Sensibility and the Sublime 9783110320381, 9783110320091

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David Weissman Sensibility and the Sublime

For my wife.

David Weissman

Sensibility and the Sublime

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2012 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-161-0 2012 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by CPI buch bücher.de

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Brian Martine for his comments on this book’s manuscript, and to Katherine, my wife and editor, for ideas and examples I know only because of her.

Introduction Many arts flourish, yet studies of aesthetics are fragmentary and diffuse.1 The dearth of systematic works is evidence of a scorned history: aesthetics is still hobbled by the emotivist charge that its values express feelings, never cognition. It suffers, too, from assaults—on beauty, form, representation, significance, and finesse—that demoralize aesthetics from within. Plato described beauty as the zenith of perfection, though no one has identified its essential features. Unable to specify a perfection that might be realized everywhere, aestheticians are skeptical that beauty is univocal or that achieving beauty is obligatory anywhere. Form was a universal point of reference until action painting, stream of consciousness literature, and aleatoric music made it seem archaic. Many plays and novels have plots, buildings are designed; yet respect for form is a preference, not an artistic duty. Painters favor abstraction because photography stripped representational art of its principal role and because our secular ethos prefers decoration to mythic stories and metaphors. Brutality trumps finesse: New York’s Metropolitan Museum once featured Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. There is also this deeper wound: contemporary aesthetics emphasizes criticism and the history and philosophy of art while neglecting the pleasure, insight, and cultivation on which they depend. Dominated by an array of topics— expression, abstraction, and ontology; tradition, styles, and craft— aesthetics loses focus despite having a natural center: criticism and the arts are unified by the sensibility of those who make or respond to art. Sensibility is a power for differentiating and responding selectively to inputs; it registers body’s internal states while mediating all our engagements with other things. Yet sensibility is usually construed narrowly as preference or taste: one prefers the oboe to the oud, Michelangelo to Miró. My use of the word is broader. Every material entity, living or not, is reactive: each resonates like a tuning fork when struck. Living things (and some machines) do more: sensibility in them is receptivity and response. Drivers stop and go as lights turn red or green; experienced cooks survey a pantry’s resources before creating something distinctive. 1

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Scribner’s, 1896), pp. 3-4; Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1981), p. 11.

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These two aspects of sensibility—receptivity and response—are fundamental. Receptivity is mind’s capacity for qualification: the qualifiers are visceral changes, the sensory data caused by encounters with other people or things, and the thinking thereby provoked. We often suppose that receptivity is only passive, though activity is implied by sensibility’s role as a filter. Some settings are fixed (one is color-blind); others express a current interest or distraction: “Say it again, please: I wasn’t listening.” That response is ambiguous: does it imply that data were not received or that they were received but unrecognized? An altered focus sometimes closes filters that could have made the data accessible to higher-order processing. Sensibility’s active side is more prominent as we follow its trajectory beyond reception to recognition and response. Sherlock Holmes recognized the significance of features that others ignored; his inferences and hypotheses were as good as his observations. Sensibility in him was an array of skills for responding selectively to circumstances. It has that role in every living thing: sensibility is the resonant—more or less educable—interface between bodies and the states of affairs to which they respond. One puts the same questions to Holmes, Cezanne, or Babe Ruth: what were your impressions, how did you construe them, what did you do? Sensibility is the individual signature expressing our disparate answers: some understand or create, others intervene. Is sensibility identical to consciousness and self-consciousness? Both are characteristic—someone knocked out doesn’t notice or respond to sensory inputs—yet sensibility is more than either or both. Consciousness is critical to focus, self-awareness inhibits and appraises, but neither is required for sensibility’s activation: people incorporate street noise into their dreams. Sensibility, like an iceberg, is mostly submerged. Take a walk while groping for an idea; notice how often it appears unannounced when attention is dominated by other things. Or see the responses of people who avoid certain others because of unavowed jealousy or those whose actions are directed by a habit or plan unconsciously formulated. You often behave in this systematic way, someone remarks; I hadn’t realized, you say. Behaviorists argue that the notion of a directing but unconscious idea is constructed after the fact when an organizing form is inferred, then wrongly described as an unconscious plan. The inference, they say, is groundless but also unnecessary: games have constraining rules and

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specific trajectories but no directing plan; like most lives, their outcomes are adventitious. This gloss is surely false to many human projects. Wanting to be a dentist, one goes to dental school; the aim is often out of conscious sight, though foresight is apparent in the choice of courses and companions. Persistence is a clue: frustrate choices critical to someone’s aims and see the resistance. Some novels and paintings—Jackson Pollock’s, for example— exhibit directing forms that were likely conjured, applied, and revised in the course of making them. This isn’t strange: many things are done with an aim but without a rigid plan for achieving it. C. S. Peirce spoke of “leading principles” or “ideas.”2 These are schemas that direct thought or action with or without explicit formulation or awareness. Our submission to them, between rapture and control, is evidence of sensibility’s deep rhythms and organizing forms. Artists trust this unconscious direction and control because they see its efficacy. Perceivers reading a book for the first time don’t know its outcome, though they anticipate its conclusion because sensibility is informed by schemas learned when other books were read. Each sensibility is educated to specificity after beginning as a determinable mental state: born with the capacity to speak any language, one learns English or Dutch. This use of sensibility is dispositional, not structural: it implies reactivity without indicating the mechanics of response. There will be a day when physiology maps this structure. Just now, we argue, like Aristotle, from activity to capacitating “faculties.”3 He was baffled by the structural bases for mental activity; like him, we proceed by telling what mind does, not how the brain does it. Knowing little or nothing about the material basis for tastes and skills, we distinguish good from ordinary cooks by the work they do. The aspects of sensibility important to aesthetics are equally opaque: we consider works created and responses to them, not the empowered structures, the bodies and brains, of people who make art or enjoy it. Aesthetic theory is contentious because sensibility’s role is construed differently by the three contrary hypotheses that dominate 2

C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. i-vi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935, 1936), vol. v, paras. 5.365-5.369, pp. 226-229. 3 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1045b28-1049b38, pp. 820-828.

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aesthetic theory. Objectivism (classicism) is the view that aesthetic qualities inhere in things themselves. Beauty is said to be a primary property or one that is secondary because consequent on properties such as the proportion and scale of things: Greek temples, for example.. Sensibility is a bystander if objectivism is true: we learn to see things as they are. Subjectivism (romanticism) urges that art be considered from the standpoint of its perceivers. Two versions dominate. One, reminiscent of Protagoras,4 argues that art is good or bad because of its effects on the imagination or emotions of those perceiving it. But this is implausible, given that anything may provoke us: why not see beauty in an abattoir? The alternative view, subjectivism with an objective turn, was proposed by Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood.5 They argued that knowing a work’s inspiring idea is the necessary and sufficient condition for aesthetic appreciation: a song or sonata is merely the platform from which imagination leaps when perceivers intuit an artist’s creative intention. Yet observers have only paintings or poems as evidence of ideas that inspired their makers. The hope of discerning those motivating ideas is confounded because any number of unrecoverable inspirations might have impelled a work, because artists often create as they go without a formulated or formulable idea to direct them, and because artists long dead can’t explain themselves. A work and its inspiring idea do sometimes coalesce: a portrait may be a good representation of its subject. But most viewers don’t care that the painting is photographic: they look for depth and revelation in the portrait without caring that it resembles its subject to some degree. It resonates in them, whatever the artist’s intention. The third—relational—alternative binds subjects to objects: it reduces a perceiver’s interpretive freedom by emphasizing sensibility’s link to works thought or perceived. It alleges that the experience of beauty is a perceptual, cognitive, or emotional response to a thing’s properties: temples are not beautiful in themselves, though one perceives them as beautiful because of their proportion and scale. This third 4

Protagoras, The Presocratic Philosophers, eds. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 411. 5 Benedetto Croce, Guide to Aesthetics, trans. Patrick Romanell (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 8-9; R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 125-152.

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hypothesis applies Locke’s theory of secondary properties to aesthetic experience:6 things are not red, blue, or beautiful in themselves, though they may be perceived as one or the other because light irradiates the object and eye. Objectivism errs because things sometimes seen as beautiful often seem ordinary. Sensibility is the decisive variable if beauty comes and goes though the properties of things perceived are unchanged: wake up to the Parthenon every day and you sometimes fail to see it as beautiful. Could it be true that sensibility is temporarily blind to a property that endures, whether or not perceived? That is possible, though objectivism also fails in other ways: it doesn’t supply a unitary scale for ranking the diversity of things said to be beautiful (music, sculpture, and fog); it can’t resolve the competing appraisals of parents disputing the relative beauty of their children; it fails to cite beauty’s constituent properties or the family resemblance that binds its disparate expressions. Subjectivism errs because the properties of things are incidental if aesthetic experience is self-generated. Why cherish art’s craft and style if anything can excite us; why require that aesthetic objects be perceived or even that they exist if imagination is sufficient to excite us? Only the relational view is adequate to aesthetic experience because it aligns sensibility to things thought or perceived. Locke’s formulation restores aesthesis to the core of aesthetic experience: it makes sensibility the complement to properties that excite illumination, pleasure, or dismay. For nothing has aesthetic value, nothing is beautiful or ugly, terrifying or appeasing, if it is not or cannot be subject to appraising thought or perception. People tone-deaf don’t hear music as beautiful, but neither do those who hear well but haven’t listened. Educating sensibility helps the second, not the first. This is not the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder irrespective of things thought or perceived. It affirms that aesthetics is unalterably grounded in these coupled terms: sensibility and things to which it responds. In aesthetics, if nowhere else, esse (to be an object of aesthetic appreciation) est percipi. The relational view implies balance and reciprocity in the relation of artists and perceivers. It affirms that cooks have no vocation in the 6

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vols. 1-2, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 179-180.

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absence of people nourished and pleased by their work, but also that there is no experience of beauty, nature apart, without the artists whose works provoke it. Artists create the things to which perceivers respond, but this responsibility entails its complement: perceivers are obliged to align their sensibilities to the things artists make. Cultivation is a discipline. An alien cuisine is a mystery until we recognize its ingredients, tastes, and the craft of those making it. Each side provokes and appraises the other: is an idea’s promise fully exploited by the craft deployed to express it; am I qualified to perceive its virtues and faults? Preparation bridges the gap between the two sides, though my emphasis on cultivation seems excessive when art and its appraisal are often the effects of repetition, not rumination. “Don’t think, just dance,” was Balanchine’s rule; “-I like (or dislike) it (always)” is a personal bias. Habituation bypasses the intra-psychic space where judgment is cultivated and satisfied, though Balanchine’s aim was different and appropriate. He worried that reflection would make his dancers stumble: steps are in the muscles, not the head. Balanchine was a provocateur: he wouldn’t have advised spectators not to think. The relational view is faulted for planting one foot in a black hole. For what can we know of sensibility beyond the fact that it registers something seen or heard by saying “I like it” or not? Better to attend to things provoking us: how do they express a familiar style in a novel or interesting way; do they integrate styles or break with those established; are they well-made? Monroe Beardsley was skeptical that we learn anything relevant to philosophic aesthetics by giving parity to the psychology of artists or perceivers: [I]t is, I think, useful to make a distinction between psychological aesthetics, which deals with questions about the causes and effects of works of art, and philosophical aesthetics, which deals with questions about the meaning and truth of critical statements….[W]e shall see that we cannot ignore psychology; its data and conclusions will bear upon ours at many points. For example, when we consider the logic of evaluation, we are led to ask about the nature of aesthetic experience and this is a psychological question. Where the psychological data are as yet

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too spare to answer the question decisively, we can at least analyze the question and formulate it as clearly as possible.7 Knowledge of intra-psychic states is troublesome but not in a way that eludes understanding. A pianist pours information into a piano by pressing its keys; the piano responds with sound. The pianist correlates to things perceived; the piano is the surrogate for minds. But minds are opaque; pianos are mechanical devices: the quality of their sound is the function of their design, manufacture, tuning, and voicing. The same piano, variously tuned and voiced, registers a pianist’s input by making different sounds. So do perceivers see and hear differently because of temperaments and tastes differently formed. Beardsley worries that perceivers may respond to a work while knowing too little of the properties for which they should be looking or listening: If value is not a quality of perceptual objects, like their redness or grandeur, then it must be a relation, and consist in someone’s taking a certain attitude toward the object. To put it in a familiar, though casual way, it is not liked because it is good, but good because it is liked…. “X has value” means “Someone likes X.” This gives us a definition of “value,” but not of “aesthetic value.” To obtain the latter, we would need to distinguish first, a certain kind of liking, or a liking in a certain way, which might be called “aesthetic liking.”8 This distinction—liking versus aesthetic liking—is accommodated by agreeing that perceivers vary in respect to aesthetic cultivation: they are more or less familiar with a genre, its styles and standards. Beardsley reserves “aesthetic liking” for people educated in a domain: their understanding, feelings, and associations are appropriate to the works seen or heard. I infer that the relational view is Beardsley’=s point of 7 8

Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 7. Ibid., p. 513.

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reference when “aesthetic liking”—educated taste—has made sensibility respectable.9 This, the relational theory, is also my point of reference. Sensibility, interiority, and selfhood are three words with a single referent but different emphases. Sensibility is a distinctive resonance (raw or cultivated)—expressing one’s responses (perceptual, cognitive, affective, or active) to things engaged. Interiority presupposes each person’s access to sensibility’s qualifications; its essence is the ruminative power for inspecting, appraising, and enjoying them. Selfhood is the developmental achievement of a sensibility that acquires responsibility for its choices, judgments, and actions. Others know us by way of our distinctive bodies, attitudes and behaviors. We know ourselves as resonant centers having values, aims, skills, and points of view. Sensibility and its cultivation are monadic: one is is affected and sometimes transformed in ways peculiar to oneself. What is perceived; how does it feel; what’s to be done? These are the positional, perspectival questions of a resonating sensibility. People applaud after an affecting concert, but readers enthralled by a novel or poem are often mute and composed. Insistent behaviorists may regard their silence as evidence that receptivity and judgment have no effects: readers don’t share those doubts. Sex, food, and wine arouse us, too, but artistic experience is deeper and more abiding because it pairs feeling to understanding. Selfhood is illuminated, intensified, and self-affirming: I freely choose the materials that gratify me; I educate myself to comprehend them; I defer to their power while feeling their effects. I am most alive when enjoying them, but this is my private self. Others may share my tastes but this intensification is known first and only to me. High culture seemed frivolous to people dominated by the frontier; early Americans sneered at European refinement. John Dewey, born in 1859, was their conscience. He knew rough living and understood that “consummatory” moments relieve its tedium and austerity,10 yet his acknowledgment seems grudging: it defers to art’s effects while slighting the autonomy and complexity of intra-psychic life. Dewey

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“X has aesthetic value” means “X has the capacity to produce an aesthetic experience of greater magnitude (such experience having more value) than that produced by Y.”’ Ibid., p. 531. This is Beardsley’s “instrumentalist definition” of aesthetic value. 10 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980), p. 41.

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often seemed to imply that we should be doing something useful while enjoying ourselves, though people mesmerized by reading or listening don’t want that distraction. The inner me is Descartes’ cogito deepened by all that is unconscious when formed by my culture, education, and genes. Choices reveal my attitudes and tastes, but this is a machine with a well-furnished inside; it perceives, thinks, and feels. Descartes emphasized its resolute interiority: it “doubts… denies…refuses.”11 Sensibility anchors the three-way dynamic of aesthesis, criticism, and the history and philosophy of art. It inspired Protagoras: man, he said, is the measure of all that is that it is and of all that is not that it is not. This claim, however false of reality, is true of aesthesis: I may be mistaken about the effectiveness of something that looks good, but not about the fact that it looks good to me. The history and philosophy of art covers disputed topics (beauty, expression, and ontology, for example) and the histories, styles and crafts of the several arts. These include music, poetry, painting, drama, literature, architecture, sculpture, and dance. The list is provisional: film and electronic arts are recent additions. The history and philosophy of art reports the interplay of technique with changing tastes and styles. One or the other takes the lead in setting standards for appraisal: harmony was essential in music, perspective was a dominant value in painting until sensibility was attuned to dissonance and nonfigurative art. Foucault’s histories of social organization invite equivalent narratives of evolving tastes, styles, and techniques: every art should have its Gombrich or Grove. Commentary is often restricted to descriptions of style and craft, but its reports (gallery catalogues for art sold at auction, for example) are indifferent to the aims of criticism: Ming vases are valuable whatever their appearance, though sensibility, not markets, is the arbiter of aesthetic value. Criticism includes interpretation (what does it mean?), history (which styles does it embody?), and appraisal (is it good or bad, and why?). It estimates artistic merit on the basis of sensibility’s effects (what is discerned; how it looks or sounds). Art would have no history,

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René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in Discourse on Method and Mediations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 66.

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there would be no critics, if there were no sensibilities able to make or perceive it. Sensibility was the principal content for aesthetics from Shaftesbury, Hutchinson, and Baumgarten to Hume and Kant. It was eclipsed by Hegel’s emphasis on the history and criticism of the “fine arts.”12 He emphasized intuition’s clear and distinct perception of the ideas art embodies: look past an idea’s material expression to see its effulgent beauty. This Platonizing aim deflates the arts by rescuing instantiated ideas from their materialized (hence obscure and imperfect) expressions; it celebrates Reason at cost to sensibility. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit13 describes the trajectory of universal reason as it supersedes finite sensibilities. They have biases and distortions explained by physiology and their individual developmental histories. But like knows like; ideas abstracted from their material expressions are, like nous, eternal. This dream is more grand than plausible: there are no works of art without people able to make them; there is no criticism without the resonant interiority—the cultivated sensibility—of the finite perceivers who appraise their work. Taste is sensibility made personal and selective. It develops and evolves when exposure and discrimination educate judgment. Appraisal implies a double motion, from outside to inside, then inside to out: we see a painting before judging it. An educated sensibility is also morally pertinent: I do justice to myself, at no cost to others, by discovering things that please me; I benefit others if my choices are examples to them, though my efficacy is minor compared to that of artists who teach us how to think and perceive. Their interiority—aesthesis, imagination, taste, judgment and craft—is turned inside out as it infuses popular culture and social identity. There are many artists and disparate tastes. Popular democracies construe diversity as the only legitimate measure of taste: let a hundred flowers bloom. No one doubts that artistic imagination and craft vary among cultures, and that no sensibility in any culture is likely educated in all its arts. Yet diversity isn’t evidence that the freedom to judge is the same as having good judgment. Why should the arts be exempt from 12

See G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1994). 13 See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. George Lichtheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

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educated appraisal when every other craft invites it? Budweiser isn’t Haut-Brion. Educated sensibilities know the difference. My teachers in writing this book—George Santayana (Sense of Beauty, 1896), Dewitt Parker (Principles of Aesthetics, 1920, and Analysis of Art, 1926), John Dewey (Art as Experience, 1934), and Suzanne Langer (Feeling and Form, 1953)—were the ornaments of a time lost in fog, a time when philosophy was less fractured, more systematic. Their writing was self-assured: serious music, painting, and literature didn’t need justification; there was esteem aplenty for educated tastes. They wouldn’t have imagined that this singular human power could be diminished or ignored, though it currently suffers both assaults. Science construes it as a place marker for information that physiology can’t yet decipher; medicine sees a vulnerability ripe for pathology. Popular culture suspects that nothing critical is lost if interiority shrivels under the pressure of electronic media or the desire for celebrity. My aim is categorial and schematic. Aesthetic experience structures emotion while forming cognition and shaping desire. We rediscover—because we can’t ignore—the resonant membrane that mediates our every relation to other people and things. Hence this book’s focus: what does sensibility show of itself in experiences of every sort, but especially those provoked when art is made and enjoyed?

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Chapter One Sensibility 1. Two perspectives Every plausible account of human experience acknowledges two perspectives: we live amidst other people and things, and within ourselves. Philosophy sometimes ignores one or the other standpoint because of stubbornly exclusive assumptions. One is the Cartesian emphasis on mind’s interiority and self-sufficiency.14 Peirce affirmed its contrary: “We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts.”15 An appropriate description of sensibility requires that we consider, then integrate, these contraries. Two figures represent them. B B A A A=Awareness X=Content of awareness B=Self-awareness Figure 1: A solitary mind, with awareness, content, and self-awareness. This figure represents an autonomous mind turned on itself. X signifies perceptual or ideational content for first-order awareness, A. B is second14

Descartes, Meditations, pp. 63-70. Peirce, “Some consequences of four incapacities,” Collected Papers, vol. v, para. 5.206, p. 158. 15

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order, self-awareness. Descartes supposed that A and B are mutually conditioning. Lower-order awareness enables second-order awareness by supplying its content (A and X); minds that are neither self-aware nor capable of self-inspection are incapable of first-order awareness. Descartes affirmed this second point—B is a necessary condition for A— because he was concerned to secure A’s existence. Anticipating Berkeley’s notion that esse est percipi, he supposed that nothing exists if there is neither confirming perception of its existence nor a capacity for perceiving available evidence of its existence. Self-awareness, too, is subject to this condition. It satisfies the requirement—it is selfconfirming—because reflexive: B is aware of itself while aware of A. Descartes’ first Meditation implies the distinction between knowledge claims (necessarily true because the possibility of error is eliminated) and opinions (less than knowledge because fallible). Necessity is guaranteed if claims are true logically (because tautological) or because the matters known stand directly before inspecting minds. A (awareness of content) and B (self-awareness) satisfy this second condition: there is no gap between awareness and its object, no place for error because the object of awareness is just the mind itself. B reflects on A when A is accessible to B without error or distortion because A and B are the acts of a mind that inspects itself while inspecting whatever content qualifies it. Descartes’ epistemological aim is incidental here. Figure 1 is pertinent because the sensibility it represents comprises A’s resonance to content and B’s awareness of A. Resonance is usefully vague: it signifies A’s receptivity to perceptual, emotional, or ideational content and B’s awareness and appraisal of A and its content. The Figure’s relevance is balanced by questions for which Descartes supplied inconclusive answers: What does mind know of itself; is all of it exposed to inference or self-perception? Is B the mere observer of first-order receptivity or is it responsible for using rules or ideas to differentiate and organize the data A receives? What part of A’s and B’s content is acquired from extra-mental sources? Descartes’ answers invoked God as guarantor of his clear and distinct ideas. Figure 2 is a response to Kant’s idealist successors when they argued, implausibly, that imagination supplies all the content of experience. It represents a mind constructing a stable map of the ambient

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world while responding to successive interactions with other people or things.

A

B

A=Reality B=Mind’s model of reality =Mind integrating new information into its model of reality =Information = Expectation Figure 2: A mind constructing and updating its model of the ambient world. Peirce’s emphatic realism expresses his aversion to the idea that esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. He proposed instead that we infer from sensory effects to their possible or likely extra-mental causes. Figure 2 represents a mind that integrates sensory data while testing its hypotheses and plans in the near-world. Perceiving smoke, inferring fire, we deduce that fire would be visible, were the hypothesis true. Looking for the evidence (Peirce’s version of induction16), we confirm, fail to confirm, or falsify the surmise. Peirce’s contention—there is nothing in mind that doesn’t originate outside it—is ambiguous and incomplete. Is mind’s model of reality constructed from information perceived and successively 16

Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. v., para. 5.145, p. 90.

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modified or is it an a priori framework used to construe things perceived? (A list of working telephone numbers is assembled piecemeal, with day-to-day erasures and new entries; a city street plan is the prescribed context where buildings are constructed, dismantled, or remade.) Peirce’s reference to the “internal world” is vague: it ignores the beliefs, desires, and attitudes that mediate reality-testing by warping our engagements with other things. His formula lacks the insight of Dewey’s “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” hence the meanings, initiatives, idiosyncrasies, and inventions that mediate stimulus and response.17 Flaunting its Kantian universality, his model requires the addition of particularizing attitudes and interests. This coupling—Descartes and Peirce—fixes the boundaries for the task at hand: how shall we describe minds that are responsive to, but partly decoupled from their circumstances? The Cartesian model makes autonomy emphatic; Peirce emphasized mind’s accommodation to a world it perpetually tracks. Neither is sufficient because mind addresses the ambient world in ways that satisfy both sides. Failures of accommodation are extinguished because repeated errors are punished. Yet there is a measure of choice: how and where shall we engage this or that, to what effect? Mapping circumstances in order to address them on our terms, we cultivate perceptual and intellectual skills appropriate to our context and aims. Every material thing, living or not, is reactive. All respond to things affecting them, but animals and some machines do more: sensibility in them is a power for mapping their circumstances while calculating responses that are more or less inventive. Responses are sometimes mechanical and generic (answering a door bell), though others, like those of improvising musicians, are spontaneous and novel. Human sensibility is discriminating receptivity and nuanced response. Experimental physicists and painters have more of both: their imaginations are richer, their discriminations are finer. Everyone has sensibility; they are connoisseurs.

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John Dewey, “"The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," Psychological Review 3 (1896), pp. 357-370. Peirce’s “Some consequences of four incapacities” was published in 1893.

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2. Semantics Sensibility is a global term signifying both the several ways that humans are aroused (endogenously or by other things) and the responding faculties (perception, cognition, appetite, or emotion). The word is ambiguous in three principal ways. First is the difference between capacities and occurrences. The is of response presupposes the can of responsive. Second are uses that imply the reactivity common to things of every sort, living or inert (ants or atoms): all respond to their interactions with others. The reactivity of living things is distinctive because accommodations to circumstances would be ineffective if, for example, qualifications to human sensibility were not distinguished and appraised (when crossing a street, for example). Each of us is, metaphorically, a force field: sensibility warps both the character of data qualifying the field and the acts or intentions issuing from it. Third is the idea that sensibility implies differential skills: seeing an opportunity, knowing what to do, one seizes it. This is sensibility in the guise of the shark or entrepreneur, but also in the habits of anyone well-taught: sensible to the rules of English grammar, one speaks correctly; sensitive to the weight and balance of a brush, one paints. Sensitivity and sensibility are complementary when sensitivity is a measure of the intensity required to affect sensibility. One hears people speaking, but not if they whisper; she plays with sensitivity, always displaying her sensibility. The terms are synonymous when each is used to signify skill or responsiveness across a range of actions or affects: there are, for example, people of similar sensitivity/sensibility. The meanings of aesthetic and aesthesis have diverged. Aesthesis signifies sensibility’s unelaborated qualifications: raw data—colors, sounds, or pain—that are noticed, differentiated, and perhaps recognized but not otherwise construed. If aesthesis were a word in common parlance, it would signify sensibility’s elementary qualifications. Its role in experience would be as fundamental to us as it was to Kant; Aesthetics would signify the study of perceptual data described as raw or naïve because free of interpretation:18 every datum would be appropriate content for aesthetic study because all qualify sensibility. But this is not

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Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1929), pp. 65-91; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), p. 229.

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our current usage: aesthetics is rooted in aesthesis, though their mutual bearing is ignored when aesthetics has come to signify the study of beauty in itself or things perceived as fine or beautiful. We recover the link that binds these notions by distinguishing aesthetic content from works of art. Aesthetic content signifies the data of aesthesis, data that qualify sensibility. Anything that does or could affect sensibility is a possible aesthetic object,19 including pots, pans, and the Rialto Bridge. Art signifies a subset of aesthetic objects. It includes everything made principally or only to embody a design or character imagined by its creator. (Haydn composed his music for an archduke, hence the qualification “principally or only.”) These semantic distinctions are materially consequential if aesthetic objects not intended as works of art are, nevertheless, enjoyed as if they were. Ordinary experience has harmonies and drama that are no less memorable for lacking a stage or proscenium: some truck cabs pulling six wheel trailers—huge, gleaming, and powerful—would do honor to any metal sculptor. 3. Sensibility’s functions Data surge through a body’s receptors, though few are integrated with impressions or ideas held in short-term memory because filters suppress most data incidental to an interest or need. Several incremental steps are implied when something is noticed and differentiated, then recognized as, say, red. First is reception: sensory organs register body’s own states or its contacts with other things. Next is the effect achieved when particular data are differentiated from the array of sensory information, hence noticed. Recognition occurs when a datum is perceived as sameagain: same color, same smell. Many data noticed and recognized are appraised; some are also named, hence identified. Data received and noticed are content for the unvarnished sensory experience signified by aesthesis, though this experience is neither raw nor naïve given that filters have suppressed data incidental to a current task. How could this be true—how could filters suppress some while letting others pass—if the data haven’t yet been recognized? Perhaps recognition occurs at two levels of processing: sensors search for data pertinent to our interests or needs; the data perceived are “raw” in the restricted sense that their 19

Beardsley, Aesthetics, pp. 44-45.

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utility isn’t confirmed until they have been noticed, differentiated, recognized, identified, and integrated into the interpretation or plan that currently organizes conscious experience. Recognition is usually unremarkable because there is no perceived difference between things currently perceived and remembered antecedents: all excite a same-again recognitional capacity.20 Responses are more complicated when instances of red are recognized, though they differ in shade or saturation from others resembled. For then recognition expresses sensibility’s capacity for generalization: an impression perceived as pink is enough like one perceived as scarlet for both to be classified as red. Generalization is one of sensibility’s five ampliative modes: extrapolation, analogy, construction, and integration (joining) are the other four. Sensibility extrapolates by filling a gap or extending a graded series of differences: Hume’s example—imagining a missing shade of blue—is an instance.21 We analogize when sensibility discerns that the structures or values of relationships in two domains are or seem isomorphic: red is to blue—loud to soft—as the timbres of trumpet and lute. Construction implies the design and assembly of a complex from its parts or elements: music, a building, or play, for example. Integration is the master amplifier. In painting, integration is the effect of balancing dominant shapes; in architecture, drama, or music, it is achieved by an organizing blueprint, plot, or theme. The other four modes are its more determinate expressions: textile designers analogize from botanical forms; architects extrapolate from Laugier’s forest hut.22 Integration may be associative and inductive, or prescriptive. Thinking associatively, we bind memories of things liked or feared. Thinking prescriptively, we impose a relational matrix across domains, some that encourage it, others where it seems alien: believing that democracy is virtuous in civil societies, we require its application in business, families, and schools. Any datum noticed and recognized, whether or not identified, is subject to these modes: each can be generalized (from scarlet or pink to red), extrapolated (from loud to louder), analogized (red to loud), constructed (red and oblong), and integrated (seeing and hearing a noisy 20

H. H. Price, Thinking and Experience (London, Hutchinson, 1953), pp. 136, 355. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 6. 22 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, trans. Wolfgang and Anni Hermann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977), pp. 11-12. 21

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fire truck). Sensibility’s cognitive powers are vastly extended by these heuristics: every theorist, artisan, artist, or diagnostician uses them to test hypotheses or plans. Newton generalized from observations of planetary motion; Einstein extrapolated to the velocity of light. Practical life without them—plugging a leak with chewing gum—would be grim. The ampliative modes are imagination’s engine; all its flexibility and creative power derives from them. Kant distinguished two kinds of imagination.23 Reproductive imagination makes experience coherent by integrating present data with those remembered because similar or often coupled. Productive imagination drives artistic creation while enabling perceivers to comprehend the things artists make. Artists lead perceivers by exposing possibilities that would otherwise be undisclosed. Witness mathematics, poetry, teenage jargon, and jazz: music and language are the exemplary vehicles for imaginative play. There are many possibilities left unexpressed by their current forms, though there may be none they couldn’t express given appropriate extensions to scales, syntax, or semantics. Perceivers, too, must have some degree of productive imagination when they discern distended figures or themes transposed. This is the convergence of artistic genius and the sensibilities they inform. Artists lead, we follow because we can discern and are often illuminated by the content and form of things they make. This convergence is crucial to the dialectic that joins artists to perceivers: they intimate or show a direction; we confirm their discovery, seek clarification, or resist the initiative. Perceivers want illumination; artists turn themselves inside out first to supply it, then to reconsider what they do in response to cogent appraisals. Each needs the other, yet Monroe Beardsley expresses an attitude common among aestheticians: I do not consider all the problems one can raise about art and artists as problems of aesthetics; I take as central the situation in which someone is confronted with a finished work, and is trying to understand it and to decide how good it is. He will encounter many problems if he reflects with persistence on what he is doing, but probably he need not inquire into the psychology of artistic

23

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 165.

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creation. The question, What makes the artist create? is a psychological question, in my view, not a philosophic question.24 This view is, perhaps, a consequence of Beardsley and Wimsatt’s cogent objections to the belief that perceivers may accurately infer an artist’s intention from his or her work.25 Or it implies an assumption widely shared in the mid-twentieth century: there is a logic of confirmation but no logic of discovery,26 hence little or nothing to learn from artists about the intention or meaning of their work. We know this attitude from Plato: bystanders understand a poem better than its author.27 Beardsley goes on to describe the work appropriate to aesthetics: “First we must distinguish between normative statements and nonnormative statements about works of art….A second distinction should be made between two kinds of non-normative statement, those that interpret and those that simply describe works of art.”28 There is no faulting these distinctions or Beardsley’s extraordinarily encyclopedic book, yet much of art’s vitality (and pleasure) is lost when its products are made to resemble butterflies chloroformed for analysis. Art is play, provocation, and response. Artists rouse us to experience unforeseen possibilities; we ask them to do more or do it better. New work is sometimes unintelligible; we regard it furtively until excitement civilizes novelty or appeases outrage. Beardsley reduces artists to the magicians responsible for Stonehenge: never knowing what they thought or intended, we admire the stones. An artist’s sources or intentions may not be apparent or recoverable, but several aspects of artistic creation make his or her work accessible to perceivers. Artistic sensibility expresses itself when craft enables the process that creates finished products. Craft is a differential power that correlates perception and imagination to the motor skills of drawing, sculpting, or writing and revising. Each work has content that expresses the ideas, feelings, style, and skills of its creator. Artists with a radical message or novel format risk oblivion if they can’t make their 24

Beardsley, Aesthetics, pp. 6-7. William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review, LIV (1946): pp. 468-488. 26 See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002). 27 Plato, Apology, Collected Dialogues, 22c, p. 8. 28 Beardsley, Aesthetics, p. 9. 25

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works comprehensible. Appraisal is the measure of craft, ideas, and their intelligibility: how well is something done (the measure of craft); is it good or bad, and why (the measure of ideas)? Artistic imagination usually exceeds the imaginative power of all but a few perceivers, yet artists dominated by their aims and ideas often lack the perspective required to appraise their work. Hence this mutual dependence: perceivers wait for artists to show them unsuspected possibilities; artists distrust perceivers’ judgments (however cultivated and well-intentioned) while having no better measure of their work. Self-conviction— Nietzsche’s tightrope walker29—is the bold response to shallow criticism, though artists who resist appraisal risk blind alleys and delusion. Two additional functions—consciousness and the process of generating ideas—are critical but mysterious. We expect focused attention—consciousness and, perhaps, self-awareness—from artists and their perceivers, though purpose and training enable skilled pianists to play without attending to successive notes or phrases. Too much conscious control would abort the flow of sound; efficacy requires that awareness be watchful but unfocused. Call this soft focus: it oversees the work at hand while reducing the distractions of people talking or coughing. There are degrees of unfocused awareness. Knitters talk among themselves, some meditate, but each seems called to attention if a stitch is dropped. Dancers say that steps are “in the muscles,” though the hard focus suppressed in performance is critical in preparation. How focused must consciousness be if action is to be effective? “When do I exist?” Descartes asks. “Only when thinking,” he answers. I don’t exist, this implies, unless conscious that I do, for my claim to existence requires sufficient supporting evidence, evidence supplied if I am self-aware. But this demand—perpetual self-conscious oversight—is too strong to account for many things done well: learning to walk a tightrope or ride a bicycle, for example. Part of the uncertainty is the effect of confusing consciousness with self-awareness. Hard focus is critical to threading a needle or learning many tasks, though its absence in the pianist or distracted driver is not equivalent to coma or sleep. Soft focus—consciousness without reflexivity—is often the only sort 29

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), pp. 12-20.

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required by many practical tasks: people deep in thought work with eyes half closed; they write or paint as ideas well up, unannounced. Consciousness is baffling, but not more than the difficulty of explaining the brain’s generation of its plans or ideas. We apply the ampliative modes when directing imagination and inquiry, but there is no inspectable evidence of what we do or how we do it. The behavioral evidence isn’t more revealing: imitation, practice, and habit explain why one boils water as others do; they don’t explain how imagination supplies variations when efficacy is threatened by the novelty of one’s circumstances or how we innovate when bored. Croce and Collingwood argued that perceiving a finished work enables us to intuit ideas that directed its creation. Portraits justify that inference, though little is known of the artist or context to explain more complicated works: buildings of many designs would have fit a site occupied by the one standing. Intuiting an artist’s intention is also precluded by obstacles or opportunities that exceeded the anticipation, intention, or control of the artist himself: one often alters course in the midst of a work because of unforeseen obstacles or insights. A novel may have been organized from the start by a coherent plan, but it’s equally possible that its author had only a sketchy idea as work began and no final idea until her book was all but done. The finished work may be tightly integrated, but there was no comprehensive directing idea that intuiting perceivers can rightly ascribe to its maker. Artists, this implies, couldn’t have helped Croce or Collingwood because they, like Plato’s poets and the rest of us, often can’t predict or explain what their ideas have been or will be. Is there a simple explanation for the incommunicability of an artist’s directing idea in situations where he or she has a well-formulated plan? Could it be the symptom of a linguistic deficiency: ideas direct planning and practice, though we often have no words adequate to the expression of complex plans and ideas. “I’m mailing a letter” has a matching idea, but there is no complex idea (simpler than the music, itself) adequate to a piano sonata. This realization frustrated Kant: how does the artist’s mind grasp its plans; how can artistic creation be so effective or artistic experience so lucid in the absence of words or concepts adequate to the work at hand?30 There are leading ideas that

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become more specific as a work evolves; perceivers discern the gestalt of a finished work, but there are no words or formulable concepts for complexities of either sort. We sometimes discern directing ideas in retrospect: for example, the incremental changes in French painting from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century. The remote outcome was unpredictable at the start, though hindsight makes apparently adventitious developments seem less capricious.31 Two issues seem elusive because they are mistakenly fused. There are usually no concepts or words that signify or prefigure ideas or designs as simple as the line drawing of a face, yet an artist doesn’t need a clear and distinct idea in order to draw the face. What explains coherence in the result if a comprehensive design hasn’t directed work from the start? The answer is all but explicit in the Critique of Judgment: “[I]f a thing is a natural product but yet we are to cognize it as possible only as a natural purpose, then it must have this character: it must relate to itself in such a way that it is both cause and effect of itself.”32 Human beings are forward sequencing machines: starting with an idea or plan, engaging other people or things, we revise the plan in ways consistent with an aim. The aim, too, may change, but we carve a trajectory through obstacles to a more or less desirable conclusion. The obstacles to practical life often defeat us. Art is more successful because two of its conditions are the isolation of effort and control of limited materials. Writers, composers, and painters have a free hand: given an outline, melody, or idea, they experiment—play—until work acquires an acceptable form. No single idea formulated before its completion does more than approximate the result. Construction doesn’t begin if a building’s design isn’t perfected and detailed in a blueprint, but the blueprint marks the culmination of creative experiment, not the expression of a prior intuition. There are, of course, exceptions: they occur, principally, when one copies a work carefully perceived and analyzed.

30

Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 18-38. One imagines a theological/epistemological dispute: Does the Absolute know the trajectory’s evolution in advance (Hegel), or does God, too, learn the outcome only as it happens (Whitehead)? 32 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 251. 31

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4. Emotion or cognition? Nineteenth-century aesthetics responded to the Hegelian cult of ideas with an equally stilted emphasis on feeling. This opposition persisted in twentieth-century positivism: it emphasized cognition and science but implied thought’s parity with feeling by affirming the autonomy of emotivism, its value theory. One might construe these gestures as another moment in the unresolved dialectic of reason and appetite, but there is another way to understand them: thought and emotion may have parallel courses. One is always thinking and always feeling, though the two can’t often persist without crossing or colliding. People working at tasks requiring similar cognitive skills are preoccupied with their different emotional histories; we nevertheless expect that they will suppress emotions that would interfere with work or business-like social relations. We’re surprised when self-control is breached, though we know the intensity of our feelings and keenly remember our lapses. For these parallel processes—emotion and cognition—are sometimes mutually affecting. That happens in families and friendship but also when making or enjoying art. One sees the elegance of furniture, an argument, or design, but enjoyment is cognitive; emotion barely flickers; feelings are roused when appetites are excited or fears provoked. Kandinsky’s late style challenges intellect but not emotion; his early work, more figurative and nostalgic, is especially affecting to people who imagine family origins in old Russia. Pity and terror33 are the effects when Shakespeare’s plays, Verdi’s operas, and many films twist these separate lines into knots. This entanglement troubles aesthetics because each term of the pair has a different focus or ground. Cognition discerns content and form; people perceiving the same thing have approximately the same information. Emotion is a personal response to information; works that amuse or trouble you have little or no effect on me. Scans confirm that emotion’s brain centers are always active. Yet particular works of art intensify activity in some people while others are unaffected. I see a beautiful house or altar piece and admire its design; your feelings are roused because this is your family home or the principal ornament of your church. Sensibility’s emotional responses are, therefore, always

33

Aristotle, Poetics, Basic Works, 1452b30, p. 1466.

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suspect: is one responding to the work at hand or to a personal meaning or memory? The opposition of reason and appetite was familiar to Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Freud. It is pertinent to aesthetics because aesthetic judgment implies the disinterest Kant emphasized: the power for appraising works for their qualities without regard for their utility or significance. Aesthetic appraisal is always vulnerable to the charge that one is expressing a bias rather than a judgment pertinent to a work’s qualities. A few critics argue that Andy Warhol, a pivotal character in the media culture of the 1960’s, was also a major artist. Is that response a measure of his artistic worth or the expression of a private interest to which his worth is incidental? There are many ways to evoke emotion, including birthday parties, fast cars, and hearing one’s national anthem. The feelings are collateral evidence for the worth of people or things valued in themselves. Art, too, may have extraneous aims (as religious art promotes belief), yet feeling’s link to cognition is firmer when emotion is focused by the work itself. Let art be the provocation: evoking feeling by stimulating intellect is often though not always a principal artistic aim. Consider cognition, then emotion, and finally the effect produced when they confirm one another. Cognition is ambiguous because of having two relevant senses: one pertinent to form and content, the other to significance. Reading a clock is only cognitive, though watches and clocks may also have meaning. I wear my father’s watch; it doesn’t work, but I wear it anyway: having it on my wrist reminds me of him. This is cognition as significance: information swathed in value, purpose, and feeling. One sees and recognizes many faces—all configured and distinguished by their form—but few are recognized as significant. People affected by religious architecture, art, or music may believe that their value derives principally from their significance: they intimate and share the grandeur of their god. Others may believe that art of every sort—even religious art—is appraised for its content and form, not for its significance. There seems to be no general truth about feeling’s relation to cognition when significance is discounted. Emotion is commonplace when listening to music, but why do people feel turned inside out when hearing a melody’s quiet resolution: why do they weep? One must be stone not to feel pity and terror as Rigoletto ends. Audiences explode:

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needing relief, they must. But why? The opera is a faithful representation of anguish and disaster, but its melodies are evocative without being representational. Why is representation important to any art if some art is evocative without it? Opera, drama, literature, and film are evocations of a time when representation was essential to art and its appreciation. Kant discounted music as a secondary art for want of it,34 though his persuasion didn’t survive the onset of photography. It liberated painterly imagination by making representation vestigial. Painted shapes splintered or deformed; paintings cohered because of immanent form, not because their coherence was founded in their accuracy as representations. Kant had argued that productive imagination subordinates reproductive imagination (memory):35 Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane36 is a manual inspired by Kant’s distinction: it prescribes the colors and shapes to be deployed and principles for combining them. Several paintings at a recent Kandinsky exhibition in Paris were an homage to him by fellow members of the Blue Rider group in Munich. Their diversity fractured taste and style while challenging the patience of viewers accustomed to representational painting. Each exhibited its maker’s compositional language: all were intelligible; none seemed evocative. Styles churn. Abstract styles are successively launched, sustained, and superseded. Occasional realists affirm that paintings anchored to something firmer than artistic imagination provoke feelings inaccessible to abstractions. Paintings by Beckmann, Kollwitz and Grosz, Lucian Freud, and Richter often have that effect. Others are sentimental, as if corrupted by the skepticism ingrained by decades when representation was made to seem reactive. We respond intellectually to representation’s political message—revive the style that made art significant—rather than emotionally to its content. This dialectic persists because there may be no single best style of abstract composition and because attitudes to representation vary among the arts. Music, though not opera, is evocative without being representational. The Long Island duck is a structure housing a store that sells products from the proprietor’s flock, though most buildings are

34 35 36

Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 203. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 142-143. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (New York: Dover, 1979).

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intelligible because of their geometry, not because their forms are iconic signs. Representation lingers as a more or less explicit expectation in painting, because vision is hard-wired to those parts of the brain appropriate to engaging things seen. Think of people rolling in their seats while seeing erotic films or screaming with anxiety at horror movies. Abstract art is cooler, inhibition is easier. But is it arresting merely because of having form, complexity, and surprise sufficient to maintain interest or does it compel understanding because it evokes some degree of feeling? The questions seem inane if we believe that everything is emotionally evocative. But this is moot; some emotions are endogenous. Persistent arousal isn’t evidence for the claim that encountering art (or anything else) is their cause: someone always hostile isn’t angry because of seeing Guernica. Yet feeling and thought are often mutually intensifying: provoked by hearing music I know, I am all the more aroused as I close my eyes to listen better. This effect varies: many things—scanning train schedules—usually has little or no emotional effect. Notice, too, that feelings, however vague or intense, relate to cognition in these opposed ways. Some, whether vague or intense, are loosely associated to things perceived and understood: one is excited by grand occasions (opera or the circus) irrespective of things seen or heard. Other feelings seem merged with cognition in moments of aesthetic illumination. One is ecstatic because infused with complex sounds one knows and adores, or pleasure is cooler but focused by elegant furniture or simple proofs. Brain scans confirm the surmise of Freudian theory that unconscious affect is often determining but penumbral: it shapes conscious experience while exposing little of itself. This surmise is epistemologically troubling because it posits unfelt feelings. Yet that coupling is not contradictory unless we suppose that emotions are essentially conscious, hence never unconscious. That assumption may be mistaken: feeling may be the modality of conscious emotions—what emotions seem to be—not the comprehensive perception of emotion in itself. Love, jealousy, and ambition may be persistent motivators when they are altogether unconscious. This inference—to the bulk of unconscious emotions—may explain one of art’s mysterious effects: one is suddenly calm in moments of aesthetic experience because art (music especially) has appeased emotions that were tumultuous but suppressed.

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The unconscious mechanics of our cognitive and emotional lives is also implied when the emotional intensity of our responses to art expresses their correlation to significant features cognized in practical life. There is, for example, the fact that abstract painting is so much less evocative than music. This may be the effect of hard-wired human responses to different media. Rothko’s color-field paintings are compelling, in part, because their oppositional character evokes the tension of colored shapes distinguished and opposed in the ambient world; the confetti-like patterns in Klee’s paintings resemble the visual complexity of nature and cities. Both are minimally representational: they provoke low-intensity expressions of emotions habitually linked to our encounters with things often perceived. Music is more evocative— despite seeming more abstract—because it resembles conversation: there is timbre, pace, and the steady sequencing of information. An obbligato passage on cello, oboe, or piano evokes speech while intimating a partner’s voice. One feels accordingly. Which is primary: cognition or feeling? The question is ambiguous because one might cite value or cause as the reason for ascribing primacy to one or the other. Causes have priority in respect to their effects by virtue of being their conditions. Yet effects have priority if their cause is the means to a valued effect: we exercise for health. Emotions often have aesthetic primacy because they are the valued effect: people read romantic novels for the sentiments incited; they go to horror films for the pleasure of shock and risk. Yet feelings are often secondary to one’s understanding of the matters perceived: Bach’s Two and Three Part Inventions are no less a cognitive pleasure for being short on expressive feeling. People often suppose that ascetic experience must be sterile; it does require a discipline most of us resist. Seeing the rapturous review of Gyorgy Ligeti’s piano concerto—diffuse and arid, it seems to me—I wonder if the reviewer is posturing. Having made little sense of the music while attending the same concert, I can’t judge. 5. Cultivation Cultivation is an adventure: no one knows all that he or she could do or be or enjoy. But cultivation seems prissy: call it education and there is quiet accord that sensibility is malleable and that we are better served when taste is judicious and informed.

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Most percepts and feelings come to awareness unbidden: distinguishing them requires no preparation and little training. But sensibility is educable. Learning tasks, a culture’s ways of doing them, its language and ideas, we become effective carpenters, parents, or artists. Or we don’t paint, write, or design, though we learn to perceive, compare, and appraise the works of those who do. Sensibilities of both sorts are familiar in every craft: many people go to restaurants where some cooks invent their recipes. Taste is cultivated preference. What do we like or deplore; how well can we specify properties or reasons that justify our responses? Elementary attractions—shadow or sunshine, red or blue—may be innate; a richer sensibility requires a range of data, inferences, and judgments that are made, considered, and revised. Enabling discrimination, inflecting emotion, education enlivens sensibility while making it articulate. Learning to read gives me access to possibilities unforeseen; the pleasures of poetry or fiction are the effects of deploying an ordinary skill in specialized domains. But I can’t read or learn if there are no books. Eighteenth-century German aestheticians said very little of music, despite its creation among them. Cultivation requires experience; lacking our opportunities to hear their music, those writers couldn’t cite or enjoy it. Dewey would have agreed with two of my assumptions: the world is encountered and appraised from the standpoint of an engaged selfeducating thinker-perceiver; the sensibility critical to aesthetic experience exploits habits, inclinations, and resources that are conditions for agency in any domain. Yet Dewey’s emphasis on practical life reduces selfhood to the switching mechanism that mediates inputs and the behaviors that exhibit one’s preferences. Nurtured on wants, shaped by the discipline of getting what I want, I measure my days by the rhythm of interests gratified or frustrated. Dewey acknowledged the psychic space where choice expresses freedom and learning, but his practical emphasis—even when construed as problem solving—has affinities to the homogenized mechanical impulses that Nietzsche ascribed to a socially programmed herd.37 Similarity is often normal and normative because people are constrained by similar needs, 37

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 35-36.

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circumstances, resources, and skills. Yet differences can’t be ignored because sensibilities vary like finger-prints. All are specific to an individual’s physiology, context, and education: each has preferences expressing his or her singular interiority. Variety doesn’t entail riotous difference because individual responses are shaped by common social and material denominators. Sensibility is, nevertheless, self-asserting. What does it want? Self-affirmation and the freedom expressed when the exercise of cultivated skills satisfies taste. Conscious sensibility is the domain of Descartes’ cogito: “I am, I exist is necessarily true each time…I mentally conceive it.” This is the epicenter of sensible interiority, the place of all that is urgent or merely present in conscious life. Yet thought’s freedom is vapid if there is nothing to think but mind itself: autonomous decoupled minds— sensibilities—risk emptiness and isolation if no other content is provided. Descartes responded that mathematical ideas are innate: each mind educates itself by resolving sensory data until it discerns their geometrical form. There may be some innate ideas—there are innate heuristics, reminiscent of Kant’s categories and schemas—but cultivation requires immersion in practices, tastes, and information that distinguish individual artists, styles, and cultures.38 Is cultivation the virtue—the indulgence—of people fecklessly wealthy? No: some people remain poor in order to avoid distractions that would deter their cultivation. And anyway, we wouldn’t condemn health if the rich were healthy. Cultivation is the power to do or make things or the ability to understand and enjoy them. Why is that a demerit for vanity rather than a personal strength? Compare two lives, both successful in worldly terms though one is insensible to all the arts while the other is privately enlivened by his knowledge of several. Whose life is richer? What does one do to acquire that private specificity and pleasure: shouldn’t we identify and teach it? 6. Appraisal People who know omelets distinguish the good and bad. Judgments in the arts are more tentative because a work’s style and complexity often provoke controversy that deters resolute appraisals. One may decline to 38

Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 709-749; dJoseph Margolis, On Aesthetics: an Unforgiving Introduction (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2009), pp. 132-137.

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judge because of insufficient knowledge though humility is uncommon when judging works of art, given the opinion that judgments of taste are indisputable. The issue is confused because this persuasion conflates the rightly claimed freedom to judge with the error of supposing that taste is a sufficient basis for the truth of one’s judgments. People don’t often make this mistake in other contexts. Imagine a team’s loyal fans: enthusiasm is boundless, yet they distinguish loyalty to a team that usually loses from esteem for its quality. People usually want to learn the standards appropriate to a domain before judging examples of its work. Burnt toast is obvious. Metronomic tempi and clumsy phrasing aren’t easily ignored when recognized. Taste explains one’s response to a work, though the judgments of naïve—uncultivated—taste aren’t reliable. Pertinent judgments require general information about craft and style plus the acuity that evolves with seeing, reading, or hearing numerous examples of an art. Aesthetic experience is a response to particularity: discern and compare the plasticity of forms, rhythms, and scales. Buildings of the same style may be much alike, but, if so, notice their differences. See the vernacular styles of other cities; repeat this exercise in the cities of other countries. The education is rigorous but informal: one looks, reads, or listens, comparing and contrasting the differences observed. Judgments may always be tentative but they gain plausibility when experience and memory are rich enough to justify them. One comes to know an art by learning its craft and styles. An established style has a range of variations that are cognitively and affectively desirable but, equally, every style embodies well-disguised seams of fragility. Knowing those vulnerabilities while pressing against them, one foresees innovations that intimate a style’s breakdown or revision. Compare people blind-sided by stylistic changes because of limited experience: one who enjoys the same breakfast every morning doesn’t imagine other pleasures and isn’t qualified to appraise other menus. Everyone suffers these blinkers in most domains: habituated to a style but unfamiliar with its limits, we are befuddled by innovations that portend its demise. Painting or photography, theatre or film: we familiarize ourselves with the new medium or style, apply criteria validated in the other domain or experiment with new criteria, then wait while maturing judgments and feelings take the measure of work that comes to be better known. Nonrepresentational art and dissonant music

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are evidence that we do adjust: historically conditioned but newly adapted, we learn to enjoy and appraise work that once seemed unintelligible. 7. Six axes Sensibility’s two modes—receptivity and response—are framed by six variables. Each variable may be construed as an axis susceptible to a range of variations. There are six axes: i. Sensibility’s qualifications vary between obscurity and clarity; ii. Each qualification is or may be construed as having causes or conditions that are internal or external to awareness; iii. Some affects, though not all, evoke associations; iv. Some qualifications, not all, provoke feelings; v. Each qualification is valued to some degree (positively or negatively) or none; vi. Some affects provoke activity, others do not: one is quiescent. i. Obscurity to clarity: Platonic philosophy wants clarity in everything: obscurity is a deficiency in ideas and reality, though comfort lacks transparency. Imagine someone home from work. Oozing tension and fatigue, submitting to warmth and ease, he settles into a comfortable chair. This is aesthesis—perception—at its baseline. Feeling is thick; well-being is visceral. Language and cognition—clarity—would reduce it. Percepts are clarified by turning up the light or sound, by using spectacles or a hearing aid. Ideas are clarified by inferences and definitions, theories by logical reconstructions and predictions. These are some principal qualifiers. The categorial difference between content and significance is also critical: more than apparel, a dress is a wedding gown. Clarity about either may say nothing of the other, hence the difficulty for psychoanalytic patients troubled by the significance—the emotional burden—of an idea or memory whose content seems clear. Some qualifications (dull feelings) have relatively fixed places on this axis. Others evolve through one or more cognitive steps: each is received; some are also noticed, recognized, and identified. Identification is achieved minimally by a name—comfort, for example— though obscurity persists because naming supplies only the first of the

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two elements described by Leibniz as “clarity and distinctness.”39 Clarity signifies differentiations secured indexically by naming or pointing. Distinctness signifies that one apprehends the character of the thing or things named: it requires description or direct perception of a thing’s constitutive properties. Kinesthetic states such as comfort are often distinguished but always obscure because their makeup is never distinct. This axis is widely acknowledged but often misconstrued by those who believe with Plato that comfort is the intimation of a quality obscurely perceived. His preference for the clarity of Ideas standing before the “mind’s eye” is the remote ancestor of our persuasion that propositional knowledge is superior to the obscurity of sensory experience: one is expressed in a well-formed public language or mathematical notation; the other is incommunicable because private and obscure. This derogation of sensory experience is disabling, given that most of our information about other things comes by way of perception. Can we—should we—make sensory experience more Platonically respectable than it is? There would be no disparity between a public language and private data if inspectable percepts or feelings were shown to embody a language-like structure. This would have two effects: data having this structure would be intrinsically clear; you wouldn’t have my impressions though you would know what I experience by seeing or hearing sentences in a language isomorphic with them. This idea of “deep grammar” derives from the “Table of Judgments” and “The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” in Kant’s first Critique40 and, in a form more logically rigorous, from the picture theory of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.41 Both imply that sensibility’s qualifications are clarifiable and communicable. (Their success would entail—as some lovers and psychoanalysts believe—that your grasp of our common language enables you to clarify the data of my experience better than I do.)

39

G. W. V. Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merril, 1965), pp. 3-10. 40 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 106-110, 180-187. 41 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), paras. 3.1-3.3, pp. 19-25, para. 4.014, p. 39.

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Thought is surely informed by language: we barely think if we can’t speak or write. The principal motive for this argument is, however, epistemological: sensory data and feelings are intelligible and communicable if they embody the structure of the language used to report or express them. These concerns are reasonable but suspect because reducing acquaintance to description42 ignores all those aspects of experience—percepts, gestalts, ideas, designs, feelings, moods, intentions, memories, and intimations—that are not essentially linguistic or propositional. Some ideas are formulable in linguistic terms; it doesn’t follow that all are linguistic when entertained. Music has a notation, though one recognizes themes and their development without being able to read it. I tell you while speaking by telephone that I’m hearing a cricket. You may imagine crickets as we speak but you aren’t hearing one as I am, and you wouldn’t have or know my audible sensation if we were sitting together listening to the same cricket with ears of equal acuity. Clarity is so much a philosophic imperative that we make a puzzle or pathology of its absence. Categorizing the data—using concepts and names to differentiate and organize them—is thought’s imperative: anything less is a mystifying failure. Remember Kant struggling to make cognitive sense of aesthetic experience in the absence of concepts (words or rules) in which to think or express complex natural phenomena or poetry’s complex ideas.43 Concepts, like Kant’s schemas, are forms that segregate and organize ideas or percepts. Yet many of sensibility’s qualifications—feelings and moods, for example—have distinctive qualities but nothing that would count as discriminable form. Or sensibility is awash in the cacophony of forms overlaid without integration. This is a commonplace in the experience of city dwellers: they tolerate diversity, noise, and spontaneity, never pretending to make it cohere. This first axis is deformed by the insistence on clarity because obscurity characterizes all of sensibility’s peripheral qualifications and many that are focal: comfort, for example. Wanting clarity and stability, we rely on thought to slow the perceptual flux by filtering and

42

Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 25-32. 43 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 77.

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classifying data pertinent to our aims. But experience often buckles under the force of qualitative diversity. Clarification is sometimes more accurate than clarity. Cities are exemplary because forms that collide or diverge provoke the dissonance and surprise of urban life. One searches for coherence in higher-order forms, though the ultimate form is just the city itself: an assembly of forms overlaid in ways that violate coherence. The arts resist us in similar ways. George Bernard Shaw despaired of music criticism44 because its language is much too crude for the phenomena described. One may hardly notice the growl of a bassoon playing in a low register though it changes an orchestra’s sonic balance. A reviewer compliments the bassoonist but communicates nothing of the experience to his readers; his words signify a difference without clarifying it. This axis—obscurity to clarity—was simple enough when construed as a visual analogue: shadow to light. Its subsequent convolutions are the effect of philosophic interventions: nothing is obscure—there are no raw feels—if everything experienced has been schematized, hence clarified. But this is thought’s perfecting aim, not our visceral condition. There would be less resistance to obscurity if it were agreed that sensibility moves up and down an axis that rises to clarified feelings, plans, and ideas from vague intimations, pleasures, and pains. ii. Inner to outer: Cartesians suppose that mind proves its selfsufficiency by clarifying its percepts or ideas without reference to anything beyond itself (God apart). But this posture—having a toothache while ignoring the tooth—is uncharacteristic: we perceive as we do because our situated bodies are affected by things we encounter. Wellbeing requires that we identify and control them. Principal thinkers (including Plato, Berkeley, Hume, and Husserl) failed to distinguish this axis from the one preceding. Confusing the move from inner to outer with the trajectory from obscurity to clarity, they wouldn’t acknowledge that movement along the first is often conditional on progress along the second. That conflation would be paralyzing in practice, for we know where we are and what we need do because of things perceived. Sensibility is radar (Figure 2). There is no practical life without progress 44

George Bernard Shaw, How to Become a Music Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960), pp. 1-6.

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from inner to outer. We often withdraw from encounters with others to consider our prospects or intentions, but retreat is temporary because experience, as Peirce described it, is reality-testing. We don’t know where we are—there is little to clarify—if we don’t engage other people and things. An experience qualifying both axes—obscurity to clarity, inner to outer—may be enjoyed naïovely. The axes seem to coalesce; the same datum (thirst or pain) is the baseline for each, though they separate as we advance from obscurity to clarity by explaining the inner state as the effect of an outer cause: comfort all around but for springs in the seat. Their separation has a pragmatic aim: need or distress requires an explanation or cure. Imagine hearing music through weightless headphones: the listener resembles a musical brain in a vat when sound is projected into the space between his ears. One might become a cultivated listener while having no reason to believe that the source of his information is external. This possibility evokes our self-referential fantasies: we are sometimes contentedly alone. It disguises the knowledge that no one lives always within himself. iii. Affective states—feelings, moods, or emotions—that are neutral or engaged: Values on this axis rise to intensity from a base where there is little or no affect. Intensifying affect has a trajectory prefigured by the axes previously described: obscure feelings are clarified by understanding (jealousy); feelings having unknown origins sometimes alter when their causes are identified and understood (anxiety). I sometimes use feeling generically (=affective states), sometimes specifically; context is determining. Every affective state—feeling, mood, or emotion—satisfies the criteria for aesthesis: all qualify sensibility. Feelings (construed specifically) include pleasure and pain, salt and sweet, hot and cold. Boredom, agitation, and depression are moods. Emotional constants include love and hate, shame and guilt, well-being, and the cerebral pleasure of works that resolve their tensions (architecture, fiction, music, and art). Some affective states—chronic depression or mood swings— are principally or only endogenous. Others were the primitive cognitions of our evolutionary past: hunger, pain, and anxiety were intimations of need or threat when little or no thought directed perception. Now, feelings are an undercurrent that amplifies or distorts responses to things thought or perceived.

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We often suppose that affective states are quiescent until provoked by encounters with other people or things, but it’s equally likely that low-level arousal—constant though diffuse—is indeterminate until colored and intensified by provocations diverse as erotic films or ascetic poetry. This evolutionary history is visible in emotion’s persistent autonomy. People value a painting or flag for its significance and emotional weight, not because of its intrinsic properties. Thought supervenes when perceivers learn to distinguish pious or patriotic messages from allegories infused with craft and imagination. There is no short-list of affective states appropriate to aesthetic experience. Some emotions are deemed appropriate for a time or in a place (piety, for example), but no list applies everywhere and always because responses are conditioned by one’s interpretation of circumstances. Affect changes as a state of affairs is construed in alternate ways. Westerners assume that happiness is appropriate to birthdays and weddings: we aren’t giddy at funerals. Yet Indians have a cautionary saying: don’t celebrate a birth, don’t grieve at funerals. Which feelings are appropriate when responding to art? Here, too, stimuli are ambiguous and responses vary. There are several comic moments in Don Giovanni: changing clothes alters identities, the servant eats a bit of his master’s dinner. Some people laugh; most do not because the context is grim. Distinguish affect from its context and causes, and we discern four constants when feelings are clarified and informed by cognition of a work’s content and form. First is the mix of fascination and passivity incited by works that draw us out of ourselves. Half seduced, half compelled, they dominate us. Feelings they provoke may or may not be pleasurable: disgust, too, is focused and compelling. Second is the sense that the emotional inhibitions of practical life are relieved. There is no risk but exhaustion to allowing free rein to one’s feelings, whatever they be. Third is measure. The risk of excess is radically diminished because emotional arousal is balanced when thought is pacified by the perception of form, proportion, rhythm, and scale. Like knows like: one acquires measure by embodying the forms perceived.45 Fourth is aesthetic distance: one is a witness not a participant in the actions, real or imagined, that provoke a feeling: one is interested but not libidinous at 45

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Basic Works, 1106a1-1107a25, pp. 957-959.

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the sight of Botticelli blonds. These four are not mutually independent: freedom and measure are easier because of aesthetic distance. Are there feelings appropriate to artists but foreign to those who perceive their work? The principal difference is an artist’s perspective on aesthetic distance. A novel about murder isn’t a murder. Yet one can’t write such books without imagining oneself amidst the circumstances described. Cezanne painted apples while all but consuming them with his eyes. One lives one’s conversations; art expresses thoughts and feelings common to everyday life with the craft, discipline, and materials appropriate to an artistic aim. Bach’s religious piety impelled his composing, but with this difference: aesthetic distance abstracted him from practical concerns, not from the music at hand. It opened the space where freedom, measure, and imagination worked their effects. What did he feel? What he earned: rapture. iv. Value and valuation: This axis is doubled by the difference between valuation (approval or disapproval) and value (the worth ascribed to things by virtue of their properties). Value is independent of valuation, though one typically believes that his or her valuations are accurate. Appraisal is an elemental response to our engagements with other people and things: are others useful or inimical to our aims; to what degree are they—works of art or other things—good or effective in their own terms? The sensibilities of people responding may be ordinary (naïve) or educated. Criticism is a more demanding expression of appraisal: it requires detailed information about craft, style, and practice, and wide acquaintance with examples of an art. Valuation: The first three axes are continuous between extremes; this one has a point of least action—valuational neutrality—lying between them. Things encountered are more or less approved. One behavioral measure of approval is the quantity of resistance (material or psychological) one need overcome to affirm a valuation. How far would you go, what would you pay to see paintings by Lucian Freud or Veronese; would you pay more to see one rather than the other? The test is crude: it exposes significant differences in one’s preferences (chocolate or vanilla, books or travel) without ascertaining the attitudes or perceptions that explain it.

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Attitudes embody values warped by feelings or beliefs: good because it makes me feel secure; bad because it scares me. Attitudes tune sensibility by limiting one’s ability to perceive, understand, or enjoy possible objects of thought or perception; they occlude sensibility by warping taste. Affirming something’s beauty is, accordingly, high praise qualified by an ambiguity reminiscent of Socrates’ question to Euthyphro: Is it good because the gods love it or do the gods love it because it’s good? Are we satisfied because suffused with self-generated feeling, or is good feeling the effect of seeing things as they are?46 There is a critical ambiguity in this alternation: thought leads feeling or thought has no leverage because feeling drowns its every initiative. Weeping doesn’t justify saying that a movie is sad in itself because sentimental people weep at every film they see. Agreeing not to quarrel about taste, we affirm the second part of this equation: the different responses of people thinking about or perceiving the same thing express each person’s sentiments; any two people may respond in disparate ways to the same things, so nothing can be inferred about a work’s properties from the emotional responses it provokes. Yet cognition is pertinent to estimates of value: it may override negative feeling, altering or suppressing it. Value: Aesthetic judgment is ambiguous: does it signify sensibility’s emotional or cognitive response to things? No one is born a restaurant critic, though people sometimes boot-strap themselves to competence. Savors and tastes resemble feelings: early preferences don’t always endure. Never abridging the freedom to judge, we want a check on the reliability of judgments that require two skills: a capacity for discerning the relevant properties of things judged, and the empirically based talent for appraising them. Significant information includes the properties specific to things of a domain (painting or song); craftknowledge sufficient to perceive that something is well or poorly made; and generic properties (including unity, form, proportion, and scale) valued in all artistic domains. Suppose that the transition from inner to outer is accomplished: the critic is asked to render an objectively grounded valuation. He or she knows what to listen or look for: how well does the work at hand satisfy a recognized style? Is it, perhaps, the avatar of a style for which the critic 46

Plato, Euthyphro, Collected Dialogues, 7a, p. 175.

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is unprepared by taste and training? Prudent critics hesitate: they know a style’s generic properties and norms, but do they recognize the pertinent features of a ruptured or evolving style? Critics are often slow to perceive fruitful transgressions: a thoughtful critic realizes that his or her education and sensibility is a scrim that may preclude unbiased regard for a work at hand. v. Association: Sensibility’s primary qualifications—matters thought or perceived, liked or disliked—often provoke memories or feelings. Hume described this axis when he distinguished original from secondary perception: As all the perceptions of the mind may be divided into impressions and ideas, so the impressions admit of another division into original and secondary. This division of impressions is the same with that which I formerly made use of when I distinguish’d them into impressions of sensations and reflexion. Original impressions or impressions of sensation are such as without any antecedent perception arise in the soul, from the constitution of the body, from the animal spirits, or from the application of objects to the external organs. Secondary, or reflective impressions are such as proceed from some of these original ones, either immediately or by the interposition of its idea. Of the first kind are all the impressions of the senses, and all bodily pains and pleasures: Of the second are the passions, and other emotions resembling them.47 Sensibility might be overwhelmed by associations—at cost to focus— with no way to limit them, though that doesn’t happen for either of three reasons: associations are limited by a current purpose (getting to work), because they are controlled by sensibility’s current focus (the work at hand), or because some of sensibility’s qualifications provoke few or no associations. Concentrate on hearing a solo flute or a poem read aloud, then notice how effectively they limit collateral thoughts. Religious art has the contrary effect on believers: flooded with beliefs and emotions expressing their fidelity to a faith and its practices, they are less attentive to an artist’s skill or imagination. Sensibilities vary accordingly: viewers who resonate to the same paintings see different virtues.

47

Hume, Treatise of Hume Nature, p. 275.

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Associations critical to aesthetics often turn on the difference between things thought or perceived directly and those construed by reading allusive words. Comparing right to scalene triangles eliminates collateral associations; stories of frustrated love rouse associations that vary with readers. This is a schismatic difference within aesthetic experience: sensibility responds directly to those seen or heard (music, abstract art, buildings, and dance); while every linguistic art has little or no aesthetic value until its words are construed, then enriched by association. Music is anomalous because we have access to it independently of the notation in which it’s written. But either way— hearing it played or reading the notation—instrumental music minimizes associations (excepting national anthems, “Happy Birthday,” and the wedding march). One side of this difference justifies the germ of truth in postmodernist claims that books are written by readers, not authors.48 Their sense is created when a text’s skeletal framework is infused with the associations provoked by reading it: one can’t read Emerson’s essay about Napoleon’s exploits as a general without seeing the horses or hearing the artillery.49 Opportunities for a reader’s intrusions are proportionate to the degree that a text encourages or requires imaginative play: liking a “book” expresses the reader’s admiration for his or her way of construing it. Advertisements and films have a similar effect: they incite an unkempt penumbra of disparate autobiographical readings. There are, however, limits to interpretation and association. Deconstructionists reject the idea of authorial integrity, though writers prove their authority by restricting or directing a reader’s inferences. Many stories invite them; logical proofs, legal briefs, spare buildings, abstract art, and most music reduce or preclude them. vi. Active or quiescent: Kant alleged that disinterest is a hallmark of aesthetic experience.50 This is the idea that things are considered as they appear, not as happens when perception is skewed by an aim. Dewey objected that Kant’s emphasis is false to practical life: it implies that efficacy is indifferent to aesthetic pleasure, though we are energized 48

See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 49 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), pp. 449-466. 50 Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 45-46.

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by working or living among things perceived as fine or beautiful.51 An architect’s skill is best known to people who use his buildings, not to those who see them from afar; clothing is utilitarian but one dresses as much for pleasure as warmth. Dewey’s point is irrefutable in itself but false when universalized: people enjoying music or poetry are often focused in ways that preclude other interests. Dewey acknowledges that this is so, though his discomfort was apparent when he considered the issue: The ideas of disinterestedness, detachment and “psychical distance,” of which much has been made in recent esthetic theory, are to be understood in the same way as contemplation. “Disinterestedness” cannot signify uninterestedness. But it may be used as a roundabout way to denote that no specialized interest holds sway. “Detachment” is a negative name for something extremely positive. There is no severance of self, no holding of it aloof, but fullness of participation.52 This is odd: “no specialized interest holds sway,” though the “fullness of participation” requires focused attention to a “specialized interest”: One enjoys this poem or music to the temporary exclusion of other things. Dewey resisted the attractions of private contemplation because it atomizes social life and disrupts the reciprocities of productive activity. But why insist that aesthetic experience must always go one direction or the other: always private and contemplative or always a consummation occurring as useful things are done? People who listen to music while dancing don’t hear it as they would if listening were their aim. Attention may be easy and naïve, or focused and intense. Neither demeans the other. Disputes about aesthetic action or purpose typically assume the standpoint of perceivers. No one doubts that artists have aims or that they often enjoy the effects of their work while doing it. The artists’ point of view is considered below.

51 52

Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 252-255. Ibid., pp. 257-258

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8. Overlaid axes These six axes are the essential trajectories of cognitive and affective life. Overlaying their values generates its familiar variety. If we restrict variety by considering mixtures at the extremes (26), we have 64 possible combinations, none specified by familiar words or phrases. Add that there are infinite ranges of experience between five of the axes (all but the second, inner or outer). Accordingly, sensibility’s possible qualifications—possible experiences—vastly exceed the expressive powers of any extant language and any possible language having fewer semantic resources than these infinite variations. Wittgenstein’s dictum—“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”53— very much exaggerates our current or possible linguistic power. Consider the poverty of words expressing emotion, or the absence of names for the many faces recognized but otherwise unknown. Language trails experience: sensibility would be crippled if restricted to distinctions prefigured there. Sensibility has the priority reminiscent of substance in Aristotle’s list of categories:54 each of the six axes is one of sensibility’s qualifying modes. But substance is always qualified by quality and quantity, while several of the axes qualifying sensibility may themselves be unqualified: value may be neutral; there may be no feelings or associations provoked by a primary qualifier. Their absence doesn’t imply that sensibility has atrophied: focus—as when checking a proof or hearing one of Bach’s more scholastic pieces—may be intense. Complexity is also reduced if qualifications noticed on one axis have no effect on the qualifications of other axes: taking a walk doesn’t cure my anxiety. But this mutual independence is rare. So, comfort is obscure but valued; it alters mood, provokes feelings of security, and sometimes provokes reflection and clarity. Activity or quiescence may seem to be the one axis that is often disengaged, but this misconstrues the scale or display required of activity. Thinking, looking, and listening are actions, a point familiar to everyone exhausted by doing them.

53 54

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, para. 5.6, p. 115. Aristotle, Categories, Basic Works, 1a17-1b9, pp. 7-8.

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Chapter Two Applications This chapter describes the six axes of sensibility in the context of their qualifications. It surveys several of sensibility’s principal qualifiers before considering aesthetics. The chapter has a simple aim: to confirm that artistic experience resembles every other specialized genre of experience, differing from others because of a specific limitation on variables common to all. Aesthetics is not sui generis, an odd but decorous ghetto. My remarks about sensibility’s other expressions are brief; they are a backdrop and contrast for the more extensive account of aesthetics. 1. Practical life Sensibility is the bodily analogue to a spider’s web. Exquisitely sensitive to movement, the spider rushes forth when a victim shakes its web. Aroused like the spider, we perceive and respond to a need, threat, or desire. Turned on ourselves, we discern mind’s furnishings; surveying the ambient world, looking for goods that would appease us, we engage other people and things. Is it fortuitous that we discover them congenial to our needs? Descartes cited God to explain sensibility’s canny representations of things perceived. We credit evolution: some needs and desires have satisfiers accessible to thought and perception. Philosophic tradition wanted beliefs that were certain; we settle for reliable beliefs and impulses favored by the hard-wiring and learning that mediate our encounters. Curiosity and imagination are sensibility’s augmenting powers: more capable than survival requires, we investigate our circumstances because interest is aroused, not merely to survive and reproduce. Practical life deploys all six axes. Impulses that begin as feelings of need, desire, or intention culminate in acts that engage other things. An intermediate step clarifies percepts (hence, our circumstances) and considers alternate ways of addressing them. Memory and imagination are constrained by standards of relevance appropriate to one’s aims and situation. Feelings rise and fall with frustrated initiatives and more or less successful changes of course. Success is valued; error is tolerable if

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corrected. Failure is subverting because it reduces confidence and initiative. We prefer simple challenges: let practical life become routine. 2. Abstract thought Plato is the summit of thinkers who regarded thought as an expression of sensibility: Forms stand before the mind’s eye when percepts are maximally clarified. Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas refine this idea; Hume’s impressions and ideas are its empiricist heresy.55 Kant’s formulation joins receptivity (forms of intuition) to rules that differentiate and organize sensory data; it affirms that experience stands before the mind’s eye, though actions schematizing it are uninspectable expressions of cognitive skill. Kant’s model has evolved. Thinking is said to be the application of syntactic and semantic rules: one speaks and understands others speaking while having no perceptual access to the mental activities that generate speech or construe it. This model is generalizable: artists use rules appropriate to music, architecture, painting, or dance to form notes, bricks, figures, or steps. Knowledge of the rules is a skill acquired and refined by applying them. How is experience formed? Does mind use an array of a priori schemas to project character and organization onto sensory data (the model favored by Descartes and Kant)? Or does it search within the data for evidence of intrinsic differences and organizing forms (Peirce’s model)? Does one order the impressions of a strange city by imposing a design of one’s own (an imagined grid, for example), or search within the data for evidence of inherent order? Post-modernist literary critics moot these alternatives before choosing the wrong one: they prescribe a book’s meaning rather than search within it for evidence of the author’s intentions. 3. Socialization and ethics Socialization is a version of practical life: we accommodate ourselves to others because of sympathy or need. But socialization has distinctive effects. People related in practical life are often mutually useful: the doctor renders a diagnosis; I pay for his judgment. The interchange is socialized—it satisfies certain conventions—though the relationship 55

There is insufficient attention to the affinities between the first pages of Hume’s Treatise and Plato’s Sophist.

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invoked may be mechanical, even mechanized: scanners, too, make diagnoses. Socialization wants something more: namely, cooperation and mutual respect between or among mutually resonating sensibilities. People are credited with having sensibility because of what they say or do and how they say or do it. One child shrinks when censured; another tightens her jaw and stares at her critic. We learn the range of likely behaviors by observing a person’s reactions to altered circumstances, then by attuning ourselves to him or her. This is apparent in the work of authors sensitive to popular tastes and in friendships where people nervously mirror one another. We seek companions and stimulation appropriate to our sensibilities; we educate others— principally children—to resonate as we do. These policies explain the social cohesiveness of people who satisfy needs and interests in mutually recognizable ways. They also explain the incomprehension or hostility provoked by those whose sensibilities challenge one’s own. Socialization is likely to have genetic and evolutionary beginnings. Survival has often required tribal loyalties and altruistic sacrifice, though proclivities for food, shelter, or partners are vague and determinable until particularized by a culture’s practices. For granting that we are wired for society, nothing comes of this propensity if nurture doesn’t bring infants into the tribal community. That process starts when babies are held and fed. Those first touches, the caretaker’s voice and embrace are intimations of more warmth and care or more crude handling. A baby’s feelings augment and intensify, some positive, some not, as he or she encounters people within and beyond the circle of caretakers and family. Opposed expectations emerge: relations are secured by behaviors and feelings valued by intimates, or we push ahead until resistance obliges us to reconsider our aims or ways of treating them. This is sensibility working as the guarantor of safety, cooperation, and social coherence. Social conflict makes us anxious and vulnerable, a fact exploitable by tyrants and advertisers because people embarrassed by choices or actions disagreeable to others are easily manipulated. Nietzsche’s description of social herding is an accurate précis of the effect: spontaneity and initiative are sacrificed for the benefits of uniformity and predictability. His cure is also relevant: inhibit or discount feelings that register other people’s attitudes and feelings when pursuing unpopular aims. This is socialization at the limit where self-conviction trumps anxiety. One is sensible to imperatives of one’s own: choose and act

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without regard to the pleasure or pain provoked by those who disapprove or by the disruptions caused when social relations are compromised. Usually (perhaps originally in our tribal history) sensibility is the interface between ourselves and others, whether things or other people. But here—in the autonomy sometimes achieved—people answer to themselves. This is the monadic sensibility of people who require internal coherence—aims consistent with values—despite the social alienation thereby entailed. Generalizing this posture risks conflict or the mutual indifference of well-regulated traffic: cars go their separate ways while drivers avoid damaging or impeding one another; there is motion but little or no interaction. This is the social efficiency of Mill’s On Liberty, a bias appropriate to people sharing city streets and stores but little else. Every engagement is only utilitarian: always preoccupied by an aim or oneself, there is no obligation to notice the sensibility of others. Hence a puzzle generated when we espouse Mill’s individualism without forsaking our loyalties: I feel impaired by the duties imposed by my relationships and roles. How can I go my way—how much autonomy may I claim— without losing the respect and affection that bind me to cherished others? 4. Spirituality Spirituality is a popular test of sensibility: people are approved for their emotional depth or deplored for want of it. Two kinds of spirituality are relevant. One equates it with emotional nuance; the other implies an ontology of spiritual beings: gods and souls, for example. These two versions are joined in popular discourse when it’s said that people having religious conviction are more likely to be moral and sincere than pragmatic atheists. This conflation is best explained by citing the first two axes described above—obscurity to clarity and inner to outer—then by noticing that this hybrid spirituality reverses their normal progression: feeling retreats from relative clarity to obscure motivations: thought abandons empirically testable beliefs about the external world for the benefit of attitudes founded in subjective states and meanings. Imagine someone who communicates with Victorian ancestors: they advise, he obliges. He dresses as they did and lives without electricity or central heating. Working alone, transcribing cemetery records in longhand, he supports himself with part-time work as a gardener. What explains him? Much about him is clear—his mien and

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behavior are gentle and steady—though motives for his attitudes and style are obscure. Searching for explanation requires that we reverse the two axes: we go from outside to inside (from clarity about his behavior to the obscurity of his motives) by locating the emotional basis for his behavior in the mist of unknown causes. Why is this man stubbornly different from his neighbors? His motive can’t be practical; he would describe it as spiritual. Idiosyncrasy is puzzling, though uniformity doesn’t require an explanation: we expect it of people who fear the loss of identity, status, and safety if perceived as different from their neighbors. Anxiety is the trip-wire that signals their vulnerability: shunning disapproval, dreading that each may be unrecognizable to others, all look for safety in attitudes and behaviors that are publicly approved. Anxiety is appeased if one rebukes every skeptical challenge by affirming that group practices are “true.” Every tribe explains itself in this or similar ways, usually without telling what “truth” signifies. The Edwardian looks to his ancestors for a stability he calls appropriate; wanting comfort and safety, he finds them in tightly controlled obsessive behavior. We see him as fey and romantic. He believes that his spiritual identity enables him to withstand adversity: ordinary practices would make him less authentic, less safe. People anchored by their patriotic or transcendental commitments are equally self-convinced. They, too, find comfort in rites that seem odd or picturesque to people of other persuasions: all are secured by beliefs and practices that have no justification but the will to sustain them. All would say, despite the diversity of their behavior, that they live “in the truth.” Would people be less spiritual if we stopped using social customs to align our sensibilities? That would be so provisionally because spirituality is so often identified with devotional practices. But there is also the spirituality of emotion, the recognition of our vulnerability, the pleasure and security of human fellowship, the hope of mutual support. Spinoza56 and the Stoics favored living without deception. There is no evidence that they were less supple emotionally than contemporaries who used spirituality as social glue.

56

Benedict de Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, the Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 266-271.

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5. Aesthetics Aesthetic experience intensifies sensibility by joining focused cognition to feeling. Pain, fear, and lust are equally intense but different because in them cognition is absent or secondary to feeling, because action rather than contemplation seems urgent, and because attention is forced rather than sustained voluntarily. Dominated by music or a story, one is affected in the manner of arrow A in Figure 1. Aware of content, one is also self-aware (arrow B). Yet self-awareness is not a remote and passive witness: stubbornly focused, it seems to grasp and enfold the content surveyed. Awash in sound, feelings aroused, one resists distractions and ignores interests or needs. This is sensibility convulsed or appeased by works of art. An entrepreneur may accomplish a daring maneuver with similar feelings; like a writer or composer at a moment of discovery, he knows the pleasure of commanding power. Perceivers have an experience that is no less intense for being less productive. Paintings or poems enjoyed are their discoveries; they, too, feel the pleasure and power of intensified experience. Aesthetic theory is hobbled by the diversity of works said to have aesthetic value: painting and poetry, music and dance. Each domain may be considered in its own right because each has its traditions of style and craft, yet emphasizing these differences isolates the arts from one another while ignoring their common ground: all resonate in people whose talent or cultivation enables them to make art or perceive it. This is a minimal reason for resisting art’s fragmentation, but it is substantive if we can discern a determinable basis in sensibility—a sine qua non— for all those artistic experiences that join feeling to the cognition of form. That possibility is my speculative aim. Getting there requires that we approach by way of a point mooted above: sensibility and things made or perceived are complementary sides of the relational view. Faces and temples exemplify the objective posture, though the beauty ascribed to them is problematic: is it a primary property of things said to be beautiful—a property as elemental as size or shape—or a second-order property, beautiful if symmetrical? Romantic poetry and sentimental films illustrate the subjectivist view: beauty is in the sentiments or judgments of the perceiver. The middle ground illustrates Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary properties. (Shape and wave

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length are primary properties, color is a subjective response to reflected light: things are seen as red because they absorb the other frequencies constitutive of white light.) Things are experienced as beautiful or fine because of properties such as timbre, scale, or proportion. Beauty, this implies, is relational: thinking or perceiving a thing’s properties, I see it as beautiful. Sensibility is critical to all three formulations: it registers the properties of things beautiful in themselves; it generates the experience of beauty in a responsive subject; or it experiences beauty when responding to properties in other things. Objectivism (the view that faces or temples are beautiful in themselves) is flawed because neither of the two ways of construing it is compelling. There is no ascertainable property or set of properties called beauty discernible in the many things called “beautiful”; nor is beauty a secondary property consequent on a thing’s having primary properties such as harmony, color, or symmetry. There seems no limit to properties perceivable as beautiful (not equivalent to saying that everything is perceivable as beautiful) and no cross-cultural accord that this or that set of properties is beautiful in itself. Subjectivism objects that thinkers/perceivers generate the experience of beauty, rather than being its passive witnesses. Disparate responses—some like what others dislike, with no neutral arbiter—are alleged to be confirming evidence for subjectivism. But this persuasion is sabotaged by the many things that please no one. Hence the power of the intermediate position: it regards subjective effects as affective and/or cognitive responses to the properties of things thought or perceived. Two of the three alternatives have elaborate histories. Aristotle’s version of the objectivist view affirms that primary substances, comprising form and matter, are free standing.57 Their beauty—of plays, for example—is principally the consequence of “Fable or Plot,”58 meaning form. Sensibility is incidental to beauty because it registers a thing’s properties while adding nothing to them. Plato’s objectivism was different because objectivity as he described it couples nous—rational intuition—to the Forms. Neither exists without the other; the Forms

57 58

Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1017b10-1018b7, pp. 761-763. Aristotle, Poetics, 1050a22, 1461.

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exist to be perceived: hence this early formulation of the principle, esse est percipi.59 That formula is significantly ambiguous: is rational intuition— sensibility—differentiated among perceivers, or is there no difference among them because everyone apprehending the Forms has the same content and information? Plato answered that nous—sensibility—is not individuated: you see the Forms as I do. Hegel agreed while acknowledging finitude and particularity: individual thinker/perceivers discern ideas instantiated in finite works of art; each mind perceives them, first, with taste particular to its finite self, later (if they are great works) when sensibility is illuminated by the Idea instantiated in the work at hand. Perspective is a contingency; taste is idiosyncrasy. Both are superseded when the intuitive insight prized by Plato and Descartes is satisfied by the concrete universality of the embodied Idea..60 This dialectic—individuality or universality—also infuses the principal subjectivist accounts of aesthetic experience: Nietzsche,61 like Kant,62 emphasized taste’s singularity. Schelling agreed that sensibility’s horizon is initially partial, distinctive, and obscure, though it rises, he said, to clarity and universality.63 There is little history to the relational view because philosophy is dominated first by Plato’s version of objectivity (Forms imprinted on nous), then by the subjectivism of Plato’s Cartesian heirs (the cogito’s clear and distinct ideas, the categories and schemas of the transcendental ego). Locke lost the argument for realism and a relational account of knowledge when he distinguished nominal from real, but unknowable, essences.64 Hume recovered this middle ground when he argued that taste and judgment are deficient until aligned with the properties of things themselves,65 but Hume was precluded from supplying an idea of objectivity given his claim that existence is only the forcefulness and 59

Plato, Republic, Collected Dialogues, 508a-511e, pp. 743-747. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, p. 718. 61 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, pp. 252-253 62 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 143. 63 F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 229. 64 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 2, pp. 25-27. 65 David Hume, Essays: moral, political, and literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), PP. 231-255. 60

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vivacity of sensory data.66 The relational view requires a stronger notion of objectivity, one affirming that an object’s existence and character are independent of our ways of thinking or perceiving it. Peirce affirmed this stronger claim,67 but his theory of inquiry (empirically testable hypotheses formulated within a community of experimenters) and his relational account of knowledge are anomalous, given our Platonic and Cartesian antecedents. Recent history is emblematic because it reveals the obstacles to elaborating a notion of objectivity that resists being cannibalized by thought or perception. We begin by formulating a notion of objectivity that seems appropriate to any thing or state of affairs having the features specified above: its existence and character are independent of thought or perception. The back of the moon is as it is without regard to anything we think or say of it, but so is that true of all the books unread but air cooled in the Library of Congress. This formulation isn’t surprising: thought and perception are the activities of animal bodies: why should things thought or perceived depend on them for their existence and character? There is, however, a subjectivist reflex, one apparent in contemporary responses to the relational view. Joseph Margolis quotes Arthur Danto: “To mistake an artwork for a real object…is no great feat when an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for…”68 Margolis responds that material things having cultural value have properties of two sorts: some material, others intentional: [A]rtworks, actions, persons language, history, traditions, meanings, practices, communities, and the like form, however informally, a collection of metaphysically similar “things,” in the sense that what distinguishes them from “mere material things” includes some subset of a run of sui generis properties that apply, paradigmatically, to the things of the cultural or encultured world…such properties or attributes or qualities may be collected as “Intentional”…to designate a provisional subset of essential such attributes, which, on adequational grounds, cannot be literally ascribed to mere material things.69 66 67 68 69

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 153. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. v, para. 45, pp. 32-33. Margolis, On Aesthetics, p. 123. Ibid., p. 133.

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Margolis thinks it uncontroversial that things in the human domain have material and intentional properties because, for example, someone hearing words spoken in a familiar language knows what they mean in one step rather than two: we don’t (he supposes) register the sounds, then construe them. Hence his belief that spoken or written language, like human persons and actions, has inherent intentional properties. Margolis doesn’t tell us how a speech or song, book or painting acquires and joins properties of these two sorts. He endorses an ontological complexity that precludes an uncluttered notion of objectivity, though a solution is close at hand. Speech is sound. It is meaningful because of a double-intentionality: the speaker intends that his or her words be heard with a specific sense; interlocutors hear them (usually) in the sense intended. Paintings don’t speak but they are painted in ways that incorporate the intentions of their makers. The finished painting is two things in one: there is paint on wood or canvas and the marks or strokes that viewers construe as signs. It’s often though not always true that artists intend that they be read as signs. Stop signs are cultural entities, but they are all steel, black and yellow paint. Having neither intentions nor intentional properties, they nevertheless satisfy the relational view. Seeing one at a crossroad, we stop, though the sign doesn’t wave or otherwise indicate that we should stop. Signs of every sort intimate intentionality’s proper site. Residing in two places, it has no need for a third: painters and people seeing their work have (or had) intentions. Paintings are the material medium through which the two communicate. Each of them has (or had) intentions; the paintings do not. This result is consequential for many disputes about representation and expression. Under which conditions does a work of art (or newspaper) represent or express an idea or state of affairs? The relational view is an instant cure: art works are artifacts; they neither represent nor express anything, though artists infuse their work with signs legible to interpreters. How signs crystallize as a style that binds artists and perceivers is an issue for psychology and social practice (but not for ontology). Signs are, for example, fundamental to Richard Wollheim’s

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idea that “seeing in” is critical to the experience of painting (and, by extrapolation, to other arts).70 Suppose that focus is restricted to a painting’s surface, for then seeing-in has three steps: one sees some degree of complexity and form in its array of colors and shapes; figures are construed as representations of people or things; one infers the painting’s meaning. (Wollheim distinguished “seeing-in” from “seeing-as,” though seeing-as is an element of seeing-in when work is representational.) One may see a painting in each of these ways without asking about its success as a representation: to what degree is it accurate? For intelligibility is secured if a picture is representational enough to be seen as a coherent ensemble of real or imaginable things. Some novels invite a parallel reading: first construing its words to understand the story being told, one perceives its form and meaning. Arts differ among themselves in respect to these demands: opera and drama require all three steps; abstract paintings, instrumental music, and many dances have form without being representational or meaningful. Seeing-in implies that aesthetic perception has depth. The degree of penetration and the difference it makes is plainer if we compare two connoisseurs of the same domain. Both make accurate discriminations but one has no basis but experience for the subtlety of his perceptions; the other is also deeply schooled in the craft and history of his art. Call one the phenomenalist, the other the phenomenologist.71 The first sees features characteristic of artists and their styles, though he doesn’t know the names or histories of either. The second sees or hears as well as the first but his perceptions are supported by his learning; a competent amateur, he also knows the materials and craft of his art. The experience of the naïf is, in Kant’s terms, neither empty nor blind, yet his associations never rival those of the phenomenologist. His conceptual framework amplifies and interprets the data in ways unsuspected by the phenomenalist. The expert’s experience is richer for the greater range of its information, but, ex hypothesi, his responses aren’t more discerning, his judgments aren’t more accurate. His enjoyment of painting or music is

70

Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 205-226. 71 Margolis, On Aesthetics, pp. 145-148.

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likely different from that of the phenomenalist but not keener or more acute. Susanne Langer argued that an experience innocent of musicology and history can be no less satisfying or discerning than one they inform.72 That surmise assumes that works of art are directly accessible to those who perceive each painting or performance as a unitary figure distinct from its ground. See or hear it in itself. Information about its style, context, and maker may come later or never. How much is one’s musical appreciation (as distinct from dramatic understanding) enhanced by knowing an opera’s plot or the meaning of its arias? Much less than its librettist would believe.73 The relational hypothesis tolerates these alternative degrees of familiarity and tension in art’s relation to its perceivers. Objectivism and subjectivism have no ways to provide for them because neither acknowledges the opposition and relevance of the other: see the object as it is or fail to see it; imagine aesthetic content or decline to imagine it. There is no resistance on either side. The relational view is also superior in this other way: objectivism is dominated by the second axis (inner to outer); subjectivism largely disdains that axis while favoring one or more of the other six; the relational view deploys all the axes over a range of applications wider than those acknowledged by either of them. Here again are the six axes, each tailored to the requirements of the relational view: i. Obscurity to clarity: Plato argued that beauty is the draw, the telos, of aesthetic experience.74 Anything less is an absence: the false, bad, and ugly are privations rather than positive states in themselves. Plato’s allegory of the cave implies that these are confused states of mind, all of them cured if we exceed obscuring subjectivity by perceiving the Forms.75 His emphasis suppresses or ignores sensible states—comfort, for example—that do not have or require clarity or a reference beyond themselves. An hour of vigorous yoga typically ends with several minutes of meditation. Sitting crosslegged or lying on one’s back in semi-darkness, practitioners are aware mostly of their breathing. There is little sense of 72

Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: a Theory of Art (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), pp. 147-148. 73 Dewitt Parker, Principles of Aesthetics (Boston: Silver, Burdett, 1920), p. 184. 74 Plato, Symposium, Collected Dialogues, 206c-d, p. 558. 75 Plato, Republic, 514a-518b, pp. 747-750.

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conscious associations or passing time. One rises quietly, purged and refreshed, with vague feelings that don’t require clarification. This is untroubled sensibility: private, meditative, and aesthetic in the core respect that awareness has content but no aim beyond itself. Clarity is a challenge, one sometimes answered by recovering the focus surrendered during meditation. Rather than do something or go somewhere, we concentrate. Moods and daydreams resist us but complex ideas are perfected by making their structures articulate. Clarification comes with analysis (the inventory of an idea’s proper parts) and synthesis (the whole created by organizing the parts). Or it requires decoding: we construe a style or read a language. ii. Inner to outer: Intra-psychic effects often have external causes. This happens, for example, when inarticulate artists make paintings of exceptional complexity and emotional power; uncomfortable with words, they clarify ideas with color, scale, and form. These artists sometimes resemble foreigners speaking alien dialects. Clarifying them requires focus and reflection informed by previous experience of works of a kind. Yet the principal requirement is the need to look or listen again, retire to reflect, then see or hear it as often as one requires to make an educated appraisal. Some intra-psychic effects—ideas, designs, theories, and plans, for example—are evidence of mind’s evolved power for generating structure out of itself. Yet these clarifications—call them Cartesian—are insufficient for people making dinner or raising children: elegance doesn’t make ideas true or plans effective. Cognitive skills are valuable principally because they facilitate our interactions with other people and things (comfort is a measure of body’s response to shoes or a chair). Cartesian retreat is an evolutionary achievement, not an end in itself: it has no survival value when abstracted from the clarifications achieved by taking the measure of things perceived. Liking a melody barely heard, I move closer to the source; puzzled by a picture or a building, I strain to see it better. This axis is the principal vector for experiences that are aesthetic or practical: things are construed as beautiful or useful when they are encountered, then decoded or engaged. The balance of these extremes—inner and outer—varies from person to person. He finds meaning and composure in his religion. She, more skeptical and pragmatic, roots herself in the success of her initiatives. People of both sorts enjoy the aesthesis of their lives, but

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sensibility has a distinct profile in each. He finds peace and beauty in the rites and beliefs of his faith; she favors pleasure, friendship, and efficacy. Which is the stronger foundation? She is content when things go well; he is comfortable when circumstances change because his beliefs are stable. These contrary responses—one active, one passive—prefigure the complementarity of artists and the people who see their work. Dissatisfied merely by having ideas, artists feel compelled to embody them in works that are publicly accessible. Perceivers needn’t do more than resonate with the effects of works seen, heard, or used, though there are differences among them. People terrorized by horror movies hardly remember the experience; their fear was real but ephemeral. King Lear penetrates every defense: devastated when the pathology of familiar relationships is enacted, we are reassured by personal conflicts that are manageable by comparison. An artist formulates and expresses his ideas in a publicly accessible medium. His or her lucidity resonates in the sensibilities of those who perceive and decode it. iii. Associations: It’s unlikely that someone checking a logical proof associates freely; he may think of other ways to prove the theorem, but the proof fixes his attention. Sentimental films and novels have a contrary effect: every viewer or reader responds in ways appropriate to his or her history. The variability of responses is especially acute in arts mediated by words. Writers use plot and characters to direct associations, though novels, plays, even histories incite memories, fantasies, or interpretations no author foresees. Romanticism is confirmed if each reader creates a different work by supplying missing context and detail. Yet slack control of perceivers’ associations is not universal: attention is tightly confined when people know the sonatas they’re hearing. Heads uncluttered, nothing literal represented or expressed, association is quashed: we listen. Associations may have either of two effects: they facilitate reality testing by enlarging the factual context ascribed to the people or events characterized; or they imbue content with significance. The same work may be construed factually or as evidence of something more: seeing diamonds evokes thoughts of carbon bonding or status; smelling incense is reminiscent of church interiors or mysteries they celebrate. Reality

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testing is critical to practical life, but significance trumps fact in sensibilities focused by meanings, myths, or ideals.76 iv. Emotionally indifferent or engaged: A connoisseur recognizes that something is well made, though it leaves him unmoved. His praise is qualified if we assume that emotion is essential to aesthetic responses, but he rejects that view. Indeed, the aesthetics of cognition is distinctive in the respect that intellectual cultivation sometimes inhibits feeling. People are less responsive emotionally when education makes them critical: I know a shorter proof; I like the music but not this performance. Knowing a domain better, one is harder to please. There is, of course, this other extreme: we are overcome with feeling, be it distress or delight. This axis has two versions. The first has indifference at one extremity while emotional intensity rises by degrees to the other end. The second locates indifference in the middle, with pleasure and pain at the extremes. These two versions are dynamically linked: each may displace the other when circumstances change. So, indifference is a response to things commonplace; it turns to pain when the familiar is disruptive (noisy or dangerous), to pleasure when the ordinary is refined. Indifference is ambiguous. It may express several responses: one misses a stimulus because inattentive, or because it isn’t understood; one ignores things noticed because they’re ordinary; or one is unmoved by their conspicuous virtues. This fourth possibility may seem baffling: how can one be emotionally indifferent if the work at hand is seen for the achievement it is? That seems implausible to people who respond emotionally to art, though it isn’t surprising in those whose dominant response in every domain is intellectual rather than emotional. Their responses are predictably cerebral when the work at issue—music, logic, or dance, for example—is dominated by form: they concede illumination, but deny feeling. Illumination is the magnetic clarity that arouses and intensifies intellectual appetite: we possess things that excite us by understanding them. This is Platonic Eros: desire suffused by the lambent passion for intuitive understanding.77

76

David Weissman, Styles of Thought: Interpretation, Inquiry, and Imagination (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 8-19. 77 Plato, Letter VII, Collected Dialogues, 344b, p. 1591.

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But is cognition ever intuitive? I infer that the apparent immediacy of thought or perceptual content (“before the mind’s eye”) is the evolutionary effect of neural integration: intuition is a word describing a neural effect, not a mental activity.78 Illumination is recognition, still a neural effect. Its emotional tone is the excitement—feeble or elating— that sometimes accompanies confirmation or discovery. v. Valorized or not: Value, like feeling, invites a simple spectrum of responses—from indifference to highly valued—but here, too, there is an alternate trajectory, one having indifference in the middle, rejection on one side, approval on the other. Rankings for some things (flies and mosquitoes) are consensual; there is less accord about buildings, literature, music, and art. People vary in their ability to discern coherent complexity (form). They seem insensitive because of having no pertinent associations or the wrong ones: minstrel shows in America, Wagner’s music in Jerusalem. Can’t one listen to Wagner while ignoring his views? The axes of association, emotion, and value preclude that response in some people. They can’t be bullied into feeling otherwise. vi. Quiescence or activity: Kant argued that aesthetic experience is contemplative, rather than purposive and active. But this cannot be right, given the axis that goes from inside to outside. Seeing and hearing may be passive, but looking and listening are active. People living in a building perceive its design from the standpoint of efficiency and comfort, each a difference registered by sensibility. More than seeing the structure from afar, they move in and around within it. Actions that control and clarify the things qualifying sensibility rebuke Kant and Dewey alike: one for supposing that purpose is always inimical to aesthesis, the other for implying that aesthesis is or should always be a fulfillment achieved in the course of action. One goes to movies or restaurants, looking or tasting while doing nothing else, because effects are intensified if one has no other purpose. Kant could have agreed that this much action and purpose is always appropriate to aesthetic experience: sensibility is aroused by seeing friends and walking dogs; the look and fit of one’s clothes are enjoyed while wearing them. Dewey’s emphasis is cogent when attention is divided (every car ad implies a distinction between transport and the pleasure of driving), 78

See David Weissman, Intuition and Ideality (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987).

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though he says too little about people focused on a single object or performance. Would he misconstrue the apparent quiescence of people in expensive seats listening with eyes closed to music they can’t play? Are they sleeping? See the response when you interrupt them. These six axes define the range of variations in artistic experience, but only because they prefigure sensibility’s possible expressions in every experience. Artistic experience is distinctive because it expresses the specific opportunities and qualities that electrify artists and perceivers: one because it offers expression to passion, talent, craft, and imagination, the other because feeling focused by intellect is addictive.

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Chapter Three Irresolution Every datum that rises to consciousness is content for aesthesis; each has a value on sensibility’s six axes. All are aesthetic, simply as entertained: watching rain through a window isn’t different as aesthesis from seeing a painting or film. There is, of course, this difference: aesthetic experience construed narrowly is a response to things that were made to provoke it or made for a different purpose though presentation is their current function. This chapter has the experience of those things—works of art—as its principal focus. Each of the points considered is disputed; all test my emphasis on sensibility: does citing it clarify or resolve them? 1. Comparing the perspectives of artists and perceivers The interests of artists and those observing their work are not always complementary. Both thrive when artists excite an audience with work that reveals unexpected possibilities or deepens understanding of things familiar. But artists are forced to choose—please clients or themselves— when buyers reject work that isn’t likely to enhance their status or earn a profit. Artists: Artistry implies craft, style, and imagination. People acknowledged as artists are principally craftsmen in domains that Hegel described as fine arts, though workers in every domain—pastry chefs no less than poets—exhibit taste and imagination when choosing and organizing their materials. Materials are usually common to work of a kind: words and meter to poetry, notes and scales to music. Master craftsmen are distinguished by their skills, artists by skills and ideas. Most ideas derive from an inventory that includes nature and the work of predecessors, though results are likely pedestrian when ideas are merely reworked. Tradition is self-sustaining because artists learn a style too well; tinkering would be disrespectful; the work would be unintelligible. Styles alter—imagination breathes—when artists explore the intuition that an odd and novel attack would have effects they barely glimpse but can’t resist. Invention is mysterious: artists learn styles; an audience and clients learn them, too, though the facility for altering rules or inventing forms mystifies us. Plato remarked that poets—unable to explain or justify the

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truths they utter—channel verbal magic from a source beyond themselves. Our explanation for creativity is more prosaic because we know the ampliative modes: teaching them doesn’t make people creative, though it does demystify the work they do. Artists learn a style’s rules by seeing or hearing work that embodies them; they play with form after discerning its plasticity: Scarlatti and Chopin altered musical expectations while using the standard keyboards of their time. We ascribe inventiveness to imagination, invoking Kant to explain the difference between associative memory and productive imagination. Minds use determinable rules made specific by experience and memory—heuristics—to organize thoughts and plans. Results are usually predicable because we follow standard paths when responding to familiar things and opportunities. But styles change, little or a lot, because imagination breaches old forms and refines new ways. Some techniques—dissonance in music, broken symmetry in architecture— guarantee stylistic changes. But is there continuity? Is there a structure to sensibility—however determinable—that constrains the evolution of artistic creation and taste? One likely constraint is a deep grammar—akin to that of Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics.79 Its expressions may range from language to music, sport, painting, gardening, architecture, and prose. What we call imagination may be an ability and willingness to test the plasticity of this grammar’s constituent forms. Logicians learn not to challenge the principle of non-contradiction. Topologists are less respectful of the idea that space can have no more than three dimensions: they may be factually mistaken but their surmise is fruitful in the way that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum exemplifies the domain of unrealized possibilities while breaking the street-wall on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Artists explore this domain while knowing that innovation subverts the legibility and authority of current style. Many of the things called beautiful may embody determinate expressions of the forms congenial to sensibility. Even particular qualities—primary colors, simple shapes, and harmonic chords—may be complex expressions of forms recognizable and satisfying to sensibility. Like knows like, though

79

See Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: a Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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artists reverse the force of this Platonic idea: the world is altered when remade in the image of forms they imagine. Perceivers: Perceivers is generic. It includes infants responding to smiling faces, though most stimuli are inscrutable until decoded. Decoding is the evidence that education is successful: one discerns the relevant content or form of the thing perceived. Failures of intelligibility are explicable in several ways: one is color-blind or tone-deaf; one hasn’t engaged a work in a way or ways appropriate to it (looking at soup rather than tasting it); one can’t decode the data received (they aren’t construed as signifiers or information); or the work at hand was created by an artist who failed to make it intelligible. Perceivers couple successfully to art when perception and cognition are accurate: I see a work for what it is. Someone more knowledgeable might like it more or less because of discerning features I ignore, yet my feelings and judgment are also an informed response to its properties. This is mind in its role as mirror of nature.80 Kant measured success in this other way: the deep grammar exploited by artists is also available to perceivers. A reader’s imagination fills gaps in a novel’s story. Viewers scan a painting, building, or design: their perceptions are selective but formed by innate rubrics made determinate by the particularities of personal experience. Perceivers color and form the data received in ways detailed when Kant described mind’s synthesis of experience. He erred by denying that we have testable access to the things provoking us—Peirce’s account of inquiry (Figure 1) is more accurate—but Kant rightly emphasized that mind is not always or often passive to the reception of data accurately recorded. Even the Mona Lisa—nothing more familiar—seems different on each viewing and is likely to seem different to every perceiver. Why? Because minds differ in the ways they organize data, and because each mind varies somewhat in its successive schematizations of the same information. Does this variation contradict the assumption of an innate grammar common to all sensibilities? No: the grammar would be determinable but subject to specificities appropriate to each person’s experience and developmental history. Would this response bar the idea of a universal grammar because of making the claim unfalsifiable? That would be 80

See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

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entailed if it were claimed that all of sensibility’s qualifications cohere with and express its deep formal structure. But that result is not implied. Many of sensibility’s qualifications would likely be found to cohere with sensibility’s immanent form. We might confirm that there are structural isomorphisms common to all perceptual fields; synesthesia may be evidence that visual and auditory phenomena satisfy the same or equivalent formal constraints. But there may also be intimations of sensibility’s grammar in forms that resist intelligibility: some because of their complexity, others because we find them clumsy or ugly. Discerning one or a few of sensibility’s innate forms (spatial structure, rhythm, noncontradiction), we may conjecture about sensibilities constrained by different forms. Speculation is unproblematic if we restrict ourselves to a subset of forms familiar in our world—in Flatland,81 for example. It is risky because unconfirmable (there is no evidence) if we use analogy or extrapolation to prefigure grammatical structures appropriate to the sensibilities of other possible worlds. Reciprocity, convergence, or discord: An artist’s relation to those who perceive his or her work seems unbalanced: one struggles to create a book or painting; the other appraises work he couldn’t produce. There is truth to this impression, though it distorts a relation mediated as much by reciprocity or convergence as discord. The artist who dares be led by imagination lacks a point of reference from which to judge his work. Trusting his judgment but fearing delusion, he wants cogent appraisal. Reality testing is easy if one is asked to confirm that night follows day; it’s forever troubled when an artist subjects himself to criticism. He doesn’t respect every judgment tendered but he may listen to other artists or people of cultivated taste. Their views are likely to be cogent when a work at hand is well or poorly made and more or less competent as the expression of a currently favored style. Judgments are less trustworthy—tastes were formed by yesterday’s styles and standards—if works deploy unfamiliar but challenging ideas. How much headway should originality enjoy: should artists go where they choose or should cultivated tastes restrain artists willing to test stylistic boundaries? These questions mark the grinding interface 81

See Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions (New York: Dover, 1992).

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between creation and appraisal. Artists challenge perceivers by revealing unexplored possibilities; perceivers chasten artists by rejecting adventures inspired by fads. The two converge, somewhat arbitrarily, in the consensus that George Dickie described as “institutional.”82 He described its status as the expression of curatorial authority, though curators defer to the community of educated sensibilities. Artists deplore this arrogation of authority or they stand back, demoralized and depleted, when bold gestures are misconstrued and harshly judged. Consider a cook’s relations to those she feeds. Food is nourishing but also aesthetic: taste is a critical lure. Cooks are pleased by contented guests, but many suspect that their finished work seems ordinary. Fatigued by heat and tension, tongues insensitive after too many tastings, they lack the distance required for cogent judgments. Why suppose that artists of any sort respond to their work with the innocence of those who enjoy it? The mutual understanding of artists and critics is all the less plausible when each of the six axes is considered in turn: Obscurity to clarity: The most cultivated perceiver (only excepting other artists) doesn’t hear a work or see a design against the backdrop of possibilities known to the artist. Educated perceivers comprehend a work’s form; artists know it to be a variant of many that were possible. Musicians who played or sang when famed composers directed performances of their work describe them as deeply moved. Listeners, too, were affected, but were they listening to or for the same things? The composer gloried in his success, still feeling weeks and hours of struggle and fatigue. He likely remembered abandoned alternatives and wondered if other choices might have served him better. Listeners knew nothing of those possibilities; they heard the work as written and played. Internal to external: A cultivated listener enjoys the sound heard between his ears when wearing headphones. Thought or sensation is sometimes enough: one needn’t interpret it as the effect of an external cause. Perceivers might be content if every encounter with artistic works were short-circuited in this way. Artists, too, are sometimes satisfied by ideas and intensities that are only internal: a novelist imagines the plot of a book she never writes. But this is not the normal way of artistic 82

See George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).

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ambition. Artists want the opposition of a resistant medium: words, marble, or building sites. These two—one empirical, the other a priori—are contrary ways of addressing the ambient world. Joachim Gasquet described a conversation with Cezanne: I want to be a true classic…through nature, through sensations….Basically, I don’t think of anything when I paint: I see colors. I paint; I enjoy transposing them just as I see them onto my canvas. They arrange themselves haphazardly as they please. Sometimes that makes a painting…. 83 [T]he painter renders his sensations, his perceptions concrete through drawing and color.…There is a logic of color….The painter owes obedience to nothing else. Never to the logic of the brain; if he gives himself over to that, he is lost. Always the logic of the eyes. If he senses correctly, he will think correctly. Painting is first of all in vision….Nature always finds the way to tell us what she means when we respect her.84 The artist…must be more or less master of his subject and, above all, of his means of expression. …He must paint what is before him and strive to express himself as logically as possible, with a natural logic….As for progress, only nature and an eye trained by contact with nature are required. All this becomes concentric by dint of looking and working. 85 Cezanne proposed that the painter go from nature to the Louvre before returning to nature with the perspectives of the Louvre. Kandinsky’s later work has a different orientation: Contrary to the static form-ideal of painting which prevailed in the past millennium, where the subject object was immediately perceived as a whole and graphically recorded by the intellect, 83

Michael Doran, ed., Conversations with Cezanne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 117-118. 84 Ibid., pp. 119-120. 85 Ibid., p. 121.

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always directed objectively earthward, the moving form-ideal of today sets into motion the eye in any desired direction of the rhythmic non-objective creation. This cannot be mentally recorded or memorized like objective impressions because it points heavenward, as an expression of infinity. If to some the harmony of order and beauty of these non-objective creative paintings is not immediately obvious or appealing, it gradually becomes evident to anyone permanently exposed to their increasingly realized influence. Through this, the onlooker subconsciously enfolds his personal advance towards exactitude and sense of esthetic beauty, finding it immensely enjoyable and useful. Because the objective painting contacts earthly matter only, it cannot cause such spiritual evolution.86 Kandinsky’s a priorism is the defensive response to a technology that seemed to displace representational styles: Since photography and motion pictures today record all events, situations, or persons for practical or sentimental need, the skill of modern man has been freed from reproduction by hand, thus enabling him to cultivate a higher stage in art expression by following his creative esthetic urge.87 Let painters respond to this subversive turn by liberating art from its representational moorings; let painting mimic geometry and music. Literature might have claimed this same advantage—words can express unrealized possibilities of many sorts—though it rarely loses touch with human concerns. Would it be advantageous if every art were liberated from its material references? Descartes made geometry algebraic; Point and Line to Plane proposes geometry (or rubber sheet topology) as the model for painting. Kandinsky lagged behind Descartes by a step, but the effect is similar: both sublime thought from materiality. Doing this is contentious because perceivers less cerebral than Kandinsky want and look for material references when seeing art. This is reasonable given that making art and 86 87

Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, pp. 11-12. Ibid., p. 11.

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seeing it is motivated principally by the desire to refine and perfect the look of content and form first encountered in the near-world. Kandinsky and his fellow abstractionists discounted that value, partly because they misconstrued music’s allusive powers: the voices of its instruments resemble human timbre; its propulsive rhythms are intimations of activity and expectation. Why isn’t intellect gratified by reading scores or seeing the paintings made when Kandinsky applied the directives of his book? Because feelings or associations they evoke are paltry when compared to the effects of the same scores heard in performance or those aroused when seeing Kandinsky’s early figurative paintings. Sensibility often wants more than abstractions, however decorative and pleasing, because they—like restaurant menus—too often lack substance. Association: A work may arouse similar associations in its maker and perceivers, though an artist’s associations frame the process of making it while associations aroused in perceivers have no equivalent force. Wright may have been thinking of coiled fly paper when designing the Guggenheim Museum, but I don’t imagine fly paper when seeing it. Wouldn’t I understand a building better if I were to construe it in the same terms that inspired its design? Croce and Collingwood believed that recapturing an artist’s directing idea is the essence of decoding. Let’s ignore the perpetual obstacle to knowing what an artist was thinking short of a memoir that recounts his or her creative moments. Perceivers would be better able to construe some works as they propose if there were reliable information about the networks of associations informing their designs. Yet most people see the Guggenheim without imagining Wright’s thinking when he designed it: we understand this and other works of art because of perceiving their manifest forms, not by knowing an artist’s ideas, motives, or intentions. Nor do artists anticipate the associations likely aroused by those who see or hear their work. How could they? Most works, great or mediocre, provoke webs of association unimagined by their makers. Value: Is there a perfection to which both sides—artists and perceivers—defer, one as creator of value, the other as appraiser? Suppose that beauty is art’s distinguishing perfection or—with Clive Bell—that significant form is its cognitive, affective center.88 Is either the point of convergence? 88

Clive Bell, Art (Champaign, Ill.: BookJungle, 2009), p. 13.

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Beauty would have that role if both sides agreed that its presence or absence is a necessary and sufficient condition for artistic perfection. But this can’t be the apotheosis we seek until someone identifies the beauty-making property or properties common to roses, Titian, and Bach. Is it determinable form or something else? Bell’s appeal to significant form is also problematic. He assumed that connoisseurs would know what is or isn’t significant; he didn’t cite its attributes beyond saying that significant art provokes emotion. This explanation is only passingly helpful because people have strong feelings in situations of every sort. Bell wouldn’t have been thinking of this pervasive emotional tone, hence the inference that his appeal to significant form was shorthand for the emotional responses of people he esteemed. His criterion is question-begging: it doesn’t specify what these people approved or why they approved it. Artists and perceivers can agree about a work’s plot or dominant melody. But what are their respective criteria for artistic success? The difficulty of correlating their judgments is complicated by significant differences among artists, among perceivers, and between artists and perceivers. People are moved by seeing a performance of Medea—they drown in feeling—but is it sure that men are affected in the same ways as women? Did Euripides feel the horror of the drama or was he coolly inciting his audience? His actors may be devastated by the play’s demands, yet each preserves the distance required to control emotions appropriate to a role. Why suppose that the dramatist has less distance than his actors? One infers from didactic movies or plays that the creator thinks or feels exactly as he or she would have an audience respond. But that inference is often gratuitous: the artist might have been thinking or feeling any number of ways. Could we establish convergence between artists and perceivers by way of a collateral interest: museums, galleries, or clients, for example? This, too, is more problem than cure. Music lovers collect recordings, though musicians are annoyed by the idea that a single performance (or an engineer’s cut-and-paste version) is construed as definitive evidence of their talent or ideas. They acknowledge the worth of individual performances but regard them as tokens of a work in progress. Perceivers have simpler aims: liking music’s artifacts, they collect the bits that please them. This difference is subversive when artists resist the

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vanity aroused when perceivers, galleries, and museums collect or revere their work. We could abandon failed strategies for correlating the judgments of artists and perceivers if something more direct were promised. Why not enumerate the properties that each regards as sufficient for beauty, significant form, or some other esteemed quality: is there a set of properties favored by both? We want a short-list, though every enumeration quickly exceeds that aim. We cite harmony and proportion—form—in nature or things made. Works of art also require the unity that enables us to think or perceive them as stable figures standing out from an incidental ground: poems, even barns and sunsets, create the illusion of aesthetic autonomy by carving out spaces of their own.89 Other properties—tone and color, for example—distinguish particular arts from one another, though complexity appropriate to content and the surprise of broken symmetry are generic values. These features are widely acknowledged, though many things that affect sensibility—old photographs, swirling clouds, abandoned farms, and broken windows—preclude a tidy list of aesthetic qualities. Descartes reduced Aristotle’s substantial forms—enumerable qualitative essences—to the simplicity of Euclidean properties and their transformations: circles to ellipses, parallelograms to squares.90 We want but can’t establish that degree of simplicity: harmonious proportion and unity are elemental, symmetry breaking and surprise are useful, many literary properties—character portrayals, flashbacks, and mood—are appropriate in context. Why be frustrated by our inability to supply a short-list of aesthetically valorizing properties? Is it our failure to confirm the presence of a single property: beauty? That is one reason, but there is another. Objectivists sought value-creating properties in things perceived; beauty was their simplified candidate. The relational view has a contrary effect: it augments the burden on the side of things perceived 89

Think of conversing in a crowded room: one strains to objectify and stabilize the interlocutor’s voice and words against the noisy backdrop. Isolation is easier with paintings, sculptures, and buildings because of their materiality and fixed places. A proscenium frames opera and drama. Music is harder to stabilize because doing it depends on an auditor’s ability to hear continuity in a moving image. Texts are similarly demanding: their intrinsic coherence is distinct from the coherence readers discern and stabilize by virtue of focus and understanding. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 88. 90 Descartes, Meditations, pp. 90-95.

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while intensifying it on the side of human responses. Sensibility is multiply affected by disparate qualities in variable relations. The diversity of its responses defies resolution to a simpler, more elemental few because sometimes, for example, we prefer tragedy to comedy and vengeance to justice. Bell’s significant form is shorthand for an array of cues we recognize and value but can’t fully specify because art’s coupling to perceivers introduces variables that aren’t fully understood or controlled. Perceivers are critical but happy to be convinced. They wait to be entertained and informed: “I like your work, whatever it means.” The diversity of their interests is out of scale with the specific objectives of individual artists. For artists are stubborn. Their self-conviction is a principal strength, so points of contact or conflict—mutual incomprehension—are fraught. Established styles are a saving grace because they supply a framework for mutual understanding. Yet these different perspectives and aims, so often immiscible, guarantee that convergence is fragile. Action: Kant emphasized that art’s perceivers are disinterested: they have no aim but the enjoyment that comes with reflecting on things seen or heard. This view is consistent with Kant’s theory that experience is created when understanding uses its categories and schemas to schematize (organize) sensory data.91 For minds may have either of two aims when having experience: they are motivated by practical needs or desires, or by delight and diversion. Peirce objected that experience is more than a mental effusion. It is, he argued, the activity of engaging things—art works or others—in the ambient world, though he agreed that we may be content to perceive or think about them. Kant didn’t provide for interaction because his theory of knowledge denies that things independent of experience can be known or that engaging them is thinkable: every such thing is said to be “noumenal”;92 talk of them is unintelligible. One may suppose that things encountered are a limit on experience corresponding to Kant’s “transcendental object.”93 But that is too loose a reading of Kant: he affirms that nothing is thinkable beyond the contents of awareness (except its transcendental conditions). The

91 92 93

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 102-175. Ibid. pp. 257-275. Ibid., p. 137, pp. 315-322.

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“transcendental object” is the idea that there is something beyond the data of experience, an idea that mind projects into experience in the course of synthesizing it. But Kant’s sober readers—sensitive to the origins of experience and the limits of understanding—make no sense of the possibility that they are affected by or affect anything except themselves. Peirce’s model of reality testing is a more accurate rendering of the activities joining artists to readers and perceivers. These encounters are active but significantly mediated. Friends can hug or speak; artists and perceivers engage one another by way of works created, then perceived and appraised. This is the dialectic of mutual provocation: artists show us possibilities unforeseen; we tell them what we see or understand, thereby prodding them to reconsider what they do or how they do it. We say nothing useful to artists dead or unknown, but the reciprocity of mutual action is lively and consequential if our responses to dead painters are useful to artists who incorporate their styles or perspectives. This reciprocity is ideally the counterpoint of show-and-tell: action and reaction. Perceivers have reliably settled views of the world and themselves. Risking intellectual, moral, and emotional torpor, they wait for artists to show them unsuspected possibilities. But possibilities are infinite; many have no relevance to us; many that are relevant are perverse or otherwise unworthy. Artistic judgment isn’t always reliable: possibilities that artists discover and explore require appraisal. Perceivers supply it. But most perceivers are hidebound, so the dialectic of artist-and-audience is always an exercise that joins temptation to distrust: what do I dare show you versus what do I dare say of things I see or hear? Each side needs the other—one to test his or her ideas, the other for provocation—though each distrusts the other’s capacity and intentions. Galleries, experts, and museums are the middle-men, the self-anointed guarantors of reliable judgment: quashing uncertainty; they tell us who and what is good. But their claims to authority are dubitable, given stylistic revolutions, changes of taste, and their commercial interest: does Andy Warhol earn a niche in the pantheon of revered artists or was that judgment always silly? Nietzsche dramatized this opposition: emphasizing artistic challenge, he conceded the risk of strutting madness, the need for modesty before the regulative judgments of one’s critics. Some artists survive this inquisition when superior gifts are allied to congenial arts

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and styles. Some works and talents that might have survived weren’t noticed; the rest shine momentarily before drowning in the froth set to churning by ambition and modest talent. 2. Arts having one or several creators Painters alone are credited for the quality of their pictures. A logical proof also stands apart; its autonomy is inherent. Allusive novels are incomplete: written to excite, they are schemas completed by their imaginative readers. Drama, dance, and music are social arts: the nest of their creators is three-deep: writer, composer, or choreographer, then director, actors, dancers, or musicians. All have artistic skills but none are viable without the social skills required when idiosyncrasy and talent are subordinate to a corporate aim. We should be more surprised than we are when performances are successful. The social conditions for realizing finished work are imprinted in the work-lives and minds of these specialized but cooperative and complementary creators. Painters, logicians, and some writers can hide from the world, emerging anonymously as their work is done. Artists needing partners never feel that relief. The internet somewhat reduces the anxiety of authors needing publishers, but nothing comparable relieves the frustration of playwrights whose work is never performed. Production costs are high; there are many explanations for failure, but sensibility withers if its creative trajectory is always thwarted. 3. Depth and revelation Imagine someone content while sitting quietly. Her relief in body and mind is aesthetic because it qualifies sensibility; wine or a bath has similar effects. These experiences have little complexity or nuance; each is satisfying while having no purpose beyond itself. Why ask for more: what lure impels us to search for complexity and depth in works of art? Plato’s cave is our point of reference: squinting in the dark, one hopes for light. There is no sense of absence when a day’s tensions are drained: one doesn’t always want or need the illumination of the Forms. But there are times—in jealousy, need, or anger—when obscurity frustrates efficacy. Freudian analysis promises liberation by exposing buried passions and memories to conscious light. Skeptics doubt his cure, though patients are changed when analysis infuses conflicted attitudes with memories of their context and formation. People once

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obscure to themselves learn emotional clarity by discerning the tensions that shaped them. Each learns a style of rumination that enables him or her to reduce distorting feelings and inhibitions. Untying a constricted emotional balloon releases fetid air; each reforms himself. The analogy to the cultivated sensibilities of artists or perceivers is imperfect but there is a common aim: look into a work in process or one created; see its parts and form. Bored by an opera or play I don’t know, I read my program and shift in my seat. I could use this opportunity to extend thought and feeling in directions that might enlarge and gratify me but I resist the lesson of Plato’s allegory: ignorance defeats learning. Blinded by the glint of light in the work at hand, I lose myself in daydreams and distractions. Which course of study would enable me to advance on my own? Artists would be appropriate instructors, but what could they teach me? Would I let them? Artists educate perceivers by introducing them to works that are provocative but comprehensible, by teaching them the elements of craft, and by encouraging them to experiment. Look or listen; create something of your own. Find works that suit you, then estimate as best you can why some please you more than others. Enjoy life more because you import these feelings and understandings into your everyday rhythms. This regime is appropriate to people of any age. It annoys some; it would gratify others. A few would reduce the message to a mannerism. Many would think themselves remade; they would experience the change as a mixture of pleasure, excitement, light, and liberation. John Dewey is their moral beacon. He emphasized that we often experience the artistic qualities of things when using them for other purposes. The fine arts are not finest when remote from everyday life; consummation (an intensely felt recognition of formal and material qualities) occurs while engaging them in practical ways.94 Life would be better if we worked in well-designed buildings; dinner would please us more if served on good china. Art is effete when set apart from everyday life in museums or concert halls. Make it accessible: let art’s rhythms intensify and excite those prefigured in daily life; let every art exploit its possibilities for adding grace to utility. Yet Dewey was a board member at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It wasn’t news to him that 94

Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 172-175.

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artists struggle with the ideas and materials of their craft or that they create works best seen or heard for themselves. Poetry isn’t background music; one withdraws from other pursuits to imagine the illusory spaces it conjures. A radio station in France once played carefully chosen music enjoyed by a small but loyal audience. A new manager changed its format: the station would play single movements from longer works interspersed with catchy ads; this would make the music palatable to advertisers and a younger audience. The bits and pieces are a lively background when driving; frequent changes of tempo keep drivers awake. But the station is detested by people who adore the music it plays: they want all of a piece, not snippets. The bits are seductive; listeners want consummation. Musical taste is not so much cultivated as mutilated when listeners never learn to hear the tensions created and resolved over the course of works that may last thirty minutes or an hour. Never mind that rhythmic movements of three to five minutes almost duplicate the span of extended popular songs, that few people have the training, patience, or desire for longer pieces, and that advertisers want as large an audience as a station may command. The practice belies the excuse: one doesn’t teach writing by ignoring grammar. We are crippled by an education that suppresses forms intrinsic to the art it teaches. 4. Beauty Beauty is neither a property of things nor a subjective state of mind, but rather the effect of their relation. “Beautiful” is a response to things seen, thought, or heard. It signifies properties cognized with or without feeling: one may have no response pro or con when seeing a fine necklace, though seeing the jumbled roof lines and facades of old cities evokes waves of elation. Examples like these encourage the inference that beauty is grounded in form, though seascapes and skies, like some paintings by Pollock and de Kooning, are perceived as wholes, not as constructions organized by a form or forms. This diversity—feeling or form or neither—precludes an essential list of beauty-making properties. The survey of things experienced as beautiful confirms that certain properties—unity, form, harmonious proportion, freshness, grace, and surprise—are characteristic. Yet we often perceive beauty in things

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lacking one or more of these properties: it’s telling, for example, that we like broken symmetry. A walk in the park earlier today supplies an example better than any argument. Trees are still bare, so the architecture of trunks and branches is apparent. One tree in particular is magnificent: two great trunks emerge from a stumpy base decorated with gargoyle-like growths. There is no symmetry to its branches, nothing harmonious in its proportions: every sprouting knob or branch is a surprise. Only its finely textured bark is recognizably a virtue of the sort normally praised. Yet this tree is beautiful to my sight and probably to that of many who see it. Indeed, many trees are beautiful while failing several of the criteria of our standard list, hence the reproof to any claim that a list of properties is essential to everything experienced as beautiful. One might abandon the search for a list of essential properties in favor of the surmise that beauty’s constitutive properties are the terms of a family resemblance:95 everything said to be beautiful may have one or more of the properties constitutive of the family. This formulation is generous but still insufficient to distinguish things perceived as beautiful. For which beauty-making properties are common to Bach’s music, a stream engine, and a wedding gown? Is there any family resemblance that binds them while excluding a myriad of things that no one calls beautiful? There is a solution, but not one founded in the properties of the diverse things called beautiful. Esteem for them is best explained by reference to the hypothesis that beauty is sensibility’s response to some things thought or perceived. Each sensibility responds to a disparate array of things: there may be no sensibilities that enjoy or dislike all of the same things. People whose perceptual and cognitive powers are shaped by the same innate but determinable forms will have made those forms more determinate, more idiosyncratic. Each will see affinities to some things that others call beautiful or ugly, but there are and will be many differences among us. The relational view is also unembarrassed by shifting opinions; it predicts that judgments will alter as sensibilities evolve. That may happen if one comes to paint in a different style or because one’s taste in 95

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), para. 66, pp. 51-52.

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painting is newly influenced by an interest in portraits, religion, or botanicals. Bach’s academic style seemed turgid to people excited by the flourish of Italian operas. Mendelssohn—reading scores, hearing differently—altered the accepted view by remarking Bach’s effects on him. The possibility of altered opinions doesn’t entail that ascriptions of beauty are tentative: one may be secure in his or her judgment because sure of sensibility’s response, though aware that responses may alter if taste and styles change. Could we discover that Bach or Mozart were mediocre composers? This is two questions. First, was either or both a mediocre craftsman: did either or both write music that fails to take advantage of the timbre and dynamics of available instruments; does their music lack appropriate form, meaning proportion, harmony, complexity, and surprise? Second, does hearing their work create the impression of vitality and depth, hence the illumination and elation that distinguish the experience of fine music? No one musically informed will likely fault either composer as a craftsman. But taste is a function of one’s cultivation in a milieu. People trained to hear new styles may find Bach or Mozart no less alien than Eastern music is to most Western ears. The caution appropriate to judgments of beauty—they may be superseded—has its reciprocal in prudence when avowing ugliness. Plato dispenses with error and the ugly by describing them as privations: apparently substantive properties are degenerate versions of truth and beauty. But ugliness, like error, is real. A neighbor’s garage band is practicing: birds scream, dogs bark, people close their windows or flee. The experience isn’t aesthetic to any positive degree, though I can’t attend to anything else. Aesthetics deplores experiences of this sort, though its impatience exposes a bias in our honorific ideas of phenomena affecting sensibility: all have or should have redeeming qualities. We say, for example, that people should be honorable. Those who lack the trait are dishonorable, though dishonorable signifies the absence of a trait, not the presence of its contrary. This consideration is only rhetorically useful: it gets rid of contrariety by annihilating one of the contraries. Dissonance and hatred aren’t mere pointers to their absent contraries; each is something in itself. The contrariety of beauty and ugliness is also pertinent in this other way. Suppose that beauty is an intrinsic property of some things

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perceived, so that ascriptions of beauty are correct or not, true or false. Many truths are slow to be affirmed because understanding has a circuitous trajectory, one that sometimes culminates when critical judgment discerns that works long ignored are beautiful. Did something less than beautiful, something ugly or nondescript, suddenly become beautiful? No, truth hits its proper mark: beauty was acknowledged in works once misperceived as academic. Yet the analogy is flawed: it will always be true that a fugue has a certain number of notes and bars; it may not always happen that music’s connoisseurs are ecstatic when hearing it. Variability is disruptive because it breeds uncertainty: it feeds the prejudice that connoisseurs are pretenders and that cultivation is a ritual discipline affirming some version of the status quo. How is judgment formed? Sensibility’s relations to things thought or perceived begins in naïveté or ignorance: object and perceiver are loosely bound. Knowing nothing of candy but having a sweet tooth, I like the first ones I taste. Experience is my teacher, so many tastes later, I shun the early pleasure for others more subtle. A teacher once shamed a class by asking how many liked Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Half of us raised our hands. How many liked Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto? Some of the other half raised their hands. The first sample, he announced, had no taste. His question was ambiguous: were we asked to judge the relative merits of the two pieces or merely to indicate our separate responses to them? One may like patriotic music while knowing its faults. The objective side of the relationship makes a different demand: justify your pleasure. This is the question to which most people have no answer in most domains. Liking many things, unable to specify the qualities that provoke our pleasure, we fall back on the limp defense that there is no disputing taste. But taste is disputed by those whose experience of nature or an art enables them to specify significant qualities of things they perceive as fine or beautiful. Mill is ridiculed for writing that the best evidence of desirability is the evidence that something is desired.96 But this acknowledgement—however foolish in ethics, politics, or commerce—is sagacity in aesthetics. The connoisseur is not someone having an a priori intuition into the realm of pure forms. The trajectory from penny candy to something 96

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), p. 34.

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better is experiential, not logical or dialectical. One who sees or hears many works of a domain comes to know its styles, material means (colors or notes), and the forms that generate its complexity; people educated in a particular artistic domain know what to look for and know when they perceive it. Judgments are informed but not foolproof because taste and perception are formed by the contingencies of experience and its milieu. Taste is the posture to which everyone accedes, each to some degree of cultivation in one or several domains. But taste is probing and problematic, not, like truth, a final resting place. One likes some things more than others, and can—in the best of cases—give justifying reasons, though one may over- or underestimate the work perceived. This isn’t reason for despair: there are few restaurants where one is never deceived or disappointed, but there is a compensatory advantage: errors acknowledged in retrospect make judgment sober. 5. Nature versus the arts Pictures from the Hubble telescope are beautiful because of their content and because their mystery is affecting: these are the starry heavens that provoked awe in Kant.97 Lesser things—butterflies, egrets, and fog—are no less affecting. Yet Clive Bell spoke for the tradition that identifies aesthetics with fine arts when he denied aesthetic value to nature because it lacks significant form.98 But what is the aesthetic content or value that nature lacks? Is it form or feelings excited by things having form? Kant would have agreed that nature seems boundless, hence that it lacks form.99 Yet physics and biology—sensibility focused by understanding—find nature beautiful because they know the laws that give it form by making it orderly. And certainly, nature provokes intense pleasure in people who know nothing of its laws. Bell may have been assuming that significance requires something additional to feeling and form, perhaps the activity of an intelligent cause. Paintings are experienced as beautiful because formed by the organizing hand and plan of their makers, yet focused intervention is not restricted to the fine or practical arts: parks, gardens, and hedgerows are created by humans tailoring nature to their taste. Was nature faulted for

97 98 99

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 111-127. Bell, Art, p. 13. Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 107-114.

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lacking a maker? Creationists allege that nature is God’s work: his purpose and plan are everywhere manifest, however obscure to us. This surmise invokes a familiar rule of inference: the existence and character of effects are determined by their cause. Creationists would have us infer that nature has aesthetic value because its existence and character are the work of God, its most excellent maker. But this inference valorizes our experience of nature without justifying its conclusion: nature may be causa sui. Knowing that our lives are organized by intentions and plans, we look for organizing form in other things. Children imagine animals or faces in cumulus clouds, but this is play, never an estimate of meteorological intention. Expecting form and purpose in works of art, confused by finding neither in Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, we persist in looking for evidence of both. But the searching is our nervous tic, not the response to a failure of his. Nature, too, resists us because it exhibits order without the evidence of purpose. Imagine an island where the setting sun is different every night, cloudy or clear, as it falls into the Atlantic beyond high cliffs. No words convey the effect on sensibility; no one seeing it doubts its beauty. 6. Practical experience versus the fine arts Music and drama are sometimes overwhelming; the intellectual and emotional effects of jewelry, clothing, or pottery don’t compare. Familiarity breeds indifference: we don’t expect the instruments of practical life to be more than pleasantly distracting. But why are fine carpets or buildings less esteemed than fine art: is it use that makes us careless when judging their worth? This is not the issue of market value—millions of dollars for a painting, thousands for an exceptional rug—but rather a question about the properties responsible for the worth of things: is there an empirical or reasoned basis for saying that “significant form” and its emotional effects are exclusive to the small set of arts considered “fine”? Aristotle’s derogation of practical life endures in appraisals of its means. Poetry, painting, and music are enjoyed while resisting the distractions of practical life; we are less inclined to dwell on the beauty of well-made tools. Kant emphasized, Dewey denied, that aesthetic attention and appraisal require that purpose be suspended when an object or event is regarded in itself. Demanding tasks require focus: one can’t

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hear everything significant in a string quartet while writing a letter. Yet one may enjoy a “consummatory” moment while using a well-designed instrument or building. Expressions of a similar idea were conspicuous when arts were used to intensify religious or tribal practices. Church music and architecture borrowed aesthetic luster from their spiritual aim; the serious purposes of religious practice were softened by the magnificence of organs, music, and churches themselves. Architecture tests this opposition—practical aims or aesthetic seduction—because both sides are represented in the conflicting assumptions of architects themselves: is a building aesthetically valuable because of its external form or because of an ensemble of structural and functional properties (including contextual fit and internal design) appropriate to its use? Some architects think of buildings as three-dimensional analogues to two-dimensional paintings. The extra dimension enlarges the possibilities for a diversity of sculptural forms without requiring that one perceive more than a structure’s skin. This aesthetic converges with a commercial interest: many clients want maximum freedom to organize floor space: accommodating architects design with Bauhaus simplicity, leaving floors undivided. Frank Lloyd Wright had a different aesthetic: like car makers that emphasize the comfort and pleasure of driving their machines, he translated the exterior forms of his prairie houses into the elegance and comfort of their interiors. Dewey would have us generalize: make that aesthetic interest imperative throughout our practical lives. 7. Art or decoration? This distinction is fraught because there seem to be no necessary and sufficient conditions that qualify a work as one or the other. Painting risks being decorative when it stops being representational and expressive; music is only diverting when reduced to hummable tunes. But there are degrees of difference, not simple contrariety, between these extremes. Two variables are the principal considerations determining a work’s place on this continuum: significance (emotional expression, figurative representation, or meaning) in painting; complexity (with melody, harmony, proportion, and development) in music. These variables are independent but not exclusive; paintings and stained glass windows often have both. No degree of either is a near guarantee that a work is decorative only, though Malevich’s (allusive because

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intimidating) Black Square challenges even that judgment. Judgments are typically personal and tentative, though one reaches for a contrast that is better justified and defined. Decoration in dress or furnishings is visually pleasing: one feels better in a well-made room. Light music relieves tension; people drink or talk or dance. But decoration is so effortless perceptually and so little affecting that we ease into and out of it with no sense of being altered or provoked. Significance and complexity are cognitively demanding: one because it requires interpretation, the other because it challenges a perceiver’s capacity for resolution and integration. Most Broadway show music is only punchy or seductive; rhythm and pace make it diverting but uncomplicated. Some artists reduce or ignore complexity in order to exaggerate the need for interpretation: ambitious directors often suppose that an opera’s music, however superior, is an occasion for mounting a production that confirms their genius. Hence this crippled example of the middle ground between art and decoration: one listens with eyes closed. Academic music avoids these alternatives because failed examples are boring rather than decorative. Abstract painting stands precariously between them: is it art or decoration? Eschewing significance, it needs complexity sufficient to make a work compelling. Artists go either of two ways: to reductions by Malevich, Mondrian, or Rothko or to the spontaneous complexity of Pollack’s drip paintings, the academic detail of cubist art, or the elaborate designs of Kandinsky’s late work. Is the result more art than decoration? Haydn and Chopin wrote music with depths uncompromised by their elegant finish. Many abstractionists share these strengths, though Picasso alone was a critical and popular icon. One reason is the significance of paintings—Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, for example—that join abstraction to his expressive deconstructions of things perceived. Painting isn’t music: it is often merely decorative when representation, expression, and meaning are purged. Artists defending themselves against photography and figurative painting emphasize color, form, light, and shadow. The results are often magnetic—design and color are sometimes enough—though many works having only these properties seem vapid and constricted for reasons essential both to sensibility and these paintings. The ocular system—eye and brain—has evolved in the near-world where perspective and reference are critical to vision. The eye searches for content that rouses feeling, it wants

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intimations of figure and resistance. Successful abstractions provoke these responses (those evoking the geometry of architecture, for example) despite the apparent absence of figures or meaning. We don’t have the definitive criteria required to warrant appraisals or inferences like these. There is only taste—more or less educated—to justify them. 8. Ranking aesthetic experiences Ranking aesthetic experiences is hindered by several confusions or assumptions: i. Plato claimed that the good, true, and beautiful are perfections, though truth stands apart from goodness and beauty because every thought or sentence affirming the existence or character of a state of affairs is true or not. There are degrees of specificity (“It talks” rather than “She talks”) but no degrees of truth and none of error. There are, however, decrements from goodness and beauty: something may have a degree of goodness or beauty without being unconditionally good or beautiful. Accordingly, it may be experienced as beautiful or fine without satisfying the highest standard of perfection. An adequate account of aesthetic experience provides for the beautiful, the ugly, and grades along the span between them. ii. Aesthetic rankings are ambiguous: do they express the levels of satisfaction experienced when things are thought or perceived, or appraisals of those things? There is no point disputing someone’s feelings, though judgments of the works inciting them are contestable. People often construe their feelings or associations as sufficient evidence of a thing’s worth, though connoisseurs resist this elision: one may remark that a work is well made and fine in itself though he doesn’t like it. Restaurant critics often affirm that dishes are impeccably made though not to their taste. iii. Appraising a cause presupposes that our thoughts or percepts represent it accurately, though accuracy is often frustrated by obstacles of different sorts: studio light is low; we sit too far from the stage to see or hear clearly. There are strategies for correcting interference or averting obstacles: wait a while before driving because fog obscures the road; listen again; wear your glasses. iv. Craft and style are platforms—means—while distinction is something more. Works are less intelligible if craft was insufficient to

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realize a directing idea. Yet technical skill and deference to a style aren’t sufficient to create works of merit. v. Judgment is learned by familiarity with works of a style or kind; it is enhanced by comparing works by the same or different painters or by hearing the contrast when, for example, music is played metronomically rather than subtly phrased to alter the beat. vi. Criteria for appraising works of art are typically inadequate because generic. Form is an example; significant form is a refinement (given that everything has form), though “significant” is only cosmetic in the absence of criteria for its application. Unity, form, proportion, harmony, arresting complexity, surprise, and broken symmetry are useful points of reference, though none is sufficient to distinguish Ferde Grofe from Bernstein or Copeland. How does one learn to rank them? Principally by familiarizing oneself with their respective gestalts. Why do we appraise them differently? Because the skill for recognizing unity in a work embodies a nest of discriminations. Perceiving the many variables at once (melody, rhythm, phrasing, complexity, development, vitality, orchestration, timbre, and surprise), we make our judgments. These are six obstacles to thoughtful appraisal. It compares to responses that are cursory or clinical: we pass a work, quickly liking it or not, or we stop only long enough to regard its prominent features and style. The invitation to rank works of art is, accordingly, vague: register indifference or pleasure; rank works clinically as expressions of craft or style; or estimate their aesthetic merit. Merit presupposes standards of craft and style, though its recognition is more holistic than analytic. Art is appraised in the way that grand masters regard positions on chess boards: one perceives order in a complex array of shapes, sounds, or colors without having words or concepts that specify its form. What should count as pertinent evidence for or against an aesthetic judgment? What is the relevance of an appraiser’s emotional response; is there a criterion for measuring the comparative value of feelings and associations that vary among people of different religions, genders, or ethnicities? Is it significant that a work provokes some associations or none? There are myriad variations on these axes, and no way to adjudicate them short of declaring arbitrarily that one or another measure outweighs every other. We retreat to a statistical criterion of less subtle grain: how do cultivated people respond to particular works? Their rankings aren’t definitive because preferences are neither true nor false.

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They are a point of reference, though one less compelling than the personal appraisals made in the course of challenging and refining one’s taste: what did I like; what do I currently prefer; why this difference? Bentham hoped to resolve disputes of taste by isolating the relevant variables (he listed them as intensity, duration, and propinquity100): weigh the variables equally, give numerical values to each, then add them. Mill conceded that significant variables (he cited moral, intellectual, and animal pleasures101) are incommensurable. He implied that the several arts are also incommensurable and advised us to trust connoisseurs. But expert judgments vary—Is Richard Strauss better than Wagner?—so again we can only survey them for a statistical result sufficient to justify crude and revisable rankings. Results are always and only contingent: winning moves confirm the accuracy of a chess master’s gestalt; there are no equivalent tests when connoisseurs disagree. 9. Appraisals across domains We sometimes compare artists within a domain: Robbins to Balanchine, Gris to Picasso. People of lesser stature are compared to the paradigmatic artists of their domain, not to artists in other domains. Nor do we have criteria for comparing people at the top of their separate trades: Rembrandt and Palladio, Mozart and Shakespeare. Judgment loses its moorings when comparing works of different genres: dance can be poetic, but not in the way of poetry. One may be a connoisseur in several domains, hence qualified to judge the quality of the work in each, but is there information or a mental power that informs comparison across domains? Aesthetics fractures for want of an answer: we infer that there are few relevant and common properties that would facilitate comparisons, hence the absence of criteria with which to correlate their works. This answer isn’t definitive because sensibility’s neural basis is still obscure. Synesthesia is the clue that brain centers for color and sound—painting and music—are connected. Other clues are also significant: a small number of physical variables characterize the signals

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Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), p. 30. 101 Mill, Utilitarianism, pp. 7-12.

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transmitted to disparate brain centers along neurons that are chemically and structurally similar. One would expect less qualitative experiential diversity than we have, given this economical material base. But there is this possible advantage: learning in one domain may have applications in others. People adept in French and Italian learn Romanian with relative ease. Are there similar advantages when learning to decipher an art? That isn’t always true: people conversant with music or painting may be insensitive to painting or music. Every such person has a facility for recognizing form, without being able to recognize it in unfamiliar domains. Could it be true, nevertheless, that the “language of music” and “the language of art” are more than rhetorical metaphors? Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane translates his admiration for music into a set of rules for satisfying equivalent values and forms in painting. The book’s last pages—photographs of black and white prototypes illustrating the book’s lessons—are reminiscent of musical scores, designs, mathematical equations, and logical proofs. Certainly, they differ considerably from forms embodied in other media, but they are not so very different as to preclude the hypothesis that human brains have an innate sensibility to form. Music is created by expressing that power in notes and rhythm; mathematics disciplines form with logical rigor; grammar is the form constraining natural and artificial languages. Every such expression of form is grounded in sensibility’s capacity for thought and perception. It receives and recognizes form, thereby encouraging the inference that human brains discern form’s expressions across domains that are materially and qualitatively anomalous. There are few concepts or words signifying the diversity, forms, and complexity of aesthetic experience. But we have names for the gestalts of faces, novels, places, paintings, sonatas, and proofs. Why are such things perceived as unities? Perhaps the brain organizes data in accord with the inherent grammar or logic mentioned above. Music, more than language, may be the clearest expression of its logic, plasticity, and constraint.

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10. Why are people drawn to some genres of aesthetic experience rather than others? Like adults still partial to childhood tastes and aversions, we cite early training, culture, or subtle neurological differences to explain preferences that are otherwise mysterious. Chocolate or cigars, pushpin or poetry: tastes are consequential because they imply that sensibility is an appetite relieved by things of one or a few kinds. Content and form—rhythm and design—are common to poetry, music, and art but also to surgery, gardening, and friendship. Why are preferences obdurate and different? Will physiology explain it? Perhaps, but not yet.

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Chapter Four Interiority and Selfhood 1. Interiority Interiority is an awkward notion: everyone knows its referent though its sense is obscure. There are two ways to specify it: distinguish overt bodily behavior from endogenous processes, especially brain activity; or characterize interiority from the perspective of a mind turned on itself (Figure 1). Cartesians regard the first alternative as question-begging: why affirm that bodies have insides when the only confirmed realities are awareness, its qualifications, and self-awareness? Solipsist Cartesianism is, however, troubled: error, frustration, and death are evidence that we have vulnerable bodies in a world imperfectly known and controlled. We need an account of interiority that elides the Cartesian point of view—mind’s access to itself—with the surmise that self-inspecting mind is an effect achieved when the brain’s lower-order systems are read or altered by the higher-order systems of its hierarchically organized neural network. Can we describe interiority without implying that mind has properties of a kind and power that exceed those of the body and brain? Hegel was minimally hyperbolic when describing self-perception: This principle of Experience carries with it the unspeakably important condition that, in order to accept and believe any fact, we must be in contact with it; or, in more exact terms, that we must find the fact united and combined with the certainty of our own selves. We must be in touch with our subject-matter, whether it be by means of our external senses, or, else, by our profounder mind and our intimate self-consciousness. This principle is the same as that which has in the present day been termed faith, immediate knowledge, the revelation in the outward world, and, above, all in our own heart.102

102

G.W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 10-11.

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Hegel’s regard for self-scrutiny seems indulgent to us, though Hegel construed it as the duty of our nature: start in finitude, rise to the Absolute. Mind’s self-engagement was assumed, though there was no accord about its ontological status: is mind an autonomous agent or the activity of a body whose material properties are not directly inspectable? Hegel, like all Descartes’ heirs, assumed that mind was not bodily: how could it be if materiality is merely an organized appearance? Kant proposed that time is the form of internal intuition; self-awareness (the arrow labeled B in Figure 1) spontaneously creates the experience of unitary time—from a position outside of time—by binding its successive moments. (Music coheres, Kant supposed, because each note is bound to those before or after through a duration unified by mind’s transcendental activity.103) But are these speculations plausible? Why accumulate so much theoretic debt when experience doesn’t justify it? Time, for example, is not so unitary as Kant required: sleep interrupts it; distractions are commonplace; memory fails. Descartes’ solution was reminiscent of Aristotle:104 think of mind as a substance unifying its accidents. Drawers hold buttons, cushions hold pins: stipulate that mental substance is the internal binder and support for its thoughts, percepts, feelings, and desires. This proposal was odd because Descartes had described mind as an activity: When do I exist? Only when thinking. Yet Descartes’ inclination—mind is a substance—is vindicated if we amplify it in ways appropriate to Aristotle’s formulation: substances are qualified by properties (color, shape, or pain), by activities (looking or listening), and by capacities that condition their activities (being able to look or listen). Capacities are second-order properties consequent on first-order structural properties: we hear because of having ears. Sensibility—qualified by percepts, thoughts, and feelings, and capacitated for perceiving, thinking, and feeling—is the likely candidate for the substance unifying interiority if sensibility signifies the system— both receptive and responsive—of nerves and sensory organs. The word interiority implies a private inaccessible space, though interiority is, more precisely, the internal dynamic of the hierarchical feedback system that enables the brain to receive information while controlling body’s 103 104

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 74-82. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1028b33-1029a6, pp. 784-785.

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states and activities. This model has other familiar expressions. Computers are sensible to inputs that come as one types or receives messages from the Web; inert when turned off, they revive when charged and turned on. A materials engineer would likely say that interiority is a function of a system’s capacities given its structure: silicon transformers in computers, neurons in us. It may seem odd that one would espouse both physicalism and Descartes’ hierarchical coupling of awareness and its content to selfawareness. People who believe that mind is the activity of body distrust the metaphor of mind as a theater. Does ideational or perceptual content stand before the single self-observer somewhat as Van Gogh looked at sunflowers? Physicalists don’t understand how brains could do that. Having no sanitized description of mind, they prefer to avoid talk of interiority out of fear that misdescriptions will encumber research. But Descartes’ characterization is not false to our self-experience, unless we go to Platonic or Husserlian extremes:105 awareness has content; there is also self-awareness. Always conceding that our rendering of selfinspection tends to reify differences that are often vague, we dare acknowledge that interiority is real and that the powers exercised there are critical to our effective and affective lives. Descartes cited most of sensibility’s functions: But what then am I. A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.106 These are principally modes of response; only feeling is a mode of receptivity. Add perception as an expression of receptivity, notice that we have inspectable evidence for each of these functions, then tell why any should be struck from this amplified list. Self-inspection isn’t the last word about the character of mental activities, but that isn’t reason to disregard the evidence it provides. We could refuse to credit any information supplied by the data qualifying sensibility, including all perceptual data. But doing that would sabotage

105

See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). 106 Descartes, Meditations, p. 66.

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every plan and action, though perceptual data prove their worth by provoking, then confirming the efficacy of our encounters with other things. Why suppose that inspectable data are often good representations of extra-mental things but never evidence of the mind that receives them? 2. Selfhood unified by sensibility Life’s rhythms and trajectories vary across the domains of practical life, intellect, sociality, and aesthetics: from need to satisfaction, ignorance to understanding, disaffection to collaboration, comfort to elation. Each interest has its texture and task; all are sometimes mutually inimical— late to work but needing sleep—yet all are mutually affecting because sensibility is their common ground. Integrated sensibility—the effect of an integrated nervous system—is the experiential condition for the interiority of a unitary self. There may come a day when people have wireless access to one another’s brain states, but that isn’t a current advantage or one we normally want. Behavior (including language, discounting brain scans) is currently our only way of estimating what others think or feel. We may ignore their interiority when observing what they do or say, but no one supposes that his or her experience reduces to the evidence from which others infer it. That reduction, inverting the hypothesis that each mind is a perspective on the whole,107 would entail that every other being has no reality apart from its ways of appearing to me. Our popular ethos is disinclined to acknowledge the integrity of private experience; Facebook and perpetual texting are current expressions of the anxiety it provokes. We don’t often acknowledge this attitude but several considerations explain it: i. America’s frontiersmen had little sympathy for introspection. We inherit their emphasis on getting things done. Refinement is an indulgence: cultivation is preening, European, and effete. Our practical culture rewards efficacy; we’re suspicious of rumination. ii. Interiority seems a warehouse of embarrassing secrets. Some are personal but many are ethnic, religious, or cultural. We suppress these differences because diversity subverts cooperation in a society of immigrants. We are already different and mutually suspicious: why advertise our differences? iii.Vulnerability is 107

Leibniz, Monadology, para. 62, p.158.

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pervasive; we want safety. But diversity is commonplace and scary because we don’t know what it portends. “Why can’t we get along?” is the prayer that we shall get along if we ignore personal or cultural quirks by suppressing interiority. iv. Privacy is an obstacle to a scientific psychology because it makes us mutually inaccessible and unintelligible. Interiority is ignored when an empirically testable psychology affirms that conduct—behavior—is the only reliable evidence of our aims and ability. v. Physiology replaces folk psychology: we don’t have an informal but accurate language to replace the metaphorical talk implying that mind is a theater.108 These strategies are multiple ways of attacking a stubborn reality. They mutilate interiority without suppressing it because practical life obliges us to look after our interests and because pain and pleasure are one’s own. Many tasks are formulaic: you do them as I do. Yet perspective, initiative, and aesthesis are irreparably singular. Vulnerability confirms our autonomy: think of teenagers desperate to like what others like, struggling to feel at one with their peers. No, say these others, you’re not one of us; you are different. 3. Temperament Temperament is life’s abiding tonality. Its behavioral expressions include gesture, gait, and mien. Sensibility is its internal measure. Antique medicine acknowledged four kinds of temperament: choleric (angry), melancholic, sanguine (optimistic), and phlegmatic. They correspond to four humors: black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. Mixing humors in various proportions was thought to generate a variety of temperaments, hence differences of sensibility. The hormonal and neuronal bases for those differences aren’t fully known. Characterizing sensibility therefore reduces us to the traditional options: descriptions of behavior or self-described experience. Badly served by my temperament—impulsive behavior often sabotages my interests—I learn to alter one or the other: circumstances, aims, or myself. Temperament is the hardest to change because impulse and feelings are responsible for so many things we do: always hopeful, a gambler at heart, I learn prudence when losses threaten well-being. 108

See David Weissman, Lost Souls: the Philosophic Origins of a Cultural Dilemma (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003).

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Hume’s reckless dictum—reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions109—celebrates my weakness, though thought and habit are barriers to passion’s worst effects. Behavior modification is also effective. Using opposition to teach control, we alter temperament by sculpting taste: frustration, error, exclusion, and discontent oppose efficacy, intellect, sociality, and aesthetic delight. Character is the steady-state achieved when viable skills and attitudes have formed. Having progressed from inner to outer, intense feeling to testable judgments, we know how to sustain viable relations to people and things that are life-sustaining or -enhancing: a partner, a job, or the sources of aesthetic pleasure. This stance—call it cognitiveaffective posture110—is complex because it embodies affective inclinations and cognitive skills pertinent to practical life, intellect, sociality, and aesthetics. The degree of cultivation in each domain varies among persons, from little to more. No one is unaffected by learning, but training is uneven: no one is everywhere effective, informed, cooperative, or cultivated. 4. Taste Taste is the system of habits and inclinations acquired when temperament is shaped by experience: painting, not music, sculpture, not dance. Taste is common to artists and those who enjoy their work, but this point of convergence obscures disproportionate skills: tastes that direct an artist’s choices and craft are discriminating powers and inclinations in those who see or hear the things made. Perceivers cultivate their tastes with a generous degree of liberty: one looks about, sampling various arts and styles before settling on one or a few. Artists are often focused, even obsessive much earlier: one art suits them for reasons unexplained. Experience refines inclination when artists learn a style, craft, judgment, persistence, and the singular bent of personal imagination. Perceivers—even connoisseurs—do less. A familiar assumption acknowledges their difference: artists are free to destroy work that doesn’t satisfy their standards; perceivers rarely claim this right to themselves. This is respect for authorship but also recognition

109

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 415. David Weissman, Hypothesis and the Spiral of Reflection (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 187-189. 110

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that the artist knows the degree to which a work falls short of its directing idea. Our democratic ethos favors the right to judge but falters when asked to acknowledge the cogency of cultivated judgments. Taste seems effete; morally healthy people don’t have it because they refuse to preen. This is an odd prejudice. We rank wines and restaurants but denounce the elitism of people who make comparative judgments in music or painting: you are free to choose but don’t be uppity, don’t annoy us by what you choose. Does this advice imply that there are no differences of quality among works of a kind or merely that we are unqualified to see them? Why not ask the views of people trained to make relevant distinctions: do you perceive a difference, can you point it out or describe it so I might see it? Any response less tolerant diminishes the freedom and sensibility of those it intimidates. 5. Freedom The freedom critical to this essay is the liberty to educate, exploit, and enjoy the inwardness that is, with one’s body, the only thing unqualifiedly one’s own. Cultivation—whatever its métier and domain— is disciplined practice; we are or ought to be free to shape, apply, and enjoy tastes and talents apposite to any domain of artistic achievement. Cultivation resembles gardening, with the difference that one freely cultivates oneself. Pleasure is often intense but confounded by its incommunicability to others: one can’t make a gift of it; others can’t know it unless they pursue—because of birth or choice—a similar discipline. People living in democratic states treasure the freedom to go and come as they please. But freedom to enjoy an inner life intensified by the cultivation of one tastes and talents is also precious. The skilled cook works quickly as he or she lays out pots, tools, and ingredients. All or most of the calculation is sotto voce or unconscious: taste and skill drive the work. Skilled writers sometimes work with eyes closed, registering the flow of ideas without conscious reflection on fingers or keys: this is interiority impressing itself on the ambient world. People riding a subway often separate themselves from the press of other bodies, the noise, and impending day by reading books. There, amidst the anomie that punishes self-esteem, these readers affirm themselves. They do it in a culture that prefers action and achievement, though its pressures don’t

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always prevail because Descartes’ affirmation—I exist each time I think it—expresses a physical truth: the sensorium reverberating within me is my experiential core. I express it to others in ways that join me to them; I know it in ways more intimate. Each person sometimes wakens to a pace that is slow and abiding. We reclaim sensibility from tensions that reduce it to social veneer; thought and feeling fill a space too often invaded by noise. 6. Rumination Distorted by competing roles and duties, frustrated by plans gone awry, selfhood wants healing and relief. Rumination is self-repair. Disengaged but active, we cast about for reliable pleasures close at hand. Sex, games, and alcohol are familiar cures but their effects are usually ephemeral. Aesthetic pleasure, too, may be shallow, though people who read, garden, listen to music or play it inhabit a separate place. They enjoy singularity of a different kind, one that binds feeling to cognition in domains where discovery is a perpetual lure. Many artists and writers enjoy the steady rhythm of focused activity and the recapitulation that follows or precedes it. What worked, what didn’t; what was learned; am I pleased? Perceivers who merely see or hear a work aren’t impelled to reflect; rumination isn’t provoked unless one also looks or listens. For then a certain paralysis occurs: one is fixed in place by a surge of feeling and cognition: the painting seems too large to comprehend (whatever its actual size); the book shouldn’t end; the music or dance shouldn’t stop. Yet thought and feeling surge as the last page is turned: the cognitive, affective response focused by this single work is perfected by the rumination it provokes. This is a consummation requiring nothing beyond itself. Extracted from the cycle of ever-deferred satisfactions, we enjoy a sense of wholeness common to aesthetic reflection, religious faith, and the comforts of family and friendship. 7. Fantasy Figure 1 signifies Descartes’ cogito as it stands after the first Meditation, when every belief about the external world has been doubted because all may be false. It represents mind alone, a thinking monad having no context that isn’t generated out of itself. This is a situation of perfect freedom and maximal risk: no thought or feeling is controlled by

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anything beyond itself; every daydream or nightmare has equal claim to reality. But this is far from Descartes’ intention: it ignores the clear and distinct geometric ideas which he regarded as both innate and (after Plato’s Timaeus) constitutive of the material world. Thought has a natural trajectory: the idea of geometrized space controls fantasy by supplying a criterion for judging its products: can they be construed (like wax) as expressions of an underlying geometrical form?111 Kant and Schelling are a next step in this progression. Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” affirms that mind’s synthesis of experience is constrained by something beyond itself.112 Yet Kant, unlike Plato and Descartes, failed to tell what reality that might be. His “transcendental object” is the idea of an extra-mental limit to experience, though every such reality (if any there be) is unthinkable because noumenal.113 That restriction entails mind’s isolation from every other thing. Disqualifying correspondence, it leaves coherence—the compatibility of our numerous judgments—as the only plausible criterion of truth. Schelling exalted the implications of Kant’s failure by inverting it: the coherence of the whole conceptual system (hence the reality thereby prefigured and expressed) is, he said, the only test of its truth.114 His solution fails in its own terms: there may be equally comprehensive but contrary interpretations, plus many coherent but contrary stories of smaller scale. How shall we distinguish coherent fantasies from accurate representations of actual states of affairs? By setting fantasies—stories— apart from one of imagination’s other products: its empirically testable hypotheses. Peirce alleged that every thought about the world is provoked by and tested against extra-mental realities (Figure 2): successive thoughts are clarified or revised to satisfy the higher-order hypotheses that certify their integration into mind’s model of the world. Hypotheses sometimes exceed reality to a degree, but the aim is a trajectory: theories are successively corrected and extended as states of affairs are represented more accurately and amply. Our success is the measure of inquiry and its three critical assumptions: i. The array of qualitative differences (liquid, ice, and steam) disguises a much smaller set of qualitative variables (water); ii. The correlations of significant 111 112 113 114

Descartes, Meditations, pp. 90-95. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 244-247. Ibid., pp.137, 266. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), pp. 14-15.

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variables express functional (often causal) relations; iii. Abduction is the inferential style that speculates about the conditions (cause, constituent, or law) for things observed: is it smoke caused by fire or water vaporized by a hot pipe? Mind’s telos is plain: represent things as they are, not as fantasy construes them. Life is often hard; must it always be grim? Where is the tolerance for fantasy amidst this dour severity? How should we provide for and explain mind’s excess capacity, its passion for video games and movies that explore possibilities exceeding reality? These, too, are imagination’s products, but the urgency to create them expresses something distinct from Peirce’s Darwinian emphasis on mind’s accommodation to material circumstances. Imagination wants relief; play supplies it. Every shape and color, every phrase can be turned to purposes different from those normally assigned. Dewey rightly argued that aesthetic pleasures should offset the routine of everyday life, but he sometimes idealized efficacy while neglecting life’s brutality. People are often sick, tired, or humiliated by work that defeats them. Fantasy restores us by exposing unimagined possibilities (in music), by reconciling us to our conflicts (in drama), or by promising liberation now or later (in church or death). We breathe again because there is salvation (we shall be blessed), because a favored team has won (we are victorious) or because someone beautiful is seducing us (we are beautiful). And always, fantasy liberates or relieves us because it differs so conspicuously from the realities from which we seek relief. Children adore fantasy, but their reality testing hasn’t crystallized; they don’t always know the difference between the world as they imagine it and the world as it is. Adult fantasy is more powerful because the difference is plain and relief so urgent. If too much fantasy is disorienting because excess blurs the line between it and reality, moderation is healing. Delight in fantasy is common to artists and perceivers, though the motive, intensity, and means are different: one drains the torrent of ideas; the other wants distraction or the depth that comes with emotions focused by intellect. Play is too anodyne a word for the relief achieved because the artist isn’t playing. He or she struggled to learn a craft and now uses it to translate the fragment of an idea into a work that will have a life of its own. The activity is cathartic and elating: one is whole again when passions or sorrows are exorcised in music, poetry, or paint. The benefits for perceivers are similar, though the cure isn’t as deep:

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perceivers, even connoisseurs, don’t need paintings as much as Raphael needed to paint them. We want time to relish works individually, though Mozart’s oeuvre runs to six hundred twenty-six (known) compositions. Why so many? Because his head buzzed with variations he couldn’t stop transcribing. 8. Intensity Sensibility, privacy, and interiority signify an intra-psychic space without specifying the quantity or quality of experiences exciting it. I can admit that my cultivation is inferior to yours and consider ways to improve it; but I won’t believe that my experience was better or worse than I perceived it to be. Aesthetic intensity is the flare that marks one’s being: perceiving more, knowing better what I do and don’t like, I know better who I am. Imagine that each member of a theatre or concert audience sees or hears the same work but resonates to it in distinctive ways. This is the aesthetic conviction of cultivated singularity. We often suppose that having it is incidental to intellectual or moral autonomy because if usually comes later than practical, intellectual, or social skills. But this needn’t be true: children like drawing, play-acting, and music. The adults they become would likely be grateful for an education that nourished this mix of imagination, activity, intellect, and feeling. Early learning might reduce the likelihood that mere intensity—emotion without cognition or control—might sometime excuse the impulsive violence of strong feeling. 9. Judgment Sensibility promises freedom because interiority decouples each person from every other. We are free to go our separate ways—inside— because free from the intrusions of other people’s feelings, thoughts, aversions, and plans. But what are we free to do? We may fulfill ourselves by daydreaming or by choosing and acting as others do, though freedom doesn’t bear the stamp of a distinctive sensibility until we make judgments that express a perspective, values, insights, and aims. Artists can’t work without making judgments: Anselm Kiefer somewhere remarked that every brushstroke expresses a decision. Perceivers are more ambivalent. They may choose humility over

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judgment when ignorant of a domain: Is it good or bad? No idea, since I don’t know the game. We’re reminded that interiority is fallow if uncultivated, but empowered when educated. Friends, restaurants, and vocations are chosen when experience supplies evidence sufficient to vindicate judgment. The choice of arts and artists is all the more compelling because there is so little cost to making judgments that are inconsequential to others while gratifying to oneself. One dares be a milquetoast in every other pursuit if one feels supple and empowered within the domain where hindsight confirms the validity of one’s aesthetic judgments. Confidence may swell to distorted self-conviction, with risks considered below, but judgment is an appropriate expression of sensibility’s autonomy. Its many applications are measured by its acuity and—when judgment is the spur to action—by one’s willingness to assume responsibility for its effects. Other times, when no one else has noticed because interiority is disguised, we monitor ourselves. 10. Resonance Resonance suggests the cascading effects experienced when a sensibility is engaged by important people or tasks But aesthetic experience has no purpose beyond itself. Artists resonate with conviction and purpose. Perceivers are often transfixed by content that seems magnetic. No expert is required to mediate or explain the experience; content speaks for itself. Resonance—the vibrations of a sensibility consumed by content—is the quality that makes this remark by Arthur Danto so difficult to accept: What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brill 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 it is. 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 nearly fifty years ago.115

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Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy LXI (1964), p. 581.

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Danto’s historical reference is to Fountain, a urinal, that Marcel Duchamp submitted for museum display in 1917. Duchamp swaggered: Fountain has form; what qualities, piety aside, distinguish it from other things displayed honorifically? The lesson Danto garners from this episode is uncertain. Is mystification typical, so perceivers baffled by paintings of any sort require an interpreter? Or is mediation restricted to people confused by the heirs to Duchamp’s irony? Danto’s therapy seems reserved for people seeing contemporary art: “As the history of art has evolved, the critic is needed more and more to explain to the viewer what is being seen.”116 Acknowledge this limitation, but then explain: why describe the viewer’s experience as aesthetic; is it more or less aesthetic than having an accountant explain the tax code? Is Danto’s advice, nevertheless, applicable to every art made or viewed in the shadow of Duchamp’s gesture? I am listening as I write to a broadcast performance of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore from the Metropolitan Opera. The audience has just responded to an aria by Juan Diego Flórez with applause so explosive and prolonged that Flórez is singing it again. It’s likely that some people in the audience didn’t know the opera’s plot when they arrived and haven’t read the program notes. But no one needs collateral information to hear this voice. How could Danto substitute his contrived response to Brillo Box for the spontaneous excitement and recognition familiar to this and every audience that enjoys art of any sort? Why would he imagine that art needs an interpreter when the capacity for aesthetic experience is one of the purest expressions of intellectual and affective autonomy? What should we infer of “art” so bloodless that it requires art historians to construe it? This quarrel (like many disputes in aesthetics) is incidental to artistic practice or aesthetic pleasure. It derives from Hegel’s claim that art is superseded by religion and philosophy when Absolute Spirit achieves its totalizing self-integration.117 That happens, he proposed, when religion and philosophy liberate Ideas from the finitude required by art’s material means: wood or canvas, for example. But Hegel didn’t imply that art must end when its ideas are taken up into religious metaphor or philosophic theory. It goes on as before: always materially

116

Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 18. 117 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 709-808.

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finite; always historically situated; always subject to reformulation in epochs to come. I imagine Hegel annoyed by the thought that Duchamp’s sneer could justify philosophy’s superseding authority. He would likely remark that philosophic coaching defeats the mix of spontaneity, cognition, and pleasure essential to aesthetic experience. 10. Morality and the sublime Aesthesis begins in visceral feelings: hunger, pleasure, or fear. It traces a spiral while rising to elation, ecstasy, or sublimity, or falling to pain or dread. Elation is a surge of pleasure, well-being, and excitement. Ecstasy is elation sustained and intensified when excitement subsides: one is seized and transported. Sublimity is equivocal: it implies ecstasy with or without a measure of the awe experienced in the presence of something out of scale: drama, power, or a religious service. Each of these responses is paradoxical, for here in the moment of experiencing oneself most intensely—appeased, alight—selfhood seems to vanish. Various arts and practices have this effect: Plotinus urged meditation;118 others favor dance, prayer, or drugs. Religious ecstasy is often enjoyed with the feeling that one is controlled by a benign divinity, but martial music and venomous speeches have a similar effect when they rouse an audience to a peak of excitement focused by an enemy. Intensity is private but contagious if its social context is political and provocative rather than aesthetic and appeasing: others see my excitement, know our cause, and respond as I do. Surging elation, like severe pain, is the intense and palpable experience of selfhood, yet these sensible extremes have different effects. Pain heightens the sense of self: I suffer. Ecstasy is liberating: oblivious to cares, lost in pleasure, I am renewed. But renewal is a comparative: what malady does ecstasy cure? An answer is implicit when this characterization is amplified: one is renewed when feeling whole or complete, thereby implying that one was previously conflicted or reduced. Rarely content in ourselves, we look ahead and plan, always aware of a retreating but bounded horizon. Heidegger construed this

118

Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen McKenna (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 439-467.

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limit as the certainty of death,119 though others have jejune concerns: paying the rent, making it up with a spouse or friend. Do elation and ecstasy incite feelings of wholeness because we believe that the success of our undertakings is assured, because they obscure adversity, or because feelings of wholeness confirm a conviction: I know what I like? The first two alternatives are often ephemeral because frustration is quickly deflating. The third—wholeness as self-conviction—seems innocent until we distinguish the elation of cultivated sensibilities enjoying art or music from the pleasures of sadists. One reads that a nineteen-year-old in a Mexican jail began working as a contract killer at thirteen. He describes his pleasure when shooting each of his (alleged) thirty victims. Practical life is also ambiguous. It requires cooperation, work- or team-mates. Elation is benign when it circulates among the members of a winning team or when experienced by people sitting quietly at an opera or concert. It is dangerous when a potent speaker turns an excited crowd into a mob. These are the two faces of these intense psychic states. One is a private illumination (sometimes enjoyed in a crowd): perceiving sensuous form, strummed like a harp, I am elated; seeing what others see, hearing what they hear, I resonate alone, irrespective of them. The ecstasy of mobs and thugs is also familiar. There is, however, a saving difference. People swept away by mob violence know that their euphoria requires little or no cognition, though feeling without cognition—mob loyalty, orgasm, or a warm bath—is ephemeral: even a raving crowd is quickly diverted if distracted. Pleasures are deeper and abiding when order or meaning is sensuously given and perceived. Ecstasy itself is faith’s guarantor for those who feel it during religious celebrations because it gives life and credibility to metaphor. The ecstasy provoked by literature, art, or music is firmer because faith, meaning, and interpretation are extraneous when experience is grounded in form or content directly perceived. There, in the intensity of aesthetic experience, one is alone but not lonely and sometimes not even self-aware. Yet nothing of judgment or perceptual acuity is lost or compromised. One knows the source of one’s pleasure and the qualities that make it affecting. Indeed, there would be no significant affective response if 119

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 299-311.

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there were no cognition: Japanese poetry doesn’t please me because I can’t read Japanese. My emphasis on aesthetic autonomy also needs amplification in this other way: it must emphasize that our moral being is ruptured if the elation promoted by tribal identity or mob rule can stifle the cognition and judgment responsible for cultivated artistic pleasure. Social practice includes reciprocities that engage us with other people and things: what do they require of us; what do we owe one another? This is a domain of rules and laws that constrain pernicious impulses while directing useful behavior. These domains—private and social—are coupled but always at risk of losing synchrony. Immorality is the likely effect of behavior that ignores either side, though the danger is disproportionate: ecstasy in response to real or imagined beauty is sometimes an addictive pursuit indifferent to others; excited crowds riot in stadiums or trash a pariah’s shop. Members of the Nazi hierarchy enjoyed the fellowship and excitement of those who shared their aims. Many adored music and song, yet this measure of personal well-being was decoupled from the elation of party affiliation and loyalty. Cultivation was no bar to atrocity. These two perspectives and the behavior they sponsored—personal joy on one side, mob violence on the other—implies a fault in the assumption that a single morality applies evenly to self-regarding and other-regarding virtues. Why suppose that the sensitivity and self-regard consequent on refining one’s taste should express itself as respect for other people? Are there two kinds of morality, each with its distinctive focus: cultivated self-regard versus respect for rules or laws that oblige us to treat others, familiar or not, respectfully? The history of cultivated bullies is evidence that there may be no link between them. One may respond that this is a false opposition: there is a difference between two kinds of ecstatic social response because of a difference between the true and false sublime. The experience is false when merely an effusive emotion; true when infused—as happens during religious worship—with knowledge of the divine. This example confirms that socially provoked ecstasy is sometimes benign; it isn’t evidence that the euphoria of a religious service validates religious belief. For how could we distinguish the elation of a winning team’s fans from the ecstasy of religious practice without the question-begging inference that religious feelings are veridical?

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Are believers proof against violence; are they more prone to violence when faith is lost? I ask because we need reliable defenses against undisciplined expressions of social elation. Some people living in dismal circumstances have the psychic strength to resist the inducements of crowd morality. What explains their moral courage if aesthetic cultivation does not? Recall that sensibility has three other domains: practical life, intellect, and sociality. Each is sufficient to create moral sensibility: practical life and sociality because they require cooperation and coordination; intellect because one quickly perceives, with Kant, that my interests and passions are no more entitling than yours. Those who commend artistic experience as the apotheosis of moral education ignore these everyday opportunities for acquiring it. Aesthetic pleasure, like the experience of power (also perceived as an aesthetic rush), is misleading if ecstasy is confused with truth and virtue. We often fail to distinguish the intellectual excitement provoked by well-phrased ideas from the surging emotional response to slogans that use credulity to exploit vulnerability. Hence these imperatives: dispute the ideas, discipline the slogans. Respect sensibility, but emphasize its vulnerability to rhetoric and excitement. Acquire judgment sufficient to discern occasions when elation makes us reckless. Cultivate appreciation for things—including music, painting, poetry, and design— that withhold pleasure from people unprepared to understand them. Learn to enjoy pleasure that is intense, quiet, and private, even when shared with myriad others who write, look or listen. Games exhilarate players and crowds alike, but violence stops when every player and fan inhibits himself. One misunderstanding may deter us: appealing to selfcontrol seems odd given the loss of self-awareness in the midst of ecstasy or elation. That observation needs precision. For self-control remains when the self seems boundless in moments of ecstatic aesthetic pleasure. Elated by music, knowing how it ends, I enjoy every note until it’s time to clap and go. Kant is both helpful and misleading. He supposed that the experience of sublimity is proportionate to the power and scale of its provocations: the infinite heavens and the moral law. But Kant’s emphasis—sublimity construed as awe—implies intimidation, not ecstasy. Awe sometimes encourages self-abasement or surrender; though physical or political power is irrelevant when the connoisseur responds ecstatically to things well made. The event is particular; the experience

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is fragile, even ephemeral, but this—the intensification of understanding and elation—is the apotheosis of singularity: everyone can say, this is mine. The experience is morally consequential because the selfknowledge hereby acquired is an unqualified self-affirmation. Failures and disappointments will shake me, but aesthetic cognition and the intensity of aesthetic pleasure are my internal light, the light of the Good near the mouth of Plato’s cave. Having seen it, I can suffer darkness in the hope of seeing it again. Four considerations qualify this discovery: first is the sense of myself intensified by aesthetic pleasure; second is my recognition of objectivity, the realization that another person or thing—a painting, a singer or dancer—is the cause of my feeling; third is Kantian disinterest, meaning that I often have no practical interest in the matter perceived; fourth is imagination as it analogizes, extrapolates and generalizes from my interiority to that of other people. These four steps define the trajectory from self-perception and self-regard through the disinterested recognition of otherness to the inference that others have an interiority like mine. They, too, are self-aware and self-affirming. Valuing myself, out of time so to speak, without regard for a current aim or practical interest, I acknowledge and respect the interiority of others. I don’t respect all their aims, beliefs, or conduct, but here, with a perspective reminiscent of Kant’s kingdom of ends.120 I affirm that their worth is equal to mine: let others enjoy this as I do. This is the extrapolation from artistic experience, especially the aesthetic composure that supervenes after moments intensified by ecstasy or elation. Could we stabilize this moment, making it everyone’s point of psychic and social reference? There is little chance that respect for the interiority of others can be generalized from self-regard by appealing to these four considerations because tribal morality is vicious,121 practical life is urgent and combative, vanity overwhelms us. The possibility of leveraging aesthetic pleasure, depth, and calm is an opportunity too valuable to ignore, though we know the obstacles to seizing it because human experience affords a better-known but equally unexploited

120

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (Radford, Va.: Wilder Publications, 2008), pp. 50-51. 121 Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 73.

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opportunity for mutual recognition: we don’t generalize from our intense affective relations to family and friends. Sensibility casts a large shadow when elation is rampant and dangerous but a small one when ecstasy is private. The first is morbid. The other is lyrical, a quality common to love and friendship but more intense, if ephemeral, when focused by aesthetic objects. Its effect is often delicious but sometimes grave. Imagine the curtain rising on Balanchine’s Serenade: seventeen women arrayed across the stage in two adjoining diamonds. Each dancer wears a gossamer light blue gown; all stand with feet parallel, faces tilted toward their raised right arms. The ballet ends when one of the women, now dead, is lifted to standing, arms raised, face bathed in light while three men carry her through the phalanx of other dancers to another place. People are slow to applaud after thirty minutes in the presence of something more than beautiful; they resist yielding an experience that slowly dissolves. But what is this increment: “more than beautiful”? The difference is moral and humane. Beauty is achieved when music, grace, and motion express elemental but familiar truths about our nature and destiny. The truths aren’t news; the shock of the occasion is the sublimity and awe we feel when seeing them expressed as dance. Music alone, glorious though it be, cannot do as much. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is musically splendid, though the plot is silly. His Don Giovanni isn’t a farce, though its villain is too cruel for empathy. Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, an opera about a brutal fisherman in a dour English village, doesn’t compete with Mozart’s music: one can’t hum the melodies from Britten’s version of singspiel. Yet Britten’s drama is tighter, its raw geometry is plainer. One expects to be overwhelmed by Mozart, not by Britten. But Peter Grimes, too, can be more than beautiful, and for the same reason.

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Index Abbott, Edwin A., 66. abduction, 99. abstraction, 1, 85. action, 1, 2, 3, 8, 17, 22, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 54, 60, 73, 74, 93, 97, 102 aesthesis, 5, 9, 10, 17, 18, 37, 57, 60, 63, 93, 102. aesthetics, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 17, 21, 24, 25, 41, 45, 50, 79, 80, 81, 87, 92, 94, 102. aleatoric, 1. appraisal, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 20, 21, 22, 25,, 31, 39, 57, 66, 67, 74, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87. architecture, 9, 19, 26, 33, 37, 46, 64, 78, 83, 85. Aristotle, 3, 25, 38, 44, 51, 90, 91. art, passim. artistry, 63. association, 7, 33, 41, 42, 44, 55, 58, 70, 84, 85, 87. atrocity, 106. autonomy, 8, 16, 24, 37, 48, 72, 75, 95, 101, 102, 103, 106. awareness, 2, 3, 13, 14, 22, 29, 33, 50, 57, 73, 89, 90, 91, 106. awe, 81, 103, 106, 108. axis, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 44, 56, 57, 59, 60. Babe Ruth, 2. Bach, Johann Sebastian, 2, 29, 39, 44, 71, 78, 79. balance, 6, 14, 17, 36, 38, 57, 66. Balanchine, George, 6, 87, 107. Baumgarten, Alexander, 10. Beardsley, Monroe, 1, 6, 7, 20, 21. beauty, 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 17, 51, 56, 58, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 104, 107. Beckmann, Max, 27. Beethoven, Ludwig von, 80. behaviorists, 2, 8. Bell, Clive, 70, 71, 73, 81. Bentham, Jeremy, 87. Berkeley, Bishop, 14, 36.

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Bernstein, Leonard, 86. Blue Rider, 27. body, 1, 9, 18, 34, 38, 39, 41, 57, 58, 64, 75, 91, 92, 93, 97. brain, 3, 22, 25, 27, 28, 35, 37, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94. Brillo Box, 103. Britten, Benjamin, 109. brutality, 1, 100. categories, 31, 44, 52, 73. cause, 28, 29, 33, 37, 38, 67, 69, 81, 82, 85, 99, 103, 107. Cezanne, Paul, 2, 38, 68. character, 17, 18, 24, 26, 29, 33, 46, 53, 58, 72, 82, 85, 93, 96. Chomsky, Noam, 64. Chopin, Frederic, 84. clarification, 35. clarity, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 44, 48, 49, 52, 56, 57, 59, 67, 76. classicism, 4. cogito, 9, 31, 52, 98. cognition, 1, 2, 11, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 37, 38, 40, 45, 49, 50, 59, 60, 76, 86, 95, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 106. cognitive-affective posture, 96. Collingwood, R. G., 4, 23, 64, 70. comfort, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 44, 49, 56, 57, 58, 60, 83, 93. commentary, 9. complexity, 8, 28, 29, 31, 44, 54, 55, 57, 60, 66, 72, 75, 79, 81, 84, 86, 88. connoisseur, 16, 55, 59, 71, 80, 81, 85, 87, 95, 100, 106. consummatory, 8, 83. cooks, 2, 3, 6, 30, 67. consciousness, 1, 2, 22, 63, 90. convergence, 20, 66, 70, 71, 73, 95. Copeland, Aaron, 86. craft, 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 21, 29, 32, 38, 39, 40, 50, 55, 61, 63, 76, 77, 79, 86, 96, 100. creationists, 82. creators, 75. criticism, 1, 9, 10, 22, 36, 39, 66. Croce, Benedetto, 4, 23, 70.

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cultivation, 1, 6, 7, 8, 29, 30, 31, 50, 59, 79, 80, 81, 94, 96, 97 101, 106, 107. culture, 8, 9, 10, 11, 26, 29, 31, 47, 53, 89, 94. Danto, Arthur, 53, 102, 103. deconstruction, 42, 84. decoration, 1, 83, 84, 85. de Kooning, Willem, 77. depth, 4, 48, 55, 74, 83, 98, 106. Derrida, Jacques, 42. Descartes, René, 9, 13, 14, 16, 22, 31, 45, 46, 52, 69, 72, 91, 92, 97. design, 1, 6, 7, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 29, 35, 46, 53, 57, 60, 65, 70, 76, 83, 84, 88, 89, 107. Dewey, John, 8, 11, 16, 30, 42, 43, 60, 76, 82, 83, 100. Dickie, George, 68. discord, 66. discrimination, 10, 16, 30, 55, 86. disinterest, 25, 42, 43, 73, 107. distinctness, 33. domain, 19, 30, 32, 40, 63, 80, 81, 87, 88, 93, 97, 105, 106. Don Giovanni, 38, 108. Donizetti, Gaetano, 103. Doran, Michael, 68. Duchamp, Marcel, 103. ecstasy, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108. education, 9, 29, 30, 32, 40, 59, 65, 77, 101, 107. elation, 77, 79, 94, 104, 106, 107, 108. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 42. emotion, 4, 11, 14, 16, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 49, 57, 59, 60, 71, 74, 76, 82, 83, 100, 101, 106, 107. emotivism, 1. ethics, 46, 79. Euripides, 71. expectation, 15, 27, 47, 64, 70. experience, 13, and passim. expression, 1, 5, 9, 10, 19, 23, 24, 26, 29, 39, 45, 46, 54, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 99, 102, 103, 107.

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external, 13, 33, 37, 41, 48, 57, 67, 83, 91, 98. fantasy, 97, 99. feedback, 92. feelings, 1, 7, 8, 11, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 57, 59, 60, 61, 65, 67, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 81, 85, 86, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106. filter, 2, 18. finesse, 1. Flatland, 66. Flores, Juan Diego, 103. form, 1, 2, 11, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 38, 40, 46, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 97, 101, 104. Foucault, Michel, 9. freedom, 4, 10, 30, 31, 38, 39, 40, 83, 97, 98, 101. Freud, Lucian, 27. Freud, Sigmund, 25. function, 7, 10, 18, 22, 62, 78, 82, 91, 98. Gasquet, Joachim, 68. genes, 9. genre, 7, 45, 88. geometry, 27, 69, 85, 108. gestalt, 23, 35, 86, 87, 88. Gombrich, Ernst, 9. Gris, Juan, 87. Grofe, Ferde, 86. Grosz, George, 27. Grove, 9. Guernica, 28. harmony, 9, 51, 69, 72, 79, 84, 86. Haydn, Joseph, 18, 84. Hegel, G. W. F., 10, 24, 52, 63, 91, 92, 103, 104. Heidegger, Martin, 104, 105, 108. Hirst, Damien, 1. history, 1, 9, 10, 37, 48, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 64, 65, 101, 105.

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humane, 109. Hume, David, 10, 19, 36, 41, 46, 52, 96. Husserl, Edmund, 36, 93. Hutcheson, Francis, 10. identity, 10, 49, 105. idiosyncrasy, 49, 52, 75 . illumination, 60, 75, 79, 105. imagination, 4, 5, 10, 14, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 38, 39, 41, 45, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 96, 99, 100, 101, 108. immorality, 106 induction, 15. information, 7, 14, 15, 18, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37, 39, 40, 52, 55, 56, 65, 70, 87, 91, 92, 102. inner, 9, 36, 37, 38, 40, 44, 48, 56, 57, 76, 96, 97. inputs, 1, 2, 30, 93. inside, 9, 10, 26, 49, 60, 91, 101. insight, 1, 16, 23, 52, 101. intensity, 17, 25, 28, 29, 37, 59, 87, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107. intention, 4, 17, 21, 22, 23, 35, 36, 45, 53, 54, 70, 74, 82, 99. interiority, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 30, 31, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 101, 102, 108. internal, 1, 13, 16, 33, 48, 67, 83, 92, 95, 108. interpretation, 9, 17, 18, 38, 42, 58, 84, 99, 105. intuition, 10, 24, 46, 52, 60, 63, 81, 92. isolation, 24, 31, 98. judgment, 6, 8, 10, 22, 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 34, 40, 46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 66, 71, 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107. Kandinsky, Wassily, 27, 69, 70. Kant, Immanuel, 10, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 34, 35, 42, 46, 52, 55, 60, 64, 65, 73, 74, 81, 82, 90, 97, 105, 106, 107. Kiefer, Anselm, 100. King Lear, 58. Klee, Paul, 29. Kollwitz, Kathe, 27. Langer, Susanne, 11, 56.

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Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 19. leading principles, 3. Leibniz, G. W. V., 33, 94. Ligeti, Gyorgy, 29. Locke, John, 5, 50, 52. Malevich, Kazimir, 84. Margolis, Joseph, 53, 54. Marriage of Figaro, 108. Medea, 71. membrane, 11, 102. memory, 25, 27, 32, 33, 45, 64, 91. Mendelssohn, Felix, 79. metaphor, 91, 102, 104. Michelangelo, 1. Mill, John Stuart, 78, 80, 87. Miró, Juan, 1. Mondrian, Piet, 84. mood, 35, 37, 44, 57, 72. morality, 103, 105, 106, 107. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 79, 109. music, passim. Napoleon, 42. nature, 2, 6, 29, 63, 68, 72, 80, 81, 82, 89, 91, 108. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 30, 47, 52, 74. objectivism, 4, 5, 51, 56. obscurity, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 49, 56, 67. outer, 36, 37, 40, 44, 48, 56, 57, 96. ontology, 1, 9, 48, 54. painting, 1, 4, 9, 10, 11, 19, 23, 27, 28, 32, 37, 40, 46, 50, 54, 55, 56, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 79, 82, 83, 84, 88, 95, 97, 101, 105. Palladio, Andrea, 87. Parker, Dewitt, 11, 56. Peirce, C. S., 3, 13, 15, 16, 36, 46, 53, 65, 73, 74, 99, 100. perceivers, passim.

117

perception, 5, 10, 14, 16, 21, 28, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 53, 55, 65, 68, 81, 88, 91, 93, 108. perfection, 1, 70, 71, 85. perspective, 9, 13, 21, 38, 52, 63, 68, 73, 74, 85, 91, 94, 95, 101, 106, 108. Peter Grimes, 109. philosophy, 1, 9, 11, 13, 33, 34, 52, 65, 103, 104. photography, 1, 27, 32, 69. physicalists, 93. physiology, 3, 10, 11, 30, 89, 95. Picasso, Pablo, 84, 87. pity, 25. Plato, 1, 10, 21, 23, 25, 33, 34, 36, 46, 51, 52, 53, 56, 59, 64, 65, 75, 76, 79, 85, 91, 97, 106. play, 1, 9, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 36, 42, 48, 51, 58, 61, 64, 67, 71, 75, 76, 77, 82, 86, 99, 100, 102, 106. pleasure, 1, 5, 21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 41, 42, 48, 49, 50, 58, 59, 60, 76, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108. Plotinus, 103. Pollack, Jackson, 3, 77, 82, 84. Popper, Karl, 21. Price, H. H., 19. privacy, 95, 101. proportion, 4, 5, 72, 108. Protagoras, 4, 9. psychology, 6, 16, 20, 54, 95. rankings, 60, 85, 86. 87. reactivity, 3, 17. reality, 9, 58, 59, 66, 74, 94, 95, 99, 100. receptivity, 1, 2, 8, 14, 16, 33, 46, 93. reciprocity, 6, 66, 74. recognition, 76, 86, 96, 103, 108. reduction, 84, 93. refinement, 8, 86, 94. Rembrandt, van Rijn, 87. representation, 1, 4, 26, 27, 29, 32, 45, 54, 55, 62, 83, 92.

118

resemblance, 5, 78. resonance, 8, 14, 102. response, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40, 51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 86, 93, 97, 98, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107. revelation, 4, 74, 89. rhythm, 3, 30, 32, 38, 66, 69, 70, 76, 77, 84, 86, 88, 89, 93. Richter, Gerhard, 27. Rigoletto, 26. Robbins, Jerome, 87. romanticism, 58, 97. Rorty, Richard, 65. Rothko, Mark, 84. rumination, 6, 74, 76, 98. Russell, Bertrand, 34. Santayana, George, 1, 11. satisfaction, 85, 93, 97. scale, 4, 5, 20, 32, 38, 40, 41, 44, 51, 57, 63, 73, 99, 104, 107. Scarlatti, Domenico, 64. Schelling, F. W. J., 52, 99. schemas, 3, 31, 35, 46, 52, 73, 75. self-awareness, 2, 13, 14, 22, 50, 91, 92, 93, 97. self-control, 25, 106. selfhood, 8, 30, 91, 98, 104. self-regard, 106, 108. self-scrutiny, 92. semantics, 16, 20. sensibility, passim. sensory data, 2, 15, 31, 44, 46, 53, 67, 73. Serenade, 109. Shaftsbury, Lord, 10. Shakespeare, William, 87. Shaw, George Bernard, 35. Sherlock Holmes, 2. significance, 1, 2, 25, 26, 33, 37, 58, 59, 81, 83, 84, 85. skills, 2, 3, 8, 16, 17, 21, 25, 30, 31, 40, 57, 63, 75, 96, 101. socialization, 46, 47.

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speech, 29, 46, 54, 103. Spinoza, Benedict de, 49. spirituality, 48, 49. spontaneity, 35, 47, 104. Stoics, 49. stories, 1, 9, 10, 25, 41, 42, 51, 55, 98. Strauss, Richard, 87. structure, 3, 11, 19, 27, 34, 57, 60, 64, 66, 83, 93. style, 1, 5, 6, 9, 21, 25, 27, 31, 32, 39, 40, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 63, 64, 66, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 81, 86, 96. subjectivism, 4, 5, 51, 52, 56. sublime, 103, 105. sublimity, 104, 107, 109. surprise, 25, 35, 72, 78, 79, 81, 86. symmetry, 51, 64, 72, 78, 86. taste, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 39, 40, 47, 52, 63, 64, 66, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 89, 96, 97, 106. Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 80. temperament, 94, 95. temples, 4, 50, 51. terror, 25. theater, 93, 95. theory, 4, 43, 50, 53, 73, 101. tradition, 1, 45, 50, 53, 63, 81, 95. truth, 6, 26, 31, 42, 49, 64, 66, 79, 80, 81, 85, 97, 98, 106, 108. ugly, 5, 56, 66, 78, 79, 80, 85. valuation, 39, 40. value, 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 19, 29, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 53, 57, 60, 63, 70, 72, 73, 82, 83, 86, 87, 100. Van Gogh, Vincent, 93. variability, 58, 80. variables, 33, 45, 73, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 98, 99. Verdi, Giuseppe, 25. violence, 101, 107.

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virtues, 6, 41, 59, 106. vulnerability, 11, 49, 94, 95, 107. Wagner, Richard, 60. Warhol, Andy, 26, 74. wholeness, 98, 105. Wimsatt, William K. Jr., 20, 21. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21, 34, 43, 44, 78. Wollheim, Richard, 54, 55. Wright, Frank Lloyd, 64, 70, 83.

CATEGORIES 2

David Weissman

Cities, Real and Ideal Categories for an Urban Ontology

Cities are conspicuous among settlements because of their bulk and pace: Venice, Paris, or New York. Each is distinctive, but all share a social structure that mixes systems (families, businesses, and schools), their members, and a public regulator. Cities alter this structure in ways specific to themselves: orchestras play music too elaborate for a quartet; city densities promote collaborations unachievable in simpler towns. Cities, Real and Ideal avers with von Bertalanffy, Parsons, Simmel, and Wirth that a theory of social structure is empirically testable and confirmed. It proposes a version of social justice appropriate to this structure, thereby updating Marx’s claim that justice is realizable without the intervention of factors additional to society’s material conditions. About the Author David Weissman, Ph. D. University of London, is a Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His previous books include Eternal Possibilities, Truth's Debt to Value, A Social Ontology, and The Cage.

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