’s good reason to believe that Plato intended this criticism of poetry and art as a parody of the sort of reckless literary criticism and fallacious argumentation that was so successfully being pursued by the Sophists around the turn of the fourth century BCE, the criticism nevertheless relies upon psychological insights that are central to both Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and it employs technical terms of their philosophy as well. For our present purpose, the most important of these terms are “imitation,” “participation,” and “form.” As we mentioned in Chapter 2, repeated imitation of a particular kind of behavior will lead to its institution as a habit. The questions of what exactly is involved in this inculcation of habit and what sort of causal operation this inculcation entails were already explored by Plato, and they became guiding themes of the Aristotelian philosophy. In Plato’s dialogues we find these questions addressed repeatedly, but often simply in passing. Education was always of foremost concern in ancient Greece, so it’s by no means surprising that we find frequent discussion of it throughout Plato’s dialogues, and the teaching of virtue in particular remained a paramount concern throughout the Hellenistic-Roman period that followed.

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ARISTOTLE ON IMITATION It’s in the works of Aristotle, however, that we find the earliest actual treatises on the subject, and it’s here that we also find the first systematic inquiries into the psychology of education, and particularly of moral education and moral development. Although Aristotle too wrote dialogues— some ancient authors even praised his dialogues as superior to those of Plato in both style and substance—all of these are now lost. We do, however, possess a large collection of his treatises, many of which were to determine the course of scientific and philosophical research throughout the remainder of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. This influence began to spread, in fact, quite soon after Aristotle’s death in 322 BCE. In 310 BCE, Ptolemy Soter, who had been a student at the Lyceum, the school that Aristotle had founded in Athens, established the famous Library of Alexandria, and the works of Aristotle and his students probably supplied the core texts of the entire early collection. 4 The Aristotelian works sent to Alexandria are referred to as “treatises,” but they were also the texts of lecture courses (the “lecture records”) given at the Lyceum. These were courses that were given from shortly after Aristotle’s death until, most likely, some 150 to 200 years later; each head (or “scholarch”) of the Lyceum would regularly send copies of the lecture-note treatises to the Library as they were updated and revised over the years. The ordering of the Library’s collection of these Aristotelian texts—lists of the collection were made by several ancient authors—is believed to reflect the order of instruction at the Lyceum, proceeding from the introduction of basic concepts and terminology and the treatment of language and logic, through research in the natural sciences, to psychology, ethics, politics, the arts and, finally, metaphysics. 5 The psychology of imitation and its relation to art that had supplied the central theme for the discussion of Socrates and his interlocutors in Plato’s Republic became, for the Aristotelians, a central theme for their philosophy as a whole. The sort of causality that is operative in repeated imitative behavior, the nature of cognition and the causalities that operate in cognition, the psychology of moral development, the power exercised by imitative practices in rhetoric and political discourse—these are but a few of the topics whose treatment recalls the origin of imitation in human nature. In the Poetics, this origin of imitation takes center stage (1448b4–24): 6 It is clear that the general origin of poetry was due to two causes, each of them part of human nature. Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation. The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic

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representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies. The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things, e.g., that the man there is so-and-so; for if one has not seen the thing before, one’s pleasure will not be in the picture as an imitation of it, but will be due to the execution or colouring or some similar cause. Imitation, then, being natural to us—as also the sense of harmony and rhythm, the metres being obviously species of rhythms—it was through their original aptitude, and by a series of improvements for the most part gradual on their first efforts, that they created poetry out of their improvisations.

Only the first twenty-six chapters of the text of Poetics—which deal with epic poetry and, more extensively, with tragedy—have survived. The remaining chapters, which dealt with comedy and probably comprised about half of the original work, were lost long before the earliest copies that we now possess were made. 7 The treatment of tragedy that has survived has exercised enormous influence on literary theory and criticism since the Renaissance, and the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, offered in Chapter 6 (at 1449b22–28), has long been a standard one: “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” That “catharsis,” that is, the purgation of emotions, is an essential goal of tragedy has been commonly accepted for centuries, but largely, it seems, on the strength of Aristotelian authority alone, for the claim is curious. It’s difficult to understand how arousing emotions in the audience will serve to accomplish their purgation, or why we should want to have them aroused in the first place if we just want them to be purged. 8 Be that as it may, the claim that imitation plays a central role in both the performance of a tragedy and the aesthetic experience of it seems clear enough. Actions and events are represented, or imitated, on stage, and we members of the audience are, by virtue of our own imitative nature, drawn toward the performance. Suspending our disbelief in the reality of the world being presented to us, we enter the world of the dramatic work, temporarily accepting it as our real world, and experiencing various emotions appropriate to the situations arising in that world and the actions being performed by the actors (with whom we might even deeply identify). The emotions that we feel on these occasions are not at all unreal; our feelings themselves are entirely real. Our experience of film has basically the same structure. Action and adventure films offer vivid examples of

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situations invoking in us feelings of fear and excitement, horror films often instill dread and terror, dramas can elicit in us a wide spectrum of emotional response, from the “pity and fear” mentioned by Aristotle to heart-wrenching grief or unspeakable joy. Such experiences of emotion— the actual feeling of fear, or dread, or joy—cannot be explained in terms of physiology or neurology. Such physicalist accounts enable us to understand the material basis or necessary physical foundation of the feelings, but they cannot explain their cognitive significance, or what William James once referred to as the “noetic quality” that belongs to mystical experience. According to James, “Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.” 9 It’s by virtue of this noetic quality that aesthetic experience is capable of teaching us things that we might otherwise never have the opportunity to learn, or never have sufficient opportunity to learn well. And this holds good not just of the aesthetic experience of tragedy, dramatic art, and literature, but of all art. Again, as stated in the abovequoted passage from the Poetics, “though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art.” Later in this book we shall be exploring this feature of aesthetic experience in more detail, and we shall also be examining the ontology of the work of art in some depth, identifying its essential features and constructing general models of both the work of art and the aesthetic experience. We shall then be in a position to speculate on the metaphysical implications of these models, with regard most importantly to the kind of causality that seems to be operative not only in the aesthetic experience of the person encountering the created work but also in the aesthetic experience of the artist engaged in its creation. The details will have to wait until later, but we should anticipate some of them here—regarding, in particular, the concepts of imitation, participation, and causality—and we can best do so by briefly continuing our discussion of Plato and Aristotle. We have looked briefly at Plato’s discussion of how imitating a bad model can lead to the development of bad habits, but we haven’t yet explained how this happens, that is, we haven’t explained the “causal mechanism” at work in this development. In Plato’s texts—which, again, are dialogues, not systematic treatises—we’re not offered any detailed analysis of this development. We’re speaking here of how imitation “causes” participation, and to understand this we have to turn to the more systematically presented works of Aristotle, throughout which the concept of causality plays a foundational role.

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Aristotle’s Metaphysics opens with the famous line, “All humans by nature desire to know,” and immediately proceeds to argue that the highest sort of knowledge, namely “wisdom,” deals with “the first causes and the principles of things.” The remainder of this first book of the Metaphysics offers a very brief summary of the accounts of such causes and principles that were offered by pre-Aristotelian scientists and philosophers, with a large part of the summary devoted to a discussion of the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophies. Early in this discussion Aristotle writes: Plato accepted his [Socrates’s] teaching, but held that the problem [of knowledge and definition] applied not to any sensible thing but to entities of another kind—for this reason, that the common definition could not be a definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing. Things of this other sort, then, he called Ideas, and sensible things, he said, were apart from these, and were all called after these; for the multitude of things which have the same name as the Form exist by participation in it. Only the name “participation” was new; for the Pythagoreans say that things exist by imitation of numbers, and Plato says they exist by participation, changing the name. But what the participation or the imitation of the Forms could be they left an open question. 10

The last two sentences of that passage are striking, for they reflect an ignorance of Platonic doctrine that we wouldn’t expect to find in a student who spent twenty years studying at Plato’s Academy and must have been well versed in his master’s central teachings. 11 Aristotle must have known, for example, that the word “participation” was not some already existing synonym for “imitation.” Plato himself coined the term, almost certainly to distinguish it from the term used by the Pythagoreans. And this new Platonic term in fact already suggests the answer that the Aristotelians were going to give to the very criticism implied in this curious passage, that is, that “what the participation or the imitation of the Forms could be they left an open question.” The term “participation” translates the Greek methexis, a term that combines meta, a preposition with many different meanings, including “after,” “beyond,” “following,” “according to,” and hexis, which we usually translate as “habit.” The new term suggests, in short, that when some persons or things are or behave in a certain way habitually, they embody a certain habit; in other words, they participate in, or “behave in accordance with,” a certain habit, or way of being/behaving. So when some persons or things come to be or behave habitually in a particular manner, perhaps through repeated imitation, they are said to have adopted a particular habit: they have come to participate in a certain way of being or behaving. 12 It’s true that Plato didn’t explicitly explain the meaning of the term that he coined. But it’s also true that he never explicitly explained any of the doctrines he had Socrates (or others) expound in his dialogues. Whatever other purposes the dialogues may have been written to serve, they

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certainly succeeded in provoking further inquiry and discussion, and that’s precisely what his student Aristotle pursued. Plato’s suggestion that imitation leads to participation doesn’t constitute a clear account of the causal relation obtaining between the universal Forms and their manifestation or embodiment in sensible particulars, but the very word he coined to refer to this relation pointed the way for Aristotle’s subsequent systematic examinations of causality. The Aristotelian “doctrine of the four causes” is most clearly stated in Book 2, Chapter 3 of the Physics, where a brief description is given for, in turn, the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final cause. 13 Most relevant for our later examination of aesthetic experience will be the formal cause, for it’s that sort of causality that underlies the concept of participation, and it’s also the sort of causality that’s at play in cognition and in aesthetic experience. FORMAL CAUSALITY IN COGNITION AND IN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE The Aristotelian account of cognition has received a fair bit of attention in recent literature in philosophy of mind and cognitive science—not surprisingly, since something extremely important is being said in that account. But reference to this account invariably proves unsatisfying, due no doubt in part to the extremely puzzling nature of some of the central passages in the Aristotelian De Anima that have to do with form and matter, and due in part also to the metaphysical assumptions of much current, mainstream philosophy. The most notoriously difficult passages of the text have to do with the identity of the cognizing subject and the cognized object, which is discussed, for example, in the opening paragraph of the last chapter (12) of Book II of De Anima (424a17–24): Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold; what produces the impression is a signet of bronze or gold, but not qua bronze or gold: in a similar way the sense is affected by what is colored or flavored or sounding not insofar as each is what it is, but insofar as it is of such and such a sort and according to its form. 14

The last several decades of interpretation and critical commentary on the Aristotelian assertion of this identity of the subject and the object of cognition is filled with tortured and sometimes downright bizarre attempts to render this claim comprehensible in terms of the materialism that currently remains fashionable in mainstream philosophy of mind. What’s needed is some familiarity with the metaphysical context of this claim, along with a willingness to interpret the Aristotelian passage faithfully, without any desire to interpret it in such a way as to lend Aristotle’s

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support to whatever position one may be attempting to promote. The most faithful of his recent commentators has been Joseph Owens, who in 1991 published a superb little essay entitled “Aristotle and Aquinas on Cognition,” 15 in which he succinctly described the Aristotelian view: With the basis of reasoning located firmly in the thing that is other than the cognitive act, Aristotle is able to offer his explanation of what knowing or perceiving a thing means. It means that the percipient or knower becomes and is that thing in the actuality of the cognition. This is not a case of having a thing in a material way. In material possession the possessor remains distinct from the thing he has, in the way you possess a house or a car. On the other hand, cognition means thoroughgoing identity with the thing insofar as it is perceived or known. Aristotle repeats this assertion of identity of knower and known too often to leave any doubt about its important role. To know a thing is to be it in a distinctive way of being.

This Aristotelian position regarding cognition, and more generally the relation of consciousness to the world, is consistently misunderstood and stubbornly misrepresented in the secondary literature, even in the quite recent scholarship on De Anima. The key to understanding this position is, again, to understand cognition as the enactment of a specific type of causality, namely, formal causality. For the Aristotelian, in the act of cognition the cognizing subject takes on the form “without the matter” of the object of cognition; that is to say, the cognizing subject becomes identical with the object with respect to its form. The form of the activity of the cognizing on the part of the subject is one and the same as the form of the activity of the being on the part of the object. These statements are not metaphorical: in cognition, the subject does indeed become the object in so far as the form of the subject’s act of cognition is the same as the form of the object’s act of being. Yet the central term here employed—“form”—is indeed employed as a metaphor. It’s employed metaphorically to designate the complex structural integrity belonging to both the subject and the object of cognition, an integrity that we can only simplistically describe by speaking of cognition as embodying the form of logical judgment consisting of discrete acts of predication, and by speaking of the being of a particular object as “possessing” attributes and embodying the form of the species to which we say it “belongs.” The word for form, eidos, is in fact the ontological equivalent of the logical and linguistic term logos, which is most properly translated as “reason,” “account,” “explanation,” or “definition,” but which is sometimes translated as “form”—as it is in the last line of the passage from De Anima quoted just above. We might summarize this entire discussion of the form of cognition by simply describing how the terms “form” and “concept” both designate the structurally identical operation of the combination of subject with predicate, the former operating ontologically, “in the world,” and

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the latter operating logically (or cognitively and linguistically), “in consciousness.” 16 Until recently, the complexity of the “structural integrity” we’re speaking of was typically overlooked in analyses of cognition in psychology and the philosophy of mind. The cognitive sciences that have so quickly developed over the past thirty or so years have now become quite sophisticated, but even now, with so much consideration being given both to the staggering insights afforded by the neurosciences and to the fruitful new perspective granted by the acknowledgment of the “embodiment” of cognition, we still fail to appreciate the extent of the complexity of this activity. And we fail to do so because we fail to acknowledge a truth that the Aristotelians could presuppose—the truth, namely, that we are organisms, and that neither the nature and functioning of our consciousness nor the relation of our consciousness to the “external world” can be explained in purely mechanical terms. We’re speaking here not of mechanical or intellectual operations—or even of the activity of “embodied minds”—but of the natural behavior of organisms. The subjects and predicates being “grasped” in discrete acts of cognition are in fact “parts” that function as organs comprising the organic unity of a living whole. The “form” of the thing is the manner in which these parts are “organized” in one whole. The crucial point now to be stressed is that both the form and the concept—the two sides of the same “structuring” coin, so to speak—operate not merely in “material entities” on the one hand and in “minds” on the other, but also, and always, in organisms. We’re not talking about mechanical minds bumping into material bodies, but of organisms engaging other organisms. We find one of the most powerful illustrations of this organic engagement in our own aesthetic encounter with the work of art. We have claimed above that the ontological structure of an object, that is, its “form,” is identical with the logical structure of the cognition of that object, that is, its “concept,” which operates as the “rule” in accordance with which the act of cognition proceeds as the combination of subject with predicate, and which act we commonly speak of as the “concept” of this or that. While our description of “an act of cognition” as the act of the formulation of categorical propositions is simplistic, we hope we can be granted this simplification for the sake of the general picture that we’re drawing of the kind of relation that obtains between consciousness and the world. Many philosophers, and by no means phenomenologists alone, have attempted to describe this relation with reference to the intentionality of consciousness, and although both Brentano and Husserl may have failed to do full justice to the medieval account of intentionality, they did both emphasize a feature of that account that provides us with an essential insight into the nature of cognition. Husserl actually elaborated this insight, in more detail than did Brentano, in his analysis of what he regarded as a central task performed by the intentionality of consciousness, namely, the task of objectivation. This objectivation is the

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cognitive counterpart of predication, which is the logical counterpart of the ontological configuration of parts in an organic whole. As this objectivation proceeds in accordance, ultimately, with the organic structure of the object of cognition itself, the doctrine of formal causality as we’ve just been describing it might now be called into service in the construction of a new model of the relation between consciousness and the world, a relation that consists in the ongoing operation of formal causality. In The Phenomenological Movement, Herbert Spiegelberg offers a clear, if not unproblematic, description of the concept of objectivation: Intention “objectivates”: This means that it refers the data which are integral parts of the stream of consciousness (reell) to the “intentional objects.” These intentional objects are given normally only through such data, mostly characterized as sense-data (Empfindungen) and later by the name of hyletic data. It is the function of the intention to “interpret” these data, i.e., to relate them to an object which is itself not part of the act, but “transcendent” to it. Thus Husserl, in this respect not unlike Brentano, sees in intentional reference by no means a simple relationship, but a complex structure in which data are used as raw materials, as it were, and integrated into the total object which forms the pole of all these references. Identity of this object is compatible with various ways of referring to it, such as perception, thought, doubt (which Husserl called the “qualities” of the intention, as opposed to its “matter”). 17

We argue that Husserl was incorrect in identifying objectivation as an operation performed by the intentionality of the cognizing subject’s consciousness. This objectivation operates as a process of formal causality, and this operation of objectivation, which proceeds in accordance with the (organic) intentional structure of the cognized object, informs the structure of the intentionality of the cognizing subject. A work of art, as we’ll explain more fully in Chapter 4, is capable in a sense of operating on its own, as the formal cause in a process the final product of which is the fully concretized aesthetic object. We must appreciate the extent to which the work is implicated in the organic process of our cognition. It must be stressed that this process is organic, not merely mechanical. 18 We obviously require the material mechanisms of cognition; we require bodies, just as novels require physical books as their material ontic foundation. But the construction that’s based on this foundation enjoys a structure that’s clearly organic. The parts actively cohere, intending one another, referring to and relying upon one another, building upon one another in such a way as to guide and inform the cognitive activity of the reader in the production of a unique, individual, actual aesthetic experience. Moreover, when we now consider this aesthetic experience, we notice that, as the actualization of potentiality belonging to the work of art, it now subsists as the intentional product of an organic process of cognition that’s guided throughout by what Ingarden called

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“the structured organic whole which is the work of art.” 19 The work of art is that same organism subsisting in potentiality. SUMMARY There’s an amusing scene in Fiddler on the Roof where two men make conflicting statements, to which Tevye the Dairyman replies, “He’s right,” having already said that the other man was right. A fourth man asserts, “He’s right and he’s right? They can’t both be right,” to which Tevye replies, “You know, you’re also right.” Philosophers are sometimes in Tevye’s position of having to evaluate theoretical notions that, on the surface at any rate, are difficult to reconcile or that even contradict each other. Sometimes Tevye’s response is the correct one, and this is one of those times. We’ve discussed in the last two chapters a number of concepts and theories: intentionality, play, participation, imitation, habit formation, the artworld and the institutional theory, inspiration, the education theory, form and formal causality, among others. They all have a point—which isn’t to say that any of them amounts to an open sesame on artistic creation or aesthetic experience. We’ve looked high and low for such an open sesame, and have abandoned the search. (We didn’t really expect to find one.) But there’s truth—some, anyway—in all of these concepts and theories. Each has some role to play in explaining what’s happening in the creation of works of art and in the audience’s encounter with these artworks. Since the theories we’ve looked at stem from different philosophical traditions and orientations, it’s not surprising that they differ in important ways, even while each, regarded on its own, does provide some insight into our topic. Our task in this chapter has been merely to continue analyzing a few ancient notions that seem to us to ring as true now as they ever did. Our task in the next chapter will be to show how these disparate notions can be integrated into a coherent account of what artists actually do. Most of these ideas originated with Plato and Aristotle. They were the first writers in the Western tradition to expound at some length on the nature of art, including the elusive issues of its source and our experience of it, and it’s these two writers to whom we’ve returned in trying to address these questions. Plato’s famous critique of art was at once moral and ontological, and he combined them into an uncompromising line of argument that has troubled artists and philosophers ever since. The moral criticism has often been deployed in the service of censorship, and it’s probably because of this that it has received far more attention than the ontological line of argument, which we’ve found far more illuminating. We haven’t pursued the censorship question and don’t intend to. (We don’t take that part of the argument seriously.) What is important in

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Plato’s critique is the ontological criticism, which turns out to be a complicated matter and one central to our project here, so it proved necessary to look at it in some detail. In the Republic, Plato had Socrates expound the view that art stands at the furthest remove from the highest functions of the mind. Art appeals to our irrational imagination, our bodily senses and base appetites, which is why it should be banned from the ideal state. It involves imitation which, as we’ve mentioned, leads over time to participation in particular kinds of behavior through the institution of habits, which for better or worse can be highly resistant to change. While Plato explored what habit formation involves and what kind of causal operation it entails, the works of Aristotle provide a more systematic treatment of this. These works elaborate a philosophy of human nature central to which are (1) the issue of the specific kind of causality that’s operative in repeated imitative behavior, (2) the nature of cognition and the causalities that operate there, (3) the psychology of moral development, and (4) the power exercised by imitative practices in rhetoric and political discourse. Imitation, for Aristotle, is natural to human beings; we are the most imitative creatures in the world, and at the early stages of life it’s primarily by this means that we learn. It’s natural for mimetic beings to delight in works of imitation. This can be seen in ordinary experience: certain things are painful to see and to feel—directly or when they’re happening to us—but we delight in viewing even the most realistic representations of them in art. The Aristotelian explanation for this is that we are knowers by nature and take great pleasure in learning, whether our capacity for it be large or small. In Chapter 2 we looked at Plato’s discussion of how imitating a bad model can lead to the development of bad habits, but the question of how this happens, what “causal mechanism” is at work, wasn’t answered by Plato in any systematic way. How does imitation, in aesthetic experience or elsewhere, “cause” participation, and what sense does it make to speak of causality here at all? Aristotle answered this by appealing to the notion of a formal cause. It’s this sort of causality, in contrast to the other three (the material, the efficient, and the final), that underlies the concept of participation, and it’s also the kind of causality that’s at play in aesthetic experience and in cognition in general. The formal cause of an object is the way the thing is arranged or formed in our experience of it, and what allows us to see it as a being of a particular kind. What’s important for us here is that, for Aristotle, there is a kind of identity between the thinking or experiencing subject and the experienced object. The subject and the object of cognition are in some way identical. For the Aristotelian, to know an object is in a profound sense to be it, that is, to participate in a particular way of being. This is the same way of being as that of the object that’s known, and repeated exposure to the same kind of object will naturally bring about an alteration in one’s own

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being. One becomes what one sees. Cognition itself is an enactment of formal causality. It’s an act in which the cognizing subject takes on the form “without the matter” of the object of thought. In cognition, the subject becomes the object in so far as the form of the subject’s act of cognition is the same as the form of the object’s act of being. The operation we’re speaking of isn’t mechanical or intellectual but organic. What’s grasped in cognition are particular elements that function as organs in a larger organic unity. The form of the thing is the manner in which these parts are organized into a whole. The form and the concept operate not merely in “material objects” on the one hand and in “minds” on the other, but in organisms. When we speak of cognition, we’re speaking not about mechanical minds bumping into material bodies, but of organisms engaging other organisms, and an important illustration of this is found in our organic engagement with the work of art. This work comes into being through the creative activity of the artist, who bestows an intentional structure upon the work, and over the course of its creation the work acquires an intentionality of its own. It’s an intentionality that is unique to a given work, that guides the artist in its construction, and it’s the same intentionality in which the audience participates during their subsequent experience of it. This entails that a work of art is a dialectical or two-sided affair, and the operation as a whole can be understood as a process of formal causality belonging at once to work of art and interpreter. We shall explore this further in our next two chapters. NOTES 1. The “potters’ quarter” of ancient Athens was known as the Kerameikos, an area that straddled the northwest wall of the city. The Eridanos river, which is more like a small stream nowadays, ran through the potters’ quarter, and the banks of the river provided the clay for the potters. The Greek keramos, the root of the English “ceramic,” means “pottery clay.” This same area served as a cemetery from the third millennium BCE to the third century CE. Potters continued to work in the area intermittently (between invasions) until the sixth century CE. 2. This isn’t the place to analyze Plato’s texts and arguments in depth, but we do have to stress that this dialogue should not be interpreted literally. Careful analysis of the texts suggests that Plato has here presented a brilliant parody of the sort of literary criticism that had become fashionable among the Sophists who were active around the turn of the fourth century BCE, and whose teachings had become influential in the schools at this time. For a detailed study of this matter, see Jeff Mitscherling, The Image of a Second Sun: Plato on Poetry, Rhetoric, and the Techne of Mimesis (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books [Prometheus Books], 2009). The teachings of the Sophists, by the way, championed varieties of moral relativism which Socrates vehemently rejected in his search for universal moral values. 3. When speaking of things like trees, the language sounds silly, but the basic idea, so to speak, remains reasonable—so much so, in fact, that similar lines of reasoning remain central to mainstream research in many fields of contemporary science, from mathematics to morphology. 4. For more on the Library of Alexandria, see Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, trans. Martin Ryle (Berkeley: University of Cali-

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fornia Press, 1990); on ancient libraries, see Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 5. Questions surrounding the authorship, history, and transmission of the texts of Aristotle and his school have inspired centuries of scholarly research and speculation as well as more popular accounts, such as Umberto Eco’s famous medieval murder mystery, The Name of the Rose (1980). See, for example, Richard Shute, On the History of the Process by Which the Aristotelian Writings Arrived at Their Present Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888); Felix Grayeff, Aristotle and His School: A History of the Peripatos with a Commentary on Metaphysics Z, H, Λ and Θ (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Carlo Natali, Aristotle: His Life and School, ed. D. S. Hutchinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 6. Translation of Poetics (Peri Poietikes) by Ingram Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 7. It’s likely that the first “book” of Poetics was written on one papyrus scroll and the second book on another. 8. In the previously cited passage found at Republic 395c3–d3, Plato’s Socrates asked: “Or haven’t you noticed that imitations practiced from youth become part of nature and settle into habits [εἰς ἔθη τε καὶ φύσιν καθίστανται] of gesture, voice, and thought?” The verb “settle into” translates the Greek καθίστανται, and the noun for this verb is κατάστασις. It has recently been suggested that the appearance of the word “catharsis”—in Greek, κάθαρσις—in Aristotle’s Poetics is due to scribal error, and that κατάστασις stood in the original Greek text. (See Costas Georgiadis, “Concerning the Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics of Aristotle,” Greek Philosophy Review 16 [1999]: 203–12 [in Greek].) As Nickolas Pappas has explained: “Poor preservation has left the Poetics even more confusing than the rest of the corpus. Only two medieval manuscripts exist that contain the Greek text, together with translations into Arabic and Latin. These manuscripts were the result of many stages of recopying by hand, errors creeping into every copy.” (Pappas, “Aristotle,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes [London: Routledge, 2001], 15–26; passage quoted: 16.) Both Georgiadis and Pappas argue that the common, now traditional interpretation of catharsis in the sense of “purgation” is un-Aristotelian. 9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1902), 371. 10. Metaphysics 987b4–14, trans. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes. 11. Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy in 367 BCE, when he was seventeen and Plato was sixty-two, and remained there until 347, the year of Plato’s death. Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and journeyed to the court of Hermias in Assos, in Asia Minor, where he remained for about three years before leaving for Lesbos with his new wife, Pythias, the niece and adopted daughter of Hermias. 12. This is discussed at greater length in Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis: The Origin of Consciousness in the Intentional Being of Nature (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010); see especially Chapter 4, “Substance, Form, and Causality.” 13. See Aristotle, Physics 194b16–195a3. 14. Trans. J. A. Smith, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. I, 674. 15. Joseph Owens, “Aristotle and Aquinas on Cognition,” in Aristotle and His Medieval Interpreters, eds. Richard Bosley and Martin Tweedale (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1991), 103–23. The passage quoted just below is found at 113–14. 16. Organisms may be said to “embody” forms at many different levels, but such embodiment will always take the form of habit. The most basic, essential habits will obtain, “as a rule,” in every healthy member of a species—for example, horses will habitually gallop, and birds will habitually fly. At the other extreme we can locate what we might call “accidental” habits, that is, particular behavioral tendencies idiosyncratically acquired by individuals—for example, some people will bite their fingernails, and others will whistle while they work.

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17. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1984 [3rd edition]), 98. Spiegelberg lists “Intention objectivates” as the first of “four additional characteristics of Husserl’s intentionality,” with the other three being “Intention unifies,” “Intention relates,” and “Intention constitutes.” The paragraph immediately following that just quoted adds: “The whole idea of intentional consciousness as an objectivation of raw materials implies and presupposes a view of perception as well as of other acts, which is by no means uncontested. It should be added that it is far from generally accepted among phenomenologists. Certainly it is in need of careful re-examination and re-evaluation.” The present work is intended, in part, to contribute to such a “re-examination and re-evaluation.” 18. We want to avoid the lazy reductionism of identifying the cognitive activity with its physiological foundation or correlate, just as we refuse to identify it with its objective correlate, be it some physical, external thing or intentional object. 19. Ingarden, “Artistic and Aesthetic Value,” 100. Ingarden delivered this paper to The British Society of Aesthetics on 6 November 1963. It was subsequently published in the British Journal of Aesthetics 4 (1964), and reprinted in Ingarden 1985; our reference is to the latter.

FOUR A Model of the Work of Art

Chapter 1 offered a brief survey of artists’ statements about their creative process, while Chapters 2 and 3 reviewed several major theories of art that we shall occasionally be referring back to through the remainder of this study. In this chapter we present a general, introductory account of Roman Ingarden’s analyses of the work of art and of our aesthetic experience of the work. We shall employ this account as our starting point for Chapter 5, in which we’ll turn to a more detailed examination of artistic creation. INGARDEN’S ANALYSES Since his death in 1970, Roman Ingarden has come to be regarded not only as a towering figure in contemporary Polish philosophy, but as one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century. He was born in 1893 in Kraków, while the city was still occupied by Austria. He attended secondary school and gymnasium in Lwów from 1903 to 1911. After spending the 1911 fall semester studying philosophy at Jan Kazimierz University (in Lwów), at the end of April 1912 Ingarden moved to Göttingen to continue his studies, enrolling in Husserl’s summersemester lecture course on the “Theory of Judgment.” Ingarden continued to study with Husserl at Göttingen for the next four years, after which he followed “the Master” to his new post in Freiburg. The socalled “Göttingen Circle” of early phenomenology had become irreparably torn apart by this time (World War I had broken out two years earlier), and only Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden, of the entire group of Husserl’s earlier students, now remained with him in Freiburg. Ingarden completed his PhD dissertation under Husserl’s supervision in January 1918 and returned to Poland about six months later, shortly before the 71

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final collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Polish independence was declared in Warsaw in October of that year, just a few months after Ingarden’s return to Poland. Ingarden remained close to Husserl, corresponding regularly and visiting him in Germany when possible, until Husserl’s death in 1938. Yet, while Ingarden always regarded Husserl as his mentor and dear friend, he never did agree with the direction that his teacher’s philosophy had begun to take already during Ingarden’s early days in Göttingen (if not much earlier). This direction drifted away from the realist-oriented thought that had attracted his earliest students to Göttingen (after he moved there from Halle an der Saale in 1901) and toward an idealism that struck most of his students as nothing less than a return to precisely the sort of “old German philosophy” that they had been hoping to leave behind. The seemingly realist-oriented phenomenology that Husserl had seemed to be propounding in his Logical Investigations (of 1900–1901), the earlier work that got him promoted and transferred to Göttingen, had suddenly changed into a resurrected variety of idealism. This is now referred to as Husserl’s “transcendental turn” to a new idealist phenomenology, according to which human consciousness “constitutes” the objects of our experience. On this view, the “real,” objective world is produced solely through the “ideal” operations of our mind; the world, that is to say, is entirely a construct of our own consciousness. Since Husserl’s earliest statements of what he called his “transcendental idealism,” philosophers have disagreed about how to interpret what he was saying. Some took Husserl to be making the epistemological claim that, as far as our conscious experience goes, an object always is what it is only “for us,” and whatever it may be “in itself”— beyond our experience and knowledge of it—is simply irrelevant. Others have taken seriously Husserl’s repeated assertion that the real world doesn’t exist outside of consciousness as the metaphysical claim that there exists no world at all without its being constituted by our conscious experience. This isn’t to claim that the real world is the way it is because consciousness organizes it in some way of its own choosing. Rather, this stronger metaphysical claim is that there’s no world at all without the human mind. Consciousness brings it into being and sustains whatever objects exist within it. The disagreement as to how to interpret Husserl’s idealism was most heated among Husserl’s own students, almost all of whom took him to be committed to the stronger, metaphysical claim. Ingarden belonged to this second group, and he spent a good deal of his career, beginning in The Literary Work of Art, constructing an extensive criticism of metaphysical idealism in response to Husserl. The same “painful question” that Husserl posed in his Logic provided Ingarden with his own point of departure. This is the question, as Husserl put it, of

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how subjectivity can in itself bring forth, purely from sources appertaining to its own spontaneity, formations that can be rightly accounted as ideal Objects in an ideal “world.”—And then (on a higher level) the question of how these idealities can take on a spatio-temporally restricted existence, in the cultural world (which must surely be considered as real, as included in the spatio-temporal universe), real existence, in the form of historical temporality, as theories and sciences. 1

Ingarden formulated a comprehensive response to this question in his major work, Controversy over the Existence of the World. Yet he had begun the research for this response in his earlier investigations into the ontology of the literary work of art, 2 and his later analyses of other kinds of artworks—specifically theater, music, painting, architecture, and film— provided further support for his systematic magnum opus. For the same reason that Ingarden chose the literary work of art as the starting point for his ontological studies of art, we shall choose it as ours. As he stated, if one is to “take a stance” on Husserl’s theory, one must analyze the purely intentional object in such a way as to determine its essential structure and mode of being, for thus can we see whether this object has its ontic basis in consciousness alone. And the purely intentional object that best lends itself to such analysis is the literary work of art. In 1918, Ingarden wrote to Husserl to express reservations about the latter’s idealist solutions to “the problem of idealism-realism,” and it was in The Literary Work of Art (completed in 1928) that he first published his criticism of Husserl’s idealism. As he wrote in the preface to that work, “Although the main study of my investigation is the literary work, or the literary work of art, the ultimate motives for my work on this subject are of a general philosophical nature, and they far transcend this particular subject. They are closely related to the problem of idealism-realism, with which I have been concerning myself for many years.” 3 As Maria Gołaszewska explains: Though the work on [The Literary Work of Art] initiated and stimulated his aesthetic investigations, its original aim was other than aesthetic. Its tasks were essentially philosophical; its problem was ontological; the analysis of a literary work of art in its general structure was designed as an example to discuss and vindicate the fundamentally philosophical issues of the mode of existence of the world and its structure. The definition of the structure and mode of existence of a literary work served as an argument to the effect that the world around us exists really. As we know, Ingarden criticized the transcendental idealism of Husserl; even though he accepted Husserl’s methodological approach, he rejected the notion of the world as existentially heteronomous and dependent on acts of consciousness and thus constituted in pure consciousness. Searching for a convincing proof of his own position, Ingarden analysed an object that seemed beyond doubt to be existentially derivative from creative acts of human consciousness, and be-

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Ingarden continued to concern himself with the problem of idealismrealism until his death in 1970, although he remains best known for his work in aesthetics, and especially for his analyses of the literary work of art, as well as the dramatic work, music, painting, architecture, and film. As we shall see, his ontological analyses of the work of art have farreaching implications for the investigation of both artistic creation and artistic creativity, as well as metaphysical implications for numerous other areas of research in the sciences. THE NATURE AND STRUCTURE OF THE WORK OF ART In his 1968 paper “On Philosophical Aesthetics,” Ingarden offered the following list of areas of research that belong to the study of philosophical aesthetics 5 : 1. The ontology of different works of art (e.g., paintings, literary works, musical compositions). 2. The ontology of the aesthetic object as the aesthetic concretization of the work of art, in other words, the ontology of its form and mode of existence. 3. The phenomenology of creative aesthetic behavior (of the creative process). 4. The phenomenological investigation of the style of a work of art and its relation to value. 5. The phenomenology and ontology of values inherent in works of art and aesthetic objects, that is, of artistic and aesthetic values; this includes the possible foundation of values in a work of art or in an aesthetic object and also the constitution of values in the aesthetic experience whereby they are actively discovered. 6. The phenomenology of the receptive aesthetic experience and of its function in the constitution of an aesthetic object. 7. The theory of cognition of a work of art and of an aesthetic object, in particular the cognition of artistic and aesthetic values; the theory of aesthetic valuation. 8. The philosophical theory of the meaning and function of art (or aesthetic objects) in human life. (The metaphysics of art?) As Władysław Stróżewski remarks, Ingarden made extraordinary progress, if not always in the same degree, in each of the above noted areas of philosophical aesthetics. And three of these he brought so far that one would simply want to call them finished works, —if this didn’t run counter to his own opinion on this point. I am thinking of the ontology of the works of art, of the

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ontology of the aesthetic object as well as of the phenomenology of the receptive aesthetic experience. 6

It is with Ingarden’s work in these three areas that we’re concerned in this chapter. Ingarden’s studies themselves are far too numerous, lengthy, and detailed to summarize properly in a single chapter, so we’ll be focusing only on selected portions of those studies, and emphasizing those features of his analyses that have particular bearing on our examination of artistic creation. Before proceeding further, however, with regard to the third area listed above, we must draw a distinction that’s often overlooked: artistic creativity and artistic creation are two quite distinct things. Works of art are produced through the activity of what we call artistic creation. Many conditions must be met in order to create a work of art, and one of these is the creative ability of the artist, that is, artistic creativity. Creation presupposes the creativity of the artist. When speaking of creativity, we’re speaking of a characteristic or ability that belongs to individual artists. It’s a subjective trait that lies hidden in the artist and is difficult, if not impossible, to examine. When speaking of artistic creation, on the other hand, we’re dealing with an activity that’s at least somewhat observable. If we watch a painter at work, we can observe not only her physical actions but to some extent her interaction with the work as it becomes realized on the canvas. We can watch her create the painting, and we can identify particular elements that belong to the final product, as well as numerous matters that the artist takes into consideration in creating the final product. Artistic creativity is a subjective condition belonging to the artist, a condition that enables him or her to engage in a set of discrete but related actions that result in a product that the artist has structured in such a way as to elicit an aesthetic response on the part of the aesthetic subject (the reader, listener, viewer, audience, etc.). While natural objects can be “employed” as means of initiating aesthetic experiences, the work of art is constructed precisely with this goal in mind. As we shall be explaining in a moment, this goal (or telos, in the Greek) belongs to the essence of the work of art: it is what makes the work a work of art, and it does this by engaging the audience in the actualization of the intentional structures that the author has “embedded”—or perhaps “encoded” would be more precise—in the work that he or she has produced. We shall now examine all of this in more detail by turning to Ingarden’s analyses. We’ll need to introduce a distinction here which may strike the reader as somewhat bizarre, but it will begin to make more sense as we proceed. This is an ontological distinction between three kinds of being: material, ideal, and intentional. 7 While material objects, such as tables and books, possess “material being,” and ideal objects such as numbers and abstract ideas (e.g., equality, justice) possess “ideal being,” works of art are “in-

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tentional objects” which possess “intentional being.” The work of art “exists” in a very different way than both material and ideal objects do. It’s not reducible to whatever material and/or ideal elements it may require for its being. A work of art shouldn’t be identified with the material thing that we perceive with our senses, nor is it an idea or concept. It’s a formation, or construction, 8 that consists of relations among parts which the artist has assembled with an eye to having an audience experience it in a certain way. That is, a work of art is a stratified formation that’s created chiefly in order to evoke a particular sort of experience—an “aesthetic experience”—in the person encountering it. As Ingarden said of the literary work, The essential structure of the literary work of art inheres, in our opinion, in the fact that it is a formation constructed of several heterogeneous strata. The individual strata differ from one another (1) by their characteristic material, from the peculiarity of which stem the particular qualities of each stratum, and (2) by the role which each stratum plays with respect to both the other strata and the structure of the whole work. 9

Throughout the following discussion we have to bear in mind that these aren’t physical, material things. The material that’s employed in creating an artistic construction or formation isn’t one of the constitutive strata of the work. It is simply the material foundation underlying the artistic construction, the Gebilde, of the strata and their complex interrelationships. This “non-materiality” of the work of art will become more obvious as we proceed. Ingarden presented detailed studies of the ontology of artworks and of our cognition of them. Several of these studies present analyses of (1) the elements of which the various strata of these works are constituted, (2) the manner in which they’re constituted individually and, most importantly, (3) the manner in which all of the strata belonging to a particular work of art are woven together in such a way as to yield what Ingarden called a “polyphonic harmony.” Every work of art is a construction that the artist builds out of ontologically distinct kinds of strata. The strata of a work of art are the “levels” of the different kinds of elements that belong to it, and the artist constructs and weaves together these strata in the process of creating the work. Depending upon the category (painting, music, literature, etc.) to which a particular work of art belongs, the work comprises some specific number of strata, with the number being more strictly determined by the sub-category to which it belongs (for example, “painting” might be subdivided into “representational” and “non-representational,” or “narrative,” “landscape,” “portrait,” “still life”), and as this process of specification continues, the number of strata may vary. The literary work of art provides the clearest illustration of art’s “stratified” structure, so we’ll begin with this.

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The literary work of art is essentially a formation of four heterogeneous strata that differ with respect to their characteristic material and the role each of them plays with regard to the other strata and to the structure of the work as a whole. These strata are: 10 (1) the stratum of word sounds and the phonetic formations of a higher order built upon these sounds; (2) the stratum of meaning units of different orders; (3) the stratum of represented objects; and (4) the stratum of schematized aspects. Ingarden sometimes refers to the first two as “the two linguistic strata,” and they are closely interrelated. The first stratum consists of such linguistic formations as words, sentences, and “sentence complexes” such as verses, paragraphs, stanzas, and so on. When speaking of this stratum, we must bear in mind the distinction between the sounds and the meanings of words and other linguistic formations. The sound of a word—or more precisely, the specific word sound that’s intended in a particular usage of that word—is always closely connected with its meaning. A sentence, as a meaningful construct, presents the reader with a succession of word sounds which, when held together in the unity of the reader’s aesthetic experience, gives rise to phonetic phenomena, such as rhythm and other rhythmic characters, which are found in all sorts of literary works but are absolutely essential to literary works of art. These rhythmic characters may in turn give rise to the phonetic phenomenon of tempo, which Ingarden described as “a determinate character of the phonetic side of language, its ‘quickness’ or ‘slowness,’ its ‘lightness’ or ‘lazy heaviness.’” 11 This stratum also contains another group of phonetic properties that is “formed by various ‘melodies’ and melodic characters”; “‘rhyme’ and ‘assonance’ play an important role” in constituting this melodic character. 12 Finally, we must mention a very special property of the phonic aspect of language, one which has its basis in a succession of determinate word sounds. At issue are characters which in themselves are no longer purely phonic but which have their basis in the purely phonic properties of the word-sound sequence and the formations arising in it (the kind of rhythm, tempo, melody, timbre of individual word sounds) and also achieve their appearance through them. These are the many and various “emotional” or “mood” qualities: “sad,” “melancholy,” “merry,” “powerful,” etc. 13

That the first stratum consists at the most basic level of words and sentences already suggests that it’s interrelated with the stratum of meaning units; already here, at this most basic “phonic” level, specific sorts of meaning appear to be present. Indeed, the two strata of (1) word sounds and phonetic formations and (2) meaning units appear to be separable from each other only in abstraction, not in our everyday (and aesthetic) experience. Ingarden used the expression “meaning unit” to refer to any word or linguistic construction that conveys any sort of meaning. The

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Oxford English Dictionary defines “meaning” as “That which a speaker or writer intends to express; the intended sense of (a person’s) words.” 14 Words have word-meanings, and sentences have more complex sentence-meanings. The relation between the word sounds and the meanings of linguistic expressions is crucial for a literary work of art, and a little more detail about this relation will prove useful for what follows. The term “word sound” refers to the sound a particular word will have when it’s spoken aloud. However, this sound will not be unique to that particular instance of the word’s being spoken. The word sound is, rather, the sound that “the same word” will have each time it’s spoken, regardless of whatever other (differing) phonic characteristics that same word may have when spoken at different times and under different circumstances. For example, the words “please leave now” may be spoken harshly in an angry command, yet softly in a tender urging, and while the three words will sound different, they will nevertheless retain essentially the same word sounds—that is, they will sound basically the same, yet they will exhibit differing phonic features. Moreover, while the linguistic formation “please leave now” will in one sense mean the same thing—that is, while it will express the same general command—it will in another sense mean something quite different: it may express, for example, a dying mother’s concern that her child not have to witness the pain of her final moments. Ingarden describes the logical ground of this difference in meaning by employing the Aristotelian view of the distinction between form and matter, according to which the form (eidos), while always to be located at the level of the species (same word: eidos), must always be instantiated in some individual, which is always a combination of form and matter. (Regarded in themselves, both form and matter are abstractions: when we regard the existing individual entity, we may logically abstract its ontologically constituent elements of form and matter.) At this point it might be helpful to step back and consider once again Ingarden’s general approach to ontology. We should note that Adolf Reinach, one of Husserl’s earliest and most devoted students, was strongly opposed to the idealistic turn of his teacher, which became more obvious than ever with Husserl’s publication of Ideas in 1913. That same year Jean Hering attended the philosophy seminars that Husserl and Reinach gave at the University of Göttingen, and in the notes he took on Reinach’s seminars it becomes clear that the concept of “essence” had become a central, and controversial, issue in the discussion of idealism and phenomenology: whereas Husserl tended toward an “idealist” interpretation of essence, Reinach argued for a “realist” approach. In his paper “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee,” published in 1921, Hering attempted to describe the relations of these three terms and, in so doing, to clarify the concept of essence. While Hering’s paper failed (in our opinion) to clarify very much, it at least identified some of the most basic problems the early phenomenologists were grappling with and,

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more importantly, it demonstrated the necessity of returning to Aristotle to identify the fundamental concepts that would have to be analyzed in order to solve these problems. Ingarden had attended Husserl’s and Reinach’s seminars in 1912–1913, so he was already aware of the centrality of Aristotelian metaphysics to basic phenomenology, but the publication of Hering’s paper appears to have motivated him to explore this matter in depth for himself. That’s what he did in the first half of 1923: his Habilitationschrift, Essentiale Fragen. Ein Beitrag zum Wesensproblem (Essential Questions: A Contribution to the Problem of Essence), was published in 1925, in volume 7 of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 15 and one subsection of this work is devoted to a critical treatment of Hering’s essay. Probably the most significant of his criticisms of Hering has to do, not surprisingly, with the concepts of “idea” and “essence,” and his criticism appears to be grounded in a thoughtful reading of Aristotle’s metaphysics. And at the heart of this metaphysics is what Ingarden referred to, in a footnote, as “the general problem of ‘participation’” (using the Latinate instead of the German term for “participation,” which is unusual). In The Literary Work of Art he wrote: When we hear a certain word, what we are prepared for is not certain specially selected parts or features of the concrete phonic material, which we then hear—features which are as concrete and individual as the material itself—but a typical phonic form [Gestalt]. 16 This form shows itself to us only through the concrete phonic material. It is given to us on the basis of this material, and it continues in existence even though quite extensive differences frequently occur in the material. If we are truly prepared for words, the typical phonic form is in no way apprehended as that which sounds hic et nunc. This unchangeable phonic form, made strictly identical by the repeated utterance of the word, is precisely what one calls “the same word sound” of a word. 17

Ingarden added this footnote to “This unchangeable phonic form”: In his review . . . H. Spiegelberg assailed this identity by indicating certain theoretical dangers that seem to stem from it. In connection with this, it must be noted that the concern here is, so to speak, with a purely qualitative, not a “numerical” (taken in its individuality in the concretization), identity of this form. That it is then “concretized” and that it then appears in a different concrete phonic material—and to that extent is “multiplied,” so to speak—is something that cannot be denied or, for that matter, doubted. It is a special case of the general problem of “participation,” which in itself cannot concern us here.

Ingarden’s explicit reference to “participation” suggests that we might be able to explain his own analyses as follows, using the terminology of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy that we’ve already discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. The word sound belongs first (in the logical sense) to the species (eidos), which is, we might say, the “potentially spoken” word

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sound. It is the form (eidos) of the spoken word sound, which is actualized when the word is spoken aloud, and thereby actually combines with the phonic material and becomes an actual individual entity: the actually spoken word. The form becomes instantiated in something—namely, the spoken word—and the meaning of that individual spoken word participates in the specific meaning expressed by the word sound. To further clarify the relation between word sound and meaning, we may turn to the concept of “phonic material.” 18 Aristotelian distinctions and terminology help us here as well. Briefly stated, the phonic material is the matter that will be informed by the word sound: first, at the level of species by the word sound as potentially spoken, and second, at the level of the actualized word sound of the actually “concretized” spoken word. The basic picture here is this: there’s a huge stock of possible sounds that we might make when speaking (this is the phonic material in the broadest, most general sense), and as we proceed to express our thoughts as the meanings of possible statements, we select from this stock of possible sounds as we choose our words, each of which has a more limited range of possible sounds that may be employed in their possible utterance (this is all happening at the “specific” level, i.e., the level of species/form/word sound). In this act of choosing, we are “specifying,” or making more specific, the phonic material that we have at our disposal; we are “informing” the phonic material at the level of species. And when we actually speak individual words aloud in some utterance (exclamation, sentence, or whatever), we are further informing that specific phonic material by instantiating it (or “concretizing” it) in the “matter” of the spoken word, which is characterized not just by the word sound but also by such other features as volume (loud/soft), tone (soft/harsh), and so on. The word sound remains the same even though, when made concrete, the phonic material is new and different “(e.g., in intonation, quality of timbre, strength of voice, etc.).” 19 When we engage with a literary work of art, it is we readers who instantiate the phonic material by speaking it, either aloud or silently to ourselves, and this ongoing act of concretization is fundamental to our experience of the work as a whole, for the meanings that we thereby realize—that is, the meanings that the author thereby communicates to us—provide the literary work of art with the materials essential to the remaining two strata: (3) the stratum of represented objects and (4) the stratum of schematized aspects. The represented objects belonging to a literary work of art are quite simply the various entities that we encounter throughout our reading of the work—basically, the characters and their actions, the events, along with their causes and results, and so on. When we read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for example, we encounter hobbits and elves, wizards and dwarves, small villages, forests and mountains, trolls and dragons, rivers, glens and dales, all of which

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inhabit or belong to the realm of Middle Earth. All of these are, in Ingarden’s language, “represented objects”: they are one and all entities that are represented in the work of art, as are all the actions they perform, the events in which they participate, and the innumerable situations in which they find themselves. It is such “represented objectivities” 20 that constitute the third stratum of the literary work of art. Ingarden described these represented objects of the literary work with the technical term “derived purely intentional objects,” which we can unpack as follows. Every act of consciousness is intentional, so the object of consciousness—basically, the object toward which an act of consciousness is directed—is called an “intentional object.” If it is that act of consciousness alone that gives rise to the object—if, for example, the object isn’t the result of an act of seeing something that’s sitting on the desk right in front of you—that object is said to be a “purely intentional” object; that is, it owes its existence entirely to the intentional activity of your consciousness. All works of art are said to be purely intentional in this sense, for even if they have a material, physical foundation (as most of them do), it is the intentional structuring, ordering, and informing of that matter that is what makes them art, and that intentionality is said to be “bestowed” upon them by the consciousness of their creator. A sentence belonging to a literary work of art, for example, possesses a meaning, originally intended by the author, who is said to “bestow” this meaning to the sentence. This meaning is said to be the “original” intended meaning, or original intentionality, and this intentionality of the work will guide readers in their individual engagements with it. The work of art as it comes to be concretized by its individual readers will consequently possess what is basically the same intentional structure as that originally intended by the author, but the intentionality of this product of the reader’s acts of consciousness is said to be “derived” from the intentionality inhering in the original linguistic meaningstructure of the work. And it’s by virtue of the reader’s own acts of consciousness that the objects that the author intends to be represented come fully into being as the “represented objects” constituting their own separate stratum of the literary work. We’ll return to the topic of our actual engagement with works of art below, but before we turn to that we must briefly describe the fourth stratum of the literary work of art, that of “schematized aspects.” All four strata are essential to the literary work of art, but it’s this fourth stratum, that of schematized aspects, that bears the heaviest burden of them all, for the essentially schematic character of the work of art constitutes both an essential structural moment of the work and the framework within which all cognition of the work proceeds. In all works of art, certain features are given only schematically and remain to be “filled out”—actualized or concretized—by the person who apprehends the work. Chief among these schematically presented features are what

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Ingarden referred to as spots (“gaps” or “places”) of indeterminacy and schematized aspects, both of which are present in all works of art. We can illustrate this by looking at the schematic character of the literary work, the painting, and the musical work. When a particular object is represented in a literary work, it’s rarely represented in exhaustive detail (not even in Marcel Proust). For example, in “building” a particular character, Mark Twain presented first one feature of that character—say, Huck Finn’s mischievousness—and subsequently other features—such as Huck’s generosity, humility, honesty, and so on. At any given point in the novel, it’s the reader’s task to concretize the character with regard to the various aspects that have been given. The precise manner in which this concretization is to proceed, however, remains largely undetermined, or underdetermined, by the text, for the character is only schematically represented. The situation is identical in the case of “spots of indeterminacy.” An author can never provide all the physical details of a person’s appearance, for example, or all the details of a particular setting—how long were Huck’s arms, and exactly how wide was the raft?—and the reader is thereby forced to “fill in” and “determine” these gaps during the course of the reading. If the author continues to provide further details regarding particular places of indeterminacy, the reader will alter the manner in which he or she concretizes both the individual features of the work and the work as a whole. The possibility of such modification enables the author to employ schematized aspects in such a way as to “hold in readiness” a determination of a given aspect that may stand in startling contrast to its previous determination. When such a schematized aspect held in readiness is then determined, and the particular feature of the work concretized, the objectivity is suddenly seen in a new light, sometimes eliciting shock or surprise in the reader. Mystery novels, for example, often employ this technique. While it would seem that such indeterminacy and schematism would play no role whatsoever in visual art—for in the visual arts the material is generally presented to us as fully determined—this isn’t the case. In order to recognize this, we must first distinguish between the painting and the “picture.” The painting is the “real object,” the framed canvas on the wall, while the picture is the work of art as it’s concretized by the individual who apprehends it. “There is no doubt,” Ingarden wrote, “that the painting, as a real object, manifests no places of indeterminacy at all.” 21 When we apprehend the painting, however, we concretize the picture, and this concretization demands the “filling out” of what’s given in the painting only schematically. Objects depicted in a painting present themselves to us in only one aspect—a chair, for example, might be seen from the side or the back—yet, since we recognize it as a chair, we intuitively and involuntarily “complete the picture” by imaginatively determining the places of indeterminacy—the sides and other aspects of the chair that “are only co-given, only surmised, but not actually seen directly.” As

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Ingarden explained further: “In the seeing of the picture we involuntarily complete some sides or parts of the presented thing; we somehow— depending on the case and the circumstances—determine it more specifically and thereby eliminate one of the places of indeterminacy that are present in the picture.” It’s the schematic character of the picture that makes this determination both necessary and possible. While less well known than his studies of the literary work, Ingarden’s analyses of the musical work are at least as provocative in their ontological and metaphysical implications. Central to his analyses is the conclusion that the musical work is ontologically distinct from (1) the score, (2) its performances, (3) the mental experiences of the composer, and (4) its perception by the listener. Unlike other kinds of artworks, music presents us with a unique problem of its identity. It’s neither material nor mental, neither real nor ideal. Thus, Ingarden was led to ask: “What makes it possible for the musical composition to exist, what guarantees its sameness, when it is neither being played nor heard?” 22 The answer lies in the peculiar mode of being of the musical work: it’s “a purely intentional object which has its source of being in the creative acts of the composer and its ontic foundation in the score.” 23 This ontic foundation provides only a schematic definition of the work, that is, the score specifies “only some determinations of [the work’s] purely tonal (acoustic) base, while others are left open and variable within certain limits, although they are also mediately codetermined. The work enters the world as a decidedly schematic formation. In its univocally determined and, as it were, actually existing content, the work is riddled with places of indeterminacy that can be eliminated only in the individual performances.” The musical work, then, finds its ontic foundation in the schematic formation that is its score; this schematic formation “guides” the performance that concretizes the work, which then becomes still further concretized by the listener. The listener’s cognition of the musical work is being guided and informed by the structure of the ongoing performance of that work, but the listener is, at the same time, contributing to the further concretization of that work, an interpretation that is based largely on purely personal tastes, memories, anticipations, mood, and so on. At this point, let’s turn our attention to this activity we’ve been referring to as “concretization.” We’re following Ingarden here, but we’re also suggesting a slight change in emphasis on a central feature of his model. Whereas Ingarden regarded aesthetic experience as directed toward the actualization of an aesthetic object, describing this aesthetic object as the goal, or telos, of the aesthetic experience, we want to focus instead on the structure of the aesthetic experience itself, for by turning our attention to the experience itself, we call attention to the dynamic character of the intentionality that guides it. We agree with Ingarden that the work of art is essentially a potential aesthetic object, but we want to stress that the work of art is also a schema—a set of guidelines, as it were—for a poten-

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tial aesthetic experience. Unlike both the object of nature, which simply arises through the agency of nature itself, and the artifact, which is commonly produced to serve some practical end, a work of art is created not only for the purpose of becoming the object of an aesthetic experience (as Ingarden is generally understood to be maintaining), but also of providing the direction for an aesthetic experience (which Ingarden most definitely also maintained). While a natural object (e.g., a seashell) or a produced artifact (e.g., Duchamp’s urinal [Fountain]) may indeed serve this same purpose, it will always do so after the fact of origination or production and through an agency that is accidental, not essential, to its being. But it belongs to the essence of the work of art that it be capable of serving this purpose. The work of art simply doesn’t “exist” 24 without this potentiality; this potentiality, in other words, is constitutive of its being. When we engage with the work of art in an aesthetic experience, it’s precisely this potentiality of the work that we’re actualizing in that experience, and this potentiality of the work rests primarily, if not exclusively, in its intentionality. (In passing, we might note that this concept of the work of art denies at the outset the correctness of the “institutional” theory of art, which we discussed in Chapter 2.) In order to see how this “actualization” of the work of art proceeds, let’s take another look at Ingarden’s conception of the work as a manylayered, or “stratified,” and “schematic” construction. Again, according to Ingarden, the work of art is constructed of heterogeneous strata that differ from one another in both their material and their function, and different sorts of artworks contain different sorts, and different numbers, of strata. In examining the stratified character of a particular work of art, we immediately find that it must be distinguished from the physical, material object, which in everyday discourse we commonly identify with the work of art. To take a particular literary work as an example, we distinguish the novel Inherent Vice from the countless physical books that bear that title on their cover. Thomas Pynchon has written only one such novel, 25 and the fact that he didn’t create all of its physical copies establishes this distinction. The novel must also be distinguished from the aesthetic experiences of its many readers, for the experiential, subjective states of the several readers of one and the same novel are not themselves identical. While the act of reading is guided by the literary work, it is at the same time characterized by qualities that originate in experiences of the reader that do not belong to the work itself. This “actualization” of the potentiality of the work proceeds by way of numerous individual acts of “concretizing” the schematically presented elements that belong to the various strata which comprise the work. Further, as we’ve seen, the literary work is not only stratified but schematic as well. As Ingarden explained:

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several of its strata, especially the stratum of portrayed objectivities and the stratum of aspects, contain “places of indeterminacy.” These are partially removed in the concretizations. The concretization of the literary work is thus still schematic, but less so than the work itself. . . . The places of indeterminacy are removed in the individual concretizations in such a way that a more or less close determination takes their place and, so to speak, “fills them out.” This “filling-out” is, however, not sufficiently determined by the determinate features of the object and can thus vary with different concretizations. 26

Immediately after this passage, Ingarden added the following observation regarding the work’s ontological status: The literary work as such is a purely intentional formation which has the source of its being in the creative acts of consciousness of its author and its physical foundation in the text set down in writing or through other physical means of possible reproduction (for instance, the tape recorder). By virtue of the dual stratum of its language, the work is both intersubjectively accessible and reproducible, so that it becomes an intersubjective intentional object, related to a community of readers. As such it is not a psychological phenomenon and is transcendent to all experiences of consciousness, those of the author as well as those of the reader. 27

His assertion that the literary work is “transcendent to all experiences of consciousness” is tantalizing, and while it might be the kind of assertion that the reader would expect Ingarden to explain, his adherence to the task at hand didn’t allow this. Any explanation would have had to address metaphysical issues, and Ingarden was reserving the treatment of these for a later study. Ingarden wrote The Literary Work of Art as a direct response to Husserl’s idealism. Husserl later denied that objects existed “in themselves,” outside acts of consciousness. Ingarden found this conclusion unacceptable, and he chose to examine the literary work of art precisely because it’s generally regarded as a purely intentional object. By demonstrating how even an object like this finds part of its ontological foundation outside the act of consciousness, he could establish that Husserlian idealism is unacceptable. Ingarden completed The Literary Work of Art in 1928, and after seven years of heavy teaching duty, in 1935 he began Controversy over the Existence of the World, which he planned to be his definitive rejoinder to Husserl. Shortly after having begun this task, however, Ingarden felt compelled to return to some questions that had arisen in The Literary Work of Art, and this led him to write The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, which was published (in Polish) in 1937. As he explained in Controversy, a whole new set of problems had presented themselves, namely, “the problem of the possibility of an intersubjectively secured cognition of a text fixed in literary form, which appeared to me as the problem of the possibility of intersubjectively secured science in general.” 28 Ingarden had established to his satisfaction that the work sub-

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sists independently of the acts of consciousness both of its author and of its readers, and that it persists in such a way as to be intersubjectively accessible to any number of aesthetically engaged subjects. This conclusion raises a number of difficult questions, not the least of which concerns the identity of the literary work. The problem of identity is still more complex in the case of performed works. In his “Introduction” to “The Musical Work” in Ontology of the Work of Art, Ingarden addressed this problem head on. We’ll quote this passage at length, for there’s no better way to elucidate the problem than by following the series of questions he posed: Let us look at a specific work, for example the well-known C-Minor Sonata, opus 13 (Pathétique) by Beethoven. How do matters really stand with it? According to the preceding assertions, it should be distinct from the mental experiences of both composer and listener; at the same time, it seems not to be a material thing. But, we will be asked, how can something that is neither mental nor physical exist, especially when no one is consciously concerned with it? And, analogously, we say, whenever we hear a performance of this sonata, that we hear the same sonata, even when it is performed by a different musician and each time in a somewhat different way. How can the same thing disclose itself to us in qualitatively different performances? When we perceive the same tree several times, this seems understandable; the perceptions of the tree are, to be sure, something subjective, but they open up for us cognitive access to a material object, which exists of itself in space, independently of our mental experiences, and which can wait in space as the same tree, so to speak, until it is perceived by us again. But how can a musical composition, which is neither material nor mental, “wait for” our perceptions and show itself to us as the same in different performances? Where then does it wait? In space? Surely there are no musical works “in space,” especially when no performances of them are being given. Moreover, the separate performances are nothing subjective, as is, for example, the hearing of the work, and they can neither confer existence upon the work nor guarantee its existence. What makes it possible for the musical composition to exist, what guarantees its sameness, when it is neither being played nor being heard? What permits it to show itself as self-identical in different performances? It cannot be regarded as an “ideal object,” for it is something created by someone at a certain time and not something “discovered.” For the same reason, it cannot be “timeless,” as ideal objects are supposed to be. 29

The key to answering all these questions lies, again, in the schematic character of the work of art, in which are located both the potentiality and the inherent intentionality of the work. To take the literary work again, we need only look at the nature and function of the sentence to see how this schematism operates. This is how Ingarden described the situation in Controversy over the Existence of the World:

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In particular, there are derivative purely intentional entities whose immediate existential foundation inheres in turn in an heteronomous entity. Thus, for example, the meaning of sentences belonging to a literary work is an intentional product that issues out of specifically structured sentence-building operations. But this sentence-meaning determines out of itself the objects presented in the given sentence (people, things, animals, events, etc.), which themselves are purely intentional. Their immediate existential foundation lies in the corresponding sentencemeanings, which for their part refer back to the further existential foundation that generally already winds up being an autonomous object, and indeed [in the case at hand] it is the sentence-building operation, or the corresponding agent [Subjekt]. 30

Note that the “sentence-sense determines from itself the objects . . . represented in the sentence concerned, which themselves are purely intentional.” A sentence is a meaningful linguistic schematic formation—that is, it’s an intentional construct. But this intentional construct intends something on its own. When we take a novel like Inherent Vice, with its thousands upon thousands of sentences, we’re talking about a massive intentional construct. And it’s operating intentionally on its own. There is intentionality there, in the literary work of art, on its own. The literary work of art is precisely that: a complex construction of intentionality, subsisting as a manifold of potentiality to be actualized by the concretizing acts of the reader. The literary work comes into being through the creative acts of the writer, who bestows an intentionality to the work—but gradually over the course of its creation the work attains an intentional stature of its own. This happens, Ingarden stated, by virtue of “the dual stratum of its language,” that is, the linguistic sound formations and linguistic meaning structures. 31 While the author has deployed these linguistic elements in her or his own manner of intending them, these elements enjoy an intentionality all their own. Their unique intentionality is precisely why the author chose them and not others in constructing the sentences and sentence complexes of the work. The work possesses, as it were, two layers of intentional significance: one bestowed by the author and one accruing to the words themselves, which is the deeper, intersubjectively constituted layer. And that intentionality isn’t a characteristic or function of any consciousness. It inheres in the work of art itself. We can think of it this way. Say you’re reading a book. It’s open in your hands. You close the book. The grammatical, syntactical, and logical relations among the printed words continue to obtain while the book is closed. Those relations are still intended by the words themselves and the combinations of words. And it’s that entire complex of intended meaning structures that constitutes the structural framework, or the schematic formation, that we recognize as the literary work of art.

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The operation of intentionality during the reading of the work is a complex, two-sided affair, and the entire operation can be analyzed as a process of formal causality originating separately in both the literary work and the reader. On the one hand, the reader’s cognition is guided by the schematic, linguistic form of the work. On the other hand, the reader is actively retaining and combining the products of this ongoing process initiated by the work, piecing them together in his or her concretization of the work. The former aspect of this process has to do with what Ingarden described as “passive reading.” As he explained, This purely passive, receptive manner of reading, which is often mechanical as well, occurs relatively often in the reading of both literary works of art and scientific works. One still knows what one is reading, although the scope of understanding is often limited to the sentence which is being read. But one does not become clearly aware of what one is reading about and what its qualitative constitution is. One is occupied with the actualization [Vollzug] of the sentence meaning itself and does not absorb the meaning in such a way that one can transpose oneself by means of it into the world of objects in a work; one is too constrained by the meaning of the individual sentences. 32

Ingarden’s description of this point isn’t well developed, and he seems puzzled by how this “passive reading” combines with the “active reading” in which we make an “intellectual attempt to progress from the sentences read to the objects appropriate to them and projected by them.” Here, he said, we try “to constitute [these objects] synthetically.” 33 While Ingarden appears to have had difficulty analyzing this stage of our cognition of the work, we might be able to develop it a little further by recalling the Aristotelian notion of formal causality. First, this is how Ingarden presented the difficulty: It is hard to describe the difference between passive, purely receptive reading and “active” reading because in passive reading we do, after all, think the sentences as we think them also in “active” reading. Thus there seems to be an activity involved in both cases. It would perhaps be easier to contrast these two ways of reading if we could say that, when one reads receptively, one does not think the meanings of the sentences by performing the corresponding signitive acts; rather, one only experiences or feels that they are being performed. By contrast, it is only in active reading that we actually perform the signitive acts. But the matter is not so simple, because in both kinds of reading mental acts are performed. The difference between the two kinds of reading consists merely in the way in which they are performed. It is, however, extremely difficult to describe this way. 34

Ingarden treated both aspects of this process of cognition as initiated and completed by the reader alone. This left him with a seemingly intractable difficulty in trying to reconcile the active with the passive. However, if we regard the literary work as capable of operating on its own then the

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difficulty resolves itself. The literary work bestows its own intentionality to the reader’s act of cognition, which the reader accepts—passively, so to speak—and retains while continuing to receive guidance from the work during the continuing process of actively concretizing it. Although our description of the reader’s “receiving guidance from the work” as a process of “formal causality” might appear odd, it will appear less so after we take note of a remarkable metaphysical suggestion that Ingarden made in Controversy I. His suggestion concerns Husserl’s assumption of a radical dissimilarity between the real world and pure consciousness, which exercises considerable influence on his formal ontology. As Husserl wrote in Formal and Transcendental Logic, 35 The problem in question [i.e., of the unity of formal apophantics and formal mathematics] could not confront the ancients; incipient logic and mathematics had to appear as undoubtedly separate sciences to them, because they had not yet advanced far enough to reduce any mathematical discipline to a pure form. . . . Accordingly Aristotle had a universal ontology of realities only; and this was what he accepted as “first philosophy.” He lacked formal ontology, and therefore lacked also the cognition that formal ontology is intrinsically prior to the ontology of realities.

Husserl added: Judgments are there for us originally in judicative activities. Every work of cognition is a multiple and unitary psychic activity in which cognitional formations originate. Now, to be sure, external Objects too are originally there for us only in our subjective experiencing. But they present themselves in it as Objects already factually existent beforehand (Objects “on hand”) and only entering into our experiencing. They are not there for us, like thought-formations (judgments, proofs, and so forth), as coming from our own thinking activity and fashioned by it purely (not, perchance, out of materials already on hand and external to it). In other words: Physical things are given beforehand to active living as objects originally other than the Ego’s own; they are given from outside. Contrariwise, the formations with which logic is concerned are given exclusively from inside, exclusively by means of spontaneous activities and in them.

In Formal and Transcendental Logic we witness the final stage of Husserl’s development toward his idealist position, the stage at which consciousness, entirely divorced from the external, “real” world, constitutes the objects of that world as contents of the subject’s “thinking activity.” Ingarden summarized this development of Husserl’s thought as follows: The only thing that connects Husserl to Plato in the phase of Logical Investigations is the claim: There are two different regions of being, the real and the ideal. In Ideas I the ideal remained existentially autonomous, while the real world is interpreted in the sense of transcendental idealism. In Formal and Transcendental Logic both regions of being are

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Ingarden disagreed with Husserl regarding the assumption of this radical dissimilarity—indeed, he saw this assumption as one of the factors that compelled Husserl toward idealism—and his criticism of Husserl has immediate bearing on the analysis of the cognition of art. Ingarden had intended to critically examine the conclusions of his own ontological and epistemological analyses in light of his subsequent metaphysical investigations, but he died before he could embark on these. Here, however, we see him quite forcefully putting forth a strong metaphysical claim that almost certainly would have played an important role in the examination and revision of his ontological and epistemological analyses. A further development of his account of cognition would likely have gone something like what we’re suggesting here. According to the Aristotelian account, it’s not only “objects” that have matter and form. The being of everything that is consists in a particular combination of form and matter, and this includes activities as well as objects. As cognition is an activity, it too has a form, and the specific form that the activity of cognition adopts depends upon its object. Indeed, the relation of cognition to object is one of formal identity, that is, the activity of cognition is “informed by” the form of the object. The details of the Aristotelian account needn’t concern us here. What’s important for our purpose is to recognize that cognition doesn’t consist in the “mental representation” of an object that’s ontologically distinct from that activity, nor does cognition consist in a mental construction of an image that has a form resembling that of the object. For Aristotle, the relation between the cognizing subject and the object isn’t mediated by any sort of representation. Rather, the subject is in immediate contact with the object, and not through sensation or any other mode of perception, but through the sharing of form, a process that gives rise to a formal identity of subject and object. The concept of Vorstellung (presentation) might not have been incomprehensible to Aristotle, but it certainly would have been irrelevant to his account of cognition. In the activity of cognizing an object, according to Aristotle, there’s only one form, and this one form is informing two otherwise ontologically distinct entities, the object and the activity. This is the Aristotelian twist on the Platonic doctrine of participation: there’s not one ontologically separate Form or Idea in which two entities participate. Rather, there’s one form that participates in the being of two otherwise ontologically distinct entities and, with respect to the form, those two entities are identical. 37 This assertion of the relation of formal identity between cognition and its “real-world” object is clearly incompatible with Husserl’s view of con-

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sciousness as essentially and thoroughly distinct from the real world. In rejecting Husserl’s view, Ingarden didn’t assert this identity. In fact, in order to argue against Husserlian idealism, which in effect reduced realworld objects to consciousness, Ingarden found it necessary to establish that there exists a formal-ontological distinction between real-world objects and purely intentional objects, with only the latter being dependent upon consciousness. However, any view that challenges the Husserlian distinction, as does Ingarden’s, opens the door for an account of cognition that, like Aristotle’s, is neither idealist nor materialist, and that relies on the operation of a formal causation that’s initiated by the intentional structure of the object of cognition and which establishes a formal identity between the work of art and the aesthetic subject, an identity that grounds the being of the aesthetic object. SUMMARY The theoretical model of the work of art that we’re putting forward is basically that offered by Roman Ingarden. If our question is what is art, we get some insight by recalling Ingarden’s realist rejoinder to Husserl’s idealism. For Husserl, operations of the mind produce or constitute the objects of our experience, such that the world is essentially a construct of our own consciousness. We are as unsatisfied with that view as Ingarden was. In advancing his argument, Ingarden chose the literary work of art as his point of departure, and he inquired into its essential structure and mode of being. Does it have its basis in consciousness alone? The literary work’s mode of being, it seemed to him, is neither ideal nor material but rather intentional. We must posit a third order of being—that is, intentional being—in order to account not only for the literary work but for artworks in general, among other things. As Stróżewski explains: In the dispute primarily between the “subjectivists,” or “idealists,” and the “realists,” centering on the theme of the structure and the mode of existence of the work of art, Ingarden took an altogether distinct position which allowed him to overcome the difficulties of the former group but at the same time to accept everything that was valid in them. This had become possible thanks to the discovery of the intentionality of the work of art, though conceived in such a manner that it did not exclude its objective character but rather allowed it to be understood. 38

On the view we’re putting forward, we are here considering three kinds of being: material, ideal, and intentional. Works of art don’t exist in the same way that atoms, planets, or even ideas do, nor should they be identified with any material object (book, picture, etc.) that we perceive with our senses. The work is better conceived as a stratified, schematic construction that consists of relations among elements that an artist has put together with a view to inspiring an aesthetic experience in an audi-

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ence. Especially important for our purposes is Ingarden’s view regarding the way in which the various strata making up a work of art are combined in such a way as to create a “polyphonic harmony.” An artist creates a work by weaving together several ontologically distinct strata, where the strata are levels or layers of the different kinds of elements that comprise the work. A work of art is made up of these strata, the specific number of which varies among the various sub-categories of art. As we’ve seen, works of art need to be actualized and concretized by an audience. The latter are tasked with filling out particular features of the work that are given by the artist only schematically. The work itself first comes into being through the creative acts of the artist, and the recreative acts of the audience complete this process. The former bestows an initial intentionality upon the work, which gradually, in the process of its creation, acquires an intentional stature of its own. Intentionality here isn’t a function of consciousness alone but belongs to the work itself. When, for example, a reader puts down a book, relations of grammar, syntax, and so on among the words on the pages don’t cease to exist, and neither do the other “intentions” of the work that lie in the strata of represented objects and schematized aspects. We may think of the literary work of art, and indeed of all sorts of artworks, as guidebooks for our consciousness, telling us step by step how to aesthetically engage our consciousness in our own experiential re-construction of the works of art that we are encountering. What we shall next be suggesting is that just as the audience is guided by the intentionality inherent in the structure of the work in the course of its re-creation, so too is the artist guided by the same structural intentionality during the course of its initial creation. Our view is that Ingarden’s ontological studies of art shed important light on artistic creation—the third area of research he lists as belonging to philosophical aesthetics. The Aristotelian notion of formal causality, we believe, allows us to make sense of the notion of an audience “receiving guidance from the work” in the very act of interpreting it. What we want next to explore is the extent to which the same holds true for the artist. NOTES 1. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik (Halle, 1929), 230–31; quoted in Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, lxxv. The translation is by Dorion Cairns: Husserl 1969, 260–61. (The Literary Work of Art will be cited in future references as LWA.) 2. As he explained in the Preface to volume I of Controversy over the Existence of the World (trans. Arthur Szylewicz [New York: Peter Lang, 2013], 20–21): “Although on the face of it the book was simply devoted to working out the philosophical foundations for a theory of the literary work of art, it in fact represented the first step toward differentiating real and purely intentional entities—and this on the basis of a fundamental distinctness in their form. . . . The stage was thus set for the conclusion that purely intentional objects have a form which is radically different from that of real

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objects, a form therefore that renders impossible the frequently attempted idealist reduction of the latter to the former.” 3. Ingarden, LWA, lxxii. 4. Maria Gołaszewska, “Aesthetic Values in Ingarden’s System of Philosophy,” in Roman Ingarden and Contemporary Polish Aesthetics, eds. Piotr Graff and Slaw KrzemienOjak (Warsaw: PWN, 1975), 47. 5. Ingarden delivered this paper (in German) at the second meeting of the Section of Aesthetics of the XIVth International Congress of Philosophy held in Vienna in September 1968. It appeared as “Ästhetik und Kunstphilosophie,” in Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kongresses für Philosophie, Vienna, 2–9 September 1968, 214–19. Ingarden subsequently expanded the paper in Polish; this expanded Polish version, “O Estetyce Filozoficznej,” was published in volume 3 of Roman Ingarden, Studia z estetyki [Studies in Aesthetics], ed. Danuta Petsch (Warsaw: PWN, 1970), 9–17. An English translation of the expanded Polish version appears in Roman Ingarden, Selected Papers in Aesthetics, ed. Peter J. McCormick (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 17–23; the list of areas is taken (slightly revised) from that translation. 6. Władysław Stróżewski, “Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetic Program,” trans. Damian Fedoryka, Aletheia: An International Journal of Philosophy 4: Epistemology and Logic (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 226–33 (quotation from 230–31). This paper first appeared, in Polish, in Ruch Filozoficzny 30, no. 1 (1972). 7. Ideal being and intentional being are in fact the two kinds of formal being. For more on these distinctions, see Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010); for example, 42 n.16, 50. 8. Ingarden uses the German term Gebilde. The German verb bilden translates “to build, constitute, form, or educate.” As suggested by the participial form, gebildet, Gebilde connotes something “built up,” or something that results from a process of construction. The English translation generally lacks that sense of process or constructive activity. The German term Bildung, moreover, translates both “tradition” and “education,” and particularly cultural education. For more on this, see Mitscherling, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and ‘the Tradition,’” Man and World 22, no. 2 (1989): 247–50. 9. Ingarden, LWA, 29. 10. For a more detailed treatment of the elements of these strata, see Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997), 128–40. Ingarden devotes nine chapters of LWA (close to 300 pages, or about three quarters of the book) to the examination of the structure of the work and the many elements of these strata. 11. Ingarden, LWA, 49–50. 12. Ingarden, LWA, 50. 13. Ingarden, LWA, 51–52. 14. Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1754. 15. Ingarden had in fact completed the manuscript already in the summer of 1923. In 1925 he formally submitted the Habilitationschrift to Kazimierz Twardowski, who was at the University of Lwów. Ingarden had studied with Twardowski for one semester prior to his moving to Göttingen to study with Husserl. 16. Gestalt is a common synonym of Form. 17. Ingarden, LWA, 36–37. 18. When Ingarden introduced this term very early in his chapter on “The Stratum of Linguistic Sound Formations” he added this footnote: “The term ‘phonic material’ [Lautmaterial] is indeed still ambiguous. See the analyses below.” (LWA, 35 n. 3) The “analyses” to which he was referring are probably those which he presented in the following twenty-seven pages of his chapter, but these pages themselves contain references to analyses that he presented throughout the remainder of the entire text of LWA. We’ll deal with some of these later references and analyses in the following discussion of the remaining two strata.

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19. Ingarden, LWA, 36. 20. Instead of “object” the term “objectivity” is frequently used in phenomenology when the reference is not to a particular identifiable entity—such as a particular desk, or tree, or animal—but to objects in general or to a general or less easily identifiable entity, such as a state of affairs, an event, an action, the atmosphere of a social gathering, or an emotional situation. 21. Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, the Picture, the Architectural Work, the Film, trans. Raymond Meyer with John T. Goldthwait (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), 225; quotations in text immediately following from 226. 22. Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, 4. 23. Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, 90–91. 24. The word “exist” isn’t entirely accurate when speaking of the work of art, for as an entity that enjoys intentional being, the work of art may more precisely be said to “subsist” or “obtain.” This sense of subsistence is roughly that found in Twardowski and Meinong (which differs from the sense in which the term was employed by Brentano); the term that Meinong uses for this activity is bestehen, a term that Ingarden too employs throughout Controversy. See Barry Smith’s overview of these thinkers in Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). 25. Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 26. Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 13–14. 27. Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 14. 28. Ingarden, Controversy over the Existence of the World, volume I, 22. 29. Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, 4–5. 30. Ingarden, Controversy over the Existence of the World, volume I, 117. 31. There is more to it than this. Also required are, for example, consistency of character and the sustained illusion of “reality,” neither of which is reducible to the two linguistic strata alone. 32. Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 38 (translation slightly modified). 33. Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 38. 34. Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 38–39 (translation slightly modified). 35. Formale und Transzendentale Logik was first published in 1929. As Husserl explained to Ingarden in his letter of 2 December 1929, he “wrote it down and published it in a few months at one stroke, after [he] had reflected on these problems for decades”; Briefe an Roman Ingarden (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 56. The following quotations are from the Dorian Cairns translation, Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), §26, 80–81. 36. Ingarden, Einführung in die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls: Osloer Vorlesungen 1967 [Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology. Olso Lectures 1967], edited by Gregor Haefliger [vol. 4 of Gesammelte Werke, edited by Rolf Feiguth and Guido Küng] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1992), 263–64. This passage is from Ingarden’s Ninth Lecture (10 November 1967): “Transcendental Reduction and Idealism (II).” The translation is ours (with the assistance of Arthur Szylewicz). 37. As Joseph Owens explains, “With the basis of reasoning located firmly in the thing that is other than the cognitive act, Aristotle is able to offer his explanation of what knowing or perceiving a thing means. It means that the percipient or knower becomes and is that thing in the actuality of the cognition. . . . Aristotle repeats this assertion of identity of knower and known too often to leave any doubt about its important role. To know a thing is to be it in a distinctive way of being.” Joseph Owens, “Aristotle and Aquinas on Cognition,” in Aristotle and His Medieval Interpreters, eds. Richard Bosley and Martin Tweedale (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1991), 113–14. 38. Władysław Stróżewski, “Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetic Program,” 231.

FIVE Structural and Hermeneutic Considerations

There’s no accounting for taste, or so we often hear. For our part, we’re inclined to agree with this only in part. It’s subjective, but not entirely. The subjectivity of aesthetic experience and judgment are owing largely to the personal dimension of art. Its creation and reception are likewise so intimately bound up with the person and their perceptual habits, preferences, and overall sense of life that any truly universal or objective assessment of any given work of art is forever beyond our reach. But to say this isn’t to imply that the matter is wholly subjective or that there are no standards whatever. It’s not very plausible to claim that the poetry of Shakespeare has equal merit with anything that your average teenager might write. Intuitively (for whatever that’s worth), we want to judge Shakespeare’s poetry more favorably, but the question is on what basis. There’s nothing particularly interesting about hearing an art critic or anyone else say “I like this,” “I’m not fond of that,” and so on. These are statements about oneself, not the work itself. So what of the work? Is there any objective basis for judging the merit of a particular artwork, or of an artist for that matter? Our view is that criteria of some kind, or something very much like criteria, do arise from the argument that we’ve offered to this point. Unless one wishes to endorse a thoroughgoing subjectivism, there must be standards or criteria of some kind that underlie judgments of this general sort. These criteria, however, have proven remarkably elusive. In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the philosophers of ancient Greece tried repeatedly to formulate a clear and adequate conception of poetry, but without success. Plato’s rejection of the Sophistic conception of poetry supplies us with our starting point for this chapter. Plato may have been writing a long time ago, but that doesn’t mean that what he had to say is no longer insightful or true. In fact, just the 95

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opposite is often the case, and this holds good for what he had to tell us about art and artistic creation. As we discussed previously, Plato and his contemporaries distinguished between poetry and what they called techne. In several of his dialogues, Plato called attention to the fact that poetry—at least, poetry composed by the likes of Homer and other great poets—was the product of inspiration, whereas lesser poets resembled craftspeople, who produced their works not by inspiration but by skill or techne, and this techne can be taught. If a subject matter is teachable then it must be possible to compile a set of rules for its teaching and practice. In the days of Socrates and Plato, such teaching manuals were called technas, and they were written not only for teaching basic language skills (including basic rhetoric) but also for teaching the skills involved in producing dramas on stage. This technical side of dramatic poetry—which we still see reflected in such words as “stagecraft” and “playwright”— came to be stressed increasingly throughout the course of the fifth century BCE, largely through the teaching of the Sophists, who were reshaping the educational system of Greece at this time. By the turn of the fourth century, not only dramatic poetry but all poetry, including lyric and epic, was being critically analyzed by Sophist-trained teachers as an essentially technical craft, and therefore not inspired at all. Such a new conception of poetry enabled the Sophists to replace the poets as the new teachers of Greece, and it’s precisely this conception of “uninspired” poetry that Plato attacked in Republic. 1 Moreover, while the Sophists claimed to teach virtue and wisdom, or sophia, their teaching largely consisted of training in the skill of rhetoric, which Plato described as the ability to make the false seem to be true, and the true seem to be false. This sort of rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and it relies on what Plato called the techne of mimesis (imitation), that is, the ability to imitate the truth while in fact being false—in other words, to seem to be what one is not. Such skill is obviously of special value to politicians, and those persons who aspired to positions of political power and influence were precisely those who chose to study under the Sophists (instead of studying, for example, in Plato’s Academy). But is it possible that poetry is nothing more than the practice of such a techne? If the Sophists were indeed correct to claim that poetry could be reduced to mere skill with language, then poetry too would lend itself to systematic analysis and criticism—and by extension, so would all forms of art and artistic creation. Yet, as Plato himself repeatedly pointed out, the poets themselves couldn’t explain to him how they were able to create their works. And looking back at the preceding chapters of this book, can we find anything in all of our arguments and analyses that might help shed light on this topic? We believe that we can, but we have to repeat that our analyses of artistic creation must always fall short of explaining the deeper mystery of artistic creativity. We maintain that artists do still need skill and craftsmanship, but they need more than this

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to create powerful and abiding works of art. In this chapter, we shall first deal very briefly with the various “skill and craftsmanship” elements involved in artistic creation, which we may call the “structural conditions” that must be met by a work to be identified, or to qualify, as a work of art. After our treatment of these structural conditions, we shall turn to a discussion of various “hermeneutic conditions” that appear to be operative in our aesthetic experience and interpretation of works of art. As we shall see, our examination of both of these sorts of conditions will often lead us to confront the mystery of creativity, and reflection on these confrontations will inform a good deal of the chapter that follows this one. STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS Whenever the issue of assessing the value of art arises, so too does the subjectivity of aesthetic experience and judgment we spoke of just above. Yet we maintain that there are certain features of works of art that may be evaluated on the basis of objectively, or at least intersubjectively, established grounds, and these have to do with the basic structural features shared by all works of art. These features have to do with the specific “techne components” that belong essentially to all works of art. There are indeed many other features of the work of art as it’s experienced by the aesthetically engaged subject that are clearly “subjective,” and we shall discuss these as well in what follows. It is best, however, to begin with some “objective” ontology, and we’ll pursue this by again following Ingarden’s analyses. We have to pause here to recall some definitions and distinctions we raised previously and introduce a few more that we’re going to need in what follows. Earlier, we defined a work of art as “an artifact created by an artist that is intended to evoke an aesthetic experience in the subject who engages with it.” In “Artistic and Aesthetic Values,” a paper that Ingarden read to the British Society of Aesthetics in 1963 (on 6 November), 2 Ingarden briefly described “the creative activity of the artist” as follows: The essence of this activity consists of specific acts of consciousness in an artist, but these invariably manifest themselves in certain physical operations directed by the artist’s creative will which bring into being or transform a certain physical object—the material—bestowing upon it that form whereby it becomes the existential substrate of the work of art itself, for example a work of literature or music, a picture, a piece of architecture, etc., and at the same time assuring to it relative durability and accessibility to a multiplicity of observers.

Ingarden continued with the following observations about the work of art itself:

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Chapter 5 Nevertheless in its structure and properties a work of art always extends beyond its material substrate, the real “thing” which ontologically supports it, although the properties of the substrate are not irrelevant to the properties of the work of art which depends upon it. The work of art is the true object to the formation of which the creative acts of the artist are directed, while the fashioning of its existential substrate is a subsidiary operation ancillary to the work of art itself which is to be brought into being by the artist.

Recalling that the work of art is a “schematic formation”—that is, a construction built out of the different sorts of material appropriate to its specific strata—the general task of the artist is to craft the material of each of these strata in such a way that all of the strata, and all of the elements constitutive of the strata, function together in the production of a work that, when encountered by the audience, will elicit the aesthetic response of engaging with the schematic structure of the work and following its inherent intentionality in the concretization of an “aesthetic object.” It is here necessary to introduce the distinction between artistic value qualities and aesthetic value qualities. The artistic value qualities of a work of art derive from the ability of the artist to craft the material of the strata in the manner just mentioned. These artistic value qualities to a large degree lead to the emergence of the aesthetic value qualities, which belong to the aesthetic object that is concretized by the reader, observer, or audience during the aesthetic experience. In short, the artistic value qualities (1) will depend to a greater or lesser extent on the technical skill of the artist, and (2) may be measured by the extent to which the work promotes and supports the engaged subject’s concretization and construction of the aesthetic object. Ingarden maintained that there are “basically two kinds” of artistic value: “There are those which are allied to the excellences or defects of ‘artistic craftsmanship’—that is virtues of artistic technique—and next there are various sorts of competence possessed by a work of art in virtue of its having certain properties and components and not others.” 3 As he explained further, again pointing to the literary work by way of example: There may, of course, be various sources for the obscurity of particular sentences or of a text, but . . . unclarity, obscurity, unintelligibility are a defect in a given sentence or work while lucidity, clarity of expression and precision of construction are a virtue. These properties of linguistic components then become value qualities characterizing the literary work itself. . . . In the field of literary art this lucidity (or its opposite), occurring along with other similar value qualities, may acquire a special character, a special role in the structured organic whole which is the work of art, and harmonizing with other artistic value qualities it may induce the emergence of new features of value either in the work of art or in its concretions. 4

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Obviously, unintelligibility is a negative value quality if the purpose of the sentence in a text is to clearly express a definite meaning, and this negative value belongs to the literary work of art itself, not to any “subjective interpretation” of the text. However, as Ingarden hastened to add: Of course the above negative value-characteristics of sentenceaggregates may on occasion be introduced into a literary work of set purpose by the author. But when this is done the purpose must be apparent from the work itself. Vagueness in the meaning of a sentence may be utilized for some artistic effect; or the feature of a badly constructed and defective sentence may form part of the presented material of the work, being spoken or written by one of the characters in it. 5

In other words, elements that by themselves have negative value qualities may be employed in a work in order to produce a positive value quality in the whole of which they are merely a part, and they may do so either in the work of art itself or in its concretization as an aesthetic object—that is, either as artistic value or as aesthetic value. Again, artistic value qualities belong to that purely intentional, schematic formation which we call the work of art, and the process of creating this foundational structure is what we generally refer to as “the creative process.” Ingarden offered this extremely helpful general description, which recalls a good deal of what we have already discussed in previous chapters: Firstly, there are the specific phases in the shaping of the physical foundation, and this occurs on each occasion. Secondly, there is the developing structure of the work of art which dawns upon the artist in the course of this structuring of the foundation, the work being initially swathed in a protoplasmic state. And finally, the effectiveness coming into being during the shaping of the physical foundation, an effectiveness in performing the function of embodying and presenting the intended work of art in its immediacy. The artist controls and checks these results, this control taking place during the receptive experience which apprehends the properties of the object (the work of art). The painter, for instance, must see the products of the particular phases of his activity, of what is already painted on the canvas, and what artistic effectiveness it possesses. The composer in putting his work together, possibly noting it down in a score, has to hear how the particular parts sound, and for this purpose he often uses an instrument in order to be able to hear the particular fragments. It is this seeing or hearing that enables the artist to continue the work and shape its physical foundation, leading the artist to make revisions or even to a complete recasting of the work. Only occasionally, in the case of poetry, do we get the poet composing “at one go” without having to read through his draft, and without any revisions or alterations. This is closely interwoven with the creative process and yet is itself an act of receptivity, of aesthetic apprehension. We may say that in this case the artist becomes an observer of

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Chapter 5 his own emerging work, but even then it is not completely passive apprehension but an active, receptive behavior. 6

While Ingarden’s example in the passages quoted a couple of paragraphs above concerned only the first two strata—the linguistic strata, of the literary work of art—he pointed to the need for “artistic craftsmanship” and “artistic technique” to assure that simple features of these strata be effectively deployed by the artist in such a manner that they “harmonize” with the other elements of the work in the creation of a “structured organic whole.” His point is that the artist, when dealing with each particular detail of the work, must always attend at the same time to the work of art as a whole, for each little piece of the work that is emerging from this process is to be organically related to each and every other little piece. The completed work of art is an organic whole characterized by a unique Gestalt character that draws the audience toward the recognition of a “harmony of qualities” inhering in the work, and it’s in the aesthetic engagement with this harmony that the aesthetic experience finds its completion. Depending on the particular work of art in question, these “pieces” of the whole can be mind-numbingly numerous and diverse. In the case of the literary work, for example, while crafting the structure of the first two strata, the author must always be considering the other two strata as well. When the particular work in question is especially complex—with a story line, for example, like that of War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past—it’s difficult for us to imagine how the author could ever have held before him the vision of the work as a whole while he was writing. Yet that is basically what the author must be able to do to write such a work. This isn’t to say that the author has to have a clear vision of the whole work before she begins writing. This is not at all the case—at least not as a rule, if we’re to believe what the artists we’ve cited previously have said about this matter. It seems, rather, that the artist most frequently begins a work, for whatever reason or with whatever goal, and then continues to construct it towards some end that the artist may or may not have had in mind before beginning it. In the course of the process of the creation of the work, the work in progress may begin to take on a life of its own and start dictating to the artist certain directions that she might choose to follow next. Whatever creative decision the artist may make at such junctures, however, must always be made with an eye to what has preceded and what might come next, and recognizing also that there are generally possibilities for alterations in both directions (e.g., revision, erasure, re-direction). In the case of a completed work of art that is being encountered by an audience, the aesthetic qualities already lie in the work waiting to be actualized during its concretization. Before the work is completed, however—that is, while the artist is still engaged in the creation of the work—such value qualities may be either discovered in the course of creation or actually intuited or felt in advance by the

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artist, who is then “guided” by these qualities in her deployment of the materials being used (be they words, colors, sounds, etc.). The “gift” of the artist derives in part from her sheer mastery of the medium, and in part from a unique sensitivity to the aesthetic potentialities that may lie before her waiting to be actualized. We might here imagine a painter at work on a portrait and trying to capture on canvas an invisible feature of the subject’s character, or perhaps a group of jazz musicians working together through a lengthy, complex improvisation. The way of the creating artist is one of perpetual exploration and discovery, and while this path leads sometimes to success, joy, and lasting achievement (the portrait is brilliant, and still hangs in the Louvre), it can also end in failure, despair, and ruin (the musician stomps off stage, puts his foot through his guitar, and never performs again). We’ll conclude this discussion of structural conditions with a final passage from Ingarden: The variety of the basic structures of works in the different arts, which I had once demonstrated, leads to the conclusion that the process of the creative composition of works of art, which in their properties are to constitute the basis for the aesthetically valuable qualities and the formation of the physical foundation of the work, runs very differently. Each of these two factors introduces different difficulties to be overcome. On the one hand, it can be the resistance of the physical materials or the aesthetic ineffectiveness of the artistic creation itself which demands from the author various skills and abilities to master a variety of techniques or to find completely new ones, all the more difficult to perfect. On the other hand, in this technical battle with the material the artist needs the ability not to lose the basic intuition of the aesthetically active synthetic form which directs him in his “realization” of his work. The genius of the original intuition and the toil of hard labour have to go hand in hand. And when their harmonization fails to occur, either we get a technically abortive creation, which nevertheless allows us to describe what it was meant to manifest, or the fundamental intuition gets lost and, for all the excellent techniques, there is now nothing left in the completed work of the aesthetically valuable quality inspired by that intuition: the creation may be perfect in its “workmanship” and yet inert, having nothing to tell us, as we sometimes express it. But with all these varieties of creative behavior on the artist’s part, the work nevertheless has in each case the same basic structure belonging to its essence. 7

HERMENEUTIC CONDITIONS For the remainder of this chapter, we want to discuss additional considerations that seem to us to follow from the account of artistic creation and aesthetic experience that we have sketched just above and in the preceding chapters. We want to put these conditions, or “criteria,” in the form of general questions that one may ask of a work of art and in some cases of

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an artist him- or herself, among the many additional questions we might ask which are specific to a particular form or style of art. These questions again appear consistent with what we often hear from artists themselves when speaking critically of either their own work or that of their peers. Artists are often very insightful critics, and what they look for in a work may not be as subjective or idiosyncratic as the above-mentioned adage about taste would have us believe. What follows are several questions that articulate less structural than hermeneutic conditions involved in artistic creation, which may function also as hermeneutic criteria of aesthetic judgment. By “hermeneutic” we mean that which pertains to the audience’s reception and interpretation of the work rather than what belongs more strictly to the work itself. While we’ve argued that no ontological chasm separates the work of art from the activity of its perceiver, this isn’t to say there’s no distinction whatever to be made here. The relation between the work itself and the audience, we might say, is dialectical in the sense of a back-and-forth movement between two poles. The two poles are not fully separate and apart but rather lead into each other. The structural criteria we’ve identified emerge from the basic structure of the work, while the hermeneutic criteria that follow come more from the side of the subject and the activity of interpretation that an audience brings to the work. It’s impossible to disentangle entirely “subject” and “object” here. Let’s think of this as a relative distinction only, not a great ontological divide. From the side of the subject or interpreter of a work of art, what general considerations might one look for, or what questions might one ask, when critiquing a particular work of art? Does the Work of Art Have Something to Say? When in 1964, singer-songwriter Bob Neuwirth was invited to a concert by a young performer by the name of Bob Dylan, the question he asked, and with some skepticism, was “Does he have anything to say?” In his words, “In those days artistic success was not dollar driven. Those were simpler times. If you had something to say, which was basically the way people were rated, they’d say have you seen Ornette Coleman? Does he have anything to say? And it was the same with Bob or anybody else. Do they have anything to say or not?” 8 Mr. Neuwirth reported this to an interviewer some decades later, and from his skepticism we gather that he often heard glowing reports of some new and must-see artist and had learned to take a dim view of such reports. If this young Mr. Dylan was merely an entertainer, singing catchy tunes for pop radio, Mr. Neuwirth had no interest. As it turned out, the young artist did have something to say. A work of art shouldn’t just deliver a certain kind of pleasure but speak. Art speaks, if it’s any good, and the qualification is important. One

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way of distinguishing better from worse here is whether there’s what artists have long called truth in a given work, whether it has the power not just to state but to show what something is or what it means. Speaking here isn’t merely informing or stating but opening up some human experience and revealing it for what it is. “Art,” as Paul Klee stated, “does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” 9 The artist who knows what they’re doing unveils what is and, equally important, means what they’re saying, and in a way that an audience can discern. You can feel it. The artist isn’t faking it, nor are they merely trying to please or to entertain; they’re doing something more than that. They’re speaking; they’re speaking to you, and if it’s good, likely to a lot of people. The work shows you something you can relate to or perhaps something you can become. It speaks from its time and place, and it brings that time and place with it, opens a window onto a particular situation, or otherwise reveals a world. It transports you, takes you out of the mundane and the everyday and into a different experience—one of transcendence perhaps, or of some different order—and in a way that resonates not just intellectually but viscerally. Great art isn’t excessively cerebral but, as Nietzsche would say, brings together the Apollonian and the Dionysian in roughly equal measure. It speaks to the whole person, since art itself is personal and emotional. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it can’t leave you emotionally unaffected. If we were unemotional beings, we’d have no need of art. Artists, as we’ve said, are seers of a kind, and not in any mystical sense. They notice what’s there for the rest of us to see, but differently, often more clearly and insightfully. In the human world there’s never only one way to be aware of something or to think about it, and the more accomplished artists know this and are inventive in their ways of seeing and presenting. As installation artist Jacqueline Gordon has put it, I can play a sound and I know what I’m paying attention to, what I find attractive about it, but that same sound can be played for somebody else and they’ll have a completely different experience with it. And that’s what I kind of call the slipperiness of sound. You can’t control what somebody else’s experience is, and I don’t want to, but I can create ideally this open environment for people to enter into and to kind of explore on their own. 10

There’s a “slipperiness” of more or less everything in our world, and artists are often rather good at bringing this to our attention. Here’s how artist and photographer Stephen Shore makes this point: “If you can imagine the difference between how you speak and how you write, and that there is a little bit more formality, perhaps a little bit of a more staid quality to how you write. I wanted to explore that difference. Is there a difference between how I see and how I photograph, and why is there that difference, and can I overcome it by being aware of it?” 11 A photog-

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rapher is, once again, a seer. What are they looking for? Not just any image, but the right image. What is that? It’s the one that’s true, that opens up and reveals the thing itself, that shows you the phenomenon as it is or some aspect that had remained hidden. As Saul Bellow put it, Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence, and habit erect on all sides—the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive. Proust calls these hints our “true impressions.” The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a “terminology for practical ends” which we falsely call life. 12

“True impressions,” intuitions, revelations, or whatever you want to call them, are found in art. This doesn’t mean that artists themselves have any special sense or epistemological faculty that’s not shared by the rest of the species, only that the better ones are accustomed to noticing things that often strike the rest of us as unremarkable and allow them to speak in ways that don’t entertain so much as surprise us and stop us in our tracks. Familiar ways of seeing are often undermined and replaced with something else, something more poignant or challenging to our everyday perceptions. Whether they see more accurately or just differently is open to question, but a work that doesn’t show us something, or speak the truth in this sense, doesn’t speak at all. Great art speaks. It doesn’t preach. If it’s political art or religious art, it has an agenda of a kind, but it doesn’t beat the audience over the head but integrates the aesthetic with whatever political or religious ideas it’s expressing. If a harmony of elements isn’t achieved, the work deteriorates into propaganda. Leo Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection, for instance, has long been criticized as inferior to his Anna Karenina and War and Peace for precisely this reason; by the final phase of his career, the religious ideas that all his works contain had become too overt and the later work sacrificed aesthetics for moralizing. And in a Way That’s New? There’s a sense in which everything has been said before, and there’s another sense in which it hasn’t. When we criticize a work for being derivative, and if the criticism has any merit to it, we mean not that the artist has borrowed from another work but that he or she has done so in the wrong way, which usually means excessively. The problem isn’t that the work resembles another one but that it crosses a line, which every artist is expected to see, that separates borrowing from stealing (or the wrong kind of stealing). It’s a thin line or, better, a gray zone, and it’s in this zone that artists do most and perhaps all of their work. The question

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is whether they do it well or badly, not whether they borrow at all. An artist who doesn’t borrow has nothing to say, even while what a work of art says must be in some measure new. It isn’t new just for the sake of being new but in order to be interesting and worthwhile. What it says has likely been said before, but not quite in this way, in this form, at this time, and for this audience. We need to rethink the meaning of plagiarism. This overused word is often taken to mean any creative work that draws in any obvious way upon some other work, normally someone else’s work but possibly one’s own—and it’s a misunderstanding. Here’s how John Lennon once responded to an interviewer who asked him to comment on a plagiarism charge that had been successfully levelled against George Harrison for the song “My Sweet Lord”: “[Harrison] could have changed a couple of bars in that song and nobody could ever have touched him, but he just let it go and paid the price. Maybe he thought God would just sort of let him off.” 13 Changing a couple of bars is sometimes enough, and songwriters aren’t the only artists who do this sort of thing all the time. All art is theft in a way, but some of it is exceedingly so. There’s the right kind of stealing and the wrong kind, and we expect artists to know the difference. It’s a question of variation: too little of it is either lazy or dishonest. It’s also pointless; why not just listen to the original? Cover versions of songs are well and good when advertised as such, but even there we expect some creative variation. There are many cover versions that are superior to the original, and when they work they don’t merely repeat the original version but introduce some novel variation. The work must communicate something new, but let’s not exaggerate how much. A little is often enough. All art is derivative, but works that have some merit provide a variation that’s an improvement over whatever has been appropriated, and let’s also not exaggerate how great the improvement must be. This is how Mark Twain expressed the matter in a letter to Helen Keller from 1903: Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second‑hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men—but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to

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Chapter 5 signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety‑nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that. . . . No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes’s poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my “Innocents Abroad” with. Then years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass—no, not he; he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your “Plagiarism Court”; and so when I said, “I know now where I stole it, but whom did you steal it from,” he said, “I don’t remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anyone who had.” 14

The notion of the artist as a Yahweh figure, creating works ex nihilo, is both commonplace and quaint. From nothing comes nothing, not only in the realm of metaphysics but in art and the whole world of ideas. A creative work of any kind is never more than a novel variation on some received body of works—an appropriation, adaptation, interpretation, critique, rejection, or in some way or other a response to something that’s come before. But novel it must be—so long as we keep in mind that novelty and plagiarism are much closer acquaintances than we usually imagine. The term “plagiarism,” used as a serious term of criticism, ought to be reserved for works that (1) closely copy a separate work (2) which was created by someone else (how could you possibly steal from yourself?) (3) and without giving credit in whatever manner is customary and expected in a given field of work. In academic writing, for instance, there are norms governing scholarly references, and plagiarism is a departure from those norms. There are no footnotes in architecture, poetry, or songwriting, so let’s not use the word as freely as many now do. Plagiarism is an act of blatant dishonesty, and competent artists know the difference between borrowing and stealing. Everything is derivative, but some things are more derivative than others. Does the Work Borrow Well? The question is not whether an artist borrows, but how. Has a given work of art been steeped in other works and aesthetic elements? Has the artist drawn upon perceptions and life experience in some way that we haven’t quite seen before? Artistic inspiration may be drawn from a tradition

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whose conventions the artist may follow or defy, not arbitrarily, but selectively and critically. The technical skills exhibited by artists are also often derived from their predecessors in the traditions that they follow. Knowledge of tradition, in short, seems essential to a good deal of what we call artistic creation. As Bob Neuwirth stated, Then I started looking at modern painting. I think the real flip was when there was a Jackson Pollock story in Life magazine, and as soon as I saw those paintings, they resonated. They just clicked—and not because they looked messy or easy. In fact, they looked impossible. They didn’t look like your kid could do it. If your kid could do that, man, go out and buy him as much paint as he can stand, because you’ve got a genius on your hands. 15

Artistic creation begins with the act of paying attention, and if this sounds elementary, it isn’t. “It is important,” as contemporary artist Sean McFarland writes, “to always pay attention and to be aware. It’s also one of the wonderful things about being alive and having eyeballs. You get to walk around and see so many things. Why not really get into it?” 16 Artist and photographer Stephen Shore similarly speaks of “pictures . . . [that are] more about really looking at the world with attention, seeing in a state of heightened awareness. Everyone knows the expression a picture’s worth a thousand words, and that’s simply not true. . . . There’s an experience of looking at a photograph that no number of words can communicate.” 17 This isn’t a merely cerebral way of seeing but an emotive and profoundly open one, and one that’s not inclined to accept things as they conventionally appear. As ballet dancer Steven Melendez puts it, “creativity in the arts . . . [is] an openness, a receptiveness to trying to understand something from a different perspective.” 18 It takes a certain amount of labor to achieve this. “Forget the idea,” composer Mark‑Anthony Turnage states, “that inspiration will come to you like a flash of lightning. It’s much more about hard graft,” and where the work itself begins with perceiving something from some different perspective or in relation to something else. 19 “Develop your senses,” Leonardo da Vinci urged; “especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” 20 Filmmaker Dianne Bell describes her creative process as “a mixture of intuition and discipline. The intuition tells me what I should work on, the discipline keeps me at the desk every day making it real. Intuitively, there are things I want to explore through writing and filmmaking, but it’s hard‑edged discipline that keeps me at work on them until they are complete. . . . Both are necessary, in equal measure.” 21 The better works of art exhibit at once perceptual insight, novelty, technical mastery, and old-fashioned labor. Aesthetic elements, most or all of them borrowed, are arranged and synthesized in a way that hasn’t been done before, or not quite.

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Borrowing well means all of these things. It happens when an artist immerses him- or herself in their art form and imbibes, one might say becomes, it. Novelist Sam Lipsyte makes the point this way: I sort of think we’re all kind of a swirl of everything we’ve read, the art we’ve looked at or heard, the life we’ve led, the people we know, the stories we’ve heard, the stories we’ve lived through and the stories we’ve heard secondhand, the fears we’ve had, the desires we’ve had. It’s kind of just swirling around, so when you’re writing it’s not that you’re channeling it in a completely unthinking way, but when I write I’m just sort of moving fence to fence and seeing what bubbles up and then I can shape it in the editing process and make it into what I want, but in the beginning I’m kind of feeling my way through. So all those influences, whether they’re literary influences or life influences or influences from other arts, are just kind of pulsing through me. 22

The artist who fails to borrow well either (1) hasn’t immersed him- or herself sufficiently in their particular art form or tradition, (2) isn’t technically proficient, (3) doesn’t draw upon much, whether in terms of perceptions, experience more generally, or other works of art, or (4) doesn’t introduce much in terms of interesting variations on whatever elements are received. When one who’s not an artist perceives a work, one is typically having an aesthetic experience, letting it speak to one and responding this way or that. When another artist perceives it, especially one working in the same medium, they may do the same, but rather often their attention is directed elsewhere, less aesthetically than technically. How this effect was achieved, why the artist solved a problem in one way rather than another, and what can be learned from it, are all questions that are typically asked. The artist is attending to the work, but in the way of an inventor. Painter Brice Marden expresses this observation as follows: “It’s always interesting to see painters look at paintings because they’re always up looking at everything except the painting, like the outside edges, all these funny little things. They don’t try to take in the general painting. They want to know how it’s made.” 23 The artist is looking for something they can use, appropriate, or in some way learn from. Having an aesthetic experience is a separate matter and is usually beside the point. The point is to continue borrowing in order to have something to say, which always means to respond. Does the Artist Make It Look Easy? An indication of great art is that the artist is no longer doing it; she is it. She has become the form or the work itself. She’s totally losing herself in the intention of the work and takes direction from the work as it creates itself. This is the genius, and they make it look easy. In fact, it’s the opposite of easy, but the audience doesn’t see this, only the result. In an

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interview, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan said this about her song “Angel”: “I channeled that. It came through me. I don’t know how else to say it, because usually writing songs is like extracting blood from a stone, especially lyrically, and that song, it just happened over the course of a week.” 24 Many artists speak this way and evaluate each other’s work by this standard, however ambiguous it may be. Lesser works can appear labored, although if we’re speaking literally, of course, there’s no necessary correlation between quantity of work invested and the aesthetic merit of a work. From the audience’s point of view, and often from the artist’s, there’s an experience of ease that comes from behavior that has become habitual, instinctive, and “natural.” Jackson Pollock, for instance, reported that his preference for painting on the floor or a hard wall was based on an experience of ease and proximity to the work that couldn’t be had otherwise: On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass, or other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. 25

The point is echoed by so many artists that we could cite passages like this all day long. We’ve cited a number already, and we can’t resist quoting more here, beginning with a few more painters. “Certain colors,” Alicia McCarthy states, “want to be next to each other, but I really think it’s kind of more like a listening thing for me, like a visual listening. It’s like each band of color is interacting with other colors.” 26 The painter isn’t lording over the work, but tracking the interactions of the colors. Dana Schutz concurs that “a painting itself has a kind of logic to it. Even on a level of how you make it or the decisions you make. Something has to go in a certain spot. It’s almost like an itch, you can physically feel it.” 27 Timothy Clark puts it even more directly: “Drawing has a purpose. It knows what it wants. It’s directed.” 28 Poet Joseph Salemi speaks of a poem often “beginning in a single perfect line . . . , and from that perfect line, the rest of the poem grows, as if from a seedling.” 29 Growth itself is once again directional; the process belongs to the thing itself and isn’t dictated by the artist. We’ve cited Mark Twain in the preface, who described novel writing as “only

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find[ing] out what [the story] is by listening as it goes along telling itself,” and the idea is echoed by a couple of contemporary authors: I have this notion [writes George Saunders] that the story exists, perfectly told, somewhere in the subconscious. But as we try to tell it, we sort of drop and break it—it comes out to us in fragments. What we’re doing in revision is trying to find that original story. And the way to do that is to listen very carefully to the story, as it tries to communicate with you via its internal energy. The advantage of this approach, I guess, is that you don’t really know what you are trying to say when you start out, and ideally you’re never quite sure—what you’re saying hopefully can’t be reduced. So that requires a little bit of faith. 30

Jay McInerney concurs: “I think, there’s only so much you can think out in advance when you’re talking about fiction. You really have to realize your ideas through language, so until you start writing you don’t really know.” 31 What the artist has at the outset is an idea, which is usually small and nebulous but also full of potential. Creating is the work of listening to the idea as it leads, or tends, this way or that, as if of itself, and of submitting to the work. The artist isn’t bringing the work into conformity with a preconceived plan, but following an intention which an audience will later track and complete in some way of their own. The better works of art manage to do this, and in a way that makes it seem easy when the reality may be quite otherwise. Does the Work Have a Sense of Play? Play is also something that you lose yourself in. The playing, the game itself, takes over while the players are swept up in a process and an event that they don’t control so much as participate in. As Jimmy Page expressed it, “Whether I took it on or it took me on, I don’t know. The jury’s out on that. But I don’t care. I’ve just really really enjoyed it, that’s it.” 32 Speaking of “the play of art,” both its creation and reception, Gadamer asked, “Is it not the case that in the final analysis, . . . artistic creation itself is an expression of a play-drive?” 33 The notions of playing and games feature prominently in many artists’ accounts of what they do and of the process into which the work invites an audience. Like other forms of play, it’s simultaneously enjoyable, often intensely so, and serious. Reinhard Mucha puts it this way: “I live every day and so a lot of daily life flows into my pieces. It all depends mostly on some found object, and of course I have a special interest in certain objects, and from that I’m starting over every time, right from zero more or less. This is my pleasure as an artist, to visualize something and to play with the visual aspects of material.” 34 Similarly, artist Thomas Schütte states: “I try to keep it as a game, and not as work. It has rules, you follow the rules and you break the rules. I’m exhausted at the end of the day, but I try to keep it as a fun

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operation. . . . And this is actually the problem, to be flexible and continue with this game, not getting stuck into always the same routine.” 35 Already in ancient Greece, Heraclitus remarked, “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” 36 In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche would echo the point, while of course giving it his own spin: “A man’s maturity—consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.” 37 Seriousness and play are not antitheses, whether it be in an aesthetic context or any other. Speaking generally, psychologist Carl Jung maintained that “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct,” and the idea has been frequently repeated in a variety of fields. 38 “Play is serious business,” writes Arthur Molella, founding director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. “At stake for us are the ways we socialize and teach future generations of scientists, inventors, artists, explorers, and other individuals who will shape the world in which we live. It is safe to say that humans, as a species, have always had a concept of play. But only recently has play begun getting the serious attention it deserves as a source of discovery.” 39 Author Michael Schrage calls “serious play” “the essence of innovation” 40 while Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan concur: “If we don’t take time to play, we face a joyless life of rigidity, lacking in creativity. The opposite of play isn’t work, but depression. If we’re going to adapt to changing economic and personal circumstances the way that nature armed us to do, then we have to find ourselves having some play time virtually every day.” 41 The artists we’ve cited aren’t all advancing the same hypothesis about play but in a variety of ways drawing attention to its importance in the aesthetic realm and beyond. Artist and audience alike participate in a kind of game that’s not much different from call and response. The call itself is an intention to which the artist responds in the act of creation while the created work in turn issues a call to which the audience must respond in a kind of chain reaction. We respond to responses and are swept up into a process or event that no one controls. The better works of art create responses that are infectious. The audience feels compelled to return to them time and time again, just as the athlete is drawn to play a new game every day. It’s always the same game, and it’s different every time. Listening to a song a hundred times is no different. It invites—it demands—repeated listening, and you may find something new in it each time. Does It Have a Sense of Mystery? A work of art that has some merit to it always retains something of the mystery that went into its creation. Jimmy Page answered an interviewer’s impossibly general question, “What is your process when you write a

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song?” this way: “I can’t tell you what the process is. It changes from one thing to another, but it usually comes for anybody who’s writing, whether they’re writing written word or music or whatever, it just comes from the creative spark really. It’s all very spontaneous.” 42 Here’s Leonard Cohen: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.” 43 So too is the audience. The finished work is never finished at all, but has an incompleteness to it, an interpretability, which draws the audience in and gives them something to do, something they can play with or otherwise sink their teeth into. It “gives rise to thought,” as Paul Ricoeur said of any symbol. 44 It affords the freedom, also the task, to interpret the work, to concretize it in some way of your own, and to see yourself in it. The better works of art, and the better artists, don’t remove the mystery, make everything explicit, or reveal all. Michael Jackson once said of Britney Spears: “I would never do what she’s doing. In a few years no one will want to hear her anymore. She knows nothing about mystery.” For Jackson, “the power of mystery” is fundamental to an artist’s work and is vital for their longevity. Spears at the time was everywhere: on radio and television, in videos and tabloids, performing and granting interviews constantly, there was no getting away from her, Jackson mused. You must always leave an audience wanting more, and overexposure kills an artist’s work and their career. Far preferable is the rare glimpse. “Leave something to the imagination,” he said, and he was hardly the first to point this out. 45 All light and no shadow doesn’t work, or not for long, because it leaves too little for an audience to do. There’s nothing to wonder about, be inspired by, or imagine. It’s all there for you, and all an audience can do is be stimulated or entertained for a while before moving on to what’s next. A lot of popular entertainment is like this, and so are works of art that are uninspired. Good art has a sense of mystery about it. It’s not exactly erotic, but it’s in the same neighborhood. It draws you in, seduces the senses and the mind, gives you something you can get lost in and that you will never experience in its entirety or grasp in any totalizing way. There’s always more to think about and to feel, something enigmatic that keeps you coming back, something you don’t understand but need to. Part of what makes so much of modern art interesting, as we’ve already remarked, is precisely its ambiguity—its refusal to oversimplify and dumb down, its insistence that the interpreter too has some work to do. Nothing interesting, maybe nothing human, is unambiguous. Our experience is muddy, questionable, and mysterious to the core, and art’s no different this way. We can’t get enough of good art, and come back to it over and over again because there’s always something more, something we can’t define, that we need to experience. There’s no end to it. A work of art that lacks mystery may be good in its way, but in the manner of a song that’s catchy

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but short on substance. What it lacks is staying power. Usually it’s onedimensional and its life span is short. It pleases, but it doesn't speak. Quality artworks allow for some interpretive freedom, but not an unlimited amount. They also guide the interpretation. If a work is too obscure or requires too much explanation, it doesn’t work, like the joke that needs to be explained. If you require an explanation, an interpretive guide, or a PhD to get it, it’s probably not good. An audience has some work to do, and a certain amount of ambiguity leaves them the space to do it. SUMMARY The questions we’ve identified in this chapter certainly aren’t the only ones one might ask, and often does, when discussing aesthetic judgment, but they seem to us both to be entailed by the general account of artistic creation that we’ve put forward and to be consistent with what many artists themselves draw attention to in assessing their own work and that of their peers. The questions, we believe, that one may ask of any work of art, and that help us to distinguish better from more ordinary works, include (1) whether a work of art has something to say, (2) and in a relatively novel way, (3) whether the work borrows well, (4) whether the artist makes it look easy, (5) whether the work has a sense of play, and also (6) a sense of mystery. Great works have all of these things among any other merits they may have. NOTES 1. This topic is discussed at length in Mitscherling, The Image of a Second Sun: Plato on Poetry, Rhetoric, and the Techne of Mimesis (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books [Prometheus Books], 2009). 2. Ingarden, “Artistic and Aesthetic Values,” in Roman Ingarden, Selected Papers in Aesthetics, ed. Peter J. McCormick (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 91–106 (quoted passages from p. 91). 3. Ingarden, “Artistic and Aesthetic Values,” 100. 4. Ingarden, “Artistic and Aesthetic Values,” 100–101. 5. Ingarden, “Artistic and Aesthetic Values,” 101. 6. Ingarden, “Phenomenological Aesthetics: An Attempt at Defining Its Range,” in Roman Ingarden, Selected Papers in Aesthetics, ed. Peter J, McCormick (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 25–44 (quoted passage from p. 31). The editor notes (44): “Roman Ingarden delivered this paper at the Amsterdam University Institute of Aesthetics on March 17, 1969. It was published in Polish in Volume III of his Studia z estetyki Warsaw: 1970. This slightly abridged English version was translated by Adam Czerniawski, and was first published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33/1975, pp. 257–69.” 7. Ingarden, “Phenomenological Aesthetics: An Attempt at Defining Its Range,” 37–38 (we have modified the translation). 8. Bob Neuwirth, quoted in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. 9. Paul Klee, quoted in www.creativityatwork.com/2012/01/04.

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10. Jacqueline Gordon, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 11. Stephen Shore, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 12. Saul Bellow, 1976 Nobel lecture, quoted in www.creativityatwork.com/2012/01/ 04. 13. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Playboy interview, January 1981. 14. Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters, vol. 2 (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 305. (Letter from Twain to Helen Keller, 1903.) 15. Gary Lippman, “Amusing Myself: An Interview with Bob Neuwirth,” The Paris Review, October 6, 2014. 16. Sean McFarland, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 17. Stephen Shore, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 18. Steven Melendez, quoted in “14 Artists Break Down the Creative Process,” Catherine Yang, Evan Mantyk, Masha Savitz, Milene Fernandez, and Sharon Kilarski, The Epoch Times, April 25, 2017. 19. Mark‑Anthony Turnage, “Top Artists Reveal How to Find Creative Inspiration,” The Guardian, Jan. 2, 2012. 20. Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in www.creativityatwork.com/2012/01/04. 21. Dianne Bell, quoted in “14 Artists Break Down the Creative Process.” 22. Sam Lipsyte, quoted in www.creativeprocess.info/interviews. 23. Brice Marden, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. Reinhard Mucha echoes the point: “I think even if I look at a Monet painting I try to figure out how is it made. What did he do, how did he handle the paint or the pencil and the canvas and all this.” Reinhard Mucha, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 24. Sarah McLachlan, interview on the CBC Radio program Q, June 18, 2018. 25. Jackson Pollock, quoted in www.moma.org. 26. Alicia McCarthy, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 27. Dana Schutz, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 28. Timothy Clark, quoted in “14 Artists Break Down the Creative Process.” 29. Joseph Salemi, quoted in “14 Artists Break Down the Creative Process.” 30. George Saunders, quoted in www.creativeprocess.info/interviews. 31. Jay McInerney, quoted in www.creativeprocess.info/interviews. 32. Jimmy Page, interview in It Might Get Loud, directed by Davis Guggenheim (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2009), DVD. 33. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Play of Art,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. N. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 123–24. 34. Reinhard Mucha, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 35. Thomas Schütte, quoted in www.sfmoma.org. 36. Heraclitus, quoted in www.creativityatwork.com/2012/01/04. 37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), sec. 94, p. 83. 38. Carl Jung, quoted in www.creativityatwork.com/2012/01/04. 39. Arthur Molella, quoted in www.creativityatwork.com/2012/01/04. 40. Michael Schrage quoted in www.creativityatwork.com/2012/01/04. 41. Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2010), 188. Poet Diane Ackerman writes that “Play is . . . our brain’s favorite way of learning and maneuvering. Because we think of play as the opposite of seriousness, we don’t notice that it governs most of society—political games, in-law games, money games, love games, advertising games, to list only a few spheres where gamesmanship is rampant. Play . . . feels satisfying, absorbing, and has rules and a life of its own, while offering rare challenges.” Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Vintage, 1999), 11. Henri Matisse noted that “Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.” Henri Matisse, quoted in www. creativityatwork.com/2012/01/04. 42. Jimmy Page, interview in It Might Get Loud.

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43. Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Jeff Burger (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 271. 44. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 347. 45. Shmuley Boteach, The Michael Jackson Tapes (New York: Vanguard Press, 2009), 143, 145, 144.

SIX Implications

The argument that we’ve developed carries implications beyond artistic creation and beyond aesthetics. We’d like in this final chapter to outline some of these. Since a detailed account of any of them would require book-length treatment, we won’t undertake that larger task but instead will discuss in outline form several of the larger consequences that appear to follow in the fields of metaphysics, psychology, sociology, and education, as well as for the ancient distinction in aesthetics between art and craft. Intentionality is at work everywhere, and it’s not only artists who track it. So do philosophers and other humanists, natural and social scientists, and indeed all of us in some fashion or other, not only in the realm of knowledge but in experience generally conceived. Following intentions that show up in our environment and which belong not only to consciousness but to the world, or to the dialectical relationship that sustains them, accounts for a great deal of what human beings do (other organisms too). This is a basic feature not only of aesthetic experience but of experience in general: we selectively notice, pay attention and respond to not only material and ideal objects but tendencies and relations that comprise our world in a great variety of ways. Such noticing is simultaneously an activity and a passivity, a taking in of what’s there and a projecting outward, and any distinguishing of the two in any given circumstance is a relative matter only, with “relative” meant quite literally. Perceiving, imagining, remembering, explaining, knowing, and so on—none of these is pure activity or the opposite but some combination that is elusive to description yet fundamental to the kind of being that we are. Intentionality in its myriad forms isn’t merely a construction of the mind but has being, and a form of it that’s neither material nor ideal. In this final chapter we ask what bearing this line of thought has upon some old and vexing issues in a few fields. Beginning in aesthetics, our 117

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question is what, if any, difference might exist between art and craft? Is there any meaningful separation to be seen here or is this distinction merely a vestige of Greek aristocracy? In metaphysics, the concept of intention we have advanced has profound implications for the modern concepts of causality and essence, and these metaphysical implications have further implications of their own for contemporary science, which continues to employ a long outdated metaphysical foundation, first elaborated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that can no longer make sense of the breathtaking discoveries in the sciences over the last several decades. This lack of a new foundation for the sciences has been most strongly criticized by researchers in physics and biology. In the social sciences, if some intentions are intersubjectively shared, as a great many of them appear to be, then isn’t there a sense in which artists make rather good sociologists, or that the latter would profit by keeping a close eye on developments in the art world? It seems to us that many of the same tendencies, dynamics, and phenomena that sociologists investigate also come to light in the arts, often before others perceive them and at times more clearly. In psychology, the whole realm of the “mind” is pervaded by intentionality, so much so that we’re inclined to speak of mind itself as a massively complex bundle of intentions, each one of which is interrelated to some number of others. Mind is more an activity, or configuration of activities, than a thing, be it a brain, machine, or mechanism of whatever kind. Finally, in education, what follows from the general account of art and artistic creation that we’ve presented for the issue of art in education? What is the educational significance of the arts, whether it be in the elementary and secondary school or at the university? Defenders of the arts, we believe, better serve these disciplines by grounding their argument in an understanding of the nature and purpose of art rather than in the sort of utilitarian considerations to which they often appeal. ART, CRAFT, ENTERTAINMENT Let’s begin with an ancient and familiar distinction. Art and craft, artist and artisan: what, if anything, is the difference between them, and isn’t any such distinction merely an expression of an outmoded elitism? Let’s recall that in ancient times artisans and technicians—including those painters and sculptors whom we today acknowledge as great artists— weren’t aristocrats but belonged to the lower classes of Greek society. Often they were slaves, while the great poets were held in high esteem. Is this distinction merely a vestige of an aristocratic worldview, as many now believe? Poets like Homer—and a little later, Pindar, Simonides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles—were widely acclaimed and well rewarded, while others, like the sculptor and the painter, were regarded as little

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more than manual laborers. An assessment quite similar to this (perhaps even a further development of this) became entrenched in our modern distinction between art and craft. Any attempt to hold onto this distinction will need to focus not on the person or class of the artist or artisan but on the works that they produce. The distinction, if there is one, is aesthetic rather than sociological, economic, or political—except, of course, in the sense that “everything is political.” Everything is indeed political, in some sense, but the distinction as we propose to draw it bears on works of art and craft themselves and (especially) their final causality. If there’s a distinction here that’s worth drawing, it will have to be rooted in aesthetics and ontology, not social fads of an art world elite, fluctuating market value, or politics. Why do we have art—even need art? We’ve cited Nietzsche already: “Without music,” he wrote, “life would be a mistake.” What would possess a philosopher, or anyone else, to say such a thing? Maybe he was exaggerating. In any event, we have here a rather important question: what is art for, or what purpose(s) does it serve? If we need it—and it does rather appear that we do—why do we need it? We’ve suggested that art’s “purpose,” or its final cause, is to give rise to an aesthetic experience of one kind or another. This in no way suggests that aesthetic experiences can’t be had by other means, or that a world without art would be entirely bereft of this kind of experience. Natural objects from a piece of driftwood to flowers, landscapes, and a thousand other things can and clearly do produce these experiences. The crucial difference is that things in nature don’t come into being in order for human beings to have aesthetic experiences of them. A flower growing naturally in the wild is a possible object of aesthetic experience, but it would be a stretch to say its purpose is for a human being to come along and experience it in a certain way. We now want to say the same of craftwork. Why does it exist? Consider the example of a well-made cupboard, circa 1800. Why was it made, by whom, for whom, and for what purpose? It was likely made by a professional cabinetmaker, possibly for a particular customer but more likely for anyone who cared to buy it. It was brought into existence in order to contain household items and also so that the cabinetmaker could make a living. A higher-end cupboard would have been designed according to the aesthetic style of the day, as that style was adapted to the place it was made. It may or may not have been designed with an eye to elegance or beauty; it wasn’t unusual, then as now, for such a piece to be designed with primarily utilitarian considerations in mind—it’s furniture after all—although the more skilled cabinetmakers typically did make some concessions to aesthetics. It needed to have the right look about it, but “right” here might well be understood in purely functional terms. Beauty of design and finish was an optional extra, and it came at a price. Now consider the same cupboard 200 years later. Let’s say the piece is very well preserved; it hasn’t been altered or damaged except by time, and its

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original, let’s say painted, finish is relatively intact or is worn in accordance with normal usage. It hasn’t been covered by four layers of bad twentieth-century paint or had half its parts replaced. It’s going to fetch a very high price today, and many are going to insist it’s a work of art. Why so? Probably because it’s a thing of beauty; it’s awe-inspiring, it speaks to us from and about its time and place, carries its past with it, and is loaded with mystery. It has a story to tell—of the people who lived with it, the times it has seen, where it’s been and what it’s been through. It readily produces an aesthetic experience, provided one has an eye for such things. If one doesn’t, then it’s an old piece of furniture, ridiculously overpriced. Is the question of whether it is or isn’t art to be settled by the eye of the beholder? We don’t think so. What we have to consider is not popular opinion, which is always liable to alter drastically over time, but the ontological conditions underlying the production or creation of any human artifact. That is, we have to identify and consider the cause or causes that were operative in its production or creation. The most relevant type of cause in the case of the piece of furniture is the final cause—that is, the purpose or intended goal of the object to be produced or created. In the case of furniture, the chief goal has always been one of utility, or practical use: you build a cupboard to hold household items, or food and the like, and you build a chair to sit in. But a secondary goal has long been one of aesthetic pleasure; we discussed this in Chapter 3, with reference to the potters, painters, artisans, and poets of ancient Greece. Artifacts such as works of furniture and pottery, and works of sculpture and poetry, have long been produced with these two “final causes” in the mind of the artisan or artist, and the value of these works has always been assessed with one or the other of these two final causes in mind. Depending upon the historical, cultural, social, and economic environments in which these assessments are made, the work may come to be regarded quite differently than it was in the day of its production or creation. The 200-year-old cupboard, for example, may come to be regarded as a “gorgeous example of the artistic style” of the period, just as we now consider the cracked red-figure drinking bowls “exquisite pieces of the painterly art” of ancient Athens. And this is because these works, which were produced for a chiefly utilitarian purpose, were also created to serve an aesthetic purpose—that is, they were then, and they remain today, by virtue of their essence, both tool and art. They are essentially both practical objects and works of art, and that’s because the artisans/artists created them with that twofold final causality in mind. There’s nothing unusual about an object serving at once a utilitarian and an aesthetic purpose. Many an artifact speaks to us in much the way that art does, which isn’t the same as saying it’s beautiful. A work of craft may be made with no less knowledge, skill, and care as an artwork, and it can be equally or more aesthetically engaging. When we call a work of

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craft an artwork, our intent is usually to pay it a kind of compliment. It’s another way of saying the piece is very well made, beautiful, expensive, or whatever else. This isn’t how we want to use these terms. The distinction between a work of art and craft turns upon an object’s specifically intrinsic final cause. A work of art’s intrinsic final cause is to give rise to a particular kind of experience. This isn’t to deny that the same work may also serve a second purpose: to contain things, for example, to impress our friends with our amazing taste, or to make money for the artist. It may have many purposes. That cupboard was capable from the beginning of eliciting an aesthetic response, and most definitely by design. It was created as furniture and it remains furniture, but it may also be more than that. That piece of ancient pottery you see in a museum wasn’t made to be in a twenty-first-century museum. It was made for drinking wine, but to be aesthetically interesting at the same time. A work of craft may also be a work of art, and the artisan may also be an artist, when a work’s final causes are simultaneously utilitarian and aesthetic. Something similar may be said of the distinction between art and entertainment. The latter’s primary purpose is to afford pleasure of one kind or another. It takes us away from the stuff of everyday life, provides a diversion and maybe a respite from practical realities. A baseball game, for instance, is something we can lose ourselves in. Our everyday worries recede, and while we may be highly invested in the outcome, when the game is over we go back to our lives. Nothing has changed. We ourselves haven’t changed, apart from the satisfaction or frustration of seeing our team win or lose. Consider next a fireworks display, a work of comedy, an action movie, video games, and most TV shows. They’re entertainment—which, we emphasize, is in no way to look down upon them, but we’re nonetheless reluctant to say that, in most cases anyway, such things are art. No snobbery whatever is intended here, nor is it implied, any more than it is in distinguishing art from craft. We enjoy entertainment as much as the next person (craftwork too), but we’re still reluctant to call it art under most circumstances. In most cases—and the exceptions here are many (numerous television series, for instance, must certainly be included in any serious list of examples of filmic art)—a piece of entertainment comes into being in order to afford a certain amount of pleasure for an audience, usually a mass audience. Quite often it’s also an act of capitalism. The ambiguity in the distinction is again owing to the fact that a work may have more than one final cause. An entertainer might also be an artist, but to collapse the distinction altogether seems to us mistaken. A work of entertainment or craft will sometimes (perhaps from the beginning, perhaps after a period of time) be called art; our view is that merely calling it art doesn’t make it so, including when the speaker is a personage within the art world. That someone—and who this person is shouldn’t matter—is able to engage aesthetically with X isn’t a sufficient condition of X being art. It’s often called art for this reason, but this view

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strikes us as excessively subjectivistic, authoritarian, and indeed elitist. One might be capable of having an aesthetic experience of more or less anything, but if everything is art—actually or potentially—then nothing is. METAPHYSICS Over the course of the preceding chapters we’ve explored quite difficult issues in metaphysics. We’ve discussed, for example, the Platonic concepts of imitation and participation, the Aristotelian view of the relation between matter and form, Roman Ingarden’s criticism of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, and the operation of formal causality in cognition, and all of these have important implications beyond the field of aesthetics. But the issue that has perhaps the most significant and farreaching implications lies in our rethinking of the concept of intentionality, for this concerns not only phenomenology and cognitive science, but the metaphysical foundation of current scientific research in general. Since early in the twentieth century, scientists have been calling attention to the fact that they are increasingly unable to ground their research on the seventeenth-century metaphysics that had worked so well for early modern science. This metaphysics reflects the mechanistic and materialist view of the universe that philosophers of the late Renaissance and early modern period found compelling, but the power of this mechanical and materialist model came to be challenged by nineteenth-century observations in physics, observations that led directly to the development of quantum theory. 1 Twenty-six years after Max Planck’s formulation of his radiation law, which launched the development of quantum theory, the British mathematician, logician, and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had this to say about this model of the universe: There persists [a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call “scientific materialism.” Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. 2

What Whitehead failed to stress, however, is that the perseverance of this scientific materialism wasn’t due to any allegiance on the part of the scientists, but rather to the dogmatic adherence of academic philosophers to the seventeenth-century assumptions of modern philosophy. It has been our contemporary philosophers of science who’ve struggled to keep this outdated metaphysics afloat, not our contemporary scientists.

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Over the past few decades, more and more physicists, biologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have been pointing to the failure of their colleagues in philosophy to address this issue. 3 Henry P. Stapp, a member of the Scientific Staff at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley, has been especially clear in his criticism: Influential philosophers, pretending to speak for science, claim, on the basis of a grotesquely inadequate old scientific theory, that the (empirically manifest) influence of our conscious efforts upon our bodily actions, which constitutes both the rational and the intuitive basis of our functioning in this world, is an illusion. As a consequence of this widely disseminated misinformation the “well-informed” officials, administrators, legislators, judges, and educators who actually guide the development of our society tend to direct the structure of our lives in ways predicated on false premises about “nature and nature’s laws.” 4

According to Stapp, in refusing to abandon this “grotesquely inadequate old scientific theory,” contemporary philosophers have failed to supply their colleagues in the sciences with precisely that clarification of concepts and critical analysis of hypotheses which it is the job of philosophers to provide. Metaphysics, after all, is a branch of philosophy, not of science, and scientists have generally been reluctant to claim expertise in a field that’s not their own. As a result of this refusal of philosophers to substantially revise the outdated metaphysics of modernity, scientists like Stapp have been forced to seek philosophical foundations for their research in what philosophers themselves regard as somewhat questionable quarters. For example, turning away from “the misrepresentations of contemporary scientific knowledge that continue to hold sway, particularly in the minds of our most highly educated and influential thinkers,” 5 Stapp asserts that, The conflating of Nature herself with the impoverished mechanical conception of it invented by scientists during the seventeenth century has derailed the philosophies of science and of mind for more than three centuries, by effectively eliminating the causal link between the psychological and physical aspects of nature that contemporary physics restores. But the now-falsified classical conception of the world still exerts a blinding effect. 6

In order to account for human behavior, Stapp has found it necessary to posit what he calls a “framework of practical rules,” maintaining that, We need to be able to see this pragmatic anthropocentric theory as a useful distillation from an underlying non-anthropocentric ontological structure that places the evolution of our conscious species within the broader context of the structure of nature herself. We need a fundamentally non-anthropocentric ontology within which the anthropocentric pragmatic theory is naturally embedded. 7

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Stapp finds this theory in the process philosophy of Whitehead, and he has attempted to ground his application of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics to neuropsychology in what he calls a “Whiteheadian Quantum Ontology.” He concludes that “Contemporary physical theory allows, and its orthodox von Neumann form entails, an interactive dualism that is fully in accord with all the laws of physics.” 8 It remains unclear, however, how the process philosophy of Whitehead, who so vehemently rejected Cartesian interactionism, may be employed consistently in establishing the legitimacy of such an “interactive dualism.” Sir John Eccles, the Australian neurophysiologist who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1963 (sharing it with Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley), also found it necessary to search for a new metaphysical foundation for his research in neurophysiology. In his Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (1989), after 235 pages of discussing recent decades of research in neurophysiology, Eccles offered a twopage concluding section entitled “The creation of the self or the soul,” in which he wrote: Problems relating to the experienced uniqueness of each self are neglected in contemporary philosophy. Presumably this arises from the pervasive materialism, which is blind to the fundamental problems arising in spiritual experience. . . . It is not in doubt that each human person recognizes its own uniqueness, and this is accepted as the basis of social life and law. When we enquire into the grounds for this belief, modern neuroscience eliminates an explanation in terms of the body. There remain two possible alternatives—the brain and the Psyche. Materialists must subscribe to the former, but dualist-interactionists have to regard the Self or World 2 as being the entity with the experienced uniqueness. 9 Since materialist solutions fail to account for our experienced uniqueness, I am constrained to attribute the uniqueness of the Self or Soul to a supernatural spiritual creation. To give the explanation in theological terms: each Soul is a new Divine creation which is implanted into the growing foetus at some time between conception and birth. It is the certainty of the inner core of unique individuality that necessitates the “Divine creation.” I submit that no other explanation is tenable; neither the genetic uniqueness with its fantastically impossible lottery, nor the environmental differentiations which do not determine one’s uniqueness, but merely modify it. 10

While many readers might regard Eccles’s radical dualism to be the only metaphysically viable option, this metaphysical/theological position is regarded with suspicion by most contemporary philosophers, including those of us who reject the materialistic, mechanistic view of the universe. We now find ourselves in a difficult situation indeed: we face not only the problem of how the mind relates to the body, and/or how consciousness relates to the world, but also the problem posed on the one hand by

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scientists who think that they’ve solved this problem by taking recourse to philosophy that philosophers themselves find dubious, and on the other hand by philosophers who think that they’ve solved this problem by relying on science that the scientists themselves find “grotesquely inadequate.” With all due respect to Dr. Stapp, we don’t believe that contemporary physics, even when buttressed by Whitehead, restores “the causal link between the psychological and physical aspects of nature”; it may establish the possibility in principle of such a link, and it may even point to something like such a link, but it certainly doesn’t “restore” or explain it. For that we have to turn to philosophy, as in fact both Stapp and Eccles explicitly acknowledge. Stapp mentions in this regard the inevitable failure of Daniel Dennett’s 1991 book, Consciousness Explained, to fulfill its promise, and he quotes Francis Crick and Christof Koch’s suggestion that “Radically new concepts may be needed” to deal with the question of how the mind and the brain are related. 11 The extremely interesting discussions of quantum theory that Stapp offers throughout his book certainly underscore this need, and he has placed the task clearly before us. Crick and Koch’s call for “radically new concepts,” however, may seem to Stapp and others to be more desperate than it in fact is, for these may already be at hand. As it happens, the realist phenomenology that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already provides us with an invaluable arsenal of such “new concepts” that have remained largely neglected for the past hundred years, and not a few of these concepts were fashioned to deal with precisely those problems that have recently become of interest to researchers in mainstream cognitive science. 12 The concept of intentionality is probably the most conspicuous and familiar of these, and the rethinking of this concept that we have presented in the preceding chapters along with our description of the operation of formal causality in cognition and the aesthetic experience offer an alternative to the sorts of questionable dualism to which contemporary scientific researchers like Stapp and Eccles have felt it necessary to return. It’s our belief that this new approach to the concept of intentionality and causality might also provide a common ground for scientists in search of a philosophy and philosophers in search of a science. PSYCHOLOGY The mind is no thing (such as a brain) but an activity or, better, a vast and massively complex array of activities that are saturated with intentionality. Intentions themselves have an organic structure; they not only tend, relate, and interrelate but their tending itself may be understood on the model of growth. Intentions grow; they’re constantly on the move while their parts actively cohere, work together, interact, and intend one an-

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other in a great myriad of ways. This is part of what makes the human psyche so elusive and so fascinating: the complexity and interconnectedness of its “parts,” which are themselves better spoken of as activities, all of which intend other activities. It’s the nature of mind to be directed in particular ways, partly as a consequence of biology and partly (likely the larger part) as a consequence of the intentions that it has imitated and come to participate in over time. This seems to be something of a psychological constant: imitation, an activity that comes very naturally to human beings (and to many other species as well), leads to participation. Indeed, it causes it, in Aristotle’s sense of formal causality. Our way of being, indeed the being of things in general, is to be directed this way and that, and a great deal of our psychological experience and behavior may be understood as so much learned and habitual activity which, once directed and formed, remains in that form and can be remarkably resistant to change. When we speak of the “force” of habit, the “catching on” of a feeling, idea, or cultural artifact, of one thing in our experience “leading” to another, of like “attracting” like, the “compulsion” of an addiction, the “need” for some particular sensory stimuli, and various similar phenomena, what’s happening is that an intention, having assumed a particular form, continues to tend in the same way or direction until some countervailing intention leads our awareness elsewhere, not unlike a tree that when a sapling is trampled or pushed over to one side will continue to grow on a lean unless another force (such as a stake) pulls it upright. What’s happening when a song is playing and you find yourself involuntarily tapping your foot or swaying to the rhythm is that an intention is continuing its trajectory and infecting another, causing its movement not in any mechanistic sense but formally. There’s a oneness of form between the rhythm of the song and the motion of the body. You get caught up in it and remain there until some countervailing intention (such as another song) goes to work on you and leads your experience in another direction as a kind of gravitational force. How do you draw a dog off a scent? Offer it food. How do you overcome the fear after falling off a horse? Get back on. Our advice to the lovelorn is to get back out there, and to the grieving to let time do its work, which is to lead our consciousness slowly to some other place. It’s neither simple nor easy; indeed, it can be exceedingly difficult or seemingly impossible, but when it happens, much the same principles are at work. Momentum can be an unstoppable force when nothing impedes its progress and growth, and it can apply to virtually anything in our experience. Try telling the avid collector of antiques that they don’t need to go to that auction, the video gamer that they don’t need to buy that new game, or the lover that they just saw their beloved yesterday so they don’t have to see her again today. Tell the reader of romance novels that they don’t need to read yet another one, the compulsive drinker to try

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coffee, the runner that the road will still be there tomorrow, or the sports fanatic that it’s just another game. Some psychological needs are rooted in biology, but a great many are not. They’re habits, experiential imperatives into which the subject has grown through continually following and indulging some tendency that, over time, and when nothing tempers or competes with it, takes on a life of its own. You can get swept up in any number of things, carried away into an experience where only one god prevails. Many a mental health problem, and the highest achievements no less, arise from this very phenomenon: some specific intention or set of intentions grows well beyond the norm, and goes on growing if nothing pulls us back and draws our experience elsewhere. Intentions persist. The song in your head, no matter how annoying, keeps playing; the lamp that’s to the left of the chair remains on the left; love endures; tastes and affinities persist; routines and behavioral patterns can last a lifetime; athletes go into slumps; tradition and culture are passed down generation after generation; the idée fixe, obsession, compulsion, and addiction go on and on; a trend, no matter how moronic, can spread like wildfire—why? Were we more empirically minded, and utterly lacking in modesty, we might give this a grand-sounding name, perhaps the Law of Intentional Continuity, modeled roughly on Newton’s First Law of Motion. The latter, you will recall, states, “In an inertial frame of reference, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.” Our law—and it isn’t a law, but it is a pervasive fact of our experience—is that an intention lasts, and indeed grows in the manner of any organic thing, not forever perhaps but until a countervailing intention interrupts its continuity and uniformity. Growth is directional, and once you begin down a road you keep going until other things intervene. If the natural world as a whole is permeated with intentionality, it’s no surprise that the human psyche is as well. The mind is a great bundle of intentions, of doings, strivings, relations, and interactions, most (maybe all) of which have a way of taking on a life of their own when not checked, distracted, or held in some kind of balance by competing intentions. Genius and madness (some of it) can both be understood this way, as a monomania of a kind, a glorious or pathological (or both) persistence of a single form of intentionality, a total immersion in something to the neglect of those other things that tend to make for a more balanced and more sane personality. Both are extremists, and they exceed the normal only in degree, not in kind. You can be an extremist about anything— aesthetic objects, creating art, food, social media, politics, technology, clothing, plastic surgery, reading books, exercise, sports, work, drugs, virtue, religion, lethargy, tattoos, fishing, collecting, hoarding, love, revenge, just about anything in our experience. You’re a genius when your idée fixe is socially approved, and pathological otherwise. Both are abnor-

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mal, and whether this is a good or a bad quality depends on the norms from which one is departing. The mind is best thought of as an activity—or a massive conglomeration of these—rather than a material object, be it a brain, computer, or mechanism of whatever kind, a machine that’s capable of being either well- or disordered. What is a disorder but another name for genius, and a genius but a certain kind of madman? Artists are mad, according to an old legend, and there’s a sense in which this is true. They’re possessed by the thing that singularly dominates their attention and their lives. So are lovers, addicts, fanatics, and world-class athletes. They’re committed, good at what they do, even when what they do isn’t good. Some of them get awards, others get therapy. And when their therapy works, it has the common effect of pulling them back, tempering their enthusiasm and their extremism. Their psyche, and anyone else’s, will never resemble a well-ordered mechanism, no matter how normal they become or what their pharmaceutical cocktail. A well-adjusted personality is no welloiled machine but a conformist, one whose cognitive-sensoryemotional apparatus inclines him or her toward whatever variety of activities is usual in a given time and place. Personality itself is this apparatus—again not a thing, a material or ideal being but an intentional one, a bundle of tendings, relatings, strivings, and habits that sometimes assume a narrow focus (for those who prefer dangerous living) and sometimes (far more often) something broader. SOCIOLOGY Intentionality is at work in societies too. Artists are not social scientists in a literal sense. They don’t generally work with “scientific” methods, even the qualitative ones, nor do they measure things. But if you want to know what’s happening in a society, it’s to them you ought to turn, and probably more than any other group of people, including philosophers. They’re rather good at tracking socially shared intentions as well, putting their finger on the pulse of things, perceiving the interrelatedness of the human world in its full complexity, noticing where a society may be going, reflecting and commenting on the spirit of the times—one piece at a time. Theirs is usually a more particularistic form of understanding than what an Auguste Comte or an Emile Durkheim was after. It’s elusive yet richer, more profound, and more visceral. They deal not with statistics but with what we might call the mood or ethos that pervades a particular time and place. Recall what Comte was after in the early days of sociology: a bigpicture knowledge (necessarily scientific—knowledge’s only form, according to him) of a society and of what’s happening in it. It was supposed to have broad-ranging explanatory and indeed predictive val-

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ue. On his positivist view, the aim of sociology is to discover scientifically provable laws. Society, he believed, operates according to laws, as nature does, and the job of the scientist is to discover these laws and to observe their workings in a great variety of social phenomena. In its early and decidedly ambitious form, sociology was assigned the task of gathering knowledge from the various human and natural sciences, systematizing it, and applying it in the scientific refashioning of society. Today, sociology in the grand style is decidedly out of fashion, but it remains an empirical investigation of society, using some combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in constructing a large, scientific account of human affairs. Our view is that artists are excellent sociologists, that their work produces an illumination that is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to create by other means. If you want to understand, for example, what was happening in postwar North America—in people’s lives, on the street, and in the private struggles of human beings—you’d do better to read poetry, listen to music, and view painting than to examine sociologists’ statistics or to read the reports of historians or journalists, however informative all of the latter can be. Think of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” or “America” (1956 both), or of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963) or “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964). Works like this are true. The times were changing, and what was communicated in these works and others like them captures something that statistics and other scientific methods miss: how things stand from the point of view of lived experience, from the inside as it were. We sometimes hear it said of an artist that their work communicates something that many others wish they could say but couldn’t, some experience that many dimly feel but can’t articulate, or not as clearly or poignantly. We wish we could find the words, paint a picture, or in some way express what’s happening and what we’re going through, but we lack the means. Artists are often rather good at capturing the flavor of an experience, hitting the nail on the head in a way that leaves an audience thinking, “But of course! We should have thought of that”—except that we didn’t and probably couldn’t, likely because we haven’t trained our habits of perception and expression in a way that would make this possible. We don’t think and work in a medium in which that particular truth can be brought to light, or in so clear and elegant a way. Let’s look a bit more closely at Ginsberg’s “America,” although the point could be illustrated using any number of examples. The poem begins this way: America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war?

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Chapter 6 Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

It goes on and on like this. What’s going on here? Are these merely the ravings of an idiosyncratic mind, some confession of youthful disaffection perhaps, or is something else finding expression? Does a work like this not capture something of the ethos and indeed the intentionality of a nation (it is, after all, named after one), in a handful of lines, and in a way that no purportedly objective analysis could? Why do these words resonate? Why did a work like this catch on at that particular time along with so many similar works by Ginsberg and other Beat poets of the post-war era if not because they had their proverbial finger on the pulse of a society, the direction in which things were tending, in ways both general and (especially) specific? If they hadn’t done so, you’d likely never have heard of this poem or this poet. The Beats, like any artists, were not sociologists in a literal sense, but they were responding to a particular time as they understood it. Themes that came to the fore in their work, such as the rejection of conservative values, the valorization of nonconformity, hedonism, psychedelic drugs, curiosity about Eastern thought, and so on, were central to what was happening in American society at the time, especially among a young generation that was becoming disillusioned with the worldview of their parents and grandparents. A poem like this is true; it spoke—to a time and a place, to a particular audience, and in a way that cut through anything non-essential and got to the heart of how things stood, what people were up against, and what someone had to say about it. Social scientists do something like this. They can and do track a great many intersubjective intentions, but their instruments of analysis also have limits as well as a certain bluntness about them, oriented as they are toward generalities more than the particulars with which artists are typically concerned. A sociologist’s statistics allow them, for example, to track the homicide rate and get some kind of handle on this phenomenon; so does Springsteen’s “Murder Incorporated.” A good journalistic or historical report on the Iraq war sheds a good deal of light; so does the Eagles’ “Long Road Out of Eden.” A psychologist’s study of romantic love produces a certain form of knowledge; so do about a thousand love songs, poems, films, and so forth. As an object can be viewed under different lights, so can one and the same complex of intentionality be tracked by a scientist and by an artist, albeit in different ways. What the two bring to light isn’t the same phenomenon; they are speaking in different idioms, and while the accounts they give are surely divergent, the divergence doesn’t usually constitute a contradiction. Art and science don’t contradict each other but speak on different levels, sometimes about the same thing and sometimes not.

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If what we’re interested in are the basic tendings, the being-in-motion, of the manifold phenomena that make up a particular society at a particular time, as sociologists are, we’d be well advised to pay special attention to what’s happening in the arts, for it’s here that the realities of human experience as it plays are most readily and often most clearly seen. Artists—the better ones—have a way of seeing things before the rest of us do, or seeing them more clearly, of putting their finger on and naming what others sense only inchoately. Larger trends and movements in the arts shed enormous light on how matters stand in a given society or a segment within it, what speaks to them and what doesn’t, and the qualities of experience that are typically had there. It’s not difficult to see from the history of art how a given movement, form, and style emerges, as it were, from the soil of a society in much the way that movements in philosophy do. Historically and sociologically speaking, Renaissance art, for example, made sense—not absolutely but then, there, and for them (and not only them). It fit the cultural soil from which it spontaneously emerged. Art is a plant that grows in a particular soil, and if one wishes to know what’s happening “on the ground” of a given society one had best look to the plants that grow there. This form of art reflected the central ideas, beliefs, values, aspirations, sensibility, and experience of fifteenth-century Europe, or a good segment of it. Impressionism would have made about as much sense at the time as an orchid in the tundra or rock and roll in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t just the electric guitar that the medieval period lacked but the sense of life that accompanies and finds expression in it. Beat poetry wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, have emerged and taken root there and then, or likely at any time prior to post-war America. Imagine Ginsberg in late antiquity, or virtually any other artist or movement of artists of the last few centuries. EDUCATION One final issue we wish to speak to briefly concerns the significance of the arts in education. It’s common knowledge that when educational institutions of virtually every kind face budgetary shortfalls, the first thing to be cut is anything and everything that falls under the umbrella of “the arts.” No government today is calling for cuts to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. Quite the contrary, but on what grounds? Why is no one surprised when music or theater in public schools is regarded as an optional extra while science and mathematics are indispensable? We’re not questioning the utility of STEM, nor does our question have to do with the utility of an education in the arts. Our argument here is that if we wish to understand the educational significance of the arts, we need to set aside the language of utility and adopt a different vocabulary. There’s far more to education than utility.

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Governments may have no concept of this—comprised as they are of politicians and bureaucrats whose mindset is largely limited to managerialism, planning, efficiency, instrumental rationality, and so on—but the argument we’ve offered may carry some educational implications which we’d like to outline briefly. It’s probably inevitable—at a time when educational policymakers often regard the arts in general as frills in comparison with the more useful subjects—that defenders of the arts will counter by demonstrating their utility. An education in music, for instance, is often justified—when it’s justified at all—by the arguments that it develops areas of the brain that are important for cognition in other, more useful, forms, that it enhances hand-eye coordination, promotes psychological development and self-esteem, and other considerations of this sort. How much weight such arguments carry we shall leave aside. An education in art does serve a purpose, but its purpose must be understood not in terms of utilitarian advantages but in light of the purpose of art itself. For as long as proponents of the arts think about an education in these fields in utilitarian and vocational terms rather than aesthetically and ontologically, they’ll continue to plead their case in a court where they’ve lost before they even begin to speak. If we’re serious about defending the arts in education, we need to refuse to speak the language of utility altogether and think more deeply and more ontologically about art. We see ourselves in art. More than that, we become ourselves, we come into our own, in this kind of experience—or we might. The “soul” itself— or whatever one wishes to call it—is no unchanging, metaphysical entity but is formed this way and that in the encounter with art in its various forms. Human beings do not live by utility alone. This is the crucial point that so many contemporary governments and educationalists miss, sometimes entirely, and to the detriment of students who too often find themselves being formed in ways that leave whole realms of human experience closed to them, often for life. An education in any of the arts isn’t merely a means to the end that is experiencing a certain form of pleasure or the acquisition of a competency or transferable skill. It feeds and indeed forms the soul, not in a religious sense but an ontological one. It gives rise to habits, forms perceptions, sensibilities, and a sense of life which can last a lifetime. It opens up a world, acquaints us with our tradition, our times, and ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether the artworks to which students are exposed are canonical or more contemporary; what matters is whether there’s truth in them, whether they introduce students to experiences and ideas that are new to them, illuminating, and potentially transformative. It’s not the dead weight of the past that they’re being exposed to; it’s their tradition, their own culture, which it falls to them to appropriate, critique, or in some way respond to. It’s themselves they are being introduced to. The point of teaching Shakespeare isn’t to train the mind in “brain work,” as if the mind were a kind

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of muscle that could be strengthened by lifting the literary equivalent of heavy weights. A work of art, canonical or otherwise, that’s worth studying in an educational setting is educational for the reason that it teaches us different ways of seeing the world, different meanings and possible ways of being that we might wish to make our own. The works to which young people are introduced are and are not “others”; they’re interlocutors with whom students can engage in more profound ways than what common experience makes possible, works that they can participate in and indeed become, that shed light on what things mean and how we might want to think about them. Rather often they change our outlook and reshape our lives. It should be commonplace for people, by virtue of their educational experiences, to be able to say, “This work changed my life.” You can think of your own examples of artworks and artists who opened your eyes to things you hadn’t seen before, introduced you to some new way of seeing the world, new questions and meanings, or otherwise gave you something you could think about, feel deeply about, and contemplate rather than merely be informed. Art shows you how to perceive and to feel; it unsettles, disturbs, and pries open minds that information and “competencies” can have a tendency to close. It makes intellectual self-satisfaction—that great antithesis of all genuine education—simply impossible. We return to Plato’s insight, which was at once educational and ontological: children become what they see, whether we’re speaking about moral character, intellectual habits, or what have you. It matters what aesthetic objects they’re exposed to and become familiar with, and whether they’re exposed to them at all. If they become habituated to great art, they will imitate and in time participate in what they see, and if they are surrounded by blandness and aesthetic sterility, they will become that as well—so we must expose them to the right things. The formative influence of art isn’t always readily apparent, or not in the way that the usefulness of technology is. To see its relevence we need to look beneath the surface, not only at how an economic agent of the future is being trained and informed but at how the soul itself is assuming a certain character, how a self is being formed, and what habits, inclinations, and sensibilities are being fostered. In all education, doors are being opened and closed, interests pursued or neglected, and modes of experience either made possible or closed off. While an education that excludes STEM likely underprepares students for the workforce, one that excludes the arts may leave them with a very different deficiency: an undernourishment of the soul, human beings who are employable but whose lives remain unexamined and dominated by meaningless amusements. An education in the arts that is poorly done—think of many students’ experience of being force-fed Shakespeare before they’re capable of understanding and appreciating it—creates a barrier to future learning in this direction, but when it’s properly done it opens up a world, intro-

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duces us to human nature—not just to the nature of others, but to our own as well. Understanding the other and self-understanding are impossible to disentangle here. The characters, situations, and narratives that we read about are all potential selves, not some monolith of knowledge that stands over against us but a world of possibilities that are our own. It’s not just “the canon” or “the tradition” of art that they’re learning; it’s their own tradition, something that they’re invited not to bow down to but to rise up to, take up, and critically appropriate. The general line of argument we’ve pursued in this book carries a good many implications, some of which we’ve outlined above. Each of them clearly calls for an elaboration that would take us too far afield. Our topic has been artistic creation and what we’ve identified as a deep structural connection between the activity in which artists engage and the experience of an audience or interpreter of their works. The line of questioning we’ve followed has led us into some other areas within aesthetics and beyond, and while many further implications could be identified, we shall stop here. NOTES 1. See J. Mehra and H. Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, vol. 1, Parts 1 and 2: The Quantum Theory of Planck, Einstein, Bohr and Sommerfeld: Its Foundation and the Rise of Its Difficulties, 1900–1925 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982). 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 22. Three years after the publication of this book, Whitehead published his Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Humanities Press, 1929). 3. The following discussion of Stapp and Eccles is an extract (revised) from Mitscherling’s “Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality,” in Mirosław Szatkowski and Marek Rosiak, eds., Substantiality and Causality (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 129–49 (esp. 129–33). 4. Henry P. Stapp, Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (New York: Springer, 2007), 87. 5. Stapp, Mindful Universe, viii (he seems to be referring to philosophers here). 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Ibid., 85–86. 8. Ibid., 81; the emphasis is Stapp’s. 9. Sir John Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (London: Routledge, 1989), 236. The reference to “World 2” indicates the extent to which Eccles remained committed to some version of the Popperian three-world theory. Twelve years before he wrote Evolution of the Brain, Eccles [1903–1997] had co-authored with Sir Karl Popper [1902–1994] The Self and Its Brain (Berlin: Springer, 1977). 10. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain, 237. Regarding the “fantastically impossible lottery” of genetic uniqueness, see 236: “If one’s experienced uniqueness derives directly from the uniqueness of one’s brain, we have to enquire into the levels of uniqueness of human brains. It could not be the uniqueness of all the infinity of detailed connectivities of the 10,000 million cells of the human cerebral cortex. Such connectivities are constantly changing in plasticity and degeneration. The most usual materialist statement is that the experienced uniqueness derives from the genetic uniqueness. No attempt is made to examine critically the implications of this statement. In the first

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place, in line with arguments by Jennings (1930), Eccles (1970, 1979), and Thorpe (1966, 1978), the unique genome that is alleged to be the basis of the experienced uniqueness is the consequence of an infinitely improbable genetic lottery (even 1015,000 against) on the conservative estimate of 50,000 human genes.” 11. These references to Dennett, Crick, and Koch, are found in Stapp, Mindful Universe, 3–4. 12. This early period of phenomenological research is only now coming to be fully explored, and critical studies of the works of these phenomenologists are finally beginning to appear. For a brief overview of the period and the literature, see Mitscherling and Baltzer-Jaray’s “The Phenomenological Spring: Husserl and the Göttingen Circle,” in their edited volume, Husserl and the Göttingen Circle, special issue of Symposium, 16 (2012): 1–19. See also Kimberley Baltzer-Jaray, ed., Selected Papers on the Early Phenomenology of Munich and Göttingen, special issue of Quaestiones Disputatae: A Journal of Philosophical Inquiry and Discussion from Franciscan University of Steubenville, 3 (no. 1: 2012); Robin Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999); Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago: Open Court, 1994).

Conclusion

In every encounter between a subject and an object, intentionality is at work. It pervades our experience of the world in general and is neither wholly discovered nor wholly imposed. It’s not only artists who discern intentions, follow where they lead, and extend the chain, although many of them are remarkably good at it. We all do this. When you walk through a forest, there’s a way that’s there to be seen (likely more than one). We’re not speaking of the kind of path that’s been carefully planned and constructed by the tourist industry but something else, something that preceded it and that also made it possible. We’re making our way through the trees and the brush, heading south, toward a river that can’t be seen from where we’re standing. Some bushwhacking is involved, ducking under branches, backtracking, and so on. A compass helps, but if we follow it too unthinkingly we’re sure to run into a tree before long. We need to veer to the left, then back quickly to the right to avoid a thicket. This way leads between two mature trees, followed by a clearing before the brush again becomes thick. We look left and right, trying to find the way. We’re not making it up or inventing anything; it’s there to be seen. It’s no more in our head than the trees we’ll walk into if we step too far to the left. The path is there—potentially, not actually, but to say it’s ideal or a construction of consciousness is as mistaken as saying it’s a material object. The tourist’s path is a material object. The path we’re speaking of isn’t, but to say that it doesn’t exist, or that it’s a pure construction of consciousness, violates our experience. This is the way, or a way; it takes us to the river without being pointlessly circuitous or forcing us to walk through unnecessarily difficult terrain. Changing the example slightly, a motorcyclist, who also happens to be a well-known artist, writes this: Perhaps it is only long habit that makes me prefer to find my routes on paper maps, with the tactile details they seem to reveal—and that’s the perfect word. I do not so much design a route as study the page for a while and let the “right” roads be revealed to me. With highlighter pen, I 137

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Conclusion stitch together a complicated thread of Rand McNally’s thin red lines, gray lines, and, best of all, the broken gray lines—the unpaved roads. 1

The author is drummer Neil Peart, who has often spoken in similar ways of composing drum parts. Artists are given to speaking this way, and it’s nothing fanciful. Here’s another example, this one from literature: when Victor Hugo arrived at the end of Les Misérables, he might, after some 1200 pages of narrative, have had an aging Jean Valjean suddenly convert to Buddhism and relocate to a mountaintop in India. Hugo was the author, after all. It’s his book—or is it? Nothing in the novel foreshadows that, and had he taken the narrative in that direction, even he would have had a very difficult time pulling it off. It wouldn’t have worked—been convincing, we might say, or indeed been true—no matter how formidable the author’s literary skills. The sense of an ending would have been frustrated, narrative coherence lost, and the reader annoyed. An ending may surprise, but not if a chain has been broken. What about a film or stage adaptation? Authors of these often change endings for one reason or another, but their freedom in doing so is again not unlimited. What limits it is neither any deference to the original author nor any imperative of predictability or tidiness, nor a prohibition against loose ends, but the intentionality of the narrative. There’s a freedom in all writing, but it’s not absolute. Some particular ending is indicated by the flow or direction of the narrative. A good story well told tells itself, even while the author retains a kind of freedom. The choice of words belongs to the author, but they need to be the right words. We too could end this book by breaking out into song, and it would be about as correct as sending Valjean to India. Another example: in music, if you string together the following sequence of notes: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and follow this with F# rather than C, this isn’t much different than following 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 with 29.6. It’s not true. The answer is 6. This isn’t a construction and it isn’t in anyone’s head. Twenty-nine point six doesn’t work and neither does F# or painting a touque on Mona Lisa. The reason is that here again there’s intentionality at work. The sequence leads in a particular direction and getting it right means following it a while further. In the numerical example, there’s a rule to follow (add one), and artists don’t have rules (or not rules like that), but to say they have no hard and fast rules doesn’t mean that they make it up out of nothing. Their freedom is conditioned, limited, and informed by the form in which they’re working—the form indeed that they become in the process of creating. There’s a oneness between artist and artwork, an identity of form. This is what artists strive to bring about, and it’s also what they commonly report: that one takes further something that’s received or encountered, works on it, modifies it, responds to it with something that comes from within but that’s also indicated or

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required by the work itself as it takes shape, as it forms itself. They’re working on the piece, but in the process something comes over them, takes hold of them, works through them. They get caught up, lose themselves, in the thing they’re supposed to be creating. “Color possesses me,” Paul Klee stated. “It possesses me forever, I know. Color and I are one—I am a painter.” 2 Michael Jackson said the same: “On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. . . . I become the singer and the song. . . . I keep on dancing. And dancing. And dancing. Until there is only the dance.” 3 Nothing about this is as simple as following the number sequence, but following, taking direction, responding to what’s already going on in the work, and becoming one with it is at the heart of what artists do and what they say they do. Artistic creation isn’t done ex nihilo or in any kind of aesthetic vacuum but follows what has already been—a tradition, a movement, or the inherent direction of a work. The artist, having immersed him- or herself in their chosen form for some usually longish period of time, extends a chain that’s received, borrows and varies, and responds to something that’s going on in the world in some way that’s instinctive, personal, and that makes sense—when it’s done well, at any rate. Sometime later an audience will become taken up in much the same way, and see themselves in the work. These are a few simple examples of intentionality at work, and we’ve argued that it’s at work everywhere. It is; it has being, and a mode of being that’s neither material nor ideal, neither strictly “out there” nor “in here,” but subsisting in the dialectic that underlies and sustains subject and object alike and that defines their interrelationship. This is the mode of being that artworks have, and it’s an environment in which artists are likely more at home than others. Engineers are at home in a very different world. So are priests and plumbers. All make themselves at home in their world or a particular region of it, come to embody it as a consequence of tracking specific kinds of intentions in specific ways over time, forming habits of perception and experience that are enduring and constitutive of the self. An artist’s universe is one of unlimited complexity. It’s no world for logicians, nor is it a Kantian world, where categories of the mind are reassuringly universal and number a baker’s dozen, where all lines are straight, everything has its place, and the trains run on time. If only we lived in such a realm. A universe of order, clarity, and elegant simplicity is a philosopher’s fantasy. In an artist’s world, in the human world, nothing sits still and simply is what it is; the determinate, the in itself, and the absolute do not exist. What a thing is, it is in relation to something else. Everything tends this way or that: it is proximal, changing, in motion, on the way, becoming, passing away, opposing, betwixt and between, in process, transacting, interacting, interrelating, in negotiation, intimating,

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symbolizing, leading somewhere or other. A is A, but it points to B, and any neat division is again a fantasy. For “A is A” to be the whole truth, we’d have to freeze A in time and space, and place our experience of it under arrest. Any A that we encounter, and that hasn’t been flattened out by philosophers, made into a fiction or a mummy, is dynamic, pushed around by forces, suspended in webs, or otherwise part of a larger phenomenon. It’s no bare particular, raw datum, or thing in itself. The world we live in is permeated with intentionality, not in the sense of an external imposition or projection of the mind but where the intention itself exists dialectically, between subject and object, and binds them together. Understanding artistic creation involves neither cracking a code nor finding a formula, and any philosophical—including phenomenological—account of it will remain incomplete. We make no claim to having answered the question of what artists do in any exhaustive way. The mystery remains, plenty of it. What we’ve endeavored to show is a structural identity between what artists in their creative moments do, or some of it, and what art lovers also do. Artists (the rest of us too) have the task of becoming at home in a world that’s saturated with intentionality, negotiating the complexities of that world, the shifting hues and the mystery that surround us all. They track particular intentions in particular ways—and their audience follows in kind. The better artists are fascinated by this and enjoy the experimentation and the play that such a world enjoins, without arresting the experience or demanding order and certainty in a world that’s fresh out of both. Any conclusions that we reach on this topic should demonstrate some coherence with how artists themselves—a good many of them—describe their creative process, and it’s for this reason that we’ve quoted a wide selection of them in the text and endnotes of this book. Artists are noticers, subtle discerners who are typically impatient with non-artists’ (and this would include philosophers’) oversimplifications, theoretical classifications, and false impositions of “clarity.” Any descriptive account must include some nuance, variability, and complexity, and we’ve endeavored to preserve and do some justice to this while providing the philosophical analysis that raises all of this to a higher order of explicitness. Artists—a great majority of them—are not philosophers, and their descriptions of the creative process are most often articulated in ordinary (usually metaphorical) language. Translating these into the language of philosophy has always proven difficult, partly because the phenomenon itself is remarkably elusive and partly because the theoretical terminology hasn’t always been up to the task and can end up reducing, flattening, and killing the thing it’s trying to describe. Artistic creation is a living, multifarious, and dynamic activity. Nothing about it is straightforward, although we’ve resisted the conclusion that it’s utterly unanalyzable or off limits to philosophical interpretation. Some common themes do emerge from artists’ statements, and we’ve spent some time trying to bring these out.

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They begin, and likely end, with the sense of mystery that remains at the heart of the entire phenomenon of which we’ve been speaking. We’ve been plumbing depths here, or trying to, and the waters down there are murky. It’s no wonder that artists struggle to speak of what’s going on, usually either balking at this standard interviewer’s question—“Exactly how do you do that?”—or speaking in metaphors—the wellspring, the godhead, whatever it is. They don’t retreat to any inner sanctum when creating art. They’re right here in the same world as the rest of us. It’s their comportment or attunement that’s different, a certain way of paying attention, the intentions they track and the habits of body and mind that they bring to those intentions. With all due respect to cows, they could stare at Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam all day long and not see it, or not have an aesthetic experience of it anyway. It’s no failing on their part—it’s simply the way they are. Their brains (we speculate) just don’t make this possible. Nor is an aesthetic experience of Michelangelo’s work possible, or likely, for the art-blind human being, the person whose perceptual habits have been trained exclusively in non-aesthetic directions. Habitual forms of experience prepare us for more of the same, and most of us are not habituated into seeing the world through an artist’s eyes. We notice things, but not usually with an eye to how they might be depicted in a sculpture or a poem. It’s not our form of everyday comportment, and to an outsider it looks strange. Artists themselves, non-artists typically think, are strange, mysterious, not quite like us. What’s especially mysterious is this phenomenon of being carried along in a process one doesn’t control, disappearing into the work itself, becoming one with it— not just seeing yourself in art but becoming yourself there. This activity that’s also a passivity, or passivity that’s also a highly intricate, laborious, emotionally charged, expressive, and deeply personal act—how does one describe that? It involves a relinquishing of the self, becoming someone or something else, and nothing about it makes sense to the literalminded. The process, “according to their report,” is more instinctive than cerebral, some combination of the Dionysian and Apollonian that inclines more toward the former. Inspiration retains a certain priority here, but where this is nothing divine (strictly speaking) but experiential and sometimes quite ordinary—a perception or quality of experience that bears noticing and a form of thinking that’s affective and sensual. The artist is following something, allowing something to emerge or to show itself in a way that it seems of itself to require. The process isn’t antiintellectual, but the rationalist models of problem solving, calculating, and deriving have little relevance. Composing is an appropriating and synthesizing of aesthetic elements in a way that defies formalization. Creation is derivative. Lightning doesn’t strike and nothing is conjured out of thin air. Artists help themselves to whatever is around, including the work of their predecessors and peers, while also making it their own,

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bringing a work into conformity both with itself and with something within the subjectivity of the artist him- or herself. If creative activity begins with inspiration, whether we regard it as divine or as natural, it quickly leads toward the difficult work of selecting and arranging elements into a configuration of some more or less inventive kind, but where invention again is more a modifying than a begetting out of nothing. The relation between creation and tradition is internal and dialectical. One takes direction from the tradition of art in which one stands and that one makes one’s own, as one finds or forms a voice in a conversation that’s ongoing. An artist is responding to a lived experience and subsequently to the work itself as it assumes some particular form. The process is laborious but also playful, visceral, and impossible to disentangle from the idea of truth. Art does more than merely please an audience; it speaks, and what it speaks is the truth, in some connotation of the word. Truth and lies, work and play, action and passion all come together here. In trying to gain philosophical clarity on what so many artists have reported, we’ve drawn especially upon Plato, Aristotle, and Roman Ingarden while endeavoring to construct a phenomenological model of artistic creation, the work of art, and aesthetic experience. Its central concepts are intentionality, imitation, participation, habit, formal causality, play, and mystery. Intentions of the kind that artists pick up on and follow, we’ve argued, are not mere projections of the mind but belong to the things themselves. An intention is neither a material nor an ideal entity but more like an activity that’s directed toward an end. Consciousness itself, including in the aesthetic experience, is an activity that crucially involves a relating to something that’s happening in the world and a mutual constitution of subject and object, these two poles of awareness. Materialism and idealism both fail to capture this and confront us with a false choice between a consciousness that merely happens upon an already fully determinate world and one that projects and constitutes everything that comes before it. The work of art is only one example of an object that fits neither description but is mutually constituted in the encounter between object and interpreter. Whether we’re speaking of the consciousness of an artist or anyone else, imitation, participation, and habit pervade human experience in general. As Plato taught us to see, human beings are natural imitators for whom it’s no exaggeration to say that we become in a profound, ontological sense what we imitate. We appropriate over time the habits of our models and come to participate in the same activity or form of life. Artists are a clear example of this: imitation leads to participation and habit formation, all of which come to bear upon the creation of artworks. Artists are imitators; they have influences, and over time they become immersed in a particular form or style of art and participate in or share in the habits of a particular way of thinking about and creating art. To participate in something is to become it, to

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appropriate the habits of our models, to make them our own and to extend them in some fashion or other. We do more than see ourselves in art; we become ourselves there, artist and audience alike. “Like attracts like,” Plato taught, and the observation applies well beyond the realm of art. We’re drawn to artworks in which we see ourselves or possibilities of what we might become. We imitate and take upon ourselves—or we might—some particular way of being which an aesthetic object embodies, and so come into our own. This seems to be psychologically and ontologically true of human beings, and it accounts for a good deal of what’s happening in both the creation and the encounter with art. It was Plato who brought to our attention not just the moral but, more importantly, the ontological implications of art which formed the basis of his moral worries. Children in particular become what they see. They imitate models of behavior, learn habits, and come to participate in the mode of being to which they’re repeatedly exposed, a phenomenon that isn’t limited to the experience of poems and other sorts of artworks. Our identity is to be a participant in a form of life and activity, to have taken upon ourselves certain meanings, beliefs, and practices with which we’re familiar. Imitation leads to participation. Related to this are the notions of concretization and play. Any work of art has an incompleteness to it. It calls upon us to bring the work of the artist to completion, to take it further by filling in gaps, putting flesh on bones, or imaginatively concretizing what an artist has given us. Each of us reconstitutes an artwork in a somewhat different way, making it in a sense not one artwork but many. What we find in the work is in part a consequence of what we bring to it, the baggage of experience, perceptual habits, and sensibilities that each of us carries around. An audience is no more passive than an artist is, but walks the same line between action and passion, effectively both following and co-creating the work that an artist has initiated. We all see ourselves in art, but we also see ourselves differently there as a result of what we bring to the encounter. Both artist and audience also bring a playfulness which goes to the heart of this form of experience. Creating art, and its reception no less, crucially involves a form of play that is no frivolity but an activity that’s instinctive, passionate, and often serious-minded. No chasm separates work and play here, as one is drawn into a movement that again one doesn’t control but follows. Artists take direction, imaginatively, and so does an audience. To speak of it as play doesn’t mean merely that the artist or the audience enjoys the experience, but that they fall into a dialectic that carries them along. They swim with a current, and while the work of art provides a direction for both the artist and the interpreter to follow, it also underdetermines the manner in which they do so. For an audience, to play here is to recreate, reconstitute, and in some way respond to what an artist has given us, while the artist also participates in a constituting activity which is at once inventive and receptive. What artists play with are intentions

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that belong to a certain form and style of art, and their mode of playing reflects the habits of perception and expression that they’ve made their own. Plato thematized the notions of inspiration, imitation, habit formation, and participation, but left unanswered what specific form of causal operation these notions entail. Aristotle took up this question, and the systematic treatment he provided seems to us to ring as true as ever. In Aristotelian metaphysics, human beings are natural knowers and (inseparable from this) natural imitators. In childhood, imitation is our species’ primary means of learning, and it’s an activity that’s delighted in for its own sake. This carries through to aesthetic experience: we’re fascinated by artistic depictions even of things that we’d dread to experience firsthand. The mode of causality that’s operative in aesthetic experience and cognition in general, and that leads from imitation to participation, as Aristotle correctly held, is formal causality. Imitating a bad model leads, through the operation of this sort of cause (in contrast to the material, the efficient, and the final), to the development of bad habits. Aristotle also demonstrated the identity between the subject of cognition and its object, that to know an object is to be—to participate in the same way of being as—the object. Repeated exposure to a particular kind of object causes (in this sense) an alteration in one’s being. One is what one habitually experiences; one becomes what one sees. Cognition is an act in which the thinking subject assumes the form of the object “without the matter,” where the form of the thing is the manner in which its parts are organized into a whole. In creating a work of art, the artist arranges elements into a configuration or object in such a way that it gains a particular intentional structure, and as the process unfolds the work gradually takes on a life of its own. The work acquires an initial intentionality that in turn begins to direct or guide the artist in its ongoing construction and which will later be participated in and brought to completion by an audience. The whole process is one of a formal causality which belongs to both the work itself and its interpreter. While the account of artistic creation that we’ve developed takes its point of departure both from artists’ own statements and from some of the work of Plato and Aristotle, we’ve drawn as well upon Ingarden’s phenomenological investigations in trying to outline a more general conception of art, its creation, and its reception. Ingarden’s critical response to Husserl carries implications far beyond the critique of idealism, and while he himself had relatively little to say about the creative process, he afforded us some important clues which we’ve endeavored to spell out and take further, and in a way that Ingarden himself could well have accepted. According to Husserl, consciousness constitutes all objects of human experience. Ingarden rejected this view, as do we. To make his case, Ingarden directed our attention to the work of art—the literary work in particular—and, following Husserl’s phenomenological method,

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inquired into its mode of being and its structure. A work of art isn’t an ideal object, a construction of consciousness alone, yet nor is it material. It has a material basis, but it isn’t itself material. One’s experience of War and Peace has its basis in one’s encounter with a particular physical object, but War and Peace itself isn’t that object. The work itself, Ingarden held, is neither material nor ideal but intentional. To understand the ontology of art—and not only art—we must posit a third order of being. Intentional beings don’t exist in the way that material or ideal objects do. An artwork in particular is a kind of schematism, a bundle of intentionalities, or a configuration of elements that exhibit complex interrelations and which are arranged by an artist for the purpose of creating an aesthetic experience. It’s comprised of several strata or levels which work together to create what he called a “polyphonic harmony.” The work of the artist is to compose or weave together the various strata that constitute the artwork, and not in just any way he or she might like but in a way that’s indicated by the intentionality of the work itself. At the same time, there’s an incompleteness to every work of art. No matter how meticulous its construction, every artwork remains to be concretized by an interpreter. How he or she does so isn’t “merely subjective” but is again indicated by the work’s own intentional structure. A work of art doesn’t interpret itself, but it does guide the audience while also underdetermining their experience. It leaves the interpreter a space of freedom to concretize or flesh out in imagination what they’re experiencing, what it’s going to mean to them, and how they’re going to respond to it. What the artist gives us is an unfinished process, a schematism, some of whose features remain to be completed in the re-creative activity of the audience. Artist and interpreter alike are guided by an intentionality that’s inherent to the work yet in an unfinished state. Both are carried along in a process that neither controls, even while the artist remains in some sense the “creator” of the work. The process is neither wholly subjective nor objective: it follows an intentionality that belongs to the work itself and isn’t a mere construction of consciousness. We’ve suggested that an artwork be conceived as a kind of guidebook for our consciousness, suggesting how to engage with it without dictating particulars, which must always be reconstructed in every case by an audience. The same intentionality that an artist first bestows, in nascent form, and then follows in the course of a work’s creation later guides while underdetermining the work of the interpreter. The aesthetic experience that results is a joint product of the work of an artist and an experiencing subject. We’ve outlined several of what we believe to be the more significant implications of this account as well as some criteria by which artworks might be critiqued both from a structural point of view and from the standpoint of the experiencer. The implications could well be multiplied, but the ones we’ve outlined focus on some issues in aesthetics, metaphys-

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ics, psychology, sociology, and education. The phenomenological account of artistic creation that we’ve put forward seems to us to entail several criteria or standards by which works of art may be assessed. On the model that we’ve presented, aesthetic judgment will never be a completely objective matter, but we’ve given some reasons for believing that it’s not completely subjective either. There are particular effects that artists need to achieve, each of which involves creating what Ingarden called a polyphonic harmony. The various elements and strata that comprise a work of art must hang together, not in any merely formal or narrowly defined way but in a way that guides the consciousness of an audience toward a specific form of aesthetic experience. Interpretation here is directed, not dictated. A space for freedom—gaps of indeterminacy—always remains, but it’s a freedom that isn’t random or purely idiosyncratic. The reception and response to art is always in some measure personal, but it’s also guided by the way in which an artist has arranged matters for us and created a work that comprises a particular intentionality. The work of interpretation is to follow this a bit further and to bring the process to completion in our experience of it. Such are what we’ve described as the basic structural criteria that a work of art must fulfill. This doesn’t constitute anything like a complete inventory of the standards by which works of art may or ought to be judged, however. No exhaustive list should be expected, but we’ve supplemented these structural criteria with several additional questions that may be and often are asked about any artwork and which fall more on the subject side of the relation between the work itself and an experiencing subject. A work of art that has some relative merit, on our view, has something to say, and in a way that’s relatively new. It borrows well from other works and from a tradition, yet without being excessively derivative. Creating art is anything but easy, though the artist has made it appear so, as if it had to be that way—seemingly natural, or undeniably right. The work also has a sense of play, and a sense of mystery. It neither dots all i’s, crosses all t’s, answers all questions, nor ties up all loose ends, but leaves the audience to complete it with work of their own. NOTES 1. Neil Peart, Far and Wide: Bring That Horizon to Me! (Toronto: ECW Press, 2016), 86. 2. Cited in Ross King, Artists: Their Lives and Works (New York: DK Publishing, 2017), 285. 3. Michael Jackson, liner notes to Dangerous (Epic Records, 1991).

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Index

Ackerman, Diane, 114n41 aesthetic experience, x, 26, 33, 40, 59, 62–65 appropriation, 4, 8–10, 18, 104, 106, 108, 139, 141, 146 Aristotle, x, 30, 36, 37, 58–65, 66–67, 69n5, 69n11, 78, 90, 91, 144 art, definition, xv, 23–24, 25, 26, 51, 52, 83, 91, 92, 97 artworld, 24–25, 122 Augustine, St., 55 Baltzer-Jaray, Kimberley, 135n12 Barron, Frank, 17 becoming, x, 37, 43, 67, 102, 108, 132, 133, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144 being, xiv, 28, 36, 37, 43, 44, 63, 75, 90, 91, 93n7, 126, 144, 145 Bell, Diane, 107–108 Bellow, Saul, 104 Brentano, Franz, 28, 30–32, 42, 64 Britton, Karl William, 46n10 Brown, Stuart, 111 Calvino, Italo, 21n27 causality, final, 119–121 causality, formal, 57, 58, 60, 62–65, 67, 88, 89, 91, 92, 118, 126, 144 Clark, Timothy, 109 cognition. See consciousness Cohen, Leonard, 111 Comte, Auguste, 30, 46n10, 128 concretization, xv, 40, 41, 44, 83, 87, 88, 98, 99, 111, 143, 145 consciousness, xiii, 26, 27, 32, 43, 45n5, 62–65, 67, 71, 81, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 117, 124, 142, 144 constitution, 38, 39–40 craftwork, 51, 52, 118–121 creativity, 23, 24, 75

Crick, Francis, 125 Danto, Arthur, 24 Dennett, Daniel, 125 Dickie, George, 24–25 divided line, 34, 51–57 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 44 Duchamp, Marcel, 83, 122 Dylan, Bob, ix, xiv, 2, 5–6, 8–10, 13, 15, 21n24, 102, 129 Eagles, 130 Eccles, John, 124, 125, 134n9 Edison, Thomas, 7 education, 33, 55, 57, 58, 118, 131–134 Eliot, T. S., 5 entertainment, 19, 102, 104, 112, 121 essence, 25, 37, 51, 75, 78, 83, 118 feeling, 3, 16 Fell, Cliff, 10 Fellini, Federico, 15, 19n3 following intentions, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, 11–14, 19, 27, 42, 100, 108, 110, 128, 139, 141, 143 form, xv, 36, 43, 57, 63, 67, 69n16, 77, 79, 90, 126, 138, 144 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 38–39, 41, 44, 45, 48n26, 49n35, 110 genius, x, 7, 53, 108, 127 George, Stefan, 48n28 Georgiadis, Costas, 69n8 Ginsberg, Allen, 129–130, 131 Giraudoux, Jean, 104 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20n14 Gordon, Jacqueline, 103 Gołaszewska, Maria, 73

153

154

Index

habit, xiii, xv, 27, 32–37, 43, 47n16, 57, 60, 61, 67, 69n16, 109, 126, 132, 139, 141, 142, 143 Harrison, George, 105 Hegel, G. W. F., 28–29, 32, 46n8 Heraclitus, 111 Hering, Jean, 78 Homer, 11, 26, 54, 56 Housman, A. E., 19n3 Hugo, Victor, 6–7, 13, 15, 138 Hume, David, 37 Husserl, Edmund, 27, 28, 64, 65, 71, 73, 78, 85, 89–90, 94n35, 144 idealism, 27, 28, 46n8, 71, 73, 74, 78, 85, 89, 90, 91, 142 imitation, 11, 19, 32–37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49n36, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58–61, 67, 95, 126, 133, 142, 143 influence, 3, 7, 18, 43, 142 Ingarden, Roman, 26, 48n25, 65, 70n19, 71–90, 92n2, 93n5, 93n8, 93n15, 93n18, 97–101, 144, 146 inspiration, x, xi, xiv, 1, 2, 3–7, 18, 53, 95, 107, 141, 142 instinct, 2, 10, 14, 18 institutional theory, 24–25, 83 intentionality, x, xi, xiv, xvi, 26–32, 42, 64, 68, 75, 81, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 108, 111, 117, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145, 146 Jackson, Michael, 3, 6, 12, 13, 14, 112, 138–139 James, William, 37, 59 judgment, aesthetic, 44, 95–113; hermeneutic criteria of, 101–113; structural criteria of, 97–101 Jung, Carl, 111 Kant, Immanuel, 32 Klee, Paul, 102, 138 Koch, Christof, 125 Kushner, Tony, 3 Lennon, John, 2, 9, 105 Leonardo da Vinci, 107 Lipsyte, Sam, 108

Marden, Brice, 108 materialism, 27, 122, 124, 142 Matisse, Henri, 114n41 Maugham, W. Somerset, 12, 20n20, 21n33 McCarthy, Alicia, 109 McFarland, Sean, 107 McInerney, Jay, 110 McLachlan, Sarah, 108 Meinong, Alexius, 94n24 Melendez, Steven, 107 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 35, 37 metaphysics, 30, 122–125 Michelangelo, ix, 13 mind, 118, 125, 127 Molella, Arthur, 111 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, xiii Mucha, Reinhard, 111, 114n23 mystery, ix, x, xvi, 1, 2–3, 3, 18, 23, 111–113, 118, 140, 146 Neuwirth, Bob, 102, 107 Newton, Isaac, 8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xv, 17, 102, 111, 119 noticing, 13, 18, 26, 42, 103, 104, 107, 108, 117, 128, 140, 141 novelty, 104–106, 146 openness, 17 organic, intentionality as, xi, 65, 125 organisms, 63, 67, 69n16 Origen, 48n24 O’Riordan, Dolores, 15 Owens, Joseph, 63, 94n37 Page, Jimmy, 2, 3, 11, 16, 110, 111 Pappas, Nickolas, 69n8 participation, xv, 32–37, 38, 40, 43, 47n17, 55, 57, 60, 61, 67, 79, 90, 111, 126, 133, 142, 143 Peart, Neil, 12, 137–138 Peirce, C. S., 37 phenomenology, 26, 32, 71, 78, 94n20, 125, 135n12 plagiarism, 4–5, 8, 10, 105–106 Planck, Max, 122 Plato, x, xiv, 1, 18, 33–37, 43, 44, 47n16, 47n17, 48n24, 51–57, 61, 66–67, 68n2,

Index 95, 133, 142, 143 play, 16–19, 38–42, 44, 45, 110–111, 111, 140, 142, 143, 146 Pollock, Jackson, 109 polyphonic harmony, 76, 92, 100, 145, 146 positivism, 29, 46n10 potentiality, 44, 83, 86, 110 psychology, 33, 36, 44, 118, 125–128 realism, 73, 74, 125 reductionism, 46n9, 70n18 Reinach, Adolf, 78 Rich, Buddy, 16, 38 Ricoeur, Paul, 7, 111 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 49n32 Robb, Graham, 6 Salemi, Joseph, 109 Satriani, Joe, 14, 21n29 Saunders, George, 110 Schrage, Michael, 111 Schütte, Thomas, 111 Schutz, Dana, 109 Seeger, Charles, 4 Seeger, Pete, 4 Shelley, Mary, 3 Shore, Stephen, 103–104, 107 sincerity, 15, 19 sociology, 118, 128–131 speaking, art as, x, 8, 14–16, 19, 102–104, 104, 113, 129, 130, 141, 142, 146

155

Spiegelberg, Herbert, 65, 70n17 Springsteen, Bruce, 2, 10, 13, 16, 17, 20n12, 130 Stapp, Henry, 123–124, 125 stratified formation, 75, 77, 84, 86, 87, 91–92, 98, 145, 146 Stravinsky, Igor, 7, 10 Stróżewski, Władysław, 74, 91 structural identity, ix, x, xv, 83, 92, 140 subject and object, 27, 38, 39, 43, 137 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 13, 20n20 technique, 51, 53, 95, 98, 100, 108 Tolstoy, Leo, 40, 55, 104 tradition, 6, 8, 18, 106, 108, 132, 133, 139 Travers, Pamela, 2 truth, 13, 14, 15, 19, 34, 56, 102, 130, 132, 142 Turnage, Mark-Anthony, 107 Twain, Mark, xii–xiii, 11, 16, 105, 109 variation, 8–10, 18, 106, 108, 138, 139, 142 Vaughan, Christopher, 111 Vogel, Joseph, 12, 20n11 Whitehead, Alfred North, 122, 124, 134n2 work, 3–7, 16, 17, 18, 25, 107, 108, 109, 142, 146 Zappa, Frank, 10, 20n5

About the Authors

Jeff Mitscherling is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario, Canada). He is the author of numerous books, including Aesthetic Genesis (2009); The Image of a Second Sun: Plato on Poetry, Rhetoric, and the Techne of Mimesis (2009); Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics (1997); and co-author of The Author’s Intention (2004). He has authored many articles in aesthetics, classical philology and philosophy, hermeneutics, the history of philosophy, and phenomenology. Paul Fairfield is professor of philosophy at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada). He is the author, among other works, of Teachability and Learnability (2016), Death: A Philosophical Inquiry (2014), and Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted (2011). He is also editor or coeditor of several anthologies, including Relational Hermeneutics (2018) and Hermeneutics and Phenomenology (2018). His writings cover a variety of themes in philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, and pragmatism.

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