The Argument

1-3

4

5-8

/'9-10 .}~

The' question posed: What is Art? Scepticismwhether a general answer may be given: suchscepticism itself to be sceptically considered.

The physical-object hypothesis, Le. the hypothe-sis that works of art are physical objects, intro-duced.

Over a certain range of the arts, e.g. literature,music, the physical-object hypothesis obviouslyuntenable: for, there is not here any physicalobject with which the work of art could primafacie be identified. Áowever the untenability ofthe hypothesis over these ar~s said to raise noserious problems for aesthetics. The promisethat we shall later return to these arts. (Thepromise redeemed in sections ~5-7.)

The physical-object hypothesis now consideredover those arts, e.g. painting, sculpture, wherethere is a physical object with which the workof art could prima facie be identified.Two diffi-culties for the hypothesis to be considered.

~-I4 The diffkulty presented by Representation orC~ ' representational properties. A discussion of rep-

II

ml

15-19

20

21

\

A.rt and its Objects lU

1 resentation, resemblance and seeing-as, and the

1

'1 suggestion made that resemblance might be",. understood in terms of seeing-as rather than

" vice.versa; the intröduction of intention into any, such analysis.

The difficulty'presented by Expression or ex-

pressi},'leproperties. Two cJude .causal views ofexp~ession rejected" Natural ex,pre~sion and 'cor-respondences' ,

,~ 'u "*

-,' ,i!' fl',I~' ~

The~physical-object hypothesis"to be strengthenedby a consideratiqn of alternative hypotheses. 'Ii"" .,.e.bdut the work of art: specificaIly, over thoseareas of art where the physical-object hypothesis. ~

II,gains a foothold (cf. 9-10)", .'1 ii,

The Ideal theory, Le. the theory'thiit works ofart are ment al ~ntiiies,.,and the, P;esentational

theory, Le. the theory that ::jyVorksof art., haveonlyimmediately percepti1?le' properties, intro-duced.

22-3 The Ideal theory considereg. Two' objectiónsraised: that the theory would make art private,and that it disregards the medium. (The bd.coleur problem, or the problem ofart's diversityor arbitrariness introduced.)

24 The Ideal theory and the Presentational theorycontrasted. Objections to the Presentationaltheory to be considered under' two -headings:

12

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---"~-~.",

An Essay

those which dispute the exha,}lstiveness of thedistinction between immediately and mediately'perceptible properties, and those Which insistthat works of art possess properties other' thanthe immediately perceptible,

"1

The first set, of objections to the' Presentationaltheory @onsidered:.Difficulties for the exhaustive

distinction between immediatelyand mediatelyperceptible pnwerties are presented by meaning-properties and expression-properties: Sound andMeanin~ ih poetry and ,the so-called imusi@ of. 1', ",

,poetry': the representation 'bf movemen1}:the rep-'.resentation of space ('tactile values'). The Gom-brich argument con@erni'ng expression. (In thecourse of tl}is discussion the notiop of Icqnicitybldefly'introduced~) '"

,11:'f) "Thesecond set of objec,tionsto the present~tion"

al

~.. theory considered. Difficulties presented by pro-. pertiesl1\th~tin'dubitá'bly are not immediately per-

ceptible;, but areJnhe,rent to art.Genres and the'radical óf presentation': the spectator's expec-tations and the artist's intentions: the concept ofart as sornething that the spectator must bringwith him. Thf discussion broken off for a paren-thesis.

2~-3 1m

I!J

"'

..

II!

*

35-7 The pro mise to consider those arts where thework of art clearly cannot be identified with a

physical object now redeemed. Types and tokens,, and the claim made that types may possess

13'

=CiOIIIII

38-9

40

41-4

45

46-9

~

~

-- * '- - ,- ,,--- .. ,,~ -"" --"-~--- --'"

! An Essay

vidu al works of art: the analogy with languageproperly understood does not require that weshould be able to identify either of these apartfromart and its objects. The so-called 'heresyof paraphrase'.

Art and its Objects

physical properties. Accordingly the arts wherethe physical-object hypothesis evidently does nothold are less problematic for aesthetics.

Interpretation. Critical interpretation and inter- '

pretation through performance. Interpretationsaid to be ineliminable. The cóntrast between

description and interpretation not to be narrowlytaken.

*

~

The con cept of art reconsidered, and the claimthat works of art intrinsically falI under thisconcept. The suggestion, to~ which this claimgives rise, that the question, What is art?, maybest be answered by considering the aestheticattitude.

~

The aesthetic attitude, and distortions of it. Art

and nature falsely assimilated. The connexionbetween seeing soniething as a work of art andthat thing's having been made as a work of art.The amorphousness of the concept 'art', and thepervasiveness of art itself.

*

Art as 'a form of life'" and the analogy betweenart and language introduced.

The concept of arJ; as a form of life consideredfrom the standpoint of the artist. The artistic,intention, and the intentions attributed to indi-

14

50

51-3

Art and phantasy contrasted: the fundamentalerror in the Ideal theorY'restated in the light ofsections 46-9. '

The concept of art as a form of life now con-sidered from the standpoint of the spectator.Understanding works of art: Iconicity reintro-,duced, and 'the conditions óf expression in artonce more examined.

54 The work of art as a self-subsistent object: this~ rconception qualified. The 'invitation in art' and

'the transcendental'.

55\\2:.)

56

57-8

~ \

A third point of view on the conception of artas a form of lire suggested. Art and how it islearnt. No more than a suggestion thrown aut.

..

The analogy so far pursued (sections 45-55) hasbeen between art and language, not 'between artand code: two contrasts contrasted. Style and re-dundancy.

Twó limitations to the analogy of art and langu-age. The fact that some works of art are in a(natural) language, and the lack of anything inart parallel to ungrammaticality or incoher-ence.

15

II

59

60-63

64

65

Art andits Objects

*

The last point suggests a consideration of thetraditional demand of, unity in a work of art.Uni ty considered, and three objections to any.strict or formaI explication of the notion. '

Consideration of unity leads in tum to a con-sideration of art as an essentiallyl!istorical phen-omenon. Art's historicity examiried. The socialdetermination of art. The bricoleur problem

finally reconsider~d. .

Aesthetics: and how it might divide into the.seemingly subsiantive' and the seemingly trivial.

C' The importance of the seemingly. trivial inaesthetics for art itself: the perennial and ,in-eradicable self-consciousness of art.

An omission recorded.

Art and its Objects

*

59 The last point suggests a consideration' of thetraditional demand of. unity in a work of art.

Unity considered, and three objections to anystrict or formal explication of the notion.

60-63 Consideration of unity leads in turn to a con-sideration of art as an essentially l1istorical phen-omenon. Art's historicity examined. The socialdetermination of art. The bricoleur problem

finally reconsidered. .

Aesthetics: and how it might divide into theseemingly substantive and the seemingly trivial.

t The importance of the seemingly trivial inaesthetics for art itself: the perennial and in-eradicable self-consciousness of art.

64

65 An' omission recorded.

t

i

III

,

.(irt anditsObjects/11

M

I .

'What is art?' 'Art is the sum or totality of works of art.''Whatjs a work of art?' 'A work of art is a poem, a paint-'mg, a piece of music, a sculpture, a novel. . ..' 'What isa poem? a painting? Cj,piece of music? a sculpture? anove!?' . .;' 'A poem is . . ., a painting is . . ., a piece ofmusic is . . .;a sculpture is . . .' a novel is . . .' .

~twould be natural to assume that, if only we could fillin the gaps in the last line of this dialogue, we sh~)Uldhav~ an answer to one of the mqst elusive of the tradi-ti,onalproblems of human culture: the nature of art.The assumption here is, of course, that the dialogue, aswe .have' it above, is consbquential. This is somethingthat,for t~e present, I shall continue to assume.

2

It might, however, be objected that, even if we couldsucceed in filling in the gaps on which ,this dialogue ends,we should still not have an answer to the traditional

question, at any rate as this has been traditionally in-tended. For that question has always been a demand for aunitary answer, an answer of the form 'Art is ...';whereas the best we could now hope for is a pluralityof answers, as many indeed as the arts or media that weinitially distinguish. And if it is now countered that we.could always get a unitary answer out of what we would

then have, by putting together l!!:t~cular answersI '.:.. ",c \

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\~i.~ ~uOAf\:~1< J\.i.~ . ,~~'jI L

-, ",- -~

Art and its Objects

into one big disjunctiQn, this misses the point. For thetraditional demand was certainly, if not always expli-citly, intended to exclude anything by way of an answerthat had this degree of complexity: precisely the uSe ofthe word 'unitary' is to show that what is not wantedis anything of the forl!l 'Art is (whatever a poem is), or(whatever a painting is), or. . . :

But why should it be asswped, as it now appears tobe, that, if we think of Art as being essentially explicablein terms of different kinds of work of art or different

arts, we must abandon hope of anything except a highlycomplex conception of, Art? For are we not overlookingthe possibility that the various particular answers,answers to the questions What is a poem?, a painting?,etc., may, when they come, turn out to have somethingor even a great deal in common, in that the things theydefine pr describe (i.e. works of art in their kinds) havemany shared properties.' For if this were so, then wewould not have to resort to, at any rate we would notbe confined to, mere disjunction. In what would be thearea of overlap, we would 'have a base for a traditionaltype of answer: even if it later emerged that we could notmove forward from this base, in that beyond a certainpoint the different arts remained intractably particular.For what this would show is that the traditional demand

could not be satisfied in its totality, not that it was wrongever to make it.

3

A procedure now suggests itself: and that is that what weshould do is to try and first set out the various particulardefinitions or descriptions - what a poem is, what a paint-ing is, etc. - and then, with them before us, see wheth"er

they have anything in common and, if they have, what it

.18

,.---

An Essay

is. But though this procedure might have much to rec-O)1lmend it on grounds of thoroughness (later we mayhave to question this), it is barely practical. For it is un-'likely that we could ever complete the initial or pre-

paratory part of the task. ,I shall, therefore, concede this much at least,

]!>rocedurally, that is, to the objections of the traditiop-alist: that I shall start with what I have called the over-

ME>.Instead of waiting for the particular answers and"th.eh seeing what they have in common, I shall try toaNticipate them and project the area over which'they areJikefy to coincide. And if this is now objected to' ongrol1nds that it reverses the proper order of inquiry, inthat we shall be invited to consider and pronounce uponhypotheses before~examining the evidence upon whichthey are supposedly based, my argument would be that

. we a11do have in effect, already inside us, the requisiteev-iElence.Requisite, that is, for the purpose, for the com-,paifatively limited purpose, to hand: we all do have suchexperience of poetry, painting, music, ete. that, if wecannot (as I ~m sure we cannot) say on the basis of itwhat these things are, we can at least recognize when weare Being told that they are something which in point offact they are not. The claim has been made that humanexperience is adequate for the falsification, but never for

the confirmation, of a hypothesis. Without committingmyself either way on this as a general philosophicalthesis, I think that it is true enough in this area, and it isUpon the asymmetry that it asserts that the procedure Ipropose to follow is based. .

This procedure will bring us into contact at manypoints with certain traditional theories of art. But it is

worth reiterating that it is no part of my present inten-tion either to produce such a theory myself or to consider

z:

19

AJ;t and its ODject;

existing theorie~ as such. There is animportapt differencebetween asking what Art is, and asking what (if any-thing) is common fo the different kinds of worJ<.of art oraifferent arts:,{ev~p.if the second questipn (my question)~isasked primarily as a prelude to, or as prefatory of, thefirst.

4

Let us begin with,"~he hypothes~s that works" of [art arep'hysical opjects. J shall call this for the sake of brevitythe 'physical-object hypothesis'. S\lch a hypothesis is anatural starting point: if only for the reaSon that it isplausible to assume thatthings are physical objects unlessthey obviously aren't. Certain things very ~obviously.;aren't physical objects. Now though it, maY:ij!not be@bvious tliat'works of art are physical objects, they don'tseemntc?belong.among these other things. They don't, thatis, immediately group themselves along with thoughts, orperiods ,of history, ornnumbers, or mirages. Furthermore;and more substantively, this hypothesis acdqrds., withmany traditional conceptions Q.fArt and its objects andw:hat they are.

5

Never~heless the hypothesis that all works of art arephY'sical objects c~n be challenged. For our purposes itwill be useful, and instructive, to divide this challengeinto two parts: the division conveniently corresponding'to a division within'the arts themselves. For in the case of

certain arts the argument is that there is no physicalobject that can with any plausibility be identified as thework of art: there is no object existing in s,pace and time(as physical objects must) that can be picked out andthought of as a piece of music pr a novel. In the case of

20

...

An Essay

erher arts - most notably painting and sculpture - theargument is that, though there are physical objects of astaildard and acceptable kind that could be, indeed gen-€ra:lly are",identified"as works of art, such identificationsare wrong. I"

j)1e first';partof this challenge is, as we shall see, by farthe, harder to meet. However it is, fortunately, not it, butth€ secop.d part of the challenge, that potential1.YLJ,iaisesstith difficulties for aestM~ties.

6

j:hat ~here is a physical object that can be identified asW1'ys~esi'orDer Rosenkayalier is not a view that Gan longSLurv:iv~the, derqand that we should pick out or point tofhat qpject.There is, ~Ofcourse, the ~opy of Ulysses that isom."my table be'fore me now, there is t'Q.eperformance of

~J .. 01,

Der Rosenkavalier that I will~go~to tonightf and boththese two things" may (with some liltitude, it' is truei' intbe ~~se pf the performance) be regarded as physical ob-jects. Furthermore, a <;ommon way of referring to theseobj~ectsis by saying things lik~ 'Ulysses is on my table','I sh"UIsee Rosenkavalier tonight': from which it wouldbe tempting (but erroneous) to conclude that Ulyssesjust is my copy of it, Rosenkavalier just is tonight'sperfgrmance. ' , '

Tempting, but erroneous; and there are a number ofvery succinct ways of bringing out the error involved.For instance" it would follow that if I lost my copy ofUlysses, Ulysses would become a lost work. Again, itwould follow that if the critics disliked tonight's per-foz;mance of Rosenkavalier" then they dislike Rosen-kavalier. Clearly neither of these inferences isacceptable.

W~ have here two locutions or ways of describing the

~,

21

-- ....

. ," ,."- "- '!"""'""",...-" ",,-, - ""., ,_. _. .'......

Art and its Objects

facts: one in terms of works of art, the other in terms of

copies, performances, etc. of works of art. Just becausethere are contexts in which these two locutions are inter-

changeable, this does not mean. that there are fio con-texts, moreover no contexts of a substantive kind, in

which they are not interchangeable. There very evidentlyare such contexts, and the physical-object hypothesiswould seem to overlook them to its utter detriment.

7

But, it might now be.maintained, of course it is absurd toidentify Ulysses with my copy of'1t or Der Rosenkayplieiwith tonight's performance, but nothing follows fromthis of a general character about the wrongness of ident-ifying works of art with physical objects. For what waswrong in these two cases was the actual physical objectthat was picked out and with which the identificationwas then made. The validity of the physical-object hy-pothesis, like that of" any other hypothesis, is quiteunaffected by the consequences of misapplying it.

For instance, it is obviously wrong to say that Ulyssesis my copy of it. Nevertheless, there is a physical object,of precisely the same order of being as my copy, thoughsignificantly not called a 'copy', with which such anidentification would be quite correct. This object is theauthor's manuscript: that, in other words, which Joycewrote when he wrote Ulysses. .

On the intimate connexion, which undoubtedly doesexist, between a novel or a poem on the one hand and theauthor's manuscript on the other, I shall have somethingto add later. But the connexion does not justify us inasserting that one just is the other. Indeed, to do so seemsopen to objections not all that dissimilar from those wehave just been considering. The critic, for instance, who

22

An Essay

aam.ires Ulysses does not necessarily admire the manu-scppt. Nor is the critic; who has seen or handled theIn4nuscript in a privileged position as such when it comesto judgement on the novel. And..:..here we have come toan opjection directly parallel to that which seemed fatalto i~entifying Ulysses with my copy of it - it would be'Ppssible for the manuscript to be lost and Ulysses to sur-vive. None of this can be admitted by the' person whotm.p.ks that Ulysses and the manuscript are one and the'sarniething. . .

"0 this last objection someone might retort that therean~ cases (e.g.,' Love's Labour Won, Kleist's Robert Guis-cq!;cl,)'where the manuscript is lost and the work is lost,and moreover the work is lost because the manuscript islost. Of course there is no real ,argument here, sincenotiiing more is claimed than that there are some cases

like this. Nevertheless the retort is worth pursuing, forthe significance of such cases is precisely the opposite ofthatintended. Instead"of reinforcing, they actua.lly dimin-ish the status of the manuscript. For if we now ask, Whenis the work lost when the manuscript is lost?, the answeris, Wh.en and only when the manuscript is unique: butthen this would be true for any copy of the work were itunique. .

Moreover, it is significaI).tthat in the case of Rosen-kavalier it is not even possible to 'construct an argumentcorresponding to the one about Ulysses. To identify anopera or any other piece of music with the composer'sholograph, which looks the corresponding thing to do, isimplausible because (for instance), whereas an opera canbe heard, a holograph cannot be. In consequence it is

. common at this stage of the argument, when music isconsidered, to introduce a new notion, that of the ideal

perfo~mance, and then to identify the piece of music ,.

23

- ......

-.. I - ,_. ._, ..,~"'..~mr" ~M_- . ,." ~--,- . ,Artand its Objects An Essay

with this. There are many difficultieshere: in the present th@teis not even a manuscript: in wh.at sense can we nowcontext it is enoughto point outth,at this st~pGouldnot saythat thesethingsevenexist? .' .conceivably satisfy the purpose for which i~Fwas in~ :gutperhaps a more ser~ous,certainly a more interest-tended; thatis, that of saving thei!physical-object~~ypoth- iRg~objection is that in this suggestion what is totallyesis. F.or ap ideal performaI1ce bnnot be, even.'in the UI1€xplainedis why the various copies of Ulysses are allattenuated sense in-which we haye extended the term to saialto be copies of Ulysfiesand nothing else, why all theordinary perfgrmances, a physieal object. . }?erformancespf [)er' Rosenkavalier are rec~oned per-

,,~ :\f. formances of that one opera. For the ordinary~ ex-8. " pla'Maqon of \Ii!how ~e cqme to group copies or

A fiq,al and desperate expedient to save the physical- pert@rmances as.being of-this book or of that opera is byobject hypothesis is to suggest that ~llthose .wor~; ef:J.rt ryf~renGe to something else, something other. than them-which cannot plausibly be identified wIth physicalsefves, ta IThwhichthey stand in some special relation.objects are identical with ciasses of such obtects. A nove~, ~Exactly what this other thing' is, or w'hat~is>the sp~cialof which there are copies, is not my or your, copy~qpt IS r~a1ii@nin which they stand to it is, oftcourse, somethingthe class of all it'Scopies. An opera, of which there are we are.as yet totally unable to say.) But the effect, indeedpeFiformances, is not .tonigpt's' er last njght's, per- "pJi€Qiselythe point, of the present suggestion is to elimin-farmance, nor even the iqeal performa~ce, but is'l':h~cla:s at-&th~ possibility of "any such reference: if a novel Qrof all its performan<iIes. (Of course, stflctly speakmgii thIS opera, just.is its copies or its performances, then we

suggestion does~'t save.the hypot~esis.at all: s!nce~~class cannQt, for purpq~es of identification, refer from theof physical objects isn;t necessanly, mdeed IS most un- hitter to the former.

likely to be, a physical object itself. But it saves some- The possibility th,at remainsf is that the various' pa~~thing like the spirit of the hypothesis.) it' ticulaT.objects,the copiesor performances,are grouped

However,it is not difficult to think of objections to t~is as they are, not by reference to some other thing tosuggestion. Ordinarily we conceive of a novelist as wnt- wh.ich theyare related, but in virtue ofsome relation thating a novel, or a~composer aS,finishing an opera. But both h.olds between them: more specifically, in virtue of're-these ideas imply some mome-gt in time at which the semblance.

work is complete. Now suppose (which is not unlikely) But, in the first place, all copies of Ulysses, and cer-that the copies of a novel or the performances of an tainly all performances of Der Rosenkavalier, are notopera go on being produced for an indefinite period: then, perfect matches: And if it is now said that the differences

on the present suggestion, there is no such moment~ let do not matter, either because the various copies or per-alone one in their creator's lifetime. So we cannot say formances resemble each other in all relevant respects, orthat Ulysses was writt~n by Joyce, or that Strauss com- because they resemble each other more than they re-posed Der Rosenkavalier.Or, again, there is the probl~m semble the c<?piesor performances of any other novel orof the unperformed symphony, or the poem of WhICh opera, neither answer is adequate. The first answer begs

24 25

~,.

Art and its Objects

the issue, in that to talk of relevant respects presupposesthat we know how, say, copies of Ulysses are groupedtogether: the second answer evades the issue, in thatthough it may tell us why we do not, say, reckon any ofthe performances of Der Rosenkavalier as performancesof Arabella, it gives us no indication why we do not setsome of them up separately, as performances of somethird opera. .

Secondly, it seems strange to refer to the resemblancebetween the copies of Ulysses or the performances ofRosenkavalier as though this were a brute fact: a fact,moreover, which could be used to explain why they werecopies or performances of what they are. It would bemore natural to think of this so-called 'fact' as somethingthat itself stood in need of explanation: and, moreover, asfinding its explanation in just that which it is here in-voked to explain. In 9ther words, to say that certaincopies or performances are of Ulysses or Rosenkavalierbecause they resemble one another seemsprecisely to re-verse the natural order of thought: the resemblance, wewould think, follows from, or is to be understood interms of, the fact that they are of the same novel oropera.

9

However, those who are ready to concede that somekinds of work of art are not physical objects will yetinsist that others are. Ulyssesand Der Rosenkavaliermaynot be physical objects, but the Donna Velata and Dona-tello's St Georgemost certainly are.

I have already suggested (section 5) that the challengeto the physical-object hypothesis can be divided into twoparts. It will be clear that I am now about to embark onthe second part of the challenge: namely, that which

26

An Essay

allows that there are (some)physical objects that couldconceivably be identified as works of ar,t,but insists thatit would be quite erroneous to make the identification.

(To some, such a course of action may seemsuperfluous. For enough has been said to disprove thephysical-object hypothesis. That is true; but the argumentthat is to come has its intrinsic interest, and for thatreason is worth developing.Tl1osefor whom the interest

. of all philosophical argument is essentially polemical,and. who have been convinced by the preceding argu-ment:;may choose to think of that which is to follow asbearing upon a revised or weakened version of the physi-cal-objecthypothesis: namely, that some works of art arephysical objects.)

10

In the Pitti there is a canvas (No. 24.5)85 cm x 64 cm: inthe MuseoNazionC}.le,Florerice,there is a piece of marble209 cm high. It is with these physical objects that thosewho claim that the Donna Velata and the St Georgearephysical objects would naturally identify them.

This identification can be disputed in (roughly) one orother of two ways. It can be argued that the work of arthas properties which are incompatible with certain prop-erties that the physical object has; alternatively it can beargued that the work of art has properties which pophysical object could have: in neither case could 'thework of art be the physical object.

An argument of the first kind would run: We say of theSt Georgethat it moveswith life (Vasari).Yet the block ofmarble is inanimate. Therefore the St George cannot bethat block of marble. An argument of the second kindWouldrun: We say of the Donna Velata that it is exaltedand dignified(W6Ifflin).Yet a piece of canVasin the Pitti

27

,;~ ,.,.-" -""""~Tmu'-; ..T""'- 'W_,"" r--. .."---~. An Essay

~ a",;;ery restricted sense: since, even when he is most~sid:uou:s:iin using the vocabulaJ:'Y of geometry to de-SGFi~€compositional devices, Jt is sigl1ificant hoW' he

iq~~~fies~;the shap~s or' fo~ms whose ar~angements heanalyses. He does so invariably by reference beck to thechara~ters or happenings that they depict. When, as in

1?'h€.'RaphaeIdescriptions, his aim is ,to bring out th!1dra~'maticl'content of a painting, he keeps extrem~ly close toitsx@pnisentational aspect. What in such circumstancesd@ we find him mentipning? The movement" of theyCH1:t;hs:thefallen Heliodorus, with vengeance br<:;aking

ov@rhini: the women and the'childreri hupdled together:ihe G1lambering\pair of boys on the left who balance the

pE()sQ"ateHeliodoruson the right, and who"'lead the eyesbacj,{ward to the centre where the High Priest is,pray;ing.Now a'hthese"particular elements, which seem the natu-

ra~l~ite1nsoK discourse in the description .of a represen-tational painting<=-or better, perhaps, of a painting)n itsrepresentational function -provide no obvious point ofapp1ication for the argument under. consideration. FortlJ,er~wqyld have to be, correspondipg to each of theseelements, .,aphysical object such that we could then askof it whether it 'possessed some property that is incom-pa~ible With the representational property we have as-cribed to the element.

But, it will be objected, I have not given the situationin 'fulL For even in the description of the Expulsjon ofHeliodorus, there are nonparticular or over-all represen-~ational attributions. W6lfflin, for instance, speaks of 'agreiu void' in the middle of the composition.

This is true. But it looks as though the argument re-quires more than this. It requires not just that thereshould exist such attributions but that they should becentral to the notion of representation: that, for instance,\

Art and its Objects

cannot conceivably have these qualities. Ther~foretheDonna Velata cannot be that piece of canvas. ",

These two arguments, I suggest, are not ,rpef,fly in-stances of these two ways of arguing, they are charac-.teristic instances. For the argument that there is an

i~ incompatibility of. property between works of art andphysical objects characteristically concentrateS ,on therepresentational properties of wor~!, of art. The argu-ment that works of art have properties that:\iphysicalobjects could not have characteristiqaily cpncent;ratespnthe expressive properties of works of art. The:t~;rms'rep-resentational' and 'expressive' are used h~.rein a verywide fashion, which, it is hoped;i"willbecome clear,as t~ediscussionproceeds.

.,

q,

Let us begin with the argument about representatipnalproperties. An initial difficulty here is to se~exactly howthe argument is supposed to fiton'to the facts~!oij'or,as'wehave seen from the St Georgeexample, its tactic is to takesome representational property that we ascribe toa workof art and then point out that there is some property~thatthe relevant physical object possesses!!andthat is incom-patible with it~ e.g. 'being instinct with life' and 'being'inanimate'. But if we consider how, in point of fact, wedo talk or think of works of representational art, we seethat by and large what we ascribe representational prop-erties to are elements or ~its of the picture: it is onlyperipherally that we make such an attribution to thework itself, to the work, that is, as a whole.

Let us take, for instance, the justly famous descriptionsgiven by W6lfflin of Raphael's Stanze in Classk Art: inparticular, that of the Expulsjon-of Heliodorus.Wolfflin isgenerally thought of as a formalist critic. But if heis,it is

28 29

\Art and its Objects

it should be through them that we learn wnat it is forsomething to be a representation of something else. Iwant to argue that, on the contrary, they are p~ripheral.First, in a weaker sense, in that they have no pr,jority overthe more particular or specific attributions. The very gen-eral attributions come out of a very large range of attri-butions, and it certainly does not look as though w.ecould understand them without understanding the other

judgements in the range. It is hard to see, for instance,how a man could 'read' the void in the middle of ~aph-ael's fresco if he was not at the same time able to make

out the spatial relations that hold between Heliodorusand the youths who advance to scourge him, or betweenthe Pope and the scene that he surveys in calm de-tachment. Secondly, a stronger argument could be moun-. I

ted - though it would be' too elaborate to do so here - toshow that the representational attribution that we makein respect of the picture as a whole is dependent upon, orcan be analysed in terms of, the specific attributions. The

clearest way of exhibiting this would be to take ~mplerover-all attributions than W6Ifflin's: for instance, that a

picture has depth, or that it has great movement, or thatit l1as a diagonal recession: and then show how these canbe funy elucidated by reference to the spatial relationsthat hold between e.g. a tree in the foreground and ,thehorizon, or the body of the saint and the crowd of angelsthrough whom he ascends to heaven. A more dramaticway of exhibiting this would be to point out that wecould not produce a sheet of blank paper and say that itwas a representation of Empty Space. Though, of course,what we could do is to produce such a sheet and entitle it'Empty Space', and there could be a point to this title.

f -~;;r

1",..

30

-~~. ,- '~.' ". .......

An Essay

12

Reference was made in the last section to the wide rangeof representational attributions that we make, and it is

iQ1portant to appreciate quite how wide it is. It certainlye~tends well beyond the domain of purely figurative art,aNd takes in such things as geometrical drawings or cer-tainforms of architectural ornament. And I now suggest~bat if we look at the opposite end of this range to thato€c~pied by, e.g. Raphael's Stanze, we may see our pre-S(mtlproblem in a fresh light.

I~,is said that Hans Hofmann, the doyen of New Yorkpa~~ing, used to ask his pupils, on joining his studio, toput a."black mark on a white canvas, and then observehow the black was on the white. It is clear that whatHO,fJ::J,ilann'spupils were asked to observe was not the factthat some black paint was physically on a white canvas.So I shall change the example somewhat to bring this outbeuer, and assume that the young painters were asked toput a blue mark on a white canvas and then observe how

the plue \yas behind (as it was) the white. The sense inwhich 'on' was used in the original example and 'behind'in the revised example give us in an elementary form thenotion of what it is to see something as a representation,or for something to have representational properties. Ac-cordingly, if we are going to accept the argument thatworks of art cannot be physical objects because theyhave representational properties, it looks as though weare committed to regarding the invitation to see the bluebehind the white as something in the nature of an incite-hlent to deny the physicality of the canvas. (This is im-precise: but the preceding section will have shown ushow difficult it is to apply the argument we are con-sidering with anything like precision.)

31

Art and its Objects .

If it can be shown that it is quite wrong to treat theinvitation in this way, that, on the contrary, there is no

incompatibility between seeing one mark on the canvasas behind another and also iJ;lsisting thqt both the marksand the canvas. on which they lie are physical objects~

then the present objection to the physical-object hypoth-esis fails. To establish this point would, however, requirean elaborate argument. It might, though, be possible toavoid the need for such an argument by showing justhow widespread or pervasive is the kind of seeing (let uscall it 'representational seeing'), to which Hofmann'spupils were invited. In fact, 'it would be little exagger-ation to say that such seeing is co-extensive with ourseeing of any physical object whose surface exhibits a~ysubstantial degree of differentiation. Once we allow thisfact, it then surely seems absurd to insist that represen-tational seeing, and the judgements to which it. charac-teristically gives rise, implicitly presuppose a denial ofthe physicality both of the representation itself and thaton which It lies. .

In a famous passage in the Trattato Leonardo advisesthe aspirant painter to 'quicken the spirit of invention' bylooking at walls stained with damp or at stones of unevencolour, and find in them divine landscapes and battlescenes and strange figures in violent action. This passagehas many applications both for the psychology and forthe philosophy of art. Here I qU,oteit for the testimony itprovides to the pervasivenes~ of representationalseeing. .

13

In the preceding sections I have very closely associatedthe notion of representation with that of seeing-as, or, as Ihave called it, 'representational seeing': to}he point of

32

~.-.

An Essay

, suggesting that the former notion could be elucidated interms of the latter. In this section I want to justify thisassociation. But first, a word about the two terms be-tweeRwhich the association holds.

'Representation;, I have made clear, I am using in anextended sense: so that, for instance, the figure thatoccurs, in an ordinary textbook of geometry, at the headof Theorem XI of Euclid could be described as aconfiguration of intersecting lines, but it could also bethought of as a representation of a triangle. By contrast, Iuse the pprase 'seeing as' narrowly: uniquely, in the con-text of representation, In other words, I want to excludefrom discussion here such miscellaneous cases as whenwe see the moon as no bigger than a sixpence, or theQueen of Hearts as the Queen of Diamonds, or (like theyoung Schiller) the Apollo Belvedere as belonging to thesame style as the Lflocoon-of Rhodes.:even though thesecases are, I am sure, and could on analysis ,be shQwn to.be,continuous with those I wish to consider. .

With these points clear,1J now return to the elucidationof representation in terms-of seeing-as. I can foresee twoobjections: one, roughly, to the effect that this eluci-dation is more complex than it-need be, the other to theeffect that it is an oversimplification of the matter.

It might be argued that if, say, we are shown a rep-resentation of Napoleon, of course we will see it as Nap-oleon. But it would be oblique to inv0ke this second fact,which is really only a contingent consequence of the firstfact, as an explanation of it: particularly when there is amore direot explanation to hand. For the fundamentalexplanation of why one thing is a representation of some-thing else lies in the simple fact of resemblance: a pictureor drawing is a representation of Napoleon because itresembles Napoleon - and it is for this reason too that we

Iii

33oi.

- --.Art and its Objects

come to see it as Napoleon (if, that is, we do) and not, asthe' argument of this essay would have it, vice versa.

But'this more direct account of what it is for one thingto repr~sent, or be of, another thing will not do: at anyrate, as soon as we move beyond the simplest cases, likethe diagrams in a geometry book. For the concept of re-semblance is notoriously elliptical, or, at any rate, con-text-dependent: and it is hard to see how the resemblancethat holds between a painting or a drawing and that. I

,which it is of would be apparent, or could even bepointed out, to someone who was totally ignorant of theinstitution or practice of representatiol'1.

Sometimes, it is true, we eX,claim of a drawing, 'Buthow exactly like A!' But this is not the counterexampleto my argument that it might at first seem to be. For if wetry to expand the 't4is', of which in such cases we pre-dicate the resemblance, we are likely to find ourselvesmuch closer to 'This person is exactly like A', than to'This configuration is exactly like A'. In other words, theattribution of resemblance occurs inside, and therefore

cannot be used to explain, the language, of representation.This point receives further confirmation from the fact

that, tho~gh the relation of resemblance is ordinarilyheld to be symmetrical, we can say apropos of a drawing,'This is like Napoleon', but we cannot say, except in aspecial setting, 'Napoleon is exactly like this drawing' or'Napoleon resembles this drawing': which seems to throwsome light on how the 'this' in the first sentence is to betaken.

A second objection might run that my account of rep-resentation, so far from being overelaborate, is in factsparser than the matter requires. For I omit one vital el-ement: namely, the intention on the part of the personwho makes the representation. It is necessary, if a draw-

34

~ - . - !!\III

An Essay

ing is to represent Napoleon,' that the draughtsmanshguld intend it to be of Napoleon: furthermore, if heintends it to be of Napoleon, this suffices for It to be ofNapoleon.

Now, the notion of intention has most obvjously animportant part to play in any complete analysis of rep-resentation: and if I have so far omitted it, this is because

Ii,Jiave not been aiming" at a complete analysis - nor,iRCi1€ed"at one fuller than m¥" immediate purposes re-q\!ll!l"e.If it 'were maintained that intention was a necess-

arYior even a sufficient, condition of representation, I do,net!know that Lwould object. This admission, however,

dees not make the radical difference it might initiallyse€),ntb. More specifically, I would argue that it does not

dispossess the notion of seeing-as from the position that IhariVeassignedto it in the analysis of representation.

I't is indeed only on one, and a quite erroneous, con-cel?cion of what aninteI)tion is that the in,troduction of it

intot!he analysis of representation could be thought to beradical in its iIYIplications. Aq:ording to this conception,aFl iDttention is, or is identified with, a thought accom-paFlying (or immediately preceding) an action and to the

effect that 'I am now doing (O[ am about to do) such andsuch. . . .': where, moreover, there is no restraint placedUpon the kind of intention that the agent may attributeto himself, by what in point of fact he is doing. What theman.is actually doing in no way curbs what he may sayhe is doin,g. It is not hard to see that, if we accept such aconception of intention, what we are disposed to see thedrawing as, or how we see the drawing, becomes totallyirrelevant to what the drawing is a representation of. For

if the intention is irrespective of what the man is doing, itmust a fortiori be irrespective of how we see what he hasdone when he has finished. .

35'"

-Art and its Objects

But though the correspondence between intention and Iaction need not be exact (a man may intend to do some- Ithing other than what he does), we cannot plausiblyallow a relation of total fortuitousness to hold between'

them. If, for instance, a man drew a hexagon and simul-

taneously thought to himself, 'lam going ro:draw Nap-oleon', we might maintain that this thought showedsomething about him but it clearly would show nothing Iabout what he intended'to draw there and then. The gen- ~eral question of what makes an accompanying thqughtan intention is very eomplex: but in the area that con-cerns us, that of representation, it would certainly seemthat whether a thought q.oesexpress the iqtentionyehindthat act of, say, drawing which it accompanies is notindependent of what the result of the action, in this casethe drawing itself, can be see!) as. And this supposition isfurther confirmed by the fact that we~couldnot imaginea man forming any intention at all to represent some- I

thing, unless he could also anticipate how the drawingwould look. If this is correct, then obviously the intro-duction of the notion of intention into an analysis ofrepresentation, which had so far been carried outuniquely by reference to seeing-as,will not subvert theanalysis; since intention is itself intimately connectedwith seeing~as.The intention" we might say, looks for-ward to the representational seeing. ,

I have stated, and argued against, two objections to myview that there is an intrinsic. relation between represen-tation and seeing-as. But I have said nothing in favour ofthe view. I believe, however, that once the objectionshave been met, the obvious appeal of my view will assertitself: the appeal resting, I ,suppose, upon some ratherbanal but undeniable fact such that a representation ofsomething is a visual sign, or reminder, of it.

36

An Essay

I hope jt is clear that I have said nothing'to cast doubton th€1fact that what counts as a representation of what,or how we represent things, is a culturally determinedmatter.

14

I have (it will be observed) presented the problem aboutrepresentational properties and the prima facie difficultythey present for the physical-objeat hypothe'sis as though'this was a problem that arose, fIt any rate in the firstinstance, only in conn,exion with certain representationalproperties. There are, that is, cases where we attribute ar,epresentational property to a work. of art anp thisclearly conflicts with some other property or propertiesthat the corresponding physical object possesses. So, forinstance, we say that a still-life has""depth,but.the canvasis flat; that a fresto has a void in the middle, but the wallIII

on which it is painted is intact. And it"isonly where sucha conflict occurs tha!, as I presented it, a problem 0ccurs.It was for this reason that I amended the Hofmann caseto tihat of a master who asked his students to put (blue)paint on the (white) canvas in such a wa¥ that they sawthe blue (= colour of the paint) behind the white (=colour of the canvas). For though, of course, conflictscould arise if one pursued the original Hofmann case anydistance (e.g. if someone asked, How far is the black infront of the white?), in the ~mended .case the conflictarises immediately.

In presenting the problem thus, I coincided, I think,With the way it is generally conceived. In other words,representational properties are not regarded as being ingeneral problematic. However, when we turn from the~roblemof representational properties to that of express-IVeproperties and how they bear on the identification of

37.......

Art and its Objects

.works of art with physical objects, the situation some.what changes. For the problem seems to be not, How cana work of art qua physical object of this or that kindexpress this or that emotion? but; How can a work of artqua physical object express emotion?

(Of course, there is a problem, which .has"indeed beenmuch discussed recently, and which we shall deal withlater [sections 28-31J, about how a particular work of artcan express a particular emotion. But that problem, it isimportant to see, is not our present problem. It has.nothing to do with the identity of physical objects andworks of art; it arises whatever view we take on that

issue.)If I am right in asserting the difference between the.

ways in which representational and expressive propertiesprove problematic - and I have no desire to be insistenthere - the explanation may well lie in the fact that,though there is nothing other than a physical object thathas representational properties, there is something otherthan a physical, or at any rate a purely physical, objectthat has expressive properties: namely, a human bodyand its parts, in particular the face and certain limbs. Sonow we wonder, How can anything other than this beexpressive? More specifically, How can anything purelyphysical be expressive?

15

We might begin by considering two false views of howworks of art acquire their expressiveness: not simply SOas to put them behind us, but because each is in its way apointer to the truth. Neither view requires us to supposethat works of art are anything other than physicalobjects.

The first view is that works of art are 'expressive be-

38

An Essay

cause they have been produced in a certain state of mindor feeling on the part of the artist: and to this the rider isoften attached, that it is this mental or emotional con-dition that they express. But if we take the view' first of

. all with the rider attached, its falsehood is apparent. Forit is a common happening that a' painter or sculptor

. modifies or even rejects a work of his because he findsthatJ it fails to correspond to what he experienced at thetime. If, however, we drop the rider, the view now seemsarbitrary or perhaps incomplete. For there seems to be noreason why a work should be expressive simply becauseit was 'produced in some heightened condition if it is alsoadmitted that the work and the condition need not have

the same character. (It would be like trying to explainwhy a man who has measles is ill by citing the fact thathe was in contact with someone else who was also ill

when that other person was not ill with measles or any-thing Telated to measles.) It must be understood that I amnot criticizing the view because it allows an artist toexpress in his work a condition other than that which hewas in at the time: my case is rather that the view doeswrong both to allow this fact and to insist that the ex-pressiveness of the work can be accounted for exclus-ively in terms of the artist's condition.

However, what is probably the more fundamentalobjection to this view, and is the point that has beenemphasized by many recent philosophers, is that thework's expressiveness now becomes a purely externalfeature of it. It is no longer something that we can ormight observe, it is something that we infer from whatWe observe: it has been detached from the object as itmanifests itself to us, and placed in its history, so that itnow belongs more to the biography of the artist than tocriticism of the work. And this seems wrong. For the

.3910

~"",..-"",II!;

Art and its Objects,

qualities of gravity, sweetness, fear, that yve iQvok~ indescribing works of art seem essential to .our under-standing of them; and if they are, they cannot be extrin-

sic to the works themselves. They cannot be, that is~mereattributes of the experiences or activities of Masaccio, of

Raphael; of Grunewald - they inhere~rather in the Bran-cacd frescoes, in the Granduca Madonna, in the Isenheim I"

Altarpiece. , \ ill

The second view, is that works of art are:iexpressive-I",

beca,use' they produce or are ably' tq producfa certainstate of mind or-.feeling in the spectator:<more,O'l.er(and inthe case 'of this view it ~s difficult tq imagine the riderever' detached);' it is this mental Qr ~,mo~ional conditionthat they express. This view is open, to objections that I

closely parallel those we p.avejust f:onsidered. :

For, iv. the first place, it",seems clear!y~Jal~e. Beforeworkse¥en of the most ~xtrewe ,!=!llotionalintensitx, like

Bernini's 5t Teresa or the black paintings of ~oyat h ispossible to remain more, or less un~xcited to i~heeqlOtionthat it would pe agreed they express. Indeed, there aremany tl~~ories that make it a qist~p.guishing or definingfeatu~e of art that it should be viewed with detachmynt,th9t there shoulp, be a distancing on the part of the spec-tator betwe~n what the work expresses and what he ex-periences: although it is worth noting, in passing, thatthose theorists who have been m6stcertain that works ofart do not arouse emotion, have also been uncertain, insome cases confused, as to how this comes about: some-

times attributing it to the artist, sometimes to the spec-tator; sometime~, that is, saying that the artist refrainsfrom giving the work the necessary causal power, some-times saying that the spectator holds himself back fromreacting to this power. ,

However, the main objection to this view, as to the

40

~"N__'~"," ,-'~"-, "-'/'R

An Essay

preVious one, is"that it removes what we ordinarily thinkof.'as ODeof the essential characteristics of the work of

~t from among its manifest propertiy's, locating it thistiI}1€:rilotin its past but in its hidden or dispositional en-

dowment.And if ,it is now argued that .this is a very,pertinent difference, in that the latter is, inprinoiple atleast, susceptible to our personal verification in a 'Yay inwhich t.neformer ,never could b~, this misses the Roint~Certa~Ff1Yi!l'wecan actualiz~ the disppsition, by bringing.,itaJ:i<ttiilJ'that the work pr6dhce,~ in us the' condition it issilp),?osed to express: and there " is clearly no cor-;resp0nding way in wJ1ich we can aotualize the P<1st.Butthough thi,s,is so',\,his still does not make'the di,spositionitself""" and it is, wdth this, after all, that~ihework'sex-press,iwenessis equated ~any the more a property that wecan dbserve~ ',Vi'

~I6

And ye.t there seems to be something to both these vJews:as an examination 6f somel1ypothetical case~, mightbring out.

For let us imagine that we are P,fesented witl} ~ physi-cal ~bject - we shaU not for the moment assume that iteither is or is sVppos~d to be a work of art - and the claimis made on its behalf, in a way that commands ourserious attention, that it is expressive of a certain

emotion: say, grief. We then learn that it had been pro-duced quite casually, as a diversion or as a part of a game:and we must further suppose that it arouses neither in usor in anyone else anything more than mild pleasure. CanWe, in the light of these facts, accept the claim? It is

conceivable that we might; having certain specialreasons. '

But now let)ls imagine~ that the claim is made on

41J...~

Art and its Objects

behalf not of a single or isolated object, but of a whole

class of objects of which our original example would be afair specimen, and it turns out that what was true of it is

. true of all of them both as to how they were producedand as to what they produce in us. Surely it is impossible

to imagine any circumstances in which we would allowthis claim. .

But what are we to conclude from this? Are we to saythat the two views are true in ageneral way, and thaterror arises only when we think of the~ as applying ineach and every case? The argument appears to point inthis direction, but at the same time it seems an. un-

satisfactory state in which to leave the matter. (Certaincontemporary moral philosophers, it is true, seem to finda parallel situation in their own area perfectly congenial,when they say that an individual action can be right eventhough it does not satisfy the utilitarian c!iterion, pro-vided that that sort of action, or that that action in gen-eral, satisfies the criterion: the utilitarian criterion, inother words, applies on the whole, though not in eachand every case.) . .

The difficulty heie is this: Suppose we relax the necess-ary condition in the particular case because it is satisfiedin general, with what right do we continue to regard thecondition that is satisfied in general as necessary? Ordi-

narily the argument for regarding a condition as necess-ary is. that there could not be, or at any rate is not,anything of the requisite kind that does not satisfy it. Butthis argument is not open to us here. Accordingly, at the i

lowest, we must be prepared to give some account' ofhow the exceptions arise: or, alternatively, why we are soinsistent on the condition in ge~eral. TO'return to theexample: it seems unacceptable to say that a single objectcan express grief though it was not produced in, nor is it

42

An Essay

procl1:lctiveof, that emotion, but that a class of objects~'annot express grief unless most of them, or some ofth~m, or a fair Jample of them, satisfy these conditions -unless we can explain why we discriminate in thisway.

At this point what we might do is to turn back andlook at the special reasons, as I called them, which wemtght have for allowing an individual object to be ex-1?xessiNeof grief though it did not satisfy the conditionsthat hold generally. There seem to be roughly two linesof thought which if followed might allow us to concedeexpressiveness. We might think, 'Though the person whomade this object didn't feel grief when he made it, yet

, this is the sort of .thing I would make if I felt grief. . . .'Aliternatively we might think, 'Though I don't feel griefwhen, I look at this here and now, yet r am sure that inotl1er circumstances I would. . . .' Now, if I am right inthinking that these are the relevant considerations, we

can 'begin to see some reason for our discriminatioJ) be-tween the particular and the general case. For there is anevident difficulty in seeing how these considerationscould apply to a whole class of objects: given, that is, thatthe class is reasonably large. For our confidence that a

certain kind of object was what we would produce if weexperienced grief would be shaken by the fact ~hat notone (or very few) had actually been produced in grief:equally, our confidence that in other circumstances we

should feel grief in looking at them could hardly survivethe fact that no one (or scarcely anyone) ever had. Thespecial reasons no longer operating, the necessary con-ditions reassert themselves.

....

~,

43

"__M"-,-,

Art and its Objects.Of

~

I? "

However, the foregoing argument must nQt be tak,~nas simply reinstating the twp views about the nature ofexpression which were introduced and"criticized in"sec-tion 15. That would be a misinterpretation: though onewhich the a,.rgument as it has been presented might bethought to invite. " ell

It is true that b,otli - ,that is! botb. the new argumentand the'old views - make reference to thesame criteria of

. . I"""

expressiveness: the psychic state on the one hand of the" ,..

artist, on t~e other hand of the spectator. ~uMhe use theymake ofthese,.criteria is very,pifferent in,the two cases. In

the one c~se the criteria are asserted categqri~ally, in the

other :t best hypotheticaJly. Originally it was clai~~dILthatworks of art were expressive of a certainsta,te if andonly if they had been produc~d in, and w~re capable of.a:t;;ousingto, thai'state. Now this claim ha?1been dropped,and the link"that is postulated between, dn tl).ebne,hand,the, work and, on the other hand, the psychic state ofeither artist or spectator holds only via a supposition:'If I were in that state. . .', 'If I were in other circum-stances. . . .'

There are, however, two ways in which the gap Q,e-tween the old and the new version of the matter can benarrowed, even if it cannot (indeed it cannot) be closed.The first is by the introduction of unconscious feelings.The second is by a more generous' conception of thedifferent relations in which a person can stand to theconscious feelings that, he has. For it is a fact of humannature, which must be taken into account in any philo-sophical analysis of the mind, that, even when feelingsenter into consciousness, they can be comparatively splitoff or dissociated: the dissociation sometimes occurring in

44

". ,~. .. ...~,- --~'=""--'

fitAn Essay

aq;'Qrd~nce with the demands of re,a,.lity"asin memory orcontemplation, "or sometimes in more pathologicalways. "

l1N0Wit is,dear that much of the crudity - andfor tha~,., i~

matter of the vulnerability - of the/two original views of~pr~sslon came from overlooking or ignoring these twofactbrs. ,So, for instance, the claim that ceI;tain music issa<l;'because 9f what the composer felt'i~is'~sometimese<'l.ualted- by its proponents,as1wellas by its'tritics2'withthe Iqlaim. that at the time ,the composer was~sufferingfrQ]Jt a bOllt"of gloom. Or; again, to sa)'" that a certainstattiie is terrifying bedmse of the emotions it arouses in .

th,e spe~tators is someti~es interpreted as meaning~thatsom~0ne who looks at it will take frighLrIn other words,to e~tablish that the composer was not on the verge oftear~ DEthat the average spectator exhibits no desire torUll'awaY'J';,isthought. to .be enough to refute this wholeconception of "expression. But 'there are'feelings that amanlfr.:!.sof which he is 'ngt conscious, and th.,ere"arewaysof being in touch with those which he has. other thanexperi~ncing them in a primary sense: and a more real-istic statement of the two original views should notrequire more than that the state expressed by the work of.art is among those states, conscious or unconscious, to

which the, artist and the spectator stand in some pos-sessive relation.

. -Sucl). a restatement would not merely add to the

realism of these new views: it would also bring them ap-preciably closer to the new account which we have sub-stituted for them. For as long as ~e confine ourselves to

conscious feelings or feelings which we experience p1."i-Inarily, there is obviously a substantial gap between thesUPposition that something or other is what we wouldhave felt if we had made a certain object, and the as-

45I

Art and its Objects

sertion that this is what the person who made it felt: and,

again, between the supposition that we would feel. insuch and such a way before a certain object in othercircumstances, and the assertion that this is what we

really feel before it. But enlarge the conception of hl,lmanfeelings., extend it so as to take in the whole range ofpsychic states, and the situation considerably changes.There is still, of course, a gap, but the gap has so shrunkthat it is sometimes thought to be no wider than can be

crossed by the l~ap from evidence to conclusion. In otherwords, a speculation about what I would have felt insomeone else's situation or in other circumstances can, infavoured conditions, be warrant enough for an assertionabout what that person really feels or about our ownhidden emotions. .

18

The question, however, mightnow be raised, Suppose thetwo criteria, which hitherto have been taken so closely

together, should diverge: for they might: how could wesettle the issue? And the difficulty here is not just thatthere is no simple answer to the question, but that it looksas though any answer given to it would be arbitrary.Does this, therefore, mean that the two criteria are quite

independent, and that the whole concept of expression,if, that is, it is constituted as I have suggested, is a con-tingent conjunction of two elemep.ts, which could aseasily fall apart as together?

I shall argue that the concept of expression, at any rateas this applies to the. arts, is indeed complex, in that it liesat the intersection of two constituent notions of ex-

pression. We can gain some guidance as to these notionsfrom the two views of expression we have been con-

sidering, for they are bqth reflected in, though also dis-

46

- ..

An Essay

torted by, these views. But, whereas the two views seem

quite contingently connected, and have no clear point ofunion, once we understand what .these notions are we-can see how and why they interact. Through them wecan gain a better insight into the concept of expression asa whole.

In the first place, and perhaps most primitively, wethink of a work of art as expressive in the sense in whicha gesture or a cry would be expressive: that is to say, weconceive of it.as coming so directly and immediately outof some particular emotional or mental state that it bearsunmistakable marks of that state upon it. In this sensethe word remains very close to its etymology: ex-prim ere, to squeeze out or press out. An expression is asecretion of an inner state. I shall 'refer to this as 'natural

expression'. Alongside this. notion is another, which weapply when we think of an object as expressive of acertain condition because, when we are in that condition,

it seems to us to match, or correspond with, what weexperience inwardly: and perhaps when the conditionpasses, the object is also good for reminding us of it insome special poignant way, or for reviving it for us. Foran object t~ be expressive in this sense, there is no re-quirement that it should originate in the condition that itexpresses" nor indeed is there any stipulation about itsgenesis: for these purposes it is simply a piece of the en-vironment which we appropriate on account of the wayit seems to reiterate something in us. Expression in thissense I shall (following a famous nineteenth-centuryusage) call 'correspondence'.

We may now link this with the preceding discussionby saying that the preoccupation with what the artistfelt, or might have felt, reflects a concern with the workof art as a piece of natural expression: whereas the pre-

47

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.._~... ~- h',' ~ ..

. ,,~Y'

I

An EssayArt and its Objects.

occupation with wha! the spectator feels, or might feel,reflects a concern with the work of art as an example of

correspQndence. D' ~

But though these two notions are logically distinct, inpractice they are bound to interact: indeed, it is arguablethat it goes beyond the limit of legitimate abstraction toimagine one without the other. We can see this by con-

, sidering the'notion of appropriateness, or fi~tingriess, con-ceived as a re1ation holding between exp{,ession aridexpressed. We might think that such a relat>!on"has aplace only in connexion with cogesR,ondences. For in thecase of 'natural expression, the link betwe~n inner andouter is surely too powerful or ~oo intimate to allow itsmediation. It is not because tears seem like grief that weregard them" as an expression of 'grief: nor does, a manwhen he resorts to tears do so because they IDa,tch hisc0ndition. So we might~think. But in reality"at"any levelabove the most primitive, natpral expression will alwaysbe coloured or influenced by some sense of what is appro-priate; there will bea feedback from judgement, how eyerinchoate or unconscious this may be, to gesture or excla-mation. AgaIn, when we turn to correspondence, it mightseem that here we are guided entirely by appropriatenessor the fit: that is to say, we appeal uniquely to the 'ap-pearances or characteristics of objects, which hold for us,in some quite unanalysed way, an emotional significance.We do not (we might think) check these reactions againstobserved correlations. But once again this is asimplification. Apart from a few primitive" cases, nophysiognomic perception ' will be independent of what isfor us the supreme example of the relationship betweeninner and outer: that iS1 the human body as the ex-pression of the psyche. When we endow a natural objector an artifact with expressive meaning, we tend to see it

48

.. - '...,,'- _. ~ ... .0' ,...",..!\:

corporeaJly: that is, we tend to credit if with "ilparticularlookwhich bears a marked analogy,to some look that thehuman body wears and that is constantly conjoined withanjrmer state. '

J!~

to,~lle question, Cali a work of art be a physical object ifit is a,l,~o~xpressive?, it now looks as though we can, onthe basis of the preceding account of expression/'give ~p'affirmative, answer. For that account was elaborated with

,speci&cally in mind those arts ~,pere it is most plausibleto think~of a work of art as a physIcal object. But it may,seem that with bot~ the two notions'of expression that~Ihave tried'la'formulate, there remains"'an unexamined or

problematic residue. And.in the two cases theprobleni is,"" "iIIf

m1achthe same. .. '

It Qlay be stated like this: Gran!ed that in each'case theprocess. ~',have described' is perfectly comprehensible,

~

how do we come at the end of it to attribute'" a humanemotion to an object? In both cases the object has certaincharacteristics. In one case these characteristics mirror,in the other case they are caused by, certain inner statesof ours. Why, on the basis of this, do the riaml~sof theinner states get transposed to the objects? "

The difficulty with this objection might be put bysayin$ that it treats a philosophical reconstruction of apart of our language as though it were a historical ac-COunt.Fodt is not at all clear that, in the cases where weattribute emotions to objects in the ways that I have triedto describe, we have any other way of talking about theobjects themselves. There is not necessarily a prior de-~criptionin non-emotive terms, on which we super-~l11posethe emotive description. Or, to put the same pointIn nonlinguistic ,terms, it is not always the case that

49.....

Art and its"Objects

things that we see as expressive, we can or could see inany other way. In such cases what we need is not ajustification, but an explanation, of our language. That Ihope to have given.

20

We have now completed our discussion of the physical-object hypothesis, and this would be a good moment atwhich to pause and review the situation.

The hypothesis, taken literally, has been~learlyshown to be false: in that there are arts where it is impos-

sible to find physical objects that are even candidates forbeing identified with works of art (sections 6-8). How-ever, as far as those other arts are concerned' where such

physical objects can be found, the arguments again~t theidentification - namely, those based on the fact 'thatworks of art have properties not predicable of physicalobjects - seemed less cogent (sections 9-19). I have nowto justify the assertion that I made at the very beginningof the discussion (section 5) that it was only in so far as it I

related to these latter arts that the challenge to this hypo-thesis had any fundamental significance for aesthetics.

The general issue raised, whether works oT art, arephysical objects, seems to compress two questions: thedifference between which can be brought out by accent-ing first one, then the other, constituent word in theoperative phrase. Are works 6f art physical objects? Areworks of art physical objects? The first question would bea question about the stuff or constitution of works of art,what in the broades~ sense they are made of: morespecifically~ Are they mental? or physical? are they con-structs of the mind? The second question would be a ques-tion about the category to which works of art belong,about the criteria bf identity and individuation appli-

50

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An Essay

Gableto them: more specifically. Are they universals, ofwhich there are instances?, or classes, of which there are

members?, are they particulars? Roughly speaking, thefirst question might be regarded as metaphysical, thesec:cmdas logical and, confusingly enough, both can be

, put'in the form of a question about what kind of thing awork of art is.

Applying this distinction to the preceding discussion,we can now see that the method of falsifying the hypoth~esis that all works of art are physical objects has been toestablish that there are some works of art that are not

objeC1is(or particulars) at all: whereas the further part ofthe case which' depends upon establishing that thoseworks of art which are objects are nevertheless not physi-cal has not been made good. If my original assertion is tobe vin.dicated, I am now required to show that what is ofmoment in aesthetics is the physicality of works of artraVher than their p~rticularity, '

~i1

If a work of art is held to be a particular but not physical,the next step is to posit a further object, over and abovethe relevant physical object; and this object is then re-garded as the work of art. Nonphysical itself, this objectnevertheless stands in a very special relation to the ph~i-cal object that (as we might say) would have been the

work of art if works of art had been or could be, physi-cal. Of the nature of this obje'ct, there' are, broadly speak-ing, two different theoretical accounts. '

According to one kind of theory the work of art is non-physical in that it is something mental or even ethereal:its location is in the mind or some other spiritual field, atany rate in a region uninhabited by physical bodies:

hence we do not have direct sensible access to it, though,

51...

Art and its Objects

presumably we are able to infer it or intuit it or imagin-atively re-create it from the object in the world that is itstrace or embodiment. According to the other kind of

theory, <thework of art differs from physical objects, notin the sense that it is imperceptible, but b~cause it has

only sensible properties: it has no properties (for instance,dispositional or historical) that are not open to direct orimmediate' observation. Whether on this account we are

to regard wqrks'of art as.public or private depends uponwhat view we take of the nature of sensory fields, whichis now their location.

In denying that works of art are physical objects, thefirst kind of theory withdraws them altogether from ex-perience, whereas the second kind pins thew to it ines-capably and at all points. I shall speak of the first asmaking out of works of art 'ideal' objects, ahd~of the'second as ma,klng out of them 'phenomenal' or 'presen-tational' objects. I haVepow to establish that both the- I

ories, the Ideal and the Presentational, involvefundamental distortions in their account of what art is.

22

Let us'begin with the Ideal theory. It is usual nowadays tothink of this as the' Croce-Collingwood theory, and toconsider it in the extended form that it has been given by

these two philosophers, who, moreover, differ only inpoints of detail or emphasis. I shall follow this pr~ctice,though (as elsewhere) recasting the original argumentswhere the requirements of this essay necessitate.

The Ideal theory can be stated in three propositions.First, that the work of art consists in an inner state orcondition of the artist, called an intuition or an ex-

pression: secondly, that this state is not immediate orgiven, but is the product of a process, which is peculiar to

52

,-An I;:ssay

. theartist, and whichinvolvesarticulatioh,organization,and unification:.thirdly, that the intuition so developedmay be externalized in a public form, in which case wehave the artifact which is often but wrongly taken to bethe work of art, but equally it need not be.

The origin of this theory, which we should understandbefore embarking upon criticism, lies in taking seriouslythe question, Wb.at .is distinctive - or perhaps better,What is distinctively 'art' - in a work of art?, and givingit an answer that has both a positive and a negativeaspect.

In his Encyclopaedia Britannicaartic:leon 'Aesthetics',Croce asks -{isto consider, as an example 'of both familiarand high art, the description given by Virgil of ,Aeneas'smeeting with Andromache by the waters of the r.i.verSimois(Aeneid, III, lines 294 ff.).,Thepoetry 4ere,.he sug-gests,cannot consist in any of the details that the passagecontains- the woes and shame of Andromache, the over-coming of misfortune, the many sad aft~rmaths of war::::and defeat - for these things Gould equally occur inworks of history. or criticism, and therefore must be inthemselves 'n,onpoetic': what we must do is to lookbeyond tihem to that which makes poetry out of them,and so we are led of necessity to a human experience.Andwhat is true ot"poetry is true of all the other arts. Inorder to reach the distinctively aesthetic, we must ignorethe surface elements, which can equally be found in non-artistic or practical contexts, and go straight to the mind,which organizes them. Having in this way identified theWorkof art with an inner process, can we say anythingl11oreabout this process? .

It is at this point that the negative aspect of the theorytakes over. What the artist characteristically !ioes is bestunderstood by contrast with - and tp.is is perhaps Co1-

53

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Art and its Objects

lingwood more than Croce - what the craftsman charac-teristically does. Since what is characteristic of thecraftsman is the making of an artifact, or 'fabrication',we can be certain that the artist's form of making, or'creation', is not this kind of thing at all.

The contrast between art and craft, which is central to

Collingwood's Principles of Art, would appear to rest" .

upon three distinctive characteristics of craft. First, ~verycraft involves the notion. of a means and ah end, each

. distinctly conceived, the end being definitive of the par-ticular craft, and the means whatever is employed toreach that end; secondly, every craft involves the dis-tinction between planning and execution,. where plan-ning consists in foreknowledge of the desired result andcalculation as to how best to achieve this, and the ex-

ecution is the carrying out of this plan; finally, everycraft presupposes a material upon which it is exercisedand which it thereby transforms into something different.None of these characteristics, the theory argues, pertainsto art.

Th.at art does not have an end is established, it mightseem, rather speciously by rebutting those theories whichpropose for art some obviously extrinsic aim like thearousing of emotion, or the stimulation of the intellect, orthe encouragement of some practical activity: for theseaims give rise to amusement, magic, propaganda, ete. But,it might be urged, why should not the end of Art be, say,just the production of an expressive object? To this onereply would be that this would not be, in the appropriatesense, a case of means and end, since the two would not

be conceived separately. Another and more damagingreply would be that this would involve an assimilation ofart to craft in its second characteristic. The artist is noW

thought of as working to ~ preconceived plan, or as,54

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An Essay

haviI}g foreknowledge of what he intends to produce;an<},this is impossible.

The trouble with this argument - like the more general

epistemological argument, of which it can be regarded asa ~ecial instance, i.e., that present knowledge of futurehaPI?enings tout court is impossible - is that it acquiresplaJsibility just because we don't know what degree ofspecificity is supposed to be attributed to what is said tobe i~J?ossible. If a very high degree of '~pecificity is in-tend@@,the argument is obviously cogent. Jhe artistc01.i"ldn@t know to the minutest detail what he will do.

However, if we lower the degree of specificity, the artistsurely can have foreknowledge. It is, for instance, neither

false (nor derogatory to say that, there were many oc-" casions-on which Verdi knew that he was going to com-

pose an opera, or Bonnard to make a picture of his model.And, after all, the craftsman's foreknowledge will oftenbe no fu~ler.

That every craft has its raw material and art doesn't-the third criterion of the distinction - is argued for byshowipg that there is no uniform sense in which we canattribute to the arts a material upon which the artistworks. There is nothing out of which the poet can be saidto make his poem in the sense in which the sculptor canbe said (though falsely, according to the theory) to makehis sculpture out of stone or steel. .

I now wish to turn to criticism of the Ideal theory. Forit must be understood that nothing that has so far beenproduced has had the character of an argument againstthet4eory. At most we have had arguments against argu~l1lentshistorically advanced in support of it.

55...

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t Art and its Objects

23

There are two arguments t~,at are widely' advanced

against the Ideal theory.The first is that by making the work of art something

inner or mental, the link between artist and audience hasbeen severed. There is now no object to which,both canhave access, for no one put the artist can ever know whathe has produced., Agalhst this it might be retorted that this extreme scep-tical or solipsi?tic conclusion would follow only if it wasmaintained that works of art could never be externalized:

w;her~as all th,e Ideal theory asserts .isthat they need notbe. A parallel exists in the way in 'Yhich we can knowwh~t a manc is thinking, even though hjs thoughts are,"

something pfivate, for he might disclose his thoughts to

. }Is.This retort, it m~ght b,efelt, while avoiding scepticism,still leaves us too close to it for comfort. Even Col-

lingwood, for instance, who was anxious to avoid thesceptical consequences of his theory, hag to concede thaton it the spectator can have only an 'empirical' or. 'rela-tive' assurance about the artist's imaginative experience,which, of course, just is, for Collingwood, the work ofart. This seems-quite at variance with our ordinary - andequally, as I hope to show, with our reflective - yiewsabout the public character of art.

The second argument is that the Ideal theory totallyignores the significance of the medium: it is a charac-teristic fact about works of art that they are in a medium,whereas the entit;ies posited by the Ideal theory are freeor unmediated. A first reaction to this argument might be

to say that it is an exaggeration. At the lowest we need tomake a distinction within the arts. In literature and music

we can surely suppose a work of art to be complete

56 )

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An Essay

before it is externalized without this having any negativeimplications for the medium. A poem or an aria couldexist:in the <.'Irtist'shead before it is written down:a,ndalthough difficulties may exist in the case of a novel or anopera, we can conceive adjustments of memdetail in thetheqry that vyould accommodate them. Bu~does this pre-serve .,the theory, even in this area? For, if the occurrenceof certain experiences (say, the saying of words ro one-self) justifies us in postulating the existence of a certainpoem", this is not to say tha( the poem i~,those experi-ences. AJairer (though certainly not a clear) way of put-ting the matter would be to say th<it it is the objeGt ofthose experiences. And the object of an experience ne~dnot be anything 'inner or mental.J ,

Anyhow these,cases should not preoccupy us. For (toret,-\rn to the starting point of this whole,l,discussion) it isnot 'Yorks of art of these kinds that provide crucial testsfor the Ideal theory. What that theory has primarily toaccount for are those works of art which are particuJars.The q,:uestiontherefore arises, If we are asked'to Jhink of,say, paintings and sculptures as intuitions existing in the,artist's mind, which are only contingently externalized,is this compatible with the fact that such works areintrinsically in a medium?

An attempt has been made to defend the theory at thi~stage by appeal to a distinction between the 'physicalmedium' and the 'conceived medium': the physicalmedium being the stuff in the world, the conceivedmedium being the thought of this in the mind. The de-fence now consists in saying that the whole process ofinner elaboration, on which the theory lays such weightand which Croce explicitly identifies with expression(l'identita di intuizione ed espressione), goes on in amedium in that it goes on in the ~onceived medium. So,

~

57"

Art and its Objects

for instance, when Leonardo scandalized the prior of S.Maria delle Grazie by standing for days on end in front ofthe wall he was to paint, without touching it with hisbrush - an incident Croce quotes as evidence of this

'inner' process of expression - we may suppose that thethoughts that occupied his mind were of painted surface,were perhaps images of ever-developing articulation ofwhat he was to set down. Thus a work of art was createdthat was both in an artist's mind and in a medium.

However, two difficulties' still arise. The first concernsthe nature of mental images. For it is hard to believe thatmental images could be so artjculated as in all respects toanticipate the physical pictures to be realized on wall orcanvas. For this would involve not merely foreseeing, but

also solving, all the problems that will arise, either neces-sarily or accidentally, in the working of the medium: andnot merely is this implausible, but it is even arguablethat the accreditation of certain material processes as themedia of art is bound up with their inherent unpre-

dictability: it is just because these materials presentdifficulties that can be dealt with only in the actual work-

ing of them that they are so suitable as expressive pro-cesses. Again - to borrow an argument from thephilosophy of mind - is it even so clear what meaning weare to attach to the supposition that. the image totally

anticipates the picture? For unless the picture is one ofminimal articulation, in which case we could have an

image of the whole of it simultaneously, we will have toattribute to the image properties beyond those of whichwe are aware. But this, except in marginal cases, is objec-tionable: for by what right do we determine what theseextra properties are? (Sartre has made this point by talk-ing of the image's 'essential poverty'.) .

A second difficulty is this: that if we do allow that the

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inner process is in a conceived medium, this seems tochallenge the alleged primacy of the mental experienceover the physical artifact, on which the Ideal theory is soinsistent. For now the experience seems to derive its con-tent from the nature of the artifact: it is because the arti-

fact is of such and such a material that the image is insuch and such a conceived medium. The problem whycertain -apparently arbitrarily identified stuffs or pro-cessesshould be the vehicles of art - what I shall call the

bricoleur problem, from the striking comparison madeby Levi-Strauss of human culture to a bricoleur or handi-man, who improvises only partly useful objects out ofold junk - is a very real one: but the answer to it cannotbe that these are just the stuffs or processes that artistshappen to think about or conceive in the mind. It is moreplau~ible to believe that the painter thinks in images ofpaint or the sculptor in images of metal just becausethese, independently, are the media of art: his thinkingpresupposes that certain activities in the external worldsuch as charging canvas with paint or welding havealready become the accredited processes of art. In other.words, there could not be Croce an 'intuitions' unless.

there were, first, physical works of art.

24

However, of the two theories that set out to account for

works of art on the assumption that they cannot bephysical objects, it is the Presentational theory that is '

more likely to be found acceptable nowadays: if onlybecause the account it gives is less recondite.

Of the Ideal theory it might be said that its particularcharacter derives from the way 'it concentrates exclus-ively upon one aspect of the aesthetic situation: theprocess, that is, of artistic qeation. The Presentational

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Art and its Objects

theory feeds on no less one-sided a diet: in its case, it is thesituation of the spectator, or perhaps more specificallythat of the critic, that comes to dominate the account it

provides of what a work of art is. It might seem a taut-ology that all that the spectator of a work of art has torely upon (qua spectator, that is) is the evidence of hiseyes or ears, but it goes beyond this to assert that this isall that the critic can, or qua critic should, rely upon, andthis further assertion is justified by an appeal to the

. 'autonomy of criticism'. The idea is that, as soon as weinvoke evidence about the biography or the personalityof the artist or the prevailing culture or the stylistic situ-ation, then we have deviated from what is given in thework of art and have adulterated criticism with history,

psy~hology, sociology, etc. (To trace the two theories inthis way to preoccupations with differing aspects of theaesthetic situation is not, of course, to say that either

theory gives a correct account of that particular aspectwith which it is preoccupied, n9r for that matteris it to concede that the two preoccupations can be

adequately pursued in isolation or abstraction one fromthe other.). The theory before us is that a work of art possessesthose properties, and only those, which we can directlyperceive or which are immediately given. As .such thetheory seems to invite criticism on two levels. In the firstplace (it may be' argued), the distinction upon which itrests - namely"that between pr.operties that we immedi-

ately perceive and those which are mediately perceivedor inferred - is not one that can be made.in a clear - or, insome areas, even in an approximate - fashion. Secondly,where the distinction can be made, it is wrong to deny to

the ~or~ of art everything except what is immediatelyperceptible: what ensues is a diminished or depleted ver-, "

60

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An Essay

sion of art. I shall deal with the first kind of objection insections 25-30, and the second kind in sections 32-4.

Contemporary theory of knowledge is full of argu-ments against the distinction enshrined in traditional em-piricism between that which is, and that which is not,given in perception, and it would be inappropriate to re-hearse these general arguments here. I shall, therefore,confine my examination of the distinction to two largeclasses of property, both of which we have already hadto consider on the assumption that they are intrinsic toworks of art, and which seem to offer a peculiarly high

. degreeof resistanceto the distinction:I refer to meaning,or semantic, properties, and expressive properties. If boththese sets of properties really are intractably inde-terminate as to this distinction, then it would follow thatthe Presentational theory, which presupposes the dis-tinction, must be inadequate.

25

Let us begin with meaning-properties.In the Alciphron (Fourth Dialogue) Berkeley argues

that when we listen to a man speaking, the immediate'objects of sense are certain sounds, from which we infer

I

what he means. The claim might be put by saying thatwhat we immediately hear are noises, not words, wherewords are something intrinsically meaningful. If we con-join this claim to the Presentational theory, we arrive atthe view that a poem is essentially concatenated noises:and this indeed is the vi~w (and the argument) that, im-plicit in a great deal of Symbolist aesthetics, has found itsmost explicit formulation in the Abbe Bremond's doc-trine of poesie pure. Without considering whether this isor is not an acceptable account of or programme forpoetry, I want to examine one presupposition of. it:

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Art and its Objects

which is that we can (not, that we do, or, that we should)listen to words as pure sound. .

There is one obvious argument in support of thIS: Im-

agine that we have a poem read out to us in a languagewe don't understand. In that case we mus~listen to it aspure sound: if, for instance, we admire the ?oem, :vemust admire it for its sound alone, for there ISnothmgelse open to us to admire it for. If we can listen to a poemin an unknown language like that, we can presumablylisten to a poem in any language in the same way. .

But the argument lacks force. For there are many waysin which we can react to utterances we don't understandwhich would not be poss'iblefor us if we did understandthem: for instance, we could sit utterly unangeredthrough a string of wounding abuse in a language wedidn't know. If it is now retorted that we could do thesame even if we knew the language, provided that wedidn't draw on this knowledge, this seemSto beg the qu~s-tion: for it is very unclear what is meant by listening to alanguage we know without drawing on our ~nowledgeexcept listening to it as pure sound. So there ISno argu-ment, only assertion. ' I Of course, there is a certain amount of poetry where the

A supplementary consideration is this: if we couldI

words are concatenated in accordance not with their

hear an utterance that we' understood as mere sound, sense but purely with their sound. Some of Shakespeare'sthen, on the proviso tJ;1atwe can reproduce it at all, we songs are examples of this. some Rimbaud, some Smart,

surely should be' able to reproduce it by mimicry: that is, most nonsense poetry or doggerel. But it does not follow'without reference to the sense, but aiming simply to from the fact that the 'lyrical initiative' (the phrase ismatch the original noises. Such a possibility would seem I Coleridge's) is sustained in this way, that we listen to theto be involved in the concept of hearing something as a poetry and ignore the sense. On the contrary: it wouldsound. But to achieve such mimicry with a word we seem that in such cases just the fact that the sense hasunderstand seems not merely factually impossible, but. been sacrificed,. or becomes fragmented, is something of

absurd. . . . . which we need to be aware, if we are to appreciate theAnother kind of argument tha~ mIght be mvoked III ! poem. Nonsense poetry is not the most accessiblepart of

supp:~ of the view that we can lISten to poetry as pure cguage's literatnre.

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T - An Essay

sound is that we often admire poetry for its aural proper-ties. This is true. But when we come to investigate suchcases, they ar~ quite evidently unable to sustain the kindof interpretation that the argument would put on them.What we find is a range of cases: at one end, where the(so-called)aural properties of rhythm etc. are actuallyidentified by reference to the sense of the poetry, as inWyatt's sonnet 'I abide, and abide, and better abide'; atthe' other end, where the aural properties can beidentified purely phonetically but they presuppose fortheir effect (at the lowest) a noninterference by, or adegree of collusion from, the sense, as in Poe's famousline: .

Andthe silken,sad,uncertain rustlingof eac;hpurplecurtain

or in much of Swinburne. It is an unwarranted extra-

polation beyond this second kind of case to the hypo-thetical case where the aural properties of the poem canbe assessed in"a way that is quite indifferent as to thesense.

63

III Art and its Objects

II

,!

26

If we turn to tIie visual arts, the analogue to the meaning

or semantic properties is the representational properties.The general question, whether these are directly per-ceptible, is beyond the scope of this essay. Certainlymany philosophers have denied that they are: fromwhich it would follow, in conjunction with the thesisthat works of art are presentational, that, say, paintingsin so far as they pertain to art represent nothing and theiraesthetic content consisKexclusively in flat coloured.sur-faces and their juxtapositions. Indeed, this is hqw a greatdeal of 'formalist' aesthetics is arrived at: and if in theactual criticism of such formalists we often encounterreferences to solid shapes, e.g. cubes, cylinders, spheres,

as part of the painting's content, this seems to be incon-sistency, since thelonly way in which volumes can inherein; a two-dimensional painting is through representation.On the other hand, Schopenhauer, who also held thatworks of art are essentially perceptual, argued that we

look ~at a picture, e.g. Annibale Carracci's Genius ofFame, legitimately, or as we should, when we see in it abeautiful winged youth. surrounded by beautiful boys,but illegitimately, i.e. we 'forsake the perception', whenwe look for its allegorical or merely 'nominal'

significance. So for him, presumably, representationalproperties were directly perceptible. .

In this section, I shall confine myself to a part of the

problem: namely, whether represented movement is di-rectly perceptible, or whether movement can be de-picted. This limited issue has, however,. as well as itsintrinsic, a great historical, interest. For it was a negativeanswer given to it that, combined with something like apresentational theory, generated' one of the most power-

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\ An Essay

ful of traditional aesthetic doctrines i.e. the Shaftes-

bury-Lessing theory o{ 'the limits 9f poetry andpainting' (to q'lOte the subtitle of the Laocoon). Lessing'sargument is, briefly, that painting, whose means, i.e.figures and colours, co-exist in space, has as its propersubject bodies: whereas poetry, whose means, i.e. sounds,

succeed. one another in time, has as its proper subjectaCtions. .

Now let us examine the issue itself. Imagine that weare looking at Delacroix's Combat du Giaour et du Pacha.

What do we directly see? There is one obvious argumentiv favour of saying that we don't (directly) perceive themovement of the two horsemen, and that is, that whatwe are looking at, i.e., a canvas on which the two horse-

men are represented, is not itself in movement. (This1nfact is Lessing's own argument.) But the principle onwhich thi~ argument is based is obviously unacceptable:namely, that of determining the properties that we im-

mediately see by reference to ~he properties possessed bythe objectJhat we see. For the point of introducing directperception was just so as to be able to contrast the twosets of properties: we 'directly perceive', for instance, abent stick when we look through water at a stick that inpoint of fact is straight.

Another and equally obvious argument, though theother way round, i.e. in favour of saving that we do (di-rectly) perceive the movement of the horsemen, is that

the horsemen are in movement. But this argument ismutatis mutandis open to the same objection as the pre-ceding on<=};for here we determine the properties that wedirectly perceive by reference to the properties not ofWhat we are looking at but of what we are looking at arepresentation of. And this seems, if anything, to com-pound the error.

Il

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Art and its Objects

But does if compound the error? To .think that it doesseemsto rest on an argument like this: When we say 'I seethe representation of two hbrsemen in movement', thiscan be analysed into '1 see the representation of. twohorsemen in a certain position, and this position is onethat can be assumed by horsemen in movement.' If weaccept this analysis, it is obviously more plausible to ap-propriate, as the properties that we see, the properties ofthe static representation rather than the properties of themoving horsemen: for there is no reference to the movinghorsemen in that part of the conjunct which is aboutwhat we see~ .

But why do we think that this conjunctive analysis of'We see the representation of two horsemen in move-ment' is correct? And the answer presumably must be,because our seeing the representation of horsemen thatwe do and the represented horsemen's being in movementare independent facts: in other words, the representationthat we see could be of, for instance, two horsemen care-fully posed as if in movement. The representation is, as itwere, neutral as to what if anything the horsemen aredoing.

This. might simply mean that Delacroix could havepainted his.picture from a scale model of two horsemen,which would, of course, have been static, rather thanfrom two moving horsemen. But if he had, this would nothave sufficed to make his picture a representation of aposed group. For we might have been quite unable to seethe picture in this way: just as, for instance, we do notsee Gainsborough:s late landsc,apes as. representationsof the broken stones, pieces of looking glass and driedherbs from which he painted.them - and for that matter

just as Delacroix himself could not have seen the scalemodel from which (on the present supposition) he

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painted, as itself of two horsemen in posed attitudes.This is not to say that no representations of thingsor

people in movement are neutral between their being ortheir not being in movement: many cases of thiskind could be cited from the hieratic forms of art. It is,though, to say that not all such representations are of thiskind. To cite an extreme example: What sort of objectcould there be such that we could imagine Velasquez'sstroboscopic representation of the spinning wheel in LasHilanderasas a representation of it in repose?

I have argued that we do wrong to pick on either therepresentation itself or the thing represented as providingus with the sure criterion of what properties we directlyperceive. But this has not led us to postulate as that cri-terion some mental image or picture, which is then calledthe direct object of perception: as traditional theory gen-erally does. If there is such a thing as a criterion of whatwe directly perceive, it rather looks as though it is to befound in what we would naturally say in response to anouter picture. But if this is so, then there seemslittle hopethat we can, without circularity, define or identify theproperties of a picture by reference to what we directlyperceive. > .

27

Before turning to the second of the two large sets of prop-erties that I talked of in section 24 as constituting aserious challenge to.the distinction upon which the Pres-entational theory rests, i.e. expressive properties, I shouldlike to digress and in this section consider a rather specialset of properties which are also problematic for thetheory. For it would be hard to deny that these propertiespertain to works of visual art: even if quite exaggeratedclaims have sometimes been made on their behalf. At the

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Art and its Objects

same time it would not be easy to fit these properties into'the dichotomy of given or inferred, which the theorydemands: though, again, the attempt has certainly beenmade. Their connexion with representation makes it ap-

propriate to discuss them here. The properties I refer toare best introduced by means of that highly versatilephrase, 'tactile values'.

The central or hard core use of this phrase (to get it

over first) occurs inside a very general theory aboutvisual art. This theory, which is widely associated withthe name of Berenson, though it has a longer history,takes as its starting point a philosophical thesis. Thethesis is the Berkleian theory of vision. According tothis theory, which attributes to each of the human sensesor perceptual modalities its own accusatives, sight takesfor its 'proper objects' coloured or textured patches dis-tributed in two dimensions: up-and-down, and across.From this it follows that we cannot directly see 'outness'or three-dimensionality. Three-dimensionality is some-thing that we learn of through touch, which has for itsproper objects things distributed in space. And if we ordi-narily think that we can see things at a distance, not justin the sense that we can see things that are at a distance,but also in that we can see that things are at a distance,this is to be attributed to the constant correlations thathold between certain visual sensations and certain tactilesensations. In virtue of these correlations we are able

straight~way to infer from the visual sensations that wereceive to the associated tactile sensations that we areabout to receive, or that we would receive if (say) wemoved or stretched out a hand. -

And if we now ask, How is it that in the visual or'architectonic' arts we have an awareness of three-di-

mensionality, although paintings and sculptures are (irre!-

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An Essay

evancies apart) addressed, not just in the first instance butexclusively, to the sense of sight?, the answer is onceagain by appeal to association. This time, indeed, the

appeal is twice over. ,In so far as representation of spaceor the third dimension is secured, this is because the paint-ing or sculpture produces in us certain visual sensations,which, by putting us in mind of those other visual sen-sations which we would receive in presence from theobjects represented, further put us in mind of the cor-related tactile sensations. The power that a visualwork of art possesses to produce in us visual sensationshaving this double set of associations to them is called

its 'tactile values': and it is to tactile values exclusivelythat the capacity of the visual arts to represent spaceis ascribed. (We can now see what the irrelevancies

I mentioned above are. They include any reference to

the fact that paintings and sculpture are also tangible Iobjects: -for this fact is quite irrelevant, according to Ithe theory, tQ the fact that they can represent tangibleobjects.)

It is not, however, with this strong use to which the

notion of tactile values can be put that I am primarilyconcerned: though the use with which I am concerned is

most successfully introduced via it. I will have alreadysaid enough to indicate why I find anything like the pre-ceding theory untenable. I am concerned with theweaker or more local sense of the notion attached to itprimarily by Wolfflin: in which only certain works of

visual art are correctly spoken of, or their efficacy asrepresentations analysed, in terms of tactile values. In

Classic Art, and again in the Principles of Art History,Wolfflin attempted a very general division of visualworks of art into two kinds or styles. The division heeffected according to the way in which space is represen,"

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ted. No particular philosophical theory is presupposedconcerning our awareness of space: and, indeed, it nowturns out to be a characteristic only of works of art inone of the .two great styles that space is represented bysuggestinghow things would seem to the sense of touch.This is a feature uniquely associated with the linear style:whereas inside the painterly style this is rejected and spa-tial representation is secured solely by appeal to the eyeand visual sensation.

We might want to go beyond WOlfflin,well beyondhim, in the distinctions we would make in the ways inwhich the third dimension can be represented. Never-theless, there certainly seems to be a:place somewhere orother for the phenomenon that in the extreme account is,for theoretical reasons, made universal: namely, the in-vocation of tactile sensations. We might say, standing infront of a Giotto or a Signorelli or a Btaque,Atelier(though not in front of, say, the mosaics in S. ApollinareNuovo, or a Tintoretto, or a Gainsl;>orough),that we canor could feel our way into the space. And the questionarises, Is this kind of perception of space direct or in-direct?

Reflection will show that it cannot be assigned, with-out detriment, to either of these two categories. To call itdirect perception would be .precisely to overlook thedifference that has made us think of it as a special kind ortype of perception in the first instance: the difference,that is, between the way of representing space to which itcharacteristically pertains, and the other way or ways ofdoing so which might be thought of as more straight-forwardly visual in appeal. For if there is a way of rep-resenting space which makes no reference to sensationsof touch, actual or recollected, then surely any waywhich involves the mediation of touch must give rise to a

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kind of perception that falls on the indirect ra~her thanthe direct side.

However, if we think of the perception of spacethrough tactile values as indirect, then this overlooksanother difference. It overlooks what makes us think ofthis as a form of perception'at all. Just as to think of suchperception as immediate assimilates it to the kind of per-ception that we have inconnexion with the more paint-erly modes of representation, so to call it indirect makesit impossible for us to distinguish it from cases wherespace is in no way represented but is indicated in someschematic or nonschematic fashion. The essential feature

of the mode of representation we are considering is thatit leads us by means of the manipulation of tactile cues tosee space. The terminology of direct or indirect per-ception gives us no way of doing justice to both theseaspects of the situation: that is, to the fact that the cuesare tactile, and to the fact that on the basis of them wesee something.

. The difficulty is reflected in the peculiarly unhelpfulphrase that is sometimes invoked, in this or analogous

I contexts, to characterize the sort of perception we have\ in looking at works of art that represent space in this

way. We have, we are told, 'ideated sensations'. This

phrase seems to be no more than a tribute to the attemptto condense into one two notions that have initially beendetermined as mutually incompatible, that is, direct andindirect perception. Everything points to the fact thatwhat is wrong is the initial determination.

Wittgenstein, in the Blue Book, takes the case of the.man, the water diviner, who tells us that, when he holds acertain rod, he feels that the water is five feet under the

ground. If we are sceptical, we precipitate the response,'Do you know all the feelings that there are? How do you

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Art and its Objects f

kpow that there isn't such a feeling?' Wittgenstein's ac-count of what the diviner might say, equally of what

should satisfy us, may not be altogether convincing, norcoherent with some of his later teaching; but it is obvi-

ously right in essentials. The man must explain the gram-mar of the phrase. And explaining the grammar of thephrase doesn't consist in simply breaking the phrasedown into its constituents and explaining each in turn.Wittgenstein's example brings out this latter point verywell: for we already know the meaning of 'feel' and'water five feet under the ground'. We must understandhow the phrase is us~d: how it latches on to other experi-ences and the ways in which we describe them. One thingthat can prevent us from coming to understand this isany a priori theory as to what we can~'and what wecannot (directly) feel or perceive.

28

I am now ready to turn to expressive properties. In sec-tions 15-19 I argued that there is no absurdity in attri-buting expressiveness as such to physical objects. Thequestion I want to consider here is whether we can attri-bute specific expressive properties to physical objectssolely on the basis of what is given. Of recent years apowerful and subtle argument has been brought forwardto show that we cannot. This argument I shall call the

IQGombrich argument: though the actual argumentation Ishall produce will be a reconstructed, and here and therea simplified, version of what is to be found in Art andIllusion and in the collection of essays entitled Medi-tations on a Hobby Horse.. The starting point of this argument is an attack on analternative account of expression in terms of 'natural res-onance'. According to this account, certain ele:ments,

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An Essay

which can occur outside as well as inside art, e.g. colours,notes, have an intrinsic link with inner states, which theyare thereby able both to express and to invoke: it isthrough the incorporation of these elements that worksof art gain or have assigned to them this or that emotive

significance. Such an account,oGombrich argues, is vul-nerable because it overlooks the fact, to which a lot of art

testifies, that one and the same element or complex ofelements can have a quite different significance indifferent contexts. 'What strikes us as a dissonance in

Haydn,' 'Gombrich writes, 'might pass unnoticed in apost-Wagnerian context and even the fortissimo of a

string quartet may have fewer decibels than the pian-issimo of a large symphony orche.stra.' Again, Gombrichcites Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie which, hesays, in the context of Mondrian's art is certainly express-ive of 'gay abandon': but would have a quite differentemotional impact on us if we learnt that it was by apainter with a propensity to involuted or animatedforms,e.g.Severini. .

What these examples show, Gombrich argues, is that aparticular element has a significance for us only if it isregarded as a selection out of a specifiable set of alterna-tives. Blue as such has no significance: blue-rather-than-

black has: and so hasblue-rather-than-red though adifferent one. In the light of this, the notion of 'context'can be made more specific. In order for us to see a workas expressive, we must know the set of alternatives

within which the artist is working, or what we might callhis 'repertoire': for it is only by knowing from whatpoint in the repertoire the work emerges that we canascribe to it a particular significance. It is this fact that istotally ignored in the theory of natural resonance.

The scope of this argument might be misconstrued. For

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it might be taken simply as an observation about how aspectator can acquire a certain skill, i.e. that of express-ively understanding a painting; so that if he doesn't ac-quire this skill, the artist goes misunderstood. But this isto take too narr~w a view ofoGombrich'sthesis: for whatin effect he is doing is to lay down the conditions forexpression itself. An artist expresses himself if, and onlyif, his placing one element rather than another on thecanvas is a selection out of a set of alternatives: and this ispossible only if he has a repertoire within which he oper-ates. Knowledge of the repertoire is a presupposition ofthe spectator's capacity. to understand what the artist isexpressing~but the existence of the repertoire i.s a pre-supposition of the artist's capacity to expr~ss himself atall.

We may now ask: Granted that the spectator cannotunderstand the expressive significance of a work of artuntil he has knowledge of the artist's repertoire, why is itthat, as soon as he does have knowledge of the artist'srepertoire, he is able to come to an expressive under-standing? To go back to the simplest example: If we needfurther knowledge before we can understand a particularplacing of blue on the canvas, e.g. knowledge that it is acase of blue-rather-than-black, alternatively of blue-rather-than-red, why do we not need further knowledgebefore we can understand blue-rather-than-black, alterna-tively blue-rather-than-red? And the answer is that,though it is a matter of decision or convention what isthe specificrange of elements that the artist appropriatesas his repertoire and out of which on any given occasionhe makes his selection, underlying this there is a basis innature to the communication of emotion. For the el-ements that the artist appropriates are a subset of an or-dered seriesof elements, such that to one end of the series

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An Essay

we can assign one expressive value and to the other acontrary or 'opposite' value: and the crucial point is thatboth the ordering relation that determines the series, e.g.'darker than' in the case of colours, 'higher than' in thecase of musical notes (to give naIve examples), and the'correlation of the two ends of the series with specificinner states, are natural rather than conventionalmatters. It is ,because a move towards one end of theseries rather. than the other is, or is likely to be, un-ambiguous that, once we know what alternatives wereopen to the artist, we can immediately understand thesi'gnificance.of his choice between them.

29 .

There is t~e question, which belongs presumably to psy-chology or so-calledexperimental aesthetic~,whether inpoint of fact it is correct to regard the elements that com-prise'the constituents of art as falling into ordered seriesin respect of their expressive value. The question, how-ever, which belongs to the philosophy of art is why some-one with a theory of expression should have a specialinterest in maintaining that this is so.

If it is correct, as t have argued in section 18, that ourdisposition to consider inanimate' objects as expressivehas its roots in certain.natural tendencies, i.e. that of pro-ducing objects to alleviate, and that of finding objects tomatch, our inner states, it is nevertheless evident that bythe time we come to our attitude towards the objects ofart, we have moved far beyond the level of mere spon-taneity. To put it at its lowest: what is in origin natural isnow reinforced by convention. Evidencefor this exists inthe fact that if someone is versed or experienced in art,no upper limit can be set to his capacity to understandexpressively fresh works of art, even if both the works

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Art and its Objects

themselves and what they express fall outside his experi-ence. For what we might have expected is that his ca-pacity to understand works of art would stop short atthose correlations of objects and inner states with whichhe has a direct acquaintance. In point of fact the situationthat obtains is close to that in language where, as it hasbeen put (Chomsky), it is a central fact, to which anysatisfactory linguistic theory must be adequate, that 'amature speaker can produce a new sentence of hislanguage on the appropriate occasion, and other speakerscan understand it immediately, though it is equally newto them.' The implication would seem to be that there is,at least, a semantic aspect or component to the expressivefunction of art.

Nevertheless, there seemsto be a difference.For even ifa 'mature spectator of art' is in principle capable of anexpressive understanding of any new work of art, just asthe mature speaker can understand any new sentence inhis language, still the understanding in the two caseswould differ. For we see or experience the emotion in thework of art, we do not 'read it off'.. In other words, ifwe press the parallel of expressive with semantic proper-ties, we shall find ourselves thinking that art stands towhat it expresses rather in the way that a black-and--white diagram with the names of the colours writtenin stands to a coloured picture: whereas the relation ismore like that of a coloured reproduction to a colouredpicture.

A technical way of making this point is to say that the.symbols of art are always (to use a phrase that originateswith Peirce) 'iconic'.

That works of art have this kind of translucence is a

. plausible tenet, and it should be apparent how a belief ina natural expressive ordering of the constituents of art

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would go some way to preserving it. It would not, that is,preserve it in the strong sense, i.e. that from a simpleobservation of the work of art we could invariably knowwhat It expressed: but it would preserve it in a weaksense, i.e. that once we knew what the work of art ex-

pressed, we could see that it did so. Since-G~mbrichhasalready maintained that some collateral information isessential for expressive understanding, he obviously doesnot require works of art to be iconic in the strong sense.Moreover, there is a general argument against main-taining that they are: namely, that the element of inven-tiveness that we believe to be intrinsic to art would be injeopardy. A work of art would threaten to be little morethan an assemblage or compilation of pre-existentitems.

30

Let us now return to the- Gombrich argument itself. Theargument is obviously very powerful; nevertheless, thereare certain significant difficulties to it, which largely con-cern the idea of the repertoire and how the repertoire isdetermined for any given artist.

As a starting point it might be suggested that we shouldidentify the repertoire with the range of the artist'sactual works. But this is unacceptable: because, except inone limiting case, it gives us the wrong answer, and, evenwhen it gives us the right answer, it does so for the wrongreason.

The limiting case is where the artist in the course of hiswork expresses the full range of inner states conceivablefor him: where, to put it another way, there is nothingthat he could have expressed that he didn't. In all othercases there will be parts of the repertoire that were notemployed, i.e. the parts that he would have employed if

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Art and its Objects,

'he had expressed those states which he, didn't, and thequestion then arises how we are to reconstruct theseparts. And the answer must ultimately come to this: thatwe ask ourselves how the artist would have expressedthose states which he never expressed. In other words, wecredit him with certain hypothetical works. But on -the'Gombrich argument this becomes impossible. For it isobvious that; before we can even set about doing this, we

must first know what state~ the artist did express, i.e. inhis actual works, but this, Gombrich, argues, we cannotdo until we know the repertoire as a whole. So we cannever start.

To put the matter another way: Confronted with the'1)c£uvreof a given artist, how are we to decide, on theGombrich argument, whether this is the work of an artistwho within a narrow repertoire expressed a wide rangeof inner states, or of one who within a much broader

repertoire expressed a narrow! range of states? Internalevidence is indifferent as to the two hypotheses: and it isunclear what external evidence the argument allows usto invoke. .

I have said that, even in the limiting case where theidentification of repertoire with the range of 'actualworks gives us the right answer, it does so for the wrongreason. What I had in mind is this: that it isn't the fact

that such and such a range of works is everything thatthe artist in fact produced that makes this range his re-pertoire. For otherwise the identification of repertoirewith actual range would be correct in all cases. It israther that the range as we have it coincides with every-thing he could have produced. But how (and ~ere thequestion comes up again) do we establish what he could,and what he could not, have produced?

One suggestion is that we should, at this stage, go back

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to the artist's situation. In other words, we'do wrong totry to determine the repertoire by reference to how thespectator would determine it. For what the spectatordoes is at best to reconstruct what the artist has initiallydone.

But do we have greater success in arriving at the re-pertoire by considering it from the artist's point of view?There is once again a limiting case. And this is where theartist explicitly sets up a range of alternatives withinwhich he works: or where the constraints of nature or

society prescribe precisely what he may do. Such caseswill be very rare. Otherwise, we simply have the artist~atwork. And if it is now asserted that we can observe the

artist ,implicitly choosing between alternatives, the. ques-tion arises, How can we distinguish between the" trivialcase, where. the artist does one thing, e.g. A, and notanother, e.g. B (where this just follows from A and Bbeing distinct), and the case that is of interest to us, where

the artist does A in preference to,B? One suggestion mightbe that we are entitled to say the latter where it is clearthat, if the artist had done B, it would have expressedsomething different for him. But on the Gombrich argu-ment this is something we can say only after we havedetermined the repertoire: hence -vyecannot use it -in

'order to determine the repertoire.

3I

The preceding objection may seem very, abstract: whichindeed it is. But this is only a reflection of the extremelyabstract character of the argument itself, from whichindeed it gains a great deal of its' plausibility. For what itleaves out of account, or introduces only in an unre-cognizable form, is the phenomenon of style and the cor-responding problem of style formation.

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For the notion of style cannot be unreservedly equatedwith that of the repertoire. For what we think of as a

style has a kind of inner coherence that a mere repertoirelacks. This is well brought out in a supposition that, as wehave seen,.Gombrich asks us to consider in the course of

expounding his argument. Let us suppose, he writes, thatMondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie had been paintedby Severini. . . . But if this appeal is not to be taken insuch a way that the names 'Mondrian' and 'Severini'function as mere dummies or variables, it is hard to knowhow to interpret it. For the only way in which the hypo-thetical situation would be conceivable, would be if we

imagined that for a phase Severini adopted the style ofMondrian as apasticheur.Now such an eventuality wouldoccasion an increase in the range of Severini's repertoire

but without any corresponding increase in the range ofhis style. The same phenomenon occurs less schematic-ally in the case of an artist in whose work we notice asharp break of style (e.g. Guercino). These cases show usthat what we should really be interested in is style, not

repertoire.There are two further differences between a style and a

repertoire, both of which are relevant to the issue of ex-pressive understanding. The first is that a style may havebeen formed in order to express a limited range ofemotions, and in such cases it is virtually impossible for

us to imagine the expression of a state which falls outsidethis range being accomplished within the style. The sup-position of an optimistic painting by Watteau, or amonumental sculpture by. Luca della Robbia, or a tor-tured or tempestuous group by Clodion, all verge uponabsurdity. Secondly - and this is a closely connectedpoint - a style may have such an intimate connexion orcorrespondence with the states that are typically ex-

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pressed within it, that we do not have to go outside thework itself and examine related cases in order to gaugeits expressive significance. A style -could be self-ex-planatory.

Wolfflin, in the introduction to the Principles of ArtHistory, sets out to characterize what he calls 'the doubleroot of style'. 'What in point of fact he does is to sep-arate out two levels on which style can occur: perhapseven two senses of the word 'styl~'. On the one hand,there are the many particular styles, the styles of indi-viduals or nations, which vary according to temperamentor character and are primarily expressive. On the other.hand, there is style in some more general sense, in whicha style approximates to a language. In the first sense, Ter-borch and Bernini (tbe examples are Wolfflin's) have theirown very differing styles, being very different kinds ofartist; in the second sense, they share a style. Each style inthe first sense corresponds to, or reflects, a preselection ofwhat is to be expressed or communicated. By contrast astyle in the second sense is a medium within which'everything can be said'. (We may for our purpose dis-regard WOlfflin's insistence that a style in this lattersense, of which for him the supreme, perhaps the sole,instances are the linear and the painterly, exhibits a dis-tinctive 'mode of vision' or incorporates specific 'cat-egories of beholding': phrases which the Principles doeslittle to illuminate.) Now, the point I have been makingabout th~ Gombrich argument might be put by sayingthat it recognizes style only in the second of Wolfflin's~senses,in which it is something akin to language. WhereGombrich, of course, differs from Wolfflin is in the var-

iety of such styles that he thinks to exist: there being forhim roughly as many styles in this sense as there are forWOlfflin styles in his first sense.

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Another way of making the same point would be tosay that for Gombrich a style is roughly equivalent to amethod of projection in cartography. We can make amap of any region of the world according'to any pro-jection: although some methods of projection may bemore suitable for one region than another. The differencesimply is that the region, alternatively the map, will lookquite different, depending on which projection is actu-ally employed. , .

We now need to consider as a whole the argument ofthe last three sections. Its effect has undoubtedly been todisturb some of the detail of Gombrich's account of ex-

pressive understanding. Nevertheless, the considerationsthat he raises leave little doubt about the important partthat collateral information does play iri our aesthetictransactions. Accordingly, they show the implausibilityof the very restricted view of a work of art that is centralto the Presentational theory.

32

The reference to the notion of 'style' could serve to intro-duce the second set of arguments against the Presen-tational theory. For 'style' would seem to be a conceptthat cannot be applied to a work of art solely on the basisof what is presented and yet is also essential to a properunderstanding or appreciation of the work. l\nd the samecan be said of the various particular stylistic concepts,e.g. 'gothic', 'mannerist', 'neo-romantic'.

However, in this section I want to consider not these

concepts but another .group whose claim not to be basedupon presentation is even clearer, but whose centrality toart has been, and still is, disputed in a most interestingcontroversy. From Aristotle onwards it has been a tenetof the traditional rhetoric that the proper understanding

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of a literary work involves the location of it in the cor-rect genre: the recognition of it, that is, as drama, epic, orlyric. It has been no less characteristic of 'modern' criti-cism that it completely rejects such categorization ofart. The concession is made that the various labels mighthave a utility in, say, librarians hip or literary history: butthey have nothing to tell us about the aesthetic aspectof a work of art. They are (to use a phrase that hasvariedimplications)a postedori. .

A typical argument to this effect occurs in Croce.Croce links the thesis that works of art can be classified

into genres with the (to him) no less objectionable thesisthat works of art can be translated. For the two theses

share the presupposition that works of art divide intoform and content: the content being that which, in trans-lation, gets carried over into the foreign language or, inthe traditional rhetoric, is realized inside the relevant

genre. But this presupposition is wrong because works ofart have an inherent unity or uniqueness. Croce concedesthat there could be a purely practical or non aestheticrole for the traditional taxonomy. Employed however asan instrument of'analysis or criticism, it utterly distortsthe nature of art.

Croce's argument is certainly open to criticism intern-ally. For it seems to be based on the assumption that, ifwe classify a work as in one genre, we are implicitlysaying that it might or could have been in another genre:hence we implicitly divide it into form (which is alter-able) and content (which is constant). But the only reasonfor thinking that there is this implication to what we sayis some general philosophical thesis to the effect that ifWe say a is I, we must be able to imagme what It wouldbe like for a not to be I but to be, say, 9. where 9 is a con-trary of I. But thistthesis, which has some plausibiliiy,

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is false over a range (and an interesting range) of cases,i.e. where we cannot identify a except by reference (ex-plicit or implicit) to f. And it might well be thilt we couldnot identify ParadiseLost except as an epic or Hamletexcept as a drama. Indeed Croce's own parallel with thetranslatability thesis should have alerted him to theweakness of his argument. For Carducci's Alla Stazionemay be untranslatable; none the less it is in Italian,which, if Croce's argument is contraposed, should befalse. Accordingly, what there is of weight in Croce'scritique of genres, and what indeed has weighed heavilywith many modern theorists, lies not in the formal argu-ment, but rather in his insistence, unspecific and am-biguous though this sometimes seems,on what is referredto as the uniqueness of any work of art.

(Another argument against genre-criticism, of which acertain amount has been heard in recent theory, is that itdistorts not so much our proper understanding of a workof art as our proper evaluation of it. But the assumptionthat underlies this variant is no less erroneous than thatwhich underlies Croce's. For the assumption is that, ifwe classify something as an opera, this determines thecriteria by which we must evaluate it: for our evaluation

, of it will consist in showing the extent to which itsatisfies the criteria of being an opera: in other words, tosay that something is a good opera is to say that it is to avery high degree an opera. The assumption has only to bespelt out for its absurdity to be realized.) .

Recently an argument of extreme ingenuity has beenbrought forward by Northrop Frye to controvert thiswhole contention. Central to this argument is the notionof the 'radical of presentation': which means, roughly,how the words in a given text are to be taken. Startingthe problem at its lowest, we might imagine ourselves

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An Essay

confronted with two pages in which the lines are printedso that they do not run to the end. One (ParadiseLost) isto be read as an epic: the other (Berenice)is to be read asa play: The difference lies,we can now say, in the radicalof presentation.

It is important to realize that the differences of whichthis argument takes account are those which should beconstrued as essential differences.For instance, we couldimagine in an English class Paradise Lost being read'round the form': on a higher level we could imagine anepic being presented on the stage in such a way thatdifferent actors read or sang'the cited words of thecharacters and a narrator narrated the text, as in Mon-teverdi's Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. But\

these readings would be accidental, if not actually inimi-cal, to the nature of the work. On the other hand, that the

text of Hamlet should be presented on a stage, thatdifferent actors should recite different sections of it, thatthe recitation should be more or less consecutive from

beginning to end, that certain effects should accompanythe recitation so as to enhance verisimilitude - these arenot accidental: a reading of the text that was done inignorance of, or indifference to, them would be not somuch incomplete as mistaken.

Nevertheless - and here we come to the crux of theargument - there is nothing in the text that indicates sucha distinction unambiguously: nor could there be. There~re, of course, certain accepted typographical con-ventions that distinguish printed plays from printedpoems. But, as readers of literature, we have to knowhow to interpret these conventions: we must not be like

the child who, in learning his part, learns the stage di-rections as well. And such an interpretation is always interms of certain aesthetic conventions which the reading

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Art and its Objects,

presupposes. 'The genre', Frye puts it, 'is determinedby the conditions established between the poet and hispublic.' .

Once we have admitted these distinctions, Fry~ argues,

we cannot stop here. For continuous with the distinctionbetween poetry where the poet is concealed from hisaudience (drama) and poetry where he is not, there is afurther distinqion within the latter category between thecase where the poet addresses his audience (epic) and thecase where he is overheard (lyric). Whether in fact this is

a'legitimate continuation of the argument, and how far,if it is, it re-establishes the traditional categories arematters that I do not need to pursue. I have not stated the

argument against, therefore I shall not consider the argu-ment for, genre-criticism in so far as this relates to theadequacy of the traditional' classification. It would beenough if it could be established that some suchclassification is intrinsic to literary understanding: and

certainly the 'radical of presentation' strongly ~uggeststhat it is.

33

It might now be suggested that considerations like theforegoing can be reconciled within the Presentationaltheory by treatirig the critical or rhetorical contepts thatare essential to our understanding of art as part of the

conceptual framework, or (in psychological terminology),the mental set, with which we are required to approachart. Some philosophers of art who have argued fora theory very like the Presentational theory (Kant,Fiedler) have, it is true, stipulated that we should freeourselves from all concepts when we approach art:but it is hard to attach, much sense to such an extremedemand.

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A difficulty with the present suggestion is to see pre-cisely its scope: what does it, and what can it not, accom-modate to the theory? Can it, for instance, take care ofthe many cases of what might generally be called 'expect-ancy' which seem inherent to our aesthetic under-standing: cases, that is, where certain anticipations arearoused by one part of a work of, say, musioor archi-tecture, to be satisfied, alternatively to be frustrated, byanother? An example, for instance, would be the prac-tice, cited by W6lffIin in Renaissance and Baroque" astypical of early Baroque (Mannerist) palace architecture,@fcontrasting a fa<;:adeor a vestibule with the interiorcourtyard: as, for instance, in the Palazzo Farnese. Oragain- and this example is more contentious, since thetime order is reversed - it has been argued that we hearthe flute solo at the begimling of L'Apres-Midi d'unFaurie differently from what we would were it the open-ing music of a sonata for unaccompanied flute: the pre-sence of the orchestra makes itself felt.. .

Roughly the point <).twhich the Presentational theorywould seem to prove recalcitrant is where that which we'import' into our perception of a work of art cannot betreated as a concept that we apply to the work on thebasis of its characteristics, but [jis ineliminably prop-ositional: wh~re, that is, it consists in a piece of infor-mation that cannot be derived from (though, of course, itmay be confirmed by) the manifest properties of thework. In an essay entitled 'The History of Art as a Hu-manistic Discipline', Erwin Panofsky has presented apowerful argument to show that there are cases where

'our understanding of a work of (visual) art and its stylis-tic peculiarities depends upon reconstructing the artistic

I 'intentions' that went to its making, and to do thisI a depends in turn upon identifying the 'artistic problems'

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to which it is a solution. The identification of an artistic

. problem seems'definitely propositional.On the face of it, Panofsky's contention seems irre-

futable, at any rate over a certain range of art. Take, forinstance, the much-imitated Gibbs fa<;:adeof St Martin-in-the-Fields. In order to understand not merely its profoundinfluence, but also it in itself, we need to see it as a sol-

ution to a problem which had for fifty years exercisedEnglish architects: how to combine a temple fa<;:adeorportico with the traditional English demand for a westtower. If we omit this context, much in the design isbound to seem wilful or bizarre. ."

To settle this, or the many analogous issues,.that arise

on Panofsky's contention would require detailed incur-sions into art-historical material. Here it may suffice to

point out a tactic characteristically adopted by thosewho ostensibly reject the contention. In each case what

they argue is that either the work of art is defective sinceit needs to be elucidated externally, or else the problem towhich it is a solution or the intention which inspired it is

something which is fully manifest in the work taken as apresentational object. We find this argument in e.g.Wind, and Monroe Beardsley. But of the counter-

argument so framed it is pertinent to ask, Manifest towhom? And the answer must be, To someone reasonablywell versed in art. In other words, the original argumentis not really rejected. The counterargument merely re-stricts the kind of information that may be 'imported':the information must not exceed that which an amateurof the arts would naturally. bring with him. If such a

person cannot reconstruct the problem to which thegiven work of art is a solution, then, but only then,knowledge that the problem is of such and such a natureis irrelevant. Furthermore, the capacity to see, given the

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An Essay

problem and the work of art, that the latter is a solutionto the former already presupposes familiarity with art. Itmay be self-evident that 2 + 2 = 4: but not to someoneignorant of what addition is. "

Moreover, it is worth pointing out that there is an anal-ogue inside the Panofsky contention to the restrictionthat his critics would place upon the kind of knowledgeimported. For if it is necessary to import specious formsof knowledge, this would, on the Panofsky tontention,

. count as an adverse factor in our appreciation of, or ourjudgement upon, the work of art. We might reconstructthe dialogue roughly as follows: Beardsley would say:Since this evidence is so esoteric, we can't take it into

account in judging the work; whereas Panofsky wouldsay: Since the evidence we have to take into account is so

esoteric, we cannot judge the work fayourably. Thedifference is not so great.

Sometimes the attempt is made to reconcile the adver-

saries in this argument by pointing out that they are em-ploying different senses of 'problem' or 'intention': theartist's problem versus the problem of the work, or theartist's ulterior intention versus his immediate intention.

But I doubt if such an analysis will get to the coreof thedifficulty: since, only the shortest distance below the sur-face, these different 'senses' of the same word are inter-related.

34

It would certainly seem as though there is one elementthat we must bring to our perception of a work of art,which is quite incompatible with the Presentationaltheory: and that is the recognition that it is a work of art.At first it might be thought that this could be accommo-dated to the theory, along the lines I indicated at the

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beginning of the last section. We might, that is, regardthe concept 'art' as part of the conceptual frameworkwith which we are required to approach art. But this willnot do, except on the most literal level. 'Art' certainly is aconcept,"but (as this essay implicitly shows) it is a con-cept of such complexity that it is hard to see how it couldbe fitted into an argument designed with merely descrip-tive or rhetorical concepts in mind.

35

. Before, however, pursuing this last point, theconsequen-ces of which will occupy us more or less for the rest of

this essay, I want to break off the present discussion(which began with section 20) and go back and take upan undischarged commitment: which is that of con-sidering the consequences of rejecting the hypothesis thatworks of art are physical objects, in so far as those artsare concerned where there is no physical object withwhich the work of art could be plausibly identified. Thiswill, of course, be in pursuance of my general aim -which has also directed the preceding discussion -- of es-tablishing that the rejection of the hypothesis has seriousconsequences for the philosophy of art only in so far asthose arts are concerned where there is such an object.

I have already stated (sections 5, 20) that, once it isconceded that certain works of art are not physical

objects, the subsequent problem that arises, which can beput by asking, What sort of thing are they?, is essentiallya logical problem. It is that of determining the criteria ofidentity and individuation appropriate to, say, a piece ofmusic or a novel. I shall characterize the status of such

things by saying that they are (to employ a term intro-duced by Peirce) types. Correlative to the term 'type' is .the term 'token'. T~ose physical objects which (as we I

9°

-AnEssay

have seen)can out of desperation be thought to be worksof art in cases where there are no physical objects thatcan plausibly be thought of in this way, are tokens. Inother words, Ulysses and Der Rosenkavalier are types,my copy of Ulyssesand tonight's performance of Rosen-kavalier are tokens of those types. The question nowarises,What is a type?

The question is very difficult, and unfortunately, totreat it with the care and attention to detail that it de-serves is beyond the scope of this essay.

We might begin by contrasting a type with other sortsof thing that it is not. Most obviously we could contrast atype with a particular: this I shall take as done. Then wecould contrast it with other various kinds of non-particulars: with a class (of which we say that it hasmembers), and a universal (of which we say that it hasinstances). An example of a class would be the class ofred things: an example of a universal would be redness:and examples of a type would be the word 'red' and theRed Flag - where this latter phrase is taken to mean notthis or that piece of material, kept in a chest or taken out

, and flown at a masthead, but the flagof revolution, raisedfor the first time in 18'30 and that which many wouldwillingly follow to their death. .

Let us introduce as a blanket expression for types,classes., universals, the term generic entity, and, as ablanket expression for those things which fall underthem, the term elerr;ent.Now:we can say that the variousgeneric entities can be distinguished according to the dif-ferent ways or relationships in which they stand to theirelements. These relationships can be arranged on a scaleof intimacy or intrinsicality. At one end of the scale wefind classes,where the relationship is at its most externalor extrinsic: for a class is merely made of, or constituted

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Art and its Objects

by, its members which are extensionally conjoined toform it. The class of red things is simply a construct outof all those things which are (timelessly) red. In the,caseof universals the relation is more intimate: in that a uni-

versal is present in all its instances. Redness is in all redthings. With types we find the ,relationship between thegeneric entity and its elements at its most intimate: fornot merely is the type present in all its tokens like theuniversal in all its instances, but for'much of the time we

think and talk of the type as though it Were itself a kindof token, though a peculiarly important or pre-eminentone. In many ways we treat the Red Flag as though itwere a red flag (d. 'We'll keep the Red Flag flyinghigh').

These varying relations in which the different genericentities stand to their elements are also reflected (if, thatis, this is another fact) in the degree to which both the-generic entities and their elements can satisfy the samepredicates. Here we need to make a distinction betweensharing properties and properties being transmitted. Ishall say that when A and B are both f, f is shared by Aand B. I shall further say that when A is f because B is f,or B is' f because A is f, f is transmitted between A and B.

(I shall ignore the sens~ or direction of the transmission,i.e. I shall not trouble, even where it is possible, to dis-criminate between the two sorts of situation I have men-

tioned as instances of transmission.)First, we must obviously exclude from consideration

properties that can pertain only to tokens (e.g. propertiesof location in space and time) and equally those whichpertain only to types (e.g. 'was invented by'). When wehave done this, the situation looks roughly as follows:Classes can share properties with their members (e.g. theclass of big things is big), but this is very rare: moreover,

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An Essay

where it occurs it will be a purely contingel,lt or for-tuitous affair, i.e. there will be no transmitted properties.In the cases of both universals and types, there will be'shared properties. Red things may be said to be exhilar-ating, and so also redness. Every red flag is rectangular.and so is the Red Flag itself. Moreover, many, if not all, ofthe shared properties will be transmitted. .

Let us now confine our attention to transmitted proper-ties because it is only they which are relevant to thedifference in relationship between, on the one hand, uni-

versals and types a~d, on the other hand, their elements.Now there would seem to be two differences inrespect oftransmitted properties which distinguish universals fromtypes. In the f}rst place, there is likely to be a far largerrange of transmitted properties in the case of types thanthere is with universals. The second difference is this: that

in the case of universals no property that an instance of acertain universal has necessarily, i.e. that it has in virtueof being an instance of that universal, can be transmittedto the universal. In the case of types, on the other hand,all and only those properties that" a token of a certain

type has necessarily,. i.e. that it has in virtue of being atoken of that type, will be transmitted to the type.Examples would be:~edness, as we have seen, may beexhilarating, and, if it is, it is so for the same reason thatits instances are, i.e. the property is transmitted. Butredness cannot be red or coloured, which its instances are

necessarily. On the other hand, the Union Jack iscoloured and rectangular, properties which all its tokenshave necessarily: but even if all its tokens happened to bemade of linen, this would not mean that the Union Jackitself was made of linen.

To this somewhat negative account of a type - con-centrated largely on what a type is not - we now need to

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append something of a more positive kind, which wouldsay what it is for v;arious particulars to be gatheredtogether as tokens of the same type. For it will be ap-preciated that there corresponds to every universal andto every type a class: to redness the class of red things,~tothe Red Flag the class of Fed flags. But the converse is nottrue. The question therefore arises, What are the charac-teris&: circumstances in which we postulate a type? The

question, we must appreciate, is' entirely conceptual: it.isa question about the structure of our language.

A very important set of circumstances in which wepostulate types - perhaps a central set, in the sense#that itIfiay be possible to explain the remaining circumstancesby reference to them - is where we can correlate a classof particulars with a piec~,of human invention: these par-ticulars may then be regarded as tokens of a certain t>ype.This characterization is vague, and deliberately so: for itis intended to comprehend a considerable spectrum ofcases. At one end we have the case' where' a particular is

, produced, and i~ then copied: at the other end, we havethe case where a set of instructions is drawn up which, if

followed, give rise to an indefinite number of particulars.An example of the former would be the Brigitte Bardotlooks: an example of the latter would'be the Minuet.Intervening cases are' constituted by the production of aparticular which was made in order t~ be copied, e.g. theBoeing 707, or the construction of a mould or matrixwhich generates further particulars, e.g. the Penny Black.There are many ways of arranging the cases - according,say, to the degree of human intention that enters into theproliferation of the type, or according to the degree ofmatch that exists between the original piece of inventionand the tokens that flow from it. But there are certainresemblances between all the cases: and with ingenuity

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An ~Essay

5ne can see a natural extension of the original charac-terization to cover cases where the invention is more

Classificatory than constructive in nature, e.g. the RedAdmiral.

36 ~

It will be clear that the preceding ch;1racterization of a

type and its tokens offers us a framew9rk within which'we can (at any rate'roughly) understand the logical statusOFthings like operas, ballets, poems, etchings, ete.: that isto say; account for ,their principles of identity and indi-vi<iluation.To show exactly where these various kinds oft(;mingslie within this framework would involve a greatdeal of detailed analysis, more than can be attemptedhere, and probably of little intrinsic interest. I shall touchvery briefly upon two general sets of problems, both ofw~ich concern the feasibility of the project. In this sec-tion I shall deal with the question of how the type is,.identified or (what is much the same thing) how thetokens of a given type are generated. In the next section Ishall deal with the question of what properties we areentitled to ascribe to a type. These two sets of questionsare not entirely dis,tinct: as we can see from tHe fact thatthere is a third set of questions intermediate between theother two, concerning how we determine whether twoparticulars are or are not tokens of the same type. Theselatter questions, which arise for instance sharply in con-nexion with translation, I shall pass over. I mention themsolely to place those which I shall deal with in per-spective.

First, then, as to how the type is identified. In the caseof any work of art that it is plausible to think of as atype, there is what I have called a piece of hu~an inven-tion: and these pieces of invention fall along the whole

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Art and its Objects

spectrum of cases as I characterized it. At one end of thescale, there is the case of a poem, which comes into beingwhen certain words are set down on paper or perhaps,earlier still, when they are said over in the poet's head (d.the Cros:~-Collingwood theory). At the other end of thescale is an opera which comes into being when a certainset of instructions, Le. the score, is written down, in ac-

cordance with which performances can be produced. Asan intervening case we might note a film, of whichdifferent copies are made: or an etching or engraving,where different sheets are pulled from the same matrix,Le. the plate. '

There is little difficulty in all this, so long as we bear inmind from the beginning the variety of ways in whichthe different types can be identified, or (to put it anotherway) in which the tokens can be generated from the in-itial piece of invention. It is if we begin with too limited arange of examples that distortions 'Can occur. For in-stance, it might be argued that, if the tokens of a certainpoem are the many different inscriptions that occur inbooks reproducing the word ,order of 'the poet's manu-script, then 'strictly speaking' the tokens of an operamust be the various pieces of sheet music or printedscores that reproduce the marks on the composer's hol-ograph. Alternatively, if we insist' that it is the per-formances of the opera that are the tokens, then, it isargued, it must be the many readings or 'voicings' of thepoem that are its tokens.

Such arguments might seem to be unduly barren orpedantic, if it were not that they revealed somethingabout the divergent media of art: moreover, if they didnot bear upon the issues to be discussed in the next sec-tion.

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An Essay

37

elf is, we have seen, a feature of types and their tokens,not merely that they may share properties, but that whenthey do, these properties may be transmitted. The ques-tion we have now to ask is whether a limit can be set

~po:q the properties that may be transmitted: morespecifically, since it is the type that is the work of art andtherefore that with which we are expressly concerned,whether there are any properties - always of course ex-duding those properties ;which can be predicated only ofparticulars - that belong to tokens and cannot be saidJpsofacto to belong to their types.,

It might be thought that we have an answer, or at least ..

a partial answer, to this question in the suggestionalready made, that the properties transmitted betweentoken and type are only those which the tokens possessR~cessarily. But a moment's reflection will show that anyaNswer along these lines is bound to be trivial. For there isn@w<).yof determining the prQperties that a token of agiven type has necessarily, independently of determiningthe properties of that type: accordingly, we cannot usethe former in order to ascertain the latter. We cannot

hope to discover what the properties,of the Red Flag areDYfinding out what prbperties the various red flags havenecessarily: for how can we come to know that, e.g. this.red flag is necessarily red, prior to knowing that the RedFlag itself is red?

There are, however, three observations that can be

made here on the basis of our most general intuitions. Thefirst is that there are no properties or sets of propertiesthat cannot pass from token to type. With the usual re-servations, there is nothing that can be predicated.. of aperformance of a piece of music that could not also be

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Art and its ObjectS

predicated of that piece of music itself. This point is vital.Fbr it is this that ensUres what I have called the harm-lessness of denying the physical-object hypothesis in thedomain of those arts where the denial consists in,sayingthat works of art are not physical objects. ,For though

they may not be objects but -types",this does not preventthem from having physical properties. Theli,e is. nothingthat prevents us, from saying that Donne's Satires areharsh on the<ear, or that Burer's engraving of St'Anthony

Qas;fl very differentiated texture, or that the conclusionof '€eleste Aida' is pianissimo. 11'

The second observation is that,~thotigh any single prop-

"erty'rp.ay be"transmitted.fr,p~ tbk,en to type, it does not,follow that!all will be: or to 'put ~t another"'way.; a tokenwill have some of its properties necessarily, but it;'Vneednbt have all of them ne.cessarily. 'the full significance of

this point will emerge later.",r, 11 41 I!f

~ Thirdly,; in the case of some arts it is necessary thatlillotall properties should be.transmitted from token toHype:though it remains true that for any single property itmight be transmitted. The reference here is, of course, tothe performing arts - to operas; 'plays, sympHonies,ballet. It follows from what was said above that anything

I'that can be predicated of a performance of a piece ofmusic can also be predicated of the piece of music itself:to this we must now add that not every property that can

be predicated of the former ipso facto belongs to thelatter. This point is generally covered by saying tliat insuch cases there is essent;ially an element of interpret-ation, where for these purposes interpretation may be

regarded as the production of a token that has propertiesin excess of those of the,type.

'Essentially' is a word that needs to be taken veryseriously here. For, in the first place, there are certain

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An 'Essay

factors that might disg:uise from us the fact that everygerformance,of a work of art involves\ or is, an interpret-(ition. One, such factor would be antiquarianism. Wecould - certainly if the evidence 'Yere available - imaginea Richard III produced just as Burbage played it, or DasKlagende Lied performed just as Mahlerconducted it. Butthough it would be possible to bring about in this way a

replica of Burbage's playing or Mahler's conductin~, weshould none the less have interpretatioqs of Ric;:hardINand Das Klagende~Lied, for this is what Burbage's playinga>ndMahler's conducting were, ,though acimittedly thefirst. Secondly, it wO\lld pe wrong,to thinkof the elem~ntof interpretation - assurfl'ing..that"this is pow conceded tobe present in the case' of.;~ll perfqrmances - as showing. "something defective. Susanne Langer, for instance, hascharacterized ,the situation in the performing arts by

saying that e.g. the piece of music;;the' composer writes is'an incomplete work': 'the performance', she says, 'is thecompletion of a musi,cal work'. But this suggests that thepoint to which the' composer carries the work is onewhich he could, or even should, have gone beyond. To see"how radical a reconstruction this involves of the ways inwhich we conceive the performing arts, we need to envis-age what would be involved-if it were to be even possibleto el~minate interpretation. For instance, one requirementwoul~ be that we should have for each performing artwhat might be called; in some very strong sense, a univer-sal notation: such that we could designate in it everycharacteristic that now originates at the point of per-formanc:e. C'an we imagine across the full range of thearts what such a notation would be like? With such

a notation there would no longer be any executant arts:the whole of the execution would have been antici-

pated in the notation. What assurance' can we have th~t

!!9

Art and its Objects

the reduction of these arts to mere mechanical skillswould not in turn have crucial repercussions upon'

the way in which we regard or assess the performingarts?

.38

However, if we no longer regard it as a defect in certainarts that they require interpretation, it might still seemunsatisfactory that there should be this discrepancywithin the arts: that, for instance, the composer or thedramatist should be denied the kind of control over hiswork that the poet or the painter enjoys.

In part, there just is a discrepancy within the arts. Andthis discrepancy is grounded in very simple facts of veryhigh generality, which anyhow lie outside art: such asthat words are different from pigments, or that it is

human beings we employ to act and human beings arenot all exactly alike. If this is the source of dissat-isfaction, the only remedy would be to limit art verystrictly to a set of processes or stuffs that were absolutelyhomogeneous in kind.

In part, however, the dissatisfaction comes from exag-gerating the discrepancy, and from overlooking the factthat in the nonperforming arts there is a range of ways inwhich the spectator or audience can take the work of art.It is, I suggest, no coincidence that this activity, of takingthe poem or painting or novel in one way rather thananother, is also called 'interpretation'. For the effect inthe two cases is the same, in that the control of the artistover his work is relaxed.

Against this parallelism between the two kinds of in-terpretation, two objections can be raised. The first is thatthe two kinds of interpretation differ in order or level.For whereas performative interpretation occurs' only

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An Essay

with certain arts, critical interpretation pertains to all:more specifically a critical interpretation can be placedupon any given performative interpretation - 'so thepoint of the parallelism vanishes, in that the performingarts still remain in a peculiar or discrepant situation.Now I do not want to deny that any performance of apiece of music or a play can give rise to a critical in-terpretation; the question, however, is, When thishappens, is this on th~ same level as a performative in-terpretation? I want to maintain that we can fruitfullyregard it as being so. For in so far as we remain concernedwith the play or the piece of music, what we are doing isin the nature of suggestingor arguing for alternative per-formances, which would have presented the originalwork differently: we are not suggesting or arguing foralternative ways in which the actual performance mightbe taken. Our interpretation is on the occasion of a per-formance, not about it. The situation is, of course, com-plicated to a degree that cannot be unravelled here by thefact that acting and playing music are also arts, and incriticizing individual performances we are' sometimesconversant about those arts: which is why I qualified myremark by saying 'in so far as we remain concerned withthe play or piece of music' .

The second and more serious objection to the parallel-ism between the.two kinds of interpretation is that theydiffer as to necessity. For whereas a tragedy or a stringquartet have to be interpreted, a poem or a painting neednot be. At any given mome:pt it may be necessary tointerpret them, but that will be only because of the his-torical incompleteness of our comprehension of thework. Once we have really grasped,it, further interpret-ation will no longer be call~d for. In other words, criticalinterpretation ultimately eliminates itself: whereas a

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Art and its Objectsi

piece .of music.or a play cannot be perrormed once andfor all.

On this last argument I wish to make two preliminaryobservations: First, the argument must not draw any sup-port (as the formulation her.e'would seem to) from theindubitable but irrelevant fact that a performance is atransient not an enduring phenomenon. The relevant factis not that a piece of ;music or a play'must always beperformed anew but that it can always be perform~dafresh, i.e. that every new performance can involve ~new interpretation. The que~tion then is, Is there not inthe case of the nonperforming arts the same permanentpossibility of new interpreta,tiqn??econdly, the argu-ment seems to be ambiguous betw,~entwo formulations,which are not clearl);..,tl~ough in fact they may be,equivalent: the ostensibly stronger one, that in the caseof a poem or painting all interpretations can ultimatelybe eliminated; and the ostensibly weaker one, that inthese cases all interpretations save'one can ultimately beeliminated. .

Against the eliminability of interpretation, the only de-cisive argument is one drawn from our actual experienceof art. There are, however, supplementary consider-ations, the full force of whieh can be assessed only asthis essay progresses, which relate to the value of art.Allusions to both can be found in a brilliant and sugges-tive work, Valery's 'Reflexionssur I'Art'.

In the first place the value of art, as has been tradition-ally recognized, does not ex;ist exclusively, or evenprimarily, for the artist. It is shared equally between theartist and his audience. One view of how this sharing iseffected, which is prevalent but implausible. is that theartist makes something of value, which he then hands onto the audience, which is thereby enriched. Another view

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i~ that in art there is a characteristic ambiguity, orperhaps better plasticity; introduced into the ~oles of ac-tivity and passivity: the artist is active, but so also is thespectator, and the spectator's activity consists in in-terpretation. 'A creator', Valery puts it, 'is one whomakes othe~s create.' .

Secondly - and this point too has received some recog-nition-thevalue of art is liot exhausted bywhat the artist,Of'even by what the artist and the spectator, gain from it:it is not contained by the transaction between them.

'Yhe work of art itself has a residual value. In certain

'subjectivist' views - as e.g. in the critical theory of I. A.Richards - the value of art is made to seem contingent:eontingent, that is, upon there b<?ingfound no better ormore effective way in which certain experiences assessedto be valuable can be aroused in, or transmitted between,the"minds of the artist and his audience. Now it is difficultto see how such fa conclusion can be avoided if the work

of art is held to be inherently exhaustible in interpret- .ation. In section 29 the view was considered that worksof art are translucent; the view we are now asked to

consider would seem to suggest that they are transparent,and as such ultimately expendable or 'throw-away'. It isagainst such a view that Valery argued that we should'regard works of art as constituting 'a. new and impen-etrable element' which is interposed between the artistand the spectator. The ineliminability of interpretationhe characterizes, provocatively, as 'the creative mis-understanding' .

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39

The word 'interpretation' has very definite associations.For the interpretative situation is one we in general con-

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ceive somewhat as follows: There are certain facts of the

case; thes~ facts can be conclusively established by refer-ence to evidence; there are also certain constructions that

can be placed upon these facts, these constructions,which are what we call 'interpretations', are notuniquely de.termined by the facts, nor is there any otherway in which they can be conclusively established; in-terpretations are, therefore, assessed by reference to prag-matic considerations, or to considerations of theory,intuition, judgement, taste, plausibility etc.; the dis-tinction between fact and interpretation is com-paratively clear-cut.

In the domain of the arts this picture has to beconsiderably revised: notably, in two respects, both ofwhich are very important for the proper understandingof art.

In the first place, in the case of a work of art what thefacts are is not something that can legitimately be demar-cated. The point here is not just that disputes can alwaysarise on the margin as to whether something is or is not afact about a given work of art. The position is more rad-ical. It is that whole ranges of fact, previously unnoticedor dismissed as irrelevant, can suddenly be seen to pertainto the work of art. These transformations can occur in a

variety of ways as a result of changes in criti~ism, or asthe result of changes in the practice of art, qr as a resultof changes in the general Intellectual environment: as thefollowing examples show.. As a first example, we might cite the grammaticality of

Shakespeare's sentences, which has over history been re-garded as a matter primarily of philological interest.Recently, however, critics have suggested that thesyntactical incoherence of certain speeches, in e.g. Mac-beth, may be of significance as expressive of deep and

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disordered trains of thought; in this way a hitherto extra-,Jieous or nonaesthetic feature of the text becomes part ofthe play, where the play is the work of art. Secondly, we~mightconsider the tree brushwork that frequently entersinto the backgrounds of Titian or Velasquez. To the eyesef contemporaries, these liberties, when not actuallyoffensive - and we have the hostile comments of Vasari

en Titian, even df Diderot on Chardin - might have had,at best, a representational justification. Even to Reynoldsthe merit of Gainsborough's 'handling' was that it intro-duced 'a kind of magic' into his painting, ,in that all the'odd scratChes and marks', which were individually ob-servable close to, suddenly at a certain distance fell intoplace and assumed form. But since the turn that paintinghas increasingly taken since, say, Manet, these passageswould now have a further, and more intimately aes-tht.etic,significance for us, in their simultaneous assertion

C!}fthe sensibility of the artist and the materiality of thepainting. A third example is provided by Freud's analysisof Leonardo's Vir9in and Child with St Anne. For even if

on empirical grounds we reject the detail of this analys.is,it leads us to take account of new sets of facts, e.g. thephysiognomic similarities between two figures in a pic-tlH~ (in this case, the Virgin and St Anne), which it wouldbe impossible for any modern spectator to exclude fromills consideration of the representation. A simpler in-stance of this last type is provided by the role played in .the structure of Othello by Iago's homosexuality: some-thing which we may well believe it was not open to earl-ier generations to perceive.

This general point puts - us in a particularly goodposition from which to see what is really wrong withboth the Ideal and the Presentational theories of art. For

both theories rest upon the assumption, shared by many

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Arfand its Objects

philosophers of art, that we can draw a boundary aroundthe properties (or kinds of property)! that belong to awork of art. Each theory, it will be observed, posits as thework of art an object more impoverished than thenonreflective account postulates, and it then proceeds to

"justify this on the grounds that the pFoperties excluded(e.g. physical, intentional) are not of aestheticsignificance. We shall, in section 52, uncoyer further con-siderations that suggest that any attempt to anticipate or

prejuqge the range of aesthetically significant propertiesis misguided.

The second re~pect in. which the ordinary picture of

interpretation and what it involves has to be' modifiedwithin aesthetics is that it is not true in this area that

interpretation is totally ,free"of, in the sense of not: deter-mined by, fact. To put the",matter another way, a dearseparation cannot be made of fact and interpretation. Forof many of the facts of art, it is required that they areinterpreteg.'in a certain way. This follows:from the factthat art is an intentional activity. This point too has oftenbeen overlooked by philosophers of art. t .

Instructive in this respect is a recent book by MorrisWeitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism.Weitz contends that 'much criticism is at fault because it

ignores the crucial distinctions between description, ex-planation (or interpretation), and evaluation. It is onlythe first of these distinctions' that concerns us here. ForWeitz, description is whatever can be establisheduniquely by reference to the text: explanation is what weinvoke in order to, understand the text. In Hamlet criti-cism descriptive issues would be, Is Hamlet ,mad? DoesHamlet vacillate? Does Hamlet love his father? Did

Hamlet say '0, that this too too sullied flesh would melt'?etc. Explanatory issues. would be, Is Hamlet pre-

106

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An Essay

dominantly callous? Why does Hamlet delay? Is ijamlet'semotion in excess of the facts? etc.

By dividing the issues in this way Weit~ invites absurd-ity. For, in the first place, it must be clear that certainthings are facts of Hamlet even though they are not in thetext: for instanccl(to take a trivial example) that Hamletwas once a child. Equally, it is clear that certain so-called~facts' are challengeable even though a passage in the textcan be cited in support of them: for instance, Ernestjlones's interpretation is not clearly invalidated, as Weitzseems to think, by the fact that Hamlet declares his lovefor,,]hisfather and there is no counterassertion in the text.

(Cf., the insistence that "the Duke in My Last Duchess'never stoops' because he says he never stoops: whereas,of course, it is Browning's point that, in saying so, hedoes.)

. Most significantly, however, Weitz is wrong to.put thequestion why Hamlet delays' on a different level fromthat of whether he delays: which Weitz does, simply be-cause Shakesp~are's text answers one and not the other.For it would surely be a defect in Hamlet if one couldclaim ,(as Eliot in effect did) that Shakespeare, in showingus that Hamlet delays, did not show us why he did. InHamlet we do not simply have a random set of factsabout Hamlet.

40

Let us now return to the point that despite (or perhapsbecause of) its importance I felt obliged to leave hanging,six sections back: namely, ~hat it is intrinsic to our atti-tude to works of art that we should regard them as worksof art, or, to use another terminology, that we shouldbring them under the concept 'art'. To some philosophersthis point has seemed of such importance that the sugges-

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tion has been,made that instead of trying to elucidate thenotions of 'art' or 'work of art' as though this were the

central problem of aesthetics, we should rather defineboth these notions in terms of our disposition to

regard things as works of art, and then make the eluci-dation of this disposition the'topic of our efforts. In otherwords, a work of art is now (by definition) an object thatwe are disposed to regard as a,work of art.

Put like this, the suggestion is obviously open to the

charge of circularity: for the deiiniendum reappears inthe deiiniens, moreover in a way which does not allow ofelimination.

But perhaps we are wrong to take the suggestion quiteso literally: that is to say, as offering us a formaldefinition of 'work of art'. The idea may be more like

this: that the primary occurrence of the expression 'workof art' is in the phrase 'to regard x as a work of art'; thatif we wish to understand the expression~ we must firstunderstand it there; and that, when it occurs elsewhere oron its own, it has to be understood by reference back to

the original phrase in which it gains its meaning and fromwhich it then, as it were for idiomatic reasons, gets de-tached.

If we regard this interpretation of the suggestion as themost acceptable, there is still one'consequence of accept-ing it that needs to be pointed out: And that is that wewould have to renounce the view that art is a functional

concept. By a functional concept is meant a concept like'knife', where this means (say) 'a domestic object for cut-

ting', or 'soldier"where this means (if it ever does) 'a manfor fighting'. For if 'f' is a functional concept, then to'regard something as an f' could not be a primary occur- Irence of 'f'. For how we treated something when we re-

garded it as an 'f' would have to be dependent on the

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functions that '£'s' necessarily have: and that in turnwould be'obtained from an understanding of the concept;j' as it occurs outside the phrase 'regarding something asan f'. So it would be the' occurrence of 'f' tout court that

w6uld be primary. The point is worth making, because~Gme philosophers, perhaps implausibly; have tried todefine art functionally, e.g. as an instrument to arousecertain emotions, or to playa certain social role. It must,.1;10wever,be made quite clear that, even if we do rejectthe view that 'art' is a functional concept, we are notcommitted to the far more implausible though widelyheld view that 'all art is quite useless' - where, that is tosay, this it taken quite literally as asserting that no workof art has a function. The view is quite implausible be-cause obviously many works of art, e.g. temples, frescoes,,pins, the Cellini salt-cellar, the railway station at Flor-~nce, have a function. What we are committed to is

spmething quite different, and very much less awkward:and that is that no work of art has a function as such, I.e.¥I'virtue of being a work of art.

However, the difficulties in the way of ma~ing the aes-d:.J.eticattitude, i.e. regarding something as a work of art,constitutive of the notions of art and work of art, are not

/

~xclusively formal. Another set of difficulties concernsthe aesthetic attitude itself, and what we are to under-

stand by treating something as a work of art: a problemon which we can find, in the treatment of it by phil-t!>sophers, a systematic ambiguity. This ambiguity canperhaps best be brought out by means of an interestingdistinction that Wittgenstein makes.

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41

In the Brown Book Wittgenstein notes an ambiguity inthe usage of words such as 'particular' and 'peculiar'.

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It An EssayArt and its Objects

Let us begin; as he does, with the word 'peculiar'. Talk-ing about apiece of soap (Wittgenstein's example) Imight say that it",ha'S[apeculiar smell; and then add some-thing like 'It is the kind we used as children': alterna-tively I might "say 'This soap has a peculiar smell',emphasizing the word, or 'It reaily has a most peculiarsmell'. :In the first 'case, the word is used to introduce the,,1

description thatfo1l6ws it, and indeed, when we have the"description, is altogether"replaceable. In the second case,however, the "Y°rd is more or less equivalent-to 'out ofthe ordil1ary~, 'un~ommon', 'striking': there is no descrip- ,

tion here whose place it takes, and indeed it is important I

to see that iI1l1Jsuchcases we aren't de~cribiI1g anything-atalt we are'femphas.izing or drawing attention to whateverit is, without saying, Rerhaps without being in a positionto say, what it is. This linguistiC fah""whic}1'lit requiressome insightifo discern, can be further"t:oncealed from usby a "locution we might "employ in these cases. Havingsaid fhat tI1~soap has "apeculiar smell in the s.econd sense,and then asked 'Wha,t smelI'?' we might say somethil1glfl<.e'The smell it has', or 'This smell', holding,it up to theother's nose: and thereby think that we have done sbme-thing to describe it. But, of course, we haven't. Witt-gensteintcalls the first usage ,of hhese words 'transitive';the second usage, 'intransitive': and, the locution thatmight lead us falsely to assimilate the second usage to thefirst he calls a 're;Nexiveconstruction' .

In the case of the word 'particular', there is a similarambiguity of usage. The word can be used in place of adescription, which we could substitute for it, sometimesonly after a period of further thought or reflection. Andthe word can 1.>eused with no promise of such a descrip-tion being forthcoming. 'Particular' used intransitivelydoes not, it is true, carry wi~h it the same suggestion of,

IIO

uncop1monness or odgity that 'pesuliar' ""does.But jt hasthelsame functionbfemphasizing or concentrating uponsome object Qr some feature of an obje@t.Wittgensteincontrasts two. usages of 'The particular wayin which A€nters a room. . .' by pointing out that when asked 'Whatway?' we might say/I'He sticks his head into the roomfirst' "alternatively we might just say 'The way.he does'." ., "

In the 'second case, Wittgenstein suggestsfth,at 'He has aparticular way. . .' might have "to be translated as q,;m¥contemplating his movement'. :Ii '"

'Wittgenstein tJ1ipks thatl~t. is characteristic "of philo-~sophical;probkms tocbhfuse these two usages; 'There arema11ytroubles', he writed: '\yhich,arise'iin this way, that a

EWg~dhas 'a"transitive and an intransitive use, andthat~weregartl th~ latter as"a particular case of the former, ex-f)laining a wordr when' if is used intransitively 1f~ areflexive" cons'truction.' He suggests that a number of

'r', ':

€lifficultles in the~philosophy 6ft mind are susceptible toI)uch an;analysis. \~ 11:'

We might now state the ambiguity referred,to in thef)revious se(;;tion by saying that philosophers of'aft'wno,make "reference to the aesthetic attitude are sys-tematitzally ambiguous as to whether they intend a par-tiCular attitude in the transitive or the intransitive sense.

0n the whole, it would look as though, despite the manytheories which try to give a positive characterization ofthe aesthetic' attitude, the attitu<te can be conceived of asa particular attitude only in the intransitive sense: forevery characterization of it in terms of sQme further de-scription or set of descriptions seems to generate counter-examples~, '

But there is room here for misunderstanding. For itmight be thought that this is the same as saying thatreally there is no such thing as the aesthetic attitude; or, ,

III

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Art and its Objects

more mildly, that there is nothing distinctive of the aes-thetic attitude. But to interpre.t~the argument this way - .

which is as co~mon among those who accept as thosewho reject it - is to miss its point. The point is not thatthere is nothing distinctive of the aesthetic attitude, butrather that there need not be any comprehensive way ofreferring to what is distinctive of it other than as theaesthetic attitude. In other words, we should regard

Wittgenstein's argument as against what he takes to be apervasive error in our thinking: that of identifying onephenomenon with another phenomenon more specificthan it, or that of seeing everything as.a diminished ver-

sion of itself. It cannot be s~rprising that Art, which nat-urally provokes envy and hostility, should be perenniallysubject to s.,uchmisrepresentation.

42

A serious distortion is introduced into many accounts;of the aesthetic attitude by taking as central to it'"caseswhic~ are really peripheral or secondary; that is, caseswhere what we regard as a work of art is, in point of fact,a piece of uncontrived nature. Kant, for instance, asks us'to consider a rose that we contemplate as beautiful. Orthere is the more elaborate ca,se invoked by Edward Bull-ough in his essay on 'psychical distance' (which is forhim 'a fundamental principle' of the 'aesthetic con-sciousness'), where he contrasts different attitudes to afog at sea: the various practical attitudes, of passengers orsailors, ranging from annoyance through anxiety toterror, ,and then the aesthetic attitude~ in whieh we ab-stract ourselves from all active concerns' and simply con-centrate upon 'the features "objectively" constituting thephenomenon' - the veil that has the opaqueness of milk,

the weird carrying-power ~fthe air, the curious creamy

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An Essay

smoothness of the water, the strange solitude and re-moteness from the world. It would be a parody of this~ind of approach, but involving no real unfairness, tok()mpare it to an attempt to explicate our understandingof language by reference to the experiences we might

. have in listening to a parrot 'talking' .For the central case, whIch mustbe our starting point,

is where what we regarded as a work of art has in point offact also been produced as a work of art. In this waythere is a matching or correspondence between the con-€ept in the mind of the spectator al1d the concept in thePiflindof the artist. Indeed, it might be maintained that anerror has already crept into my exposition when twosections back I talked of the aesthetic attitude in terms of

'bringing objects under the concept "art" '; for this sug-gests that we impose a concept upon an object, where theother object itself is quite innocent of, or resists, thatc@ncept. The aesthetic attitude might be thought to have~een made to look, quite misleadingly, a matter of de-cision on our part.

This, of course, is not to deny that we can regardobjects that have not been made as works of art, or forthat matter pieces of nature that have not been made atall, as though they had been: we can treat them as worksor art. For once the aesthetic attitude has been established

Qn the basis of objects produced under the concept of art,we can then extend it beyond this base: in much the sameway as, having established the concept of person on thebasis of human beings, we may then, in fables or chil-dren's stories, come to apply it to animals or even to treesand rocks, and talk of them as though they could think orfeel. Such an extension in the case of art can occur tem-

porarily: as, for instance, in Valery's famous reflection, onthe sea shell. Or it can occur permanently - as, for in-

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Art and its Qbjects"

stctnce, in the event, which h1s ;1J.ad"such' far-reachingeffects on the whole q~ modern art, when, around

the turn of this centuJ11}',in response t~ an, aestheticimpulse, th~re wasy,a wholesale transfer of primitiveartefacts from ethnographicalcollec'tions, yvhere they hadhi'therto been housed, to museums of fine art, where,

it [was now ~thought;J they were more appropriatelym Ilocated. ,W -

We Can now see better the irrrol),made by Kant andBullough in the way iheYirintroduce the aesthetic; atti-

~tude. For;if the"aesthetic,attitude can be ext~nded,~rintheIIowayI have suggested, °'Yer objects to whiQ:,hit does.,notpri~arily apply, then there 'witl pe a large number ofobjects ~pwards which it is posSible td adppt both an Cles-thetic and (to use the ordinary blankett'hm for 'nori-aesthetic') a practical attitude: indeed,\I\it iSic~stomary tosay that allobjects can be seen in"bqth these modes. So itmight be thought.iJ.thata good method of explicating what

it is to adopt an a~?tH'etk aUitude" towards <!-ni"b'bjectiI would be to take anbbject towards which"we can adopt

either attitude and then proceed'to contrast the ,two atti-htudes as they bear upon this object. And so it would be:provided, of course, that,.in such cases, we had a p'rimar~y

~ instance of the aesthetic attitude: and this is what Kant

and Bullough do not give us. Imagine the situation inreverse: that we want to explicate what it is to adopt apractical as opposed to an aestlTetic attitude -towardssomething. It would surely be absurd to try to ,demon-strate what it is to show~ say, concern, by concentratingon the action of the yokel who rushed up on to the stageto save the life of Desdemona. .

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43

In the last section I talked of an.error involved in'the wayin which both Kant "md Bullough introduce the aesthetic

attitude. I did not, however, want to suggest that this wa~~merely an error: a straightforward mistake, that and llOmore. For in selectingttheir examples"as they did, thesepllilosophers were implicitly making a point. This pointmight be made explicitly'by saying that art is grdundediIi'life. Not only the feelings that art is,about, but also the

,feelings that we have ab~utart" hav~ their origins ouf""sidei~or <ihtecedent to, the institutions of art. If this is so,then the analogy that I have attempted to construct be-tween, on the ori'e hand the way in which Kant and Bul~lough l,introduce the aesthetic attitude and, on the other

~and, what would obviously be an absurd way of intro-du~ing nonaesthetic or practical attitudes, must be mis-

i'guided.~or just because it would indeed be absurd to tryto explicate the feeling of conce~n by refere:gce to wHatone might feel in watching the misfortunes of a heroineon the stage. it by no means fol1ows that it would be

absurd 'to try to explica'te the aesthetic attitu& by refer-ence to our contemplation of a rose or a fog at sea. Whatmy analogy overlooked is the essential asymmetry be-tWeen art and life. So, for instance, whereas we coul'd feel

concern for a real human being without ever having beenaffected by the depiction of misfortune iJ;l a play, thereverse is inconceivable. Equally, we could not have afeeling for the beauties of art unless we had been cor-responding moved in front of nature. This is what

justifies Kant's and Bullough's examples, and makes mycriticism of them ineffective - the argument wouldrun. -

There is no one who has more assiduously asserted the

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Art and its Objects

dependence of art <.lndour appreciation of art upon life aswe experience it than John Dewey. 'A primary task'Dewey writes (and the passage is typical)

is imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon thephilosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity. between the refined and the intensified forms of experiencethat are works. of art and the everyday events, doings andsufferings that are universally recognized to constituteexperience. '"'"

We can find similar assertions in many writings on the

theory of art: the primacy of life over art is an ideawidely attested to. The difficulty, however, is to under-stand or interpret the idea in such a way as to fall neither

~into triviality nor into error.It would, for instance, be trivial to assert that, in the

history both of the species and of the individual, experi-ence of life precedes experience of art. Nor indeed can weimagine what it would be like for things to be otherwise.Vico, for instance, held that the earliest form of languagewas poetry, from which the discursive form of speech isan evolution: and a well-known theorist of our own day

has suggested that there might have been a primitivelanguage of images that preceded the ordinary languageof words. Conceived of as more than allegories, such

speculations rapidly lose coherence. The major difficultyis to see how these so-called languages could fulfil the

basic deman~J.sof social life without in point of fact ap-proximating to language as we have and use it. Twodemands, which we might take as representative ofothers, are those of communication upon practical issues,and of inner thought or thinking to oneself. How couldthese demands be satisfied in the language postulated byVico or Sir Herbert Read? Alternatively, it may be that

these speculations require us to believe that there was an

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An Essay

~arly form of life in which such demands upon language~ere, as yet, not felt; to which it is hard to give sense.

The erroneous interpretation of the assertion that art isdependent upon life is more difficult to bring out. Itwould be to the effect that the institution of art con-

tributes nothing to human experience, in that it merely'appropriates, or annexes to itself, feelings, thoughts, atti-

. tudes, that are already in existence. Thus the disap-pearance of art from the world would make no-substantive difference to the wealth of human life: There

would be no more than. a formal or superficial impover-ishment: for we could concoct out of what was left an

equivalent for all that we )lad hitherto derived fromart.

The error involved in this way of interpreting the de-pendence of art upon life might be brought out by saying~hat it assumes that the"value or significance of a social'phenomenon can be exhaustively accounted for in, termsof its bare constituents, as though the. manner in whichthey were combined was of no relevance. To borrow theterminology of traditional empiricism, it is true that art isnot (or the concept of art cannot be derived from) asimple impression. But this does not establish thesuperfluity of art, unless we make the further assumption(which is, it must be admitted, not all that alien to thisstyle of philosophy) that it is only simple impressionsthat count.

it is clear, for instance, that, when we look at a paint-ing or listen to a piece of music, our perception rests uponprojection and responsiveness to form, processes whichwe may believe to be in operation from the beginnings ofconsciousness. It has been said, with reason, that the crux

or core of art may be recognized in some effect as simpleas the completely satisfying progression from a cobbled

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Art and its Objects

, street to the smooth base of a building that grows up-ward from it. Here, then, we have the dependence ofart on life. But, whereas in ordinary life, or in everydayperception, such projections may go unchecked, or theyneed be controlled only by practical considerations, inart there is a further constraining influence of greaterauthority, in the person of the artist who has made ormoulded the work of art according to his own innerdemands. It is the imprint of these demands upon thework that we must respect, if we are to retain the aes.-thetic attitude. The artist has built an arena, withinwhich we are free, but whose boundaries we must not

overstep. ,

IIi a brilliant rhetorical passage in What is Art?, Tol-stoy takes issue ¥{ith the pretensions o~the Wagnerites.He depicts the crowd pouring uncomprehendingly out ofthe darkened theatre, where they have just witnessed thethird evening of the Ring; ,'Oh yes certainly! Whatpoetry! Marvellous! Especially the birds', he makes themexclaim - for to Tolstoy one of the perversions or soph-istications of Wagner's art, one of the surest signs of hislack of inspiration or strong feeling, is his 'imitativeness'as Tolstoy calls it. But to talk of imitativeness here isto miss just the point I have been making. For when,we listen to the bird songs in Wagner, even'in Messiaen,we are not simply reduplicat~ng the experiences that wemight have in the woods or fields. In the aesthetic situ-ation it is no mere contingency, as it is in nature, that wehear what we do. This does not mean, however, thatwhat is peculiar to art is a new feeling, or a new mode ofperception or a new kind of awareness; it is rather a newconjunction of elements already in existence. The per-ception,is familiar, the sense of constraint is familiar: it is

t4e aI?algam or compound that is introduced by art.

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The argument of these two sections might be illus-trated historically by saying that, when the Impression-ists tried to teach us to look at paintings ~s though wewere looking at nature - a painting for Monet was unefenetre ouverte sur Ja !1ature - this was because theythemselves ,had first looked at nature in a way they hadlearnt from looking at paintings.

44

But, of course,.it must not be assumed that, by linking thenotion of regardIng 1iomething as a work of art to that ofproducing something as a work of art, as was done asection back, any problem in aesthetic theory has beenmagic1ally resolved. For the latter notion has - at anyrate, there ,is no reason to think otherwise - as manydifficulties as the former. Anthropologists and historjansof culture, for instance, encounter these difficulties fre-

quently. The hope, however, would be tha~ by puttingthe two notions together, which is where they belong, it'~i'may prove possible to illuminate the difficulties of the i'

one by reference to those attendant on the other.Mpre'comprehensive than the question, asked about

a particular object, whether it was in fact produced as awork of art, is the ql;lestion, asked more generally about asociety, whether objects could be produced in it as worksof art, i.e. whether the society possessed the concept ofart. The question is often raised about primitive societies.It has been argued by Tatarkiewicz and Collingwood thatthe Greeks did not possess such a concept: Paul Kristellerhas further postdated the time prior to which no conceptrecognizably identical with ours existed, and has arguedthat 'art' as we employ it is an invention of the sev-

enteenth century. Such arguments, in so far as they donot confuse the conceptual issue with the merely lexi-

II9

Art and its Objects

cographical or verbal issue, serve to bring out the vastnumber of interrelated criteria that we appeal to in talk-ing of art. It is not, therefore, surprising that in this essaythe question must remain unresolved.

Another way of bringing out the ramified character ofthe concept of art is to take seriously for a momentHegel's speculation that art might disappear from ourworld. To entertain this speculation, we have to supposethe successive disappearance of phenomena as diverse asartistic reputations, collecting, certain decisions aboutthe environment, art history, museums, etc.: the project isimmense, and is further complicated by the fact that notall these phenomena can be identified independently.ofeach other. Many aspects of social existence would haveto be unravelled to an extent that exceeds our imagin-ative powers. In order to understand this situation, I shallinvoke another phrase from general philosophy.

45

In the mature expression of Wittgenstein's philosophy,the phrase 'form of life' (Lebensform) makes a frequentappearance. Art is, in Wittgenstein's sense, a form oflife.

The phrase appears as descriptiv(f or invocatory of thetotal context within which alone language can exist: thecomplex of habits, experiences, skills, with whichlanguage interlocks in that it could not be operated with-out them and, equally, they cannot be identified withoutreference to it. In particular Wittgenstein set himselfagainst two false views of language. According to thefirst view, language consists essentially in names: namesare connected unambiguously with objects, whjch theydenote: and it is in virtue of this denoting relation thatthe words that we utter, whether to ourselves or out

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An Essay

loud, are about things, that our speech and thought are'of' the world. According to the second view, language initself is a set of inert marks: in order to acquire a refer-ence to things, what is needed are certain characteristicexperiences on the part of the potential language-users,notably the experiences of meaning and (to a lesserdegree) of understanding: it is in virtue of these experi-ences that what we utter, aloud or to ourselves, is aboutthe world. There are obviously considerable differencesbetween these two views. In a way they are dia~metrically opposite, in that one regards language astotally adherent for its distinctive character' on certain'experiences, the other regards it as altogether completeprior to them. Nevertheless, the two views also havesomething in common. For both presuppose that theseexperiences exist, and cim be identified, quite separatelyfrom language; that is, both from language as a whole,and also from that piece of language which directlyrefers to them. (Thislast distinction is useful, out it wouldbe wrong to press it too hard.) The characte~ization of!language'(alternatively, of this or that sublanguage) as 'aform of life' is intended to dispute the separation oneither level.

The characterization of art too as a form of' life hascertain parallel implications.

46

The first implication would be that we should not think

that there is something which we call the artistic impulseor intention, and which can be identified quite inde-pendently of and prior to the institutions of art.

An attempt is sometimes made. to explain artistic 'cre-ativity (and, therefore, ultimately art itself) in termsof an artistic instinct, conceived, presumably, on the

121

.." ,, . ." . ...,' ",. '.~,

AJj"\tand its Objects

analogy of the se~ual instinct or hunger. But i.fwe pursuethe analogy, it fails us. For there is no way in whi@h wecan ascribe manifestations to this artistic instinct until

there ,me already established in society <;ertain practicesrecognized as artistic: the sexual instinct, on the,9therhand, manifests itself in certain activities, whether or nqt~ .

society recognizes them as sexual - indeed, in many"a, cases, sgciety actively denies their true character. 1;0 put

the matter the other way round: If the sexual instincts

are ingulged; then certain sexual activities follow; wecannot, however, regard the arts as though we were ob-serving in them the consequenq~s that follow whe,J1theartistie instinc~ is indulgeck,Either way round the point isthe same: in the case of sexuality, the connexion betweenthe instinct and its satis.faction in the world is immediate,iii the 6ase of art it i~ medfated by a practice or instk

tU'tion. (If it is not always true tHat the sexual instinctmanifests if~flf ,9.irectly, at least the me'aiation is throughprivately determined thoughts or,phantasies, not througha pyblic institution: the parallel il,l the sexual sphere"tot,~lking of an, artistic instinctwduld be to po~tulat~ a'matrimonial' instinct.)]}' ",

Nor does the more fashionable kind of analogy be"tween the artistic instinct and disordered mental func-

tioning, e.g. an obsession, fare anybetter.<For, once again,there is an immediate connexion be~een the obsession'and the compulsive behaviour in which it is discharged,to which we find no parallel in art. There may, of course,be an obsessional element in much artistic activity, but

the choice by the artist of certain activities, which inpoint of fact happen to be artistic activities, need not beobsessional. To put it in a way that may seem para-doxical, the kind of activity in which the artist engagesneed not be for him, as the compulsive behaviour is of

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An Essay 'II

h@cessity for '"the obsessional, 'meaningful': for on ogel€vel at ."any rate, t~t obse~sional wants to do "what hedoes, and in 'consequence the analysis of his obsession,consists,in tras:ingthis, wish to ,another an"dearlier wish,df which it is a symptom. It was just to distinguish artrfrom this kind of case that -Freud classed it as sub-

limation, where 'sublimation' means ,the dischargewof@nuergyin socially acceptable channels.

Of course, this, is not to deny that art is connected,.with~Jjlstinctualmovements, or that it could exist away from '"

their 'vicissitude,s. Jhere are, indeed, certain psychic'!.fortes, such as the reparative drive or the desire to est~b-tlishwhole objects, without which the general fOfl;p.sthat II

ali;t"takes, as well as its value, would be barely com-.,prehensible. In much the same way, religious beliefwould be barely ;'comprehensible witl1oJlt an' under-standing of early attitudes to' ~parents: but it wouldmiss the distinctive character of 'such beliefs to analysetJ!!,~mwithout Tem:ainder~,in the case of each individual.i~to th~, personal motivation" that, leads' Him to embracethem. . '

'The error against which this section has peen directedis that of thinking, that there is an artistic impulse thatcan be identified in,dependently of the institutions of. art.It does not. follow that th€re is no such thing as an artisticimpulse. On the contrary, there is, where this means theimpulse to produce something as a work of art: an im-pulse which, as we have seen, constitutes, on the artist'sside, the match to the aesthetic attitude, where thismeans the attitude of seeing something as a work of art.Indeed, reference to this impulse is necessary in order toescape from an error implicit in the very first section ofthis essay: that of seeing art as an unordered set of dis-joined activities or products. For what gives art its unity ,

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Art and its Objects

is that the objects that centrally belong to it have beenproduced under the concept of art.

47

After considering the first implication of the idea of art asa 'form of life', I shall for this section digress, and con-sider briefly, in the light of what has just been said, the

problem which I have called (section 23) the bricoleurproblem. For this has acquired a fresh significance. For, ifit is true that artistic creativity can occur only in so far as

certain processes or stuffs are already accredited as thevehicles of art, then it becomes important to know how

and why these accreditations ar,emade. More specifically,are these accreditations entirely arbitrary: in the sense,for instance, in which it is arbitrary that, out of thestock of articulated sounds, some and not others, have

been appropriated by the various natural languages astheir phonetic representations? Furthermore, if they arearbitrary, does this mean that the artist is dominated bywhoever is responsible for the accreditations - let us forthe moment identify him with the spectator - and that

the picture we have of the artist as a free agent is er-roneous?

I shall begin with the second question: I shall concedethat there is a way in which the spectator is supreme overthe artist: and I shall then try to take away the air of

paradox that attaches to this truth. In the first place, weare wrong to contrast the artist and the spectator asthough we were dealing here with different classes ofpeople. For in reality what we have are two differentroles, which can be filled by the same person. Inde~d, itseems a necessary fact that, though not all spectators arealso artists, all artists are spectators. We have already

touched upon this truth in considering expression, but it

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An Essay

has many applications, not the least of which relates tothe present problem of the social determination of artforms or art vehicles. Secondly, it is unnecessarily dra-matic to speak here of 'domination': even if we do thinkthat the accreditation of art forms is arbitrary. For wemight go back for a moment to the example by referenceto which I introduced the notion of arbitrariness: I did so

by reference to language. Now, do we think that the'native speaker of a language is 'dominated' in what hesays by his predecessors and his contemporaries, inwhose mouths his language has evolved to become whatit now is?

We may now take up the first question and ask, Is it infact arbitrary that certain processes and stuffs, and notothers, have been accredited as the vehicles of art? It is

obvious that we can make any single artistic process, e.g.placing pigment on canvas, seem arbitrary by strippingaway from it, in our minds, anything'that gives it anyair of familiarity or naturalness. But all ,that this shows isthat, when we raise questions about the arbitrariness orotherwise of a certain process, we need to specify thecontext in relation to which they are asked. If we indi-cate - as we did just now in asking about painting - aquite topen', or zero-, context, the accreditation willdearly seem arbitrary. But it does not follow from thisthat it will seem al{bitrary for all contexts or even for alarge range of contexts.

Perbaps we can see this more clearly by going back,on<::eagain, to the phoneticproblem.If we take a naturallanguage in the abstract, it is obviously ar,bitrary thatcertain articulated sounds, not others, were chosen to beits phonemes: where this means little more than thatthere are others that could have been chosen. If we fill in

the historical background, including the development of

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J\rt and its Objects

language, the arbitrariness diminishes. If~wecomplete thecontext and include such facts as that na~Jve speakers of

one language wi~l barely be able t6 form the phon.emes ofamotRer, any suggestion of arbitrariness that a particularman liv~ng in a particular society might tHink attaches tothe, sounds that he employs quite vanishes. In such a situ-ation a!Jnan can scarcely think of his language other thanas, in Hamann's phrast 'his wedded wife'. j~

Iflthe case of art crtrivatutal cOJ;1textin which to deter-mine the arbitrariness Of!,other.;wiseof the vehicles of

art is provided by certain very' general principles whichhave historically'\been advanced concerni~$ theesselltialcharacteristics of a work of art. Examples would be: that

the bbject~!must be enduring, or at least tJJat.it"'must sur-,yive (not be consumed in) appreciation; 'tha{f,it must be

" apprel1endeClby the 'theoretical~ senses ofpsight and. Qear-ing;'o-tJ;1atit must 'exhibit internal diffe"rentia.tibn, or'becapable of being ordered;.,that it must not be inherentlyvaluable, etc. Each of these principles can, of, course, be

questioned, and certainly as they stand none s,eems irre-proachable. But that is not the poinf~here: fbr I have,din-traduced these principles solely to show the kind ofcontext in which alone we can ask whether it is arbitrarythat a certain stuff or!j'process has become an accreditedvehicle of art.

48

A second implication 'of the point that art is a form of lifewould be that we do wrong tOepostulate, of each. work ofart, a particular aesthetic intention or impulse whichboth accounts for that wor,k and can be identified inde-

pendently of it. For though there could be such a thing,there need not be. '

In section 41 I invoked a distinction ofWittgenstein!s

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An Essay

'between two senses of 'peculiar' and 'particular': there tomake the point that if it is characteristic of works of artthat we adopt a particular attitude towards them, i.e. theaesthetic, this attitude "is particul'arin the intransitivesense. The same dIstinction can be used now, this time to

wake a point in reference not to art in general but toi;I;ldividualworks of art; and that is that, if we say that awork of art expresses a particular state of mind, or eveni1Ji'w:e~;'sayof it that it expresses a particular state of mindwith great intensity or. poignancy, once again the,word;partkular'is used in its intransitive sense.

. 'And once again this use brings with it its own dallger.§0fmisupderstcinding. For if what a work of"artex)Jfessesis only a particular state i~ an intransitive sense; or (toput it another way) if the Pl1rase 'what the work of artexpresses' is only a reflexive 'construction; then (it mightseem},.works of art do not reallY express anything at~all.1£ we cannot identify the state except through the work,tIlen we have at best pam" or highly generalized ex-pressiqp: alternatively, we have no e~pression at alL"This,is, for instance, how Hanslick would appear to haveargued, when he concluded from the fact that music

doesn't express de~nite feelings like piety, love, joy~ orsad,ness, that it isn't an art of expression.

But the argument is misguided. For it must be em-\,-phasized that the difference between the two usages of'This expresses a particular state' does not correspond toany difference in the expressive function of the work, inthe sense either of what is expressed ()r of how it is ex-pressed. The difference lies simply in the way in whichWe refer to the inner state: whether we describe it, orw.b.ether we simply draw attention to or gesture towardsit.

When We say L'Embarquement pour l'ile de Cythere

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Art and its Objects

or the second seoction of En Blanc et Nair, expresses aparticular feeling, and we mean this intransitively, we .are misunderstood if we are then asked 'What feeling?'Nevertheless, if someone tells us that to him the paintingor the piece of music means nothing, there are many re-sources we have at our disposaLfor trying to get him tosee what is expressed. In the case of the music, we couldplay it in a certain way, we could compare it with othermusic, we could appeal to the desolate circumstances ofits composition, we could ask him to think why heshould be blind to this specific piece: ih the case of thepainting, we could read to him A Prince of Court Paint-ers, pausing, say, on the sentence 'The evening will be awet one', we could show him other paintings by Wat-teau, we coul~ point to the fragility of the resolutionsin the picture. It almost looks as though in suchcases we can compensate for how little we are ableto say by how much we are abl~ to do. Art rests on thefact that deep feelings pattern. themselves in a coherentway all over our life and behaviour.

. 49

The appeal of the view that a work of art expressesnothing unless what it expresses can be put into (other)words, can be effectively reduced by setting beside itanother view, no less well' entrenched in the theory ofart, to the effect that a work of art has no value if what it

expresses, or more generally says, can be put into (other)words.

Now, if this view had been advanced solely with refer-ence to the nonverbal arts, it would have been of dubioussignificance. Or it might have been counter{.d that thereason why a work of art not in words should not beexpressible in words is just that it was not originally in

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An Essay

words, i.e. the view reflects on the media of art, not on artitself. However, it is a'significant fact that the view hasbeen canvassed most heavily precisely in that area of artwhere its cutting-edge is sharpest: in literature. For if theliterature is in a language rich enough to exhibit syn-onomy, the view would see~ to assert something aboutart. I

Within the so-called 'New Criticism' it has been a

characteristic tenet that there is a:'heresy of paraphrase' . .It is, of course, conceded that we can try to formulateWhat a poem says. But what we produce can never bemore than approximate; mo~eover, it does not lead us to'the poem itself. For 'the paraphrase is not the real core of

]jp.eaning which constitutes the essence of the poem'.(Cleanth Brooks). '.

This view would appear to have a number of differents@urces. One, which is of little aesthetic interest, is that

sometimes in poetry language of such simplicity or di-II rectness is used (e.g. the Lucy poems, Romances sans

Paroles) that it is hard to see where we would start if wetried to say the same thing in other words. But not allpoetry employs such language: nor, moreover, is the em-

!')loyment of such language peculiar to poetry. In conse-€J.uence, the heresy of paraphrase, in so far as it bases

Jtself on this consideration, is an instance of faulty gen-eralization. Another source is that even when the poetryis in a kind of language that admits of paraphrase - meta-phor would be the supreme example here - any eluci-dation of what the poem says would have to contain, inaddition to a paraphrase of the metaphors, an account ofwhy these particular metaphors were used. A third

source is that often in poetry there is such a high degreeof concentration or superimposition of content that it is

not reasonable to expect that we could separate out the

129

,~."---,-~,_.-II

~ Art and its0bjects

various thoughts andl feelings (:meanings', as they aresometimes called by critiCs) that are afforded expressionin the work.

It is impossible in this essay tq,pursue these last twopoints, thougr they relate to very general and importantfeatures of art which cannot be ignored in a full under-

standing of the subject. One is the importance of themode df prese)1tation in;"art: a phrase which naturallycltange~ its application somewhat as we move fromrnerdium'to medium but includesJiVerydifferent things likebru'shwork, choice of imagery~ intel'yelation of pIa! and

"'6ub,7plots, etc. The other is t;,];1~condensation charac-teriS'tic Of art. Both these points will be touchedJon!i:l~ter,

and an:Ntempt made to weave them int01the emergingpattern of art. '

>,t,

DI

50"

In tihe light of the preceding diseussion (sections 46-9),we might now turn back to the Croce-Collingwoodtheory pf art and of the artistic process. For we are nowin a,position 1:'6see Tather more sharply the error involvedin that account. We can see it, that is, as an instance of

a more general error., For the equation, central to that theory, first 'of the

work of art with an internally elaborated image or 'in-tuition', and then of the artistic gift with the capacity toelaborate and refine images in this way, is just anotherattempt, though perhaps a peculiarly plausible one, toconceive of art in a way that makes no allusion to a formof life. For on this theory, not only can the artist create a

particular yvork of art without in point of fact ever exter-nalizing it, but his capacity in general to create works ofart, or his attainment as an artist (as we might put it),

may flourish quite independently of there being in ex5st-. '

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,,~ii ~

An Essay

eJ]:(!]eany means of externalizatipn. The artist is an artistsOlely in virtue of his inner life: where'.'inner life', it willbe appreciated, is understood narrowly 'So~asnot to in-

. dude any thoughts or feelings that contain an exylicitr:eferenceto art. '

The analogy with language/which'the phrase 'form oilife' suggests, should help us to see 'what is wrong here.~0r parallel to the conception of the artist as the manW;Rosehead' is crammed with intqitions though he maykFl0V\\;6f no medium in which to externalize them, would

b€ the conception of the thinker as ~ man with his headfliJ;l~of ideas though he possesses no language in which todpress them. The second conception is evidently aDsurd.A!ildif we do ..nbt alw:ays recognize the absurdity of thefirst conception too, this'is because we do not allow thepa:r;allel.For we might rather think that the true parallelto the Crocean artist is, in the domain of language, 'theman who thinks to himself. But this would be wrong: forthree reasons. 0 II

, In the first place, the man who thi~ks to. himself hasalready acquired a medium, or language. The peculiarityis in the way, he employs it: that is, always internally.Secondly, it is a dist~nctive characteristic of language, towl).ich there is no analogue in art (with the possible ex-ception of the literary arts), that it has this internal em-ployment. We can talk to ourselves, but we cannot

(with the exception just noted) mak,f,works of art to our-selves.,Thirdly, we must appreciate 'that it is an essentialfeature of the Croce-CollingWood thesis that not onlycan the artist make' works of art to himself;, but he maybe in the situation in which he can only make works ofart to himself: in other words, it is possible that he couldhave the intuitions and there be no way in the society ofexternalizing them, But there is no parallel to this in the

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Art and ~tsObjects

case of thought. For if we have language which weemploy internally, then we always can, physical defectsapart, also employ it externally: though in point of factwe may never do so. There could not be a language that itwas impossible for someone who knew it to speak. Ac-cordingly, the proper analogue to the artist, conceivedaccording to the Croce-Collingwood theory, is not thethinker who has a medium of thought which he uses onlyto himself but the thinker who has no medium of

thought, which, I have maintained, is an absurdity. .

Freud, in several places, tried to approach the problemof the artistic personality by means of a comparison he .proposed between the a:r;tist and the neurotic. For boththe artist and the neurotic are people who, under the

pressure of certain. clamorous instincts, turn away fromreality and lead a large part of their lives in the world ofphantasy. But the artist differs from the neurotic in thathe succeeds in finding 'a path back to reality'. Freud'sthinking at this point is highly condensed. He wouldappear to have had a number of ideas in mind in usingthis phrase..But one of the ideas', perhaps the central one,is that the artist refuses to remain in that hallucinated

condition to which the neurotic regresses, where the wishand the fulfilment of the wish are one. For the artist,

unlike the neurotic, the phantasy is a starting point, notthe culmination, of his activity. The energies which haveinitially driven him away from reality, he manages toharness to the process of making, out of the materialof his wishes, an object that can then become a source ofshared pleasure and consolation. For it is distinctive ofthe work of art, in contrast, that is, to the daydream, thatit is free of the excessively personal or the utterly alienelements that at once disfigure and impoverish the life ofphantasy. 'By means of his achievement the artist can

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An Essay

open to others unconscious sources of pleasure whichhi.therto they had been denied: and' so, as Freud san-guinely puts it, the artist wins through his phantasy whatthe neurotiC can win only in his phantasy: honour,power, and the love of women.

It will be apparent that on this account all art involvesrenunciation: renunciation, that is, of the immediate

gratifications of phantasy. This feature is not peculiar toart, though it may be peculiarly powerful in art: it issha'fed with any activity in which there is a systematic

abandonment of the pleasure principle in favo~r of thetesting of wish and thought in reality. In the case of artthis testing oc.curs twiCe over: first, in the confrontation

of the artist and his medium, and then again in the con-fn!mtation of the artist and his society. On both occasionsit is characteristic that the artist surrenders somethingthat he cherishes in response to the stringencies of some-tIring that he recognizes as external to, and hence inde-pendent of, himself. .

Now it is precisely this feature of art, art asrenunciation - a feature which accounts in some measure ,for the pathos of art, certainly of all great art, for the.sense of loss so precariously balanced against the richesand grande.ur of achievement -that the theory we havebeen considering totally denies. The Croce-Collingwoodtheory of the artist is, it might be said, a testimony to theomnipotent thinking from which, in point of fact, it isthe mission of art to release us.

51

Hitherto in presenting art as a form of life, I have dis-

cussed it from the artist's point of view, not the spec-tator's: though, of course, the two discussions overlap, asdo (as I have argued) the points of view themselves.

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Art and its Objects

Indeed, that they do is largely what warrants the phrase'form of life'. However, wi!hin the form of life there is adistinctive function that accrues to the spectator: I nowturn to it.

For guidance we, must once again appeal to theanalogy with language'. What disringuishes the hearer ofa language who knows it from 'bne who-doesn't is notthat he reacts fo it, whereas the other doesn't: for the

other could, jusfas, say", a dog responds to his master's~call. The difference is that,! the man who knov,vs the

language replaces an associative link, which mig).1t ormight not be conditioned, w~th~understan(jing. The ,manwho does not"know the language might a~sociate to thewords - or rather noises as they vv,Jllbe for him (see sec-

tion 25). In this way he might even come to know asmuch about the speaker as the man who shares a

language with 'him: but the distinctive feature,is that hiscoming to know about the speakeLand the speaker's re-vealing it will be two independent events, whereasthe man who knows ,the language can't but find outwhat he is told.

However, how are we to use the analogy? Are we to

say bluntly that it is distinctive of,the spectator versed inart that he understands the work of art? Or are we to use

the analogy more tentatively and say of the spectatorthat he characteristically replaces mere association to thework with a response that stands to art as understandingdoes to language? \

Around the answer to this question whole theories of

art (e.g. cognitive, subjective, contemplative) have been'constructed. Their internecine conflict, w;hich constitutes

a large part of aesthetics, is sufficiently barren as tosuggest that something ,has gone wrong in their initialformation. What appears to happen in most cases is this:

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An 'Essay

$oni'ethingis found in o'Jr characteristic reaq;ons to artthat corresponds to a use of a particular W0rd:this wordis then adopted as the word for the spectator's attitude:but when this happens, it is the whole of the use of theword, or its use in all contexts, that is collected: and thespectator's attitude. is then pronounced to be all thosethings which are covered by this word. A theory i~estab-}ished,and an insightlobscured. An example is provideqby Tolstoy;s",theory of Art. Tolstoy, recognizing thatt'here is an element of €ommunication in all art, or thataUart..is,in some s,ensedl,theword, communication, thensaid that art was communication, then turned his bac~ onth.e original recognitiondby insisting that art was, or '~asproperly, communication'in some further sehse of theword'than that in which it had originally forced it~elfD . .'11up<;mhim.

What I shall do is to retain the word 'understan,di' tocharacterize the spectator's ahitude, try ~not to importalien associations, and see what can be said aBout what is

characteristically involved in this kind o~. under-standing. M'

There 'are two points of a/general chara'eter that it willbe profi'table to bear in mind thrqughout <mysuch exam-ination,J} mention them here, tho~gh 1shall not be able toelaborate more than afraction of what they suggest.

The first is this: that for it to be in any way in.order totalk of understanding apropos of art, there must be somekind of match or correspondence between the artist's ac-

tivity ,and the, spectator's reaction. Enough has alreadybeen said in connexion with interpretation to make it

, clear that in the domain of art the match will never becomplete. The spectator will always understand morethan the artist intended, and the artist will always haveintended more than any single spectator understands - to

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Art and its Objects

put it paradoxically. Nor, moreover, is it clear whetherthe match must be with what the artist actually did on

the specific occasion of producing this particular work,or whether it has only to be with, say, the kind of thingthat the artist does. Is the spectator's understanding to be

directed upon the historical intention of the artist, orupon something more general or idealized? And if thiselement of unc,ertainty seems to put the understanding ofart in jeopardy, we should appreciate that this is not asituation altogether peculiar to art. It is present in mariycases where (as we say) we understand fully, or only toowell, what someone really did or said. -

Secondly, I suggest that, when we look round forexamples on which to test any hypo~heses that we mightform about the spectator's attitude, it would be instruc-tive to take cases where there is something which is awork of art which is habitually not regarded as one, andwhich we then at a certain moment come to see as one.Works of architecture that we pass daily in city streetsunthinkingly are likely to provide fruitful instances. Andit is significant what a very different view we are likelyto get of the spectator's attitude from considering thesecases rather than those which we are conventionally in-vited to consider in aesthetics (see section 42), I.e. caseswhere there is something that is not a work of art, whichis habitually not regarded as one, and which we then at acertain point in time 5=°meto see as if it were one. '

52

In section 29 I referred to a certain traditional view bysaying that art in its expressive function possessed a kindof translucency: to put it another way, that if expressiqnis not naturai, but works through signs, as we may haveto concede it does, then at least we may insist that these

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An Essay

signs are iconic. We might think that we now have aneluddation of this rather cryptic view in the idea that it '

is characteristic of the spectator's attitude to art thatlle replaces association by understanding. For, it might"he argued, the difference between iconic and noniconicsigns, which is generally treated as though it '<»,wereadifference in the relations in which the signs stand to the,referent,is really a difference in the relations in which westand to the sign: to call a sign iconic is just to say of itthat it is part of a well-entrenched or familiar language.ifhe naturalness of a sign is a function of how natural wea(e with it. Now, to talk of replacing association byunderstanding is just to talk of a greater familiarity withthe,signs we use. Therefore, if we understand a sign, wecan regard it as iconic, and in this'way we have an over-all explanation of th'e iconic character of signs in art.

It would certainly seem to be true that we distinguishthe cases where we 'read off' certain information from a

,diagram from the cases where we just see it, largely on'censiderations of how entrenched the medium of com-munication is in our life and habits. We read off the

coloured picture from the black-and-white diagram, weread off the profile of the hill from the contour lines, justbecause these methods are so tangential to the processesby which we ordinarily acquire and distribute knowl-edge. However, we cannot conclude from this that anysign language that we regularly operate is for us iconic.Familiarity may be a necessary; but it is not a sufficient,

condition of beipg iconic otherwise we should have toregard any language of which we are native speakers aseo ipso iconic.

If, therefore, the suggestion before us has some plaus-ibility, this is only because, in the original argument, atleast one distinction too few was made. For the im-

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Art and its Objects'J

plication was that the distinction between cases wherewe 'read off' infofmation and cases where the'infor-mation is conveyed iconically is exhaustive. But this isabsurd.For instance,we do not readoffsomethingwhenwe read it.

However, even if we cannot account for the dis-tinction between iconic and noniconic signs entirely interms of a partieular relation in which we stand to thesigns, i.e. our familiarity in handling them, some advan-tage can be obtained from looking at'it in this way ifonly because it attenuates the distinction. 'Interveningcases suggest themselves, anq the peculiarity <;>fan iconicsign is thus reduced. .

Furthermore, even if we cannot analyse the distinctionentirely in terms of this one attitude of ours toward signs,there may be another attitude of ours in terms of whichthe analysis can be completed: and in this way the orig-inal character, if not the detail, of the analysis may bepreserved. Let us say that every (token) sign that we usehas a cluster of properties. Ordinaril¥ the degree of ourattention to these properties varies greatly over theirrange: with spoken words, for instance, we pay great at-tention to the pitch, little to the speed. Now it mayhappen that, for some reason or other, we extend, or in-crease the scope of, our attention either intensively orextensively: we consider more properties, or the sameproperties more carefully. Now, my suggestion is that itis as, and when, signs become for us in this way 'fuller'objects that we may also come to feel that they have agreater appropriateness to their referent. (As a deep ex-",lanationwe might want to correlate tlie seeing of a signas iconic with a regression to the 'concrete thinking' ofearliest infancy.) Of course, the adoption of this attitudeon our part will not automatically bring it about that we

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see the ,signas iconic, for the properties of the sign maythemselves be recalcitrant: but it can be contributorytowards it. However, once we have seen the sign as iconicthrough an increasing sensitivity to its many properties,we then tend to disguise this by talking as though therewere just one very special property of the sign, that ofbeing iconic, of which we had now become aware. Wethink that the sign is tied to its referent by one speciallink, whereas in point of fact there are merely many as-sociations.

(I have, it will be observed, followed the conventionwhereby an iconic sign is thought of as matching, or re-sembling, or being congruent with, its referent: but whyreferent or ,reference, rather than. sense, is left unex-amined - as, for reasons of space, it will be here.)

I want to complete the present discussion by suggest~ing,that it is part of the spectator's attitude to art that heshould' adopt thjs attitude towards the work: that heshould make it the object'of an ever-increasingor deepen-ing attention. Here we have th~ mediating link betweenart and the iconicity of signs. Mostsignificantly, we havehere further confirmation for the view, already insistedupon (section 39),'that the properties of a work of artcannot be demarcated: for, as our'attention spreads overthe object, more and more of its properties may becomeincorporated into its aesthetic nature. It was some suchthought as this that we may believe Walter Pater to haveintended when he appropriated the famous phrase thatall art 'aspires to the condition of music' .

53

Mozart-his father: Vienna, 26 September 1781.

. . . As Osmin's tage gradually increases, there comes (justwhen the aria seems to be at an end) the allegro assai, which

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is in a tat ally different tempo. and in a different key: this isbaund to. be very effective. Far just as a man in such atawering rage aversteps all the baunds af arder, maderatianand prapriety and campletely fargets himself, so. must themusic to.a farget itself. But since passians, whether vialentarnat, must never be expressed to. the paint af exciting disgust,and as music, even in the mast terrible situatians, must neveraffend the ear, but must please the listener, ar in ather wardsmust never cease to. be music, so. I have nat chasen a keyremate from F (in which the aria is written) but ane relatedto. it - nat the nearest, D minar, but the mare remate Aminar.

There is here, not far belaw the surface, 'l clue to. same-

thing which we' have perhaps ignared, ar at any rateunderestimated, in cannexian with the prablems raised inthe last sectian: mare generally~ in cannexian with ex-

pressian. Far what Mazart's letter brings aut is the way inwhich the attributian af expressive value ar significanceto. a wark af art presuppases an autanamaus activity,carried aut aver time, which cansists in the building up,

in the madifying, in the decampasing, af things which wemay think af as unities ar structures. A precanditian afthe expressiveness af art is - to. apprapriate the title af afamaus wark in general art histary - the 'life af farms inart'. This phrase shauld nat lead us, as perhaps it didHenri Fa<;:illan,who. cained it, to. assign a kind af impetusar quasi-evalutianary efficacy to. the farms themselves,distinct fram human agency. On the cantrary, it is

always'the artist who., cansciausly ar uncansciausly,shapes the farms that bear his name. (Indeed, nathing lessthan that wauld suit my paint.) Nevertheless the artistdaes nat canjure these farms aut af nathing: nor do. wehave to. maintain that he daes so. in arder to. attribute

agency to. him. In creating his farms the artist is aper-

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ating inside a cantinuing activity ar enterprise, and thisenterprise has its awn repertaire, impases its awnstringencies, affers its awn appartunities, and therebypravides accasians, inconceivable autside it, far inven-tian -and audacity. ,

A parallel suggests itself. In recent years aur knawl-tdge af the ematianallife and develapment af children-.and hence af adults in so. far as we all retain infantile

residues - has increased beyand anything believed feas-ible farty ar fifty years ago., thraugh the explaitatian afan abviaus enaugh resource: the play af <;:hildren.By ab-serving and then interpreting haw children play it hasr;>rovedpassiBle to. trace back certain daminant anxieties,.and the defences that are characteristically invakedagainst them, to. the earliest manths af infancy. But suchabservatian has in turn prov~d pas,sible anly because af,the inherent. structure that games passess and that thechild twists and turns to. his awn needs. There is, we maysay, a 'life af farms in play'.

So.,far instance, we say that play is inhibited when thechild's interest in a dall cansists salely in dressing and\!lndressing it, ar when the anly game it can play with taytrains ar cars cansists in accidents ar collisians, just be-cause we are aware that these games admit af furtherpassibilities, which the child is unable to. utilize. ,Or,again, we argue that the child is anxiaus when it mavescantinuausly from playing with water, to. cutting aut inpaper, to. drawing with crayan, and back again, just be-cause these activities have already been identified asdifferent games. If the structure af play is nat explicitlyreferred to. in psychaanalytic writing, this can anly bebecause it seems such an abviaus fact. Yet it is in virtue af

it that we are enabled to. assign to. the child such a vastrange af feelings and .beliefs - frustratian, envy af the,

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Art and its Objects

mother, jealousy; guilt, and the drive to make re-paration. ~

'\ I am not saying that ar\,5s,or is a form of, play. Tlfereis a view to this effect, deriving .f~om Schiller and thenlost inlvulgarization in the 'last century. Here I compareart and play, only tQ"make a point about art apalogo,us tothaCI have beel]~asserting about play: namely, that artw.ust first have a, life of its. own, before ,i,t can thenBecome all"the:btherthings thatit is.

Tqis point, about> the priority oril!au~ononiy of art'spwn proceduresi wasn:iade by the psy~hoanalyst Ernst~ris, al)d in a way which allows \ls a further insight;,Jntoits significance. Kris pqt it by saying.Jhat in the creation.0]' a, work of art the relation,s of the primary ana the

secondaty processes are reversed from, those re.ye~led inthe~tudy of the dream. The tepns need explication. InThe lnterpretation.of Dreams, Freud ~..as driven to:con-elude th~t, two fundam.entally ~different types .of psy-chIcal proc~ss can be'~iscriminated in the fexmation iPfdreams. One of these, which also q.ccounts for our ordh

nary th~nkihg, issue's'IJinrational trains of thought.1~eother process, which is the survival of om earrliest mentalappar;atus, seizes hold of this train of thought and oper-ates upon it in certain characteristic ways: the wayswhich Freud singled out for scrutiny are! condensation,displacement, and the casting of thought into a visuallyrepresentable form. The more primitive of the two pro-cesses Freud called the primary process: t~e other, theprocess of rationality, he called the secondary process:and as to their interrelations, Freud formed the hypoth-esis that a train of thought, which is the product of thesecondary process,. is subjected to the .operations of theprimary process when and only when there has beentransferred on to it a wish to which expression is denied.. .

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'the result of these interrelations, or tlIe"dream, is aJdnd,of picture:puzzle, unintelligible in itseJf, in which thevarious' latent thoughts, constituting the wish ar~ rep-resented,in a pictographio<script, to be deciphered onlya;ijJ:ei'themost careful analysis.'.(. ..,

The work 6f art has,this in common with the dream:. ., ..that it'ildraws upon. powerful unconsciol,ls sources./BuUtis unlike the dream in, that even at its freest it exhibits,.cf

vastly g:eater measure' of contrbl,iand Kris',suggestion is. .' ',' . ' , ,

tha~ if we: want an analogue for artistic creation Weshould find it, in,the f.\?rfuation rfbt..of drea~s but of]okes. D

F,prih Jokes fmd"the' Unconscious Freud had propos~d asQmewhat different relation as p.olding between the pr~-1il1a~yand the secondary processes when a jO,keis formed~Freud. expressed "this byrsaying that a joke comes I intobeipgwhen a preconscious thought is 'given over for. amoment' to unconscious revision. Jokes, like dre~ms', g

haye,some of the characteristics of our earliest mode of!1 rII

thinking. (it ~as, Breud pointed"out, no s,oincidence t~atmanypeople,confron,ted forthefirst time with the analo/"'. '.,.'sis of a dream, find it funny or in the nature of' a joke.)At the same time, whereas a dream is asocial.,priyate and"eludes un,derstariding, a joke is social, public and aims atintelligibtlity. And theexpl<)nation of these.differences-alo:p.gwith what the two phenomena have in common" -lies in' the relative influence of the two psychic processes.A dream remains au;fond an unconscious wish that

makes use of the secondary process 'in order to escapedetectiol) and to avoid unpleasure: a joke is a thought

. which takes advantage of the primary process to gainelaboration and to produce pleasure. On this level, thework of art resembles the joke, not the dream.

It is not necessary to accept the precise way in whichKris goes on to demarcate the primary and secondary

..

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processes in order to benefit from his suggestion. Forwhat it permits us to see is the necessity, for art's expres-siveness, indeed for its achievements in general, that thereshould be certain acdedited activities with stringenciesof their own, recognized as leading to works of art, uponwhich the secondary process operates. We could notmake joke$ unless there was, in general, language; moreparticufarly, something that we had to say in thatlanguage. By contrast, dreams lack s,!ch presuppbsi-

I!I tions. "

But the comparison between jokes a,sFreud explainedthem and works of art allows us to see more than this. It

allows us to see yet another thing that is wrong in theCroce-Collingwood theory: and that is the extent towhich the theory distorts or disguises what occurs at themoment of 'externalization'. For that is the moment at

which, in Freud's words, the thought, or the project thatlies behind the work of art, is 'dipped in the unconscious'.Without such an immersion, the elaboration that makes

for much of the depth of the work of art would be miss-ing.

Again~ the assimilation of works of art to jokes ratherthan to dreams restores to its proper place in aesthetictheory the element of making'or agency appropriate tothe artist. For, as Freud points out, we 'make' jokes. Ofcourse we do not - as he goes on to say - make jokes in

" the sense in which we make a judgement or make anobjection. We cannot, for instance, decide to make ajoke, nor can we make_a joke to order. Similarly, as Shel-ley pointed out, 'a man cannot say "I will composepoetry" ': but it does not follow from this that the poetdoes not compose poetry'". In a clear sense he does. Thereis, however, no sense at all in which we can say that wemake our dreams.

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54

~ertain remarks I have made apropos both of artistic@reativity (lnd of aesthetic understanding, might seem to,endorse a particular view in the psychology of art:

l'lamely, that art consists)n the manufacture of certainqrtifacts which are conceived of and valued, by artist andspectator alike, as preeminently independent and self-subsistent objects. The significance of a work of art(would be the view) lies in its oneness~ A great deal bo~p.o~ traditional aesthetics and of psychoanalytic writingconverge on, this point.

Now, .it is certainly true that the affirmation and cel-ebration ofithe whole object plays a great part in art. Asthe representative of the good inner figure, of the parentassaulted in phantasy and then lovingly restored, it isessential to all creative activity. There are, however,other feelings and attitudes thatjare accommodated, or towhich we find correspondences, in those complex andFllultifarious structures which we designate works of art.In a brilliant series of essays Adrian Stokes has drawn ourattention to the'enveloping aspect of art, the 'invitation' ashe calls it, which is in danger of being overlooked bythose who concentrate upon the self-sufficiency of thework of art. And this aspect of art has its deeper ex-planation too. Before we can experience the good or re-stored parent as a whole figure, we must first be able toestablish relations of a stable and loving character with,parts of the parent's body, felt as benign influences. With-'out such part-object relations the whole-object relationwould never be achieved, and it is Stokes' contention thatit is these earlier psychic states that certain forms of art-and Stokes is here thinking explicitly of the painterlystyle, or of art in the plastic rather than in the carving,\

145

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Pu:;tapd its Obj~cts ,~ ", . .' ,;~

tradition, as -yvellas'muchqpodern art -lllVlte us to re-experience.

It would not be~appropriate,here to follo~ these'"sp~cu-lations in d~tail. F9r that would take u,~,out of the phil-osophy of art into its psychologyer pheno'nienology~ Thepoint I want to m'akeis more gen~fal. It is, that a!}inap.-

" equate 'or 'a' diminishedtYiew of'our; aq;ual experience,pfart" ~an in~ turn suggest, or "reinforce, a 'false ~theoreticaJconceptioh of art'. Indeed;' w~~are already in a pgsitio-Qtoste thi~ at. .work. For if .weNdke wacertain~ Q,road~"phi~o-$,pphical characterizationof\l1he aesthetic attitude - "a§,~or ihsdhce, it fs:defined by Kant in t~~ms o~;disinterest-

lJI.ednes~Vorby Bullbugh i,nterms~bf psyc¥ical distahcef or(perhaps)' by ortega yGasset'in tenn,sof dehumanizatign- we I"mayinterp~~t this as the reflection of/!!afone-~,jd~dconcern .with the work of art as"aITi~:aependent"andself"

Hi $ufficjent object:, Ai'l th~se pHilosophers, .we maY1~~ay.;,were only able "to envisage ;'\tn,~Waepthetic attitude asexemplifying" a whole-object i.et~tibn.",v," W'rIi'

, Nor need we stop ,here. Eor we can Iiext,end our in-;'ty"rpI~nition from the adherents of a\icertain tradi'tion"to,its critics. Iri Abstraction and Empathy Wilhelm Worrin-ger, while, explicitly 'attackiing the empathists, in effe'ctquestioned the presuppositions of~a whole continuingway of regarding and evaluating works of art. Undef"theguise of theory a specific preference for one formaf aes"thetic experience had (he claimed) been erected into anabsolute or timeless norm. 'Our traditional aesthetics', he

wrqte in 1906, 'is nothing more than a psychology of the'Classical feeling for art: In the present setting it is in-structive to examine Worringer's characterization of the

~. other form of art or aesthetic experience, the 'transcen-dental' as he called it: which he particularly connectedwith the art of primitive peoples and the Gothic. The

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An Essay

psychic state from which such art springs is, at any rate1:>,9'the standards of 'the classical mind', deficient inawareness ~oth of the self and of clearly defined external6qjects. The art that attempts to appease this state does so'bY 'setting up a point ,Of rest or tranquillity over andagainst,the'oppressive flux of appearances. We need not.(~ven if w.e can) follow Worringer in all that he says. Butit1s poss'ble to see ~J1his rather murky analysis a charac-terization - although ironically enough, an inadequate or~ne-sided characterization - o~ those early psychic states

to which Stokes'essay~ make many references. w \".. "

'It

55

-'[\:]]:eanalogy between art and language has nqw been con-si€leredfirst, from ,the point of view of the~:artist,~ho'

\ -mfl.'Ybe @Ompared,to the speaker of a language, then,frem: the point of view of the audience or spectator, whomay be compared to the person who hears or reads alanguage. Conversely, I have tried to see how far thenotions of meaning something and of understaqding m'ayDe applied to art. However~ recent. philosophy suggests at1}itd point of view from which the analogy may be ,con-sidered. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgensteinshowed how the concept oLa language and what it in-volves may be understood, or our understanding of itdeepened, by considering how we learn language. The sug-gestion, therefore, would be that we should consider ouranalogyfrem the point of view of someone learning eitherlanguage or art. Is there a resemblance between the wayin which language is acquired and the way in which art isacquired? A more fundamental inquiry might be, Does theprocess of learning art tell us anything about the natureof art, in the way in which the precess of learning a lan-guagedoestell us something about the nature oflanguage?

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I shall not answer this question: upon which the issuesraised in section 52 evidently bear. I shall merely makean observation, which in turn may suggest how the ques-tion is to be answered. In the Philosophical Investi9ationsWittgenstein insists that if we try to find out about thenature of. language by considering how someone learnsa language, we must not (as St Augustine did) take thec~se of the person learning his native language. In dis-cussing iconicity I came close to talking of what wouldbe the equivalent in art of the native speaker of alanguage. I stopped short: why I stopped short is,perhaps, because there is no equivalent.

56

The analogy that I have been pursuing through theselater sections is, I want to insist, one between art and

language. The insistence is necessary: for there is anotheranalogy, which bears a superficial resemblance to mine,and which may, deliberately or in error, be substitutedfor it. That is the analogy between art and a code. Eitherit may be specifically held that art has more in commonwith a code than with a language: or else the originalanalogy may be adhered to, but the characteristic fea-tures of a language and a code may become so confusedor transposed, that in point of fact it is to a code, not tolanguage, that art is assimilated. In either case errorensues. (For these. purposes a code may be defined as therepresentation, or mode of representation, of a language.With, of course, this proviso: that there is not a one-onecorrespondence' between languages and codes. Sem-aphore would be an example of a code: so also, thoughless obviously, would be the alphabetic inscription ofEnglish or French.)

I want to consider two ways in which these analogies

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may become confused, or the one substituted for theother. The first, which is straightforward, raises again theissues of understanding and paraphrasability. It is an es-sential; not a contingent, feature of a code that, if weclaim to understand a coded message, and are then askedwhat it says, we should be able to say. We could notunderstand a message in a code unless we were able todecipher it or to formulate it en clair. Accordingly, if weassimilate art to a code, then we will find ourselvesthink-ing (falsely, as we have seen) that our understanding of awork of art will be adequate only to the degree to whichwe can paraphrase it, or can say what we understand byit. Conversely, we may now say that when Hanslick re- '

jected the expressiveness of music, he did so because he .found cogent an argument which implicitly treatedmusic as, or presupposed music to be, a code rather t~ana language.

The confusion between language and a code, alterna-tively the deliberate assimilation of art to a code, alsooccurs - though more obscurely - when certain attemptsare made to apply information theory, which was afterall worked out in connexion with the study of telegra-phic or telephonic channels, to the problems of aesthet-ics. I am .specifically thinking of the attempts to invokethe notion of redundancy to explain, on the one hand,meaning, on the other hand, coherence or unity, as theyoccur in art. I wish to maintain that any such enterprise,in so far as it goes beyond mere suggestion or metaphor,rests upon the assimilation of art to a diminished versionof language, and hence to a diminished version of itself.

In scanning a linear message, we may be able on thebasis of one sign or element to infer, to some degree of.probability, what the next sign or element will be. Thehigher the probability, the more u~necessary it is, given

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the first sign, for the second sign to be set down. Thesuperfluity of one sign on the basis of a preceding sign iscalled redundancy, which in turn admits of degree. Ininverse ratio to a sign's redundancy is the informa.tion itcarries. If a sign is 100 per cent redundaht, it carries noinformation, since its occurrence can be totally pre-

, dieted; however, as its redundancy or' degree of prob~ability decreases, so the infQrmation that it carriesincreases. If we now try to use these notions to_explicatethe aesthetic notions of meaning and unity, we shall say~he foIIow,ing:'The conditions in which an element of awork of art gives rise to meaning are the same as those inwhich information is carried, Le. the conditions increase

in favourability as redundancy approaches zero. By con-trast, the conditions in which a work of art gains in,unityare the same as those in which redundancy is increased:for 'our awareness 'of a pattern unfolding is coincidentwith a large number of our expectations being re-alized.

I now wish to maintain two points. First,. that thenotion of redundancy applies much more readily or ex-tensively to the representation of a language than to alanguage itself. This contention does not, of course, di-rectly bear upon the aesthetic issue: but it has a negC!-tiveforce, in that it removes one argument, based on analogy,for thinking that the notion of redundancy is central toart. Secondly, I want to argue, more directly, that thenotion of redundancy has only a peripheral applicationto art. .

To apply the notion of redundancy presupposes thatwe are dealing with what may generally be thought of asa probabilistic system: a system, that is, where we areable on the basis of one sign or set of signs to make apreferred guess as to the subsequent sign or signs. If we

15°

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An'Essay,,~,

now wish to establish whether it is a language or its rep;

resentation, i.e. a code, that most ad~quatel{;'satisfiessuch a model, we must first consider wH'atare the factorsthat would justify us in assigning transition probabilitiesbetween successiveelements in a message.Roughly, therewould seem to be two kinds 'of determinant: syntax 'orformation rules, aridempirical frequencies. I shall not tryto assess the comparative role;in a code and in language,

"of syntactical constraints over t4e sequen~e of elements:though we may already remark a significant difference inthe fact that the elements or alphabet pi' a coge ?,re de-numerable, whereas no precise' limit can be set to thevocabulary of a language.' But if we ~urn to statisticalfrequencies, the difference.in the use that (!:anbe made ofthese in the two cases, seems to be one of principle. ForthougH it may be possi~le to use statistical material toassign a probability to the success,orof some. specifiedeode":element;the corresponding'assumption 'tEat wouldhave to be employed in respect of,language seems quiteunwarranted: namely, that. the employment of a givenstring of words makes'probable its reemployment.

As for any direct argument to the 'effectth~t art, or anyessential feature of it, can be explicated in terms of re-dundancy, the case seems even weaker. And there arethree considerations that weigh against it: ,/

In the first place, the notion of redundancy pre-supposes linearity. There must be a specifiedsense or di-rection in which the work of art is to be read: and it isonly in the temporal kinds of art that' such a directioncan be unambiguously posited. Secondly, if it runscounter to the creative character of language to a~sumethat the 4igher the occurrence of a certain sequence, thehigher the probability of. its recurrence, the cor-responding assumption about art must be even less well

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founded. Of course, there are areas of art where we find

very marked stringencies as to the sequence of elements;,I- am thinking of the rules of melody, or poetic metre. But

these string~ncies cannot be equated with probabilitiesbased on frequency. For it is only if the stringencies havebeen adopted, that we shall find the corresponding con-straints exemplified: equally, it is only if we know thatthe stringencies have been adopted, that we are justifiedin modifying our expectation to "anticipate them. Jhird-ly (and the last sentence suggests this point), even if itwere possible, to explain meaning or coherence in art interms of redundancy, mere redundancies, even rule-governed redundancie?, would not, suffice: we shouldrequire felt or experienced redundancies, Not every re-dundancy generates a corresponding expectation; nor is itany part of the understanding of art that we should beequally aware of, or attentive to, all transitions that exhi-bit high frequency. A central question in ~the psychologyof art is why some redundancies give rise to expectations,and others do not.

Equally, it must be pointed out that not every expec-tation in art is based on redundancy. We may expectMozart to treat a theme, or van Eyck to order a mass ofdetail, in a particular way, but we could not formulatethis in terms of past performances. Those who are hope-ful of the application of information theory to the prob-lems of art tend to talk of styles or conventions as

'internalized probabilistic systems'. That is ,consonant,with their approach. In Renaissance and BaroqueWolfflin is sharply critical of the theory; there attributedto Goller, that the great changes of style can be attributedto tedium or a jaded sensibility. If the foregoing charac-terization of style were acceptable, there would be muchto be said for Goller's theory.

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57

Jhave; then, been trying to elucidate the notion of art asa:form of life by pursuing the analogy that the phraseitself intimates: that with language. However a point is~@achedat which the' analogy runs out. I want in thjs anddie subsequent section to touch on two important limi-tations that must be set upon it.

But, first, an objection to the analogy as such, which Imention solely in order to get it out of the way. It mightbe argued that art cannot be compared to language inthat the two differ radically in function: for the ~unctionof language is to communica'te ideas, whereas the func-tion of art is something quite different" e.g. to arouse,,~express, evoke emotions, etc. Alternatiyely, it is the func- ,"tion of one of the two uses of language, i.e. the scientific,to communicate ideas, tho.ugh it is the function of the.other use, i.e. the poetic; to express' emotion, and the~nalogy is therefore ambiguo\ls in a significant respect, in,that it does not state which of the two uses of language isintended. But the theory that language is essentially con-cerned with the communication of ideas is a dogmaticnotion, which does not even take account of the variety

\

of ways in which ideas are communicated. However, thetheory of the two uses of language (as in the criticaltheory of I. A. Richards) constitutes no real improvementon it, incorporating as it does the original error: for itwould never have been necessary to postulate the poeticuse if the account of the scientific use had not been taken

over unexamined from the theory of the single use.However, a related point constitutes the first of the

genuine limitations to the analogy. To compare art tolanguage runs into the difficulty that some works of art,

more generally some kinds of work of art, e.g. poems, ,

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Art and its 01>jects

plays, novels, are actually in language. In the case 9f theliterary arts, does the'-analogy simply collapse into ident-ity? Or are we to observe here ~adifferel1ce in level, and

, say that literary works of art at one and the. same 'timeare like linguistic structures and also hav~ as their com- ,poneqts linguistic structures?

ill!There certainly seems no easy way of decidingwhether it, is fruitful to persist.rin the analogy oyer therange of the literary arts; In view of the way we"havebeen using the analogy, it .looks as !'though the 'crucial

question to ask would be, Is ~here a ~pecial sense in whichwe could be "said' to understand a poem or a novel overand above our understanding of the words, phrases, sen-tlnces, that occur in tit? But it remains unclt~'arhow this

question 'is to be decided. Fo:r;i\,instance:If it is asserted, asit is in the l';{ewCriticisrri', .that understanding Roetry. isgrasping a certain structure of metaphors, is ihi~, t~m-tamount to giving an affirmativ~' answer to <1'this,frcfues-tion?i1' ~~' "

""

58 'f:

The second!limitation th~t must be placed"on the analogybetween art and language is more pervasive, in that itoperates across the whole range of the arts: and thaUs,the far higher degree of tolerance' or permissibility thatexists in art. In language, for instance, we can recognizedegrees of grammaticality, or we distinguish betweenthose statements to which a semantic interpretation isassigned, those where one may be imposed, and thosewhere no such interpretation is feasible. It is evident that,though works of aTt can become incoherent, it is imposs-ible to construct a set of rules or a theory by reference towhich this could be exhibited.

At the risk of obviousness it must b~ emphasized that

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~hat we have encountered here is a defe@tina certain

analogy between art and something else, not a defect inart itself. It 'would be wrong, for instance)Vto think thatant e~hibits to a high degree something that language tol-erates only to a low degree, i.e. wnat we might think of as'vagueness'; To counteract this temptation we needtoiseethe positive side to the indetermina<;;y possessed by art::m0re specifically: how this indeterminacy accommo-€lates, or brin~s to a convergence1 demands, chara<;,i;t~ristically made of art~by tile spectator-' and deman~s@haracteristically';.maderpf art by t~e artist. We alre,ady

nave 9,urV'eyedsome material that bearsuBpn,this.From the spectator's point it is, as we have seep (sec-

tf6n38), req~ired that he ~p.6uld be able to structure o~jnterpret the work of art ~J1more ~ways than ~ne. The.:freedom in perception and understanding that this allows u

ih~n1is one of the"recognized values that art possesses. But,tH:islirfreedomis acceptable only if it is not gained at the

.k. '

. @~penseMofthe arb'st: it must, therefore, be congruent,with some requirement of his.

To identify this requirement, we need to realize thai, atany rate over a great deal of art, the artist is chqrac-teristically operating at the'intersection of more than oneintention: It would, therefore, be quite, alien to his pur-poses'if there were rules in art which allowed him toconstruct works which could be unambiguously cor-related with a 'meaning': whether this meaning is envis-aged as an inner state or a message. For it would be of nointerest to hiril to construc;t such works: or, to put itanother way, his distinctive problem would always con-sist in the fusion or condensation of works constructed in

this way. .

A misleading way of putting the preceding pointwould be to say that all (or most) art is ~ambiguous'. Mis- i

,'.:

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Art and its Objects

leading: because it suggests that the intentions whosepoint of intersection is a work of art are of the same typeor order: for instance, that they are all meanings. But itneeds to be appreciated that very often the 'confluencewill occur between a meaning and, say, a purely 'formal'intention. By a formal intention I mean something likethe desire to assert the materiality or physical propertiesof the medium: alternatively, an intention connectedwith the tradition, in the sense of wanting to modify it,or to realize it, or to comment upon it., It is instructive to reflect how little any of these con-siderationsarise in an area that is often in philosophybracketed with art, i.e. morality. Once this is appreciatedto the full it should cause little surprise that, whereasmorality is rule-dependent, art isn't.

59

In the last section the word 'incoherent' was introduced

in connexion with defective works of art, and it might bethought an error that this was not taken up, ,since itwould have provided us with a means towards the sol-ution of our problem. For do we not have here a conceptfor characterizing deviation in the domain of art, anal-ogous to that of ungrammaticality or nonsense as appliedto language?

The suggestion is attractive: incorporating, as it does,an ancient idea, at least as old as Aristotle, that the

peculiar virtue of a work of art consists in its unity, orthe relation of parts to whole. There are, however, cer-

tain difficulties that emerge in the course of working outthis suggestion, which somewhat detract from its primafacie utility.

The appeal of the suggestion lies in the idea that wecan straightforwardly equate the coherence demanded of

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'Works of art with some' clear-cut concept of order as thislIaS been systematically developed in some adjacenttheory: for instance, with mathematical concepts of sym-metry or ratio, alternatively with the concept of Gestaltas this occurs in experimental psychology. The trouble,'however, is that any such equation yields us at best a{\:!;laracterization of certain versions,. or historical vari-

ap<ts,of the coherence demand: it does not give us a uni-versal account. It allows, for instance, for thel,lenaissance notion of concinnitas, which was,

sjgnificahtly enough, developed with a mathematicalmodel explicitly in mind: it will not, however, allow forthe types of order that we find exemplified in many ofthe great Romanesque sculptural ensembles or, again, inthe work of late Monet or Pollock.

There are a number of considerations that account for

tlilis inadequacy. In the first place, the coherence that weleok for in a work of art is always relative to the el-ements that the artist is'required to assemble within it.(lhe requirement may, of course, originate either exter-J1ally or internally to the artist.) In this way all judge-ments of coherence are comparative: that,is to say, thework of art is pronounced to be more coherent than itmight otherwise have been, given its elements, alterna-tively more coherent than some other arrangement ofthose same elements.

Secondly, there are likely to be considerable differencesin weighting between the different elements,. so thatwhereas some elements are treated as highly malleableand can be adjusted at will, to fit the demands of com-position, other elements are comparatively intractableand their original characteristics must be sqfeguarded. Anexample of a somewhat superficial kind comes from theMadonna della Sedia where, it has been pointed out, .

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Raphael, confronted by the possibiljt){fof having two .adjacent circular shapes on his canvas;'preferred to flattenout the knob of the chair back"'rather than distort the eye,

of the ln~flnt Chris!: in acting thus he was implicitly ac-

cepting,a certfin evaluation concernifJ.gthe"integrityof<hiselemehts. It is arguable that tne MorelIian sc~~dules ofhand, ear, finger, are <;}efective,fromthe point of view ofsci~ptific connoisseurship, just because t~ey fail to recog-

I .

nize the existence,.of such constraints qpon the artist.

Thirdly, the elements themselve;; will not always !pehomogeneous as to type or matter. For instance"in q1r~'~?in Btaque still-lifes from 19,d' onwards t~e elements tobe ordered will include the profiles ,of the various objectsthai'constitute tHe still life and also the materiality wofthe

pictu~e surface. It is, fhdeed, necessary to ap,preciate th~'vyry wide range of elemeuts that are characteristicallyassemb"led in works of art, if we ar«<to see why there

, "" .'

always is a problem of order In art. E. ' qually, this enablesus~to see why "the argument, which 'originates with Plot-

inu~! that beauty cannot consist in organizatiou,i'because""if it did:' we would not be able to predicate beauty oftotally simple objects, is vacuous in its application to art.For within art there will be (virtually) no such cases. ,~,

Tbe foregoing considerations alone would account forthe very limited utility of introducing strict or systematicnotions of order or regularity in the explication of artis-tic order. But to them we can add another consideration,

whose consequences are far-reaching indeed. And that is.that in many instances, the kind of order that is soughtby the artist depends from historical precedents: that is,he will assemble his elements in ways that self-con-sciously react against, or over,tly presuppose, ar-rangements that have already been tried out within the.tradition. We might call such forms of order 'elliptical',

!58

An Essay

in;,that the work of art does not, 'in its manifest proper-..ti~s,present us with enough evidence to comprehend theprder it exhibits. This is, of course, something to be metwith more 'at certain historical periods than others. It isno coincidence that the art-historical term which we'use

to chara'Cterize a period when this phenomenon wasIllOst in evidence, 'mannerism', has a twotold meaning: itconnotes at once erudition concerning the past, and aGleeppreoccupation with style. .

60

~nbugh has already been said in this essay to suggest thatOUI'"initial hope of elicitihg a definition 6f art, or of awork of art, was e;xcessive: to suggest this, though not tb,pr@veit. However, it may anyhow be that a more ,fruit-flit as well as a more realistic; tnterprise would be tosee,k, not""a definition; but a general method for ident-\ifying works of art, and, In the concluding considerationof the preceding section, there is an indication how this

might be'Ybbtained. For the met~od might~take this form:that we should, first, pick out certain obje<;;tsas originalOr primary works.of art; ahd that we should then set up"

sdme rules which, successively applied .to the originalworks of art, will give us (within certain r.ough limits) allsubsequent or derivative works of art.

A strong analogy suggests itself between such a recur-sive method of identifying works 9f art and the project ofa generative grammar in which all the well-formed sen~tences or a language are" specified in terms of certainkernel sentences and a set of rewrite rilles. The majordifference between the two enterprises would be that,whereas the derivations of which a grammar takes ac-count are permissible or valid derivations, the transform-ations to which a ~heory of art needs to be adequate are

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those which have been made over the ages: identifiableworks of art constitute a historical not an ideal, set.

It is a corollary of this last point that if we could laydown the rules in accordance with which the historicalderivations have been made, we should have a theory

which not merely was comprehensive of all works of art,it would also give us some insight into their formation.

But can we arrive at a formulation pf the!'e rul~s? It is

important that at'"the outset we should be aware of theimmensity of the task. It is, in the first place, evident thatit would be insufficient to have rules which merely al-lowed us to derive from one work of art another of the

same, or roughly the same, structure. We may regard itas the persistent ambition of Academic theory to limitthe domain of art to works that can be regarded as sub-stitution-instances of an original or canonical work:,butthis ambition has been consistently frustrated.

Of course, there are historical derivations that have.been of this simple form, e.g. the changes in sonnet formwhich comprise much of the history of early Renaissanceliteratures. But as we move out from this narrow base,

we encounter increasing complexity. The next cases wemight consider are those which involve the embedment,total or partial, of one work of art in another. Thesimplest example here is that of allusion or quotation: amore complex instance, cited by 1. A. I).ichards in ThePrinciples of Literary Criticism, is provided by the secondchorus of Hellas, where we have, a~ Richards puts it, aborrowing by Shelley of Milton's 'voice'.

There are, however, a substantial number of trans-formations in the domain of art which are more radical

still, and require for their understanding rules much stron-ger. Such transformations consist in nothing less thanthe deletion of the principal characteristics of earlier art,

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An Essay

eiected either fnstantaneously or seriaiIy over time.ltxamples of such metamorphoses would be the great sty-listic changes, as these have been studied by those 'philo-$ophical' art-historians who have sensed most clearlyt~e essentially transformational character of art, ...e.g.Wolfflin, Riegel, Fo<;:illon.It would be possible to interpretthese powerful thinkers as attempting to formulate therecursive devices whereby art proceeds. Their actualachievement was subject to three limitations. In the first~lace, they had far too narrow a conception of the range@fdevices operative in art: symptomatic of this would be,~or irlstance, Wolfflin's failure to account for, or, for thatmatter, to see that he had to account fbr, Mannerism in

,pis stylistic cycle. Secondly, they had no theoreticalr;meansof fitting together stylistic changes on the general~.r social level with changes of style on an individual orexpressive level: Wolfflin's famous programme of 'art his-t0ry without names' is in effect the denial that there isany need to make the fit since all change occurs primarilyor operatively on the nibre general level. Thirdly, alltpese writers were confused about the status of their in-v~stigation. From the fact that it is in the nature of artthat it chang~s or has a history, they tried to move to theconclusion that the particular history it has, the par-ticular changes it undergoes, are grounded in the natureof art. , .

It would seem to be a feature of contemporary art thatthe transformations it exhibits are more extensive in

character than the stylistic changes with which the philo-sophical art-historians concerned themselves. For it is ar-guable that whereas the earlier changes affected only themore or lysS de~ailed properties of a work of art, e.g.painterly versus linear, in the art,of our day one work ofart generates another by the supersession of its most gen. .

II'

16r

Art and its Objects

eral or its all-over properties, e.g. Pont-Aven as the suc-cessor of Impressionism, hard-edge painting as thesuccessor of abstract expressionism.

There are two general problems that arise in connexionwith the devices"interms of which I have suggested thatthe history of art might be set out. These,problems arevery difficult, and I shall simply mention them. The firstconcerns the nature ()f these, devices. Are they theoreti-cal postulates made by the art-historian in order toexplain the course of art, or do they enter moresubstantively into the activity of the artist, say as regu-lative principles either conscious or unconscious?Perhapsthis distinction need not be tOd/sharp. We have seen thatit is characteristic of the artist that he works under theconcept of art. In q.ny age this concept will probablybelong to a theory, o{which the artist may well be un-aware. It then becomes unclear, perhaps eve~ immaterial,whether we are to say that the artist,works under such atheory. .

Secondly, How much of art should we hope to accountfor in this way? In linguistic theory a distinction is madebetween two kinds of originality: that to which anygrammatical theory must be adequate, which is in-herently rule-abiding, and that which depends on the cre-ation of rules: It would be paradoxical if originality ofthe second kind did not also exist in art.

61

In the preceding section I ha~e indicated some kind ofscheme of reference, or framework, within which a workof art can be identified. This does not, of course, mean

that any spectator, who wishes to identify something as awork of art, must be able to locate it at its precise pointwithin such a framework. It is enough that he should

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have an acquaintance with that local part of t~e frame-- work where the work occurs: alternatively, that he

should be able to take this on trust fromjsomeone whosatisfiesthis condition.

A far more difficult problem arises concerning the re-lation between the conditions necessary for identifying awork of art and those necessary for its understanding. Towhat extent do we ne~d to be able to locate the work ofart in its historical setting before we can understand it?The answer that we give to this question is likely to varyfrom one work of art to another, depending upon theextent to which the forID'ativehistory of the work actu"ally enters into, or affects, the content: to put it anotherway, the issue depends on how much the style of thework is an institutional, and how much it is an express-ive, matter. As a rough principle it might be laid downthat those works or art which result from the applicationof the mOreradical transformational deviceswill,requirefor their understanding a,correspondingly greater aware-ness of the devices that went to their formation.

Two examples may serve to make-this last point. Mer-leau-Ponty suggeststhat much of the dramatic tension ofJulien Sorel's return to Verrieres arises from the sup-pression of the kind of thoughts or interior detail that wecould expect to find in such an account; we get in onepage what might have taken up five. If this is so, then itwould seem to follow that, for the understanding of thispassage, the reader of Le Rouge et Ie Noir needs to .cometo the book with at any rate some acquaintance with theco~ventions of -the early-nineteenth-century novel. Thesecond example is more radical. In 1917 Marcel Du-champ submitted to an art exhibition a porcelain urinat'with the signature of the manufacturer attached in his,Duchamp's, handwriting. The significance of such icono-

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Art and its Objects

clastic gestures is manifold; but in so far as the gesture isto be seen as falling within art, it has been argued (byAdrian Stokes)that this requires that we project on to theobject's 'patterns and shape. .. a significance learnedfrom many pictures and sculptures'. In other words, itwould be difficult to appreciate what Duchamp wastrying to do without an over-all knowledge of the historyof art's metamorphoses.

We can also approach the matter the other way round.If there are many cases where our understanding of awork does not require that we should be able to identifyit precisely, nevertheless there are very few cases indeedwhere our understanding of a work is not likely to sufferfrom the fact that we misidentify it, or that we falselylocate it from a historical point of view. It is in this re-spect instructive to consider the vicissitudes of appr~ci-ation undergone by works that have been systematicallymisidentified, e.g. pieces of Hellenistic sculpture that forcenturie9 were believed to have a classical provenance.

62

The argument of the preceding section appears to disputea well-entrenched view about art: for it suggests that it isonly works of art that come above - whereas, on theordinary view, it is those works which fall below - acertain level of originality or self-consciousness, Whichneed or can acquire a historical explanation. Now, in sofar as the ordinary view is not mere prejudice, the disputemay be based upon a misunderstanding. For the kind ofexplanation I have been talking of is, it will be observed,one in purely art-historical terms, whereas what is ordi-narily objected to is a form of explanation which wouldsee the work of art as the product of extraartistic con-ditions. It is not historical determination as such, it is

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An Essay

(more specificillly)social determination, that is thoughtincompatible with the highest values of art: spontaneity,originality, and full expressiveness.

The question that now arises, whether social deter-mination is in fact incompatible with these values, is hardto answer: largely because it' presupposes a clearer ormore precisely formulated notion of social determin,ationthan is generally forthcoming from either the adherentsor the critics of social explanation.

It is evident that, if one reads into the notion of socialdetermination somethjng akin to compulsion, or gen-erally of a coercive character, then it will follow thatexplanation. in social terms and the imputation of thehighest expressive values are incompatible. And certaiplysome of the most su,ccessfulattempts to date to explainworks of art by reference to their social conditions haveseen it as their task to demonstrate some kind of con-

straining relation obtaining between the social environ-ment and art. Thus, there have been studies of thestringencies impJicit in patronage, or in the com-missioning of works of art, or in the taste of a rulingclique. However, this interpretation cannot exhaust thenotion of social determination: if only because it con-spicuously fails to do justice to the theoretical characterthat is generally thought to attach to social explanation.All such explanation would be on a purely anecdotallevel.

Another interpretation, therefore, suggestsitself, alongthe following lines. To say of a particular work of artthat it is socially determined, or to explain it in socialterms, is to exhibit it as an instance of a constant cor-relation: a correlation, that is, holding between a certainform of art, on the one hand, and a certain form of sociallife, o~ the other. Thus, any particular explanation pre-

165

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M and its Objects

supposes a hypothesis of the form, Whenever A then B.To say in gerl'eral"that art is socially <ietermined is to dono more than to subscribe to a h~~ristic maxim,ad-

vocating the framing and testing of SUGhhypotheses:~Thisinterpretation obviously derives' from, traditional em-piricism, and traditionah empiricism is surely right in in-sistiDg that, as long as the hypotheses are no more thanstatements of constant conjunction, <j.,nyexplanation by

r~ference to them in no way prejudices!.fr~edom.,A workof art may be socially determined in this' sense~>andalsodisplay, to any degree,wspontal1eitx, originality, express"

,iveness, etc. However, a fairly cq,ndusive consideration

"against this interpretation of social determination is theapparent impossibility<'of finding plausible, let aldhe~true,hypotheses of the required "character: which may in turn'be"related to a specific difficultyqf principle, which isthat of identifying forms of art andJorms of social life"insuch a way that they m.ight be found to recur acrqsshistory. '

Accordingly:, if..the thesis of social determination isboth to be credible and to enjoy a theoretical status, a

further interpretation is required. More specifically, aninterpretation is required'which,involves a"'more intimatelink between the social and artistic phenomena thanmere correlation. A likely suggestion is that we,?houldlook for a common component to social life and to art,which also colours and perhaps is coloured by the re-maining components of which these phenomena are con-stituted. And we may observe among Marxist critics orphilosophers of culture attempts, if of a somewhat sche-matic kind, to evolve such patterns of explanation: one,for instance, in terms of social consciousness, another interms of modes .or processes of labour. The one viewwould be that social consciousness is at once part of the

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An Essay

'fabric of social life, and is also r:eflected in the art of theage. The other view would be it is the same processes oflabour that occur in the infq.structure of society, whe:r;~they are framed in the production 'relations, and alsp pro-'Vide art with its accredited vehicles. On this latter view

the difference between the worker anp. the artist wouldlie in the conditions, not in the character, of their ac-

tI-\;,ity.What the labourer does in an alienated fasp-ion, atthe command of another, deriving therefore neitherpi<ofit nor benefit to himself from it, the artist does, incomparative autonomy. '" ,

If we now ask whether social determination under-

stood in this third way is or is not compatible with free- .dom and the other values of expression, the answer must,Me"in the detail that the specific .pattern of explanationexhibits. In the case where thepfocesses 'Of mqdes of

labour are. the intervening factor, we perhaps alreadyhave enough of the detail to work out an answer: given,that is, we can accept a, particular view of freedom and"Self-consciou~pess.A further point, however, would alsoseem worth makin g in connexion with this third in-

, ,'"

terpretatiort of social determination: and that is that thedetermination now occurs on an extremely high level ofgenerality or abstractness. \ The link between art andsociety is in the broadest terms. This may further suggestthat the determination cannot be readily identified withconstraint or necessity.

f

63 .<.

The conclusion, toward which the argument of the pre-ceding four sections has been moving, might be put bysaying that art is essentially historical. With this in mind,we might now return for the last time to the bricoleurproblem, and see what light this throws tipon it.

167

Art and its Objects,

One point immediately suggests itself. And that is,when we consider the question asked Qf any particular

. stuff pr process, Why is this an accredited vehicle of art?,we need to distinguish between two stages at which itmight be raised, and accordingly between two ways inwhich it might be answered. In its primary occurrencewe must imagine the. question raised in a context inwhich there are as yet no arts, but to the consideration ofwhich we perhaps bring to bear certain very general prin-ciples of art (such as those specified in section 47)..In itssecondary occurrence the question is raised in a contextin which certain arts are already going concerns. It willbe apparent that, when the question is raised in thissecond way, the answer it receives will in very large partbe determined.by the analogies and the disanalogies thatwe can "constructbetween the existing arts and the art inquestion. In other words, the question will benefit fromthe comparatively rich context in which it is asked. It is,for instance, in this way that the question, Is the film anart? is currently discussed.

Last time I considered the question I argued that it

gained in force or significance as the context was en-riched. We can now see that the enrichment of the con-text is a historical matter. In consequence the question, aspart of a serious or interesting inquiry, belongs to thelater or more developed phases, not to the earlier phases,a fortiori not to the origin, of art. Yet it is paradoxicallyenough in connexion with the beginnings of art that it isgenerally raised. . . ..

64

'This', someone might exclaim, 'is more like aesthetics',contrasting the immediately preceding discussion withthe dry and pedantic arguments centring around the

168

~An Essay

logical or ontological status of works of art that occupiedthe opening sections. Such a sentiment, though com-prehensible enough, would be misguided. For it is notonly from a philosophical point of view that it is necess-ary to get these matters as right as possible. Within artitself there is a constant preoccupation with, and in artthat is distinctively eaily or distinctively late much em-phasis upon, the kind of thing that a work of art is. Criti-cal categories or concepts as diverse as magic, irony,ambiguity, illusion, paradox, arbitrariness, are intendedto catch just this aspect of art. (And it is here perhaps thatwe have an explanation of the phenomenon recorded insection I I that a painting which was not a representation

\ of Empty Space could yet properly be entitled 'EmptyiiiSpace'. For the title of this picture would be explained by

reference to the reference that the picture itself makes topainting.)

It needs, however, at this stage to be pointed out thatthe arguments in the opening sections are less conclusivethan perhaps they appeared to be. Certainly some con-ventional arguments to the effect that (certain) works arenot (are not identical with) physical objects were dis-posed of. But it could be wrong to think that it followsfrom this that (certain) works of art are (are identicalwith) physical objects. The difficulty here lies in thehighly elusive notion of 'identity', the analysis of whichbelongs to the more intricate part of general phil-osophy.

65

It will be observed that in this essay next to nothing hasbeen said about the subject that dominates much con-temporary aesthetics: that of the evaluation of art, and itslogical character. This omission is deliberate.

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There is little in the literature of aesthetics that can be rec-

om~t;nded in an l'Ullqualified way. I can enumerate the"",'

'Yorks that 1 have found most valuable or supgestive:/hey~re K,mt's C,ritiqye of J!!.flgment'/)theintroduction to Hegel'sPhilosophy of ,Fine Art, Alain's Systeme des Beaux-Arts,};rnst Gombri~i1's Art and Illusion and '~Meditations on aHobby Horse,'"a~t t~e essays,of, .f\driaI1Stokes. I have alsq!been deeplx influen~ed by the thought of Freud and Witt-~ ~ ~

gensteih, thoug:h.:their writings specifically on"aesthetics a~e, .jUdged bythe high standards that th~y themselv~s impose,disappointing. .

Most contemporary; writing onaesthetjcs takes the form,of articles. In ~iting "these articles I employ th:~ followingabbreviations: Yij.

'.,

"Aesthetics and Language, ed. .Wqliam

Elton (Oxford, 1954),Aesthetics T;o-day, ed. Morns Philipson

(Cleveland and New York, 1961)Philosophy Looks at the Arts, ed. ]. Mar-

golis (New York, 1962) .jCollected Papers on Aesthetics, ed. Cyril

Barrett, S.]..(Oxford, 1965)Aesthetic Inquiry: EsS{lYs in Art Criticism

and the Philosophy of Art, ed. MonroeC. Beardsley and Hubert M. Schneller(Belmont, Calif., 1967)

American Philosophical QuarterlyBritish Journal of Aesthetics

~

Elton

Philipson

Margolis

Barrett

BeardsleyAmer. Phil. Q.B.f.A.

171

Art and its Objects

Journal of Aesthetics and Art CriticismJournal of PhilosophyProceedingsof the Aristotelian SocietyProceedings of the. Aristotelian Society,

Supplementary VolumePhilosophy and Phenomenological

ResearchPhilosophical QuarterlyPhilosophical ReviewPsychological Review

].A.A.C.J. Phil.P.A.S.

PhjJ.and Phen.P.A.S.Supp.Vol.

Res.Phil. Q.Phil. RevPsych. Review

Sections 2-3

For traditional treatments of the question, see .~.g. Plato, Re-

public, Book X; Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, ~rans. AylmerMaude (Oxford, 1930); Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, 2nd ed.,trans. Douglas Ainslie (London, 1922); Roger Fry, Vision andDesign (London, 1924); Ernst Cassirer, ;4n Essay on Man(New Haven, 1944); Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition inArt and Poetry (New York, 1953). >;. .

For the sceptical view, see Morris Weitz, Philosophy of theArts (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), and 'The Role of Theory inAesthetics', ].A.A.C., Vol. XV (September 1957),pp. 27-35,reprinted in Margolis and in Beardsley; Paul Ziff, 'The Taskof Defining a Work of Art', Phil. Rev.~ Vol. LXII (January1953), pp. 58-78; W. B. Gallie, 'Essentially Contested Con-cepts', P.A.S.,Vol. LVI (1955-6),pp. 167-98,and 'Art as Essen-tially Contested Concept', Phil. Q., Vol..VI (April 1956),pp.97-114; C. 1. Stevenson, 'On "What Is a Poem?"', Phil. Rev.,Vol. LXVI (July 1957), pp. 329-60. This approach lar.gelyderives from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Inves-tigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953), e.g., pars.65-7, and The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958),passim.

For a criticism of the extreme sceptical view, see e.g. J.Margolis, The Language of Art and Art Criticism (Detroit,1965),Chap. 3; Michael Podro, 'The Arts and Recent English

f172 I

,~

An Essay

Philosophy', Jahrbuch fUr Asthetik und Allgemeine Kunst-wissenschaft, Band9 (1964),pp. 216-26.

Sections 6-8

There isa voluminous contemporary literature on the onto-logical status of the work of art, which is reviewed -in R.Hoffmann, 'Conjectures and Refutations on the OntologicalStatus of the Work of Art', Mind, Vol. LXXI,(October 1962),pp. 5I2-20. More generally, see e.g. Bernard Bosanquet,Three Lectures on Aesthetics (London, 1915), Chap. II; C. 1.Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valutltion (La Salle,IlL, 1946), Chaps. 14-15; J.-P. Sartre, The Psychology of Im-agination, ,trans. anon. (New York, 1948), Part IV; MargaretMacdonald, 'Art and Imagination', PAS., Vol. LIII (1952-3),'pp:' 205-26; Mikel Dufrenne, Phenomenologie de]'l;xperience Esthhique (Paris, 1953); Jeanne Wacker, 'Par-ticular Works of Art', Mind, Vol. LXIX (April 1960), pp.223-33, reprinted in Barrett; J. Margolis, The Language of Artand Art Criticism (Detroit, 1965), Chap. IV; P. F. Strawson,'Aesthetic Appraisal and Works of Art', The Oxford ReviewWoo3 (Michaelmas 1966), pp. 5""'13.

Sections Il-I3

On the alleged incompatibility between the physical and therepresentational properties of a work of art, see SamuelAlexander, Beauty and Other Forms of Value (London, 1933),Chap. III; and Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York,1953). For criticism of this view, see Paul Ziff, 'Art and the"Object of Art" " Mind, Vol. LX (October 1951), pp. 466-80,reprinted in Elton. .

A sophisticated variant of the view, which neverthelessretains the notion of illusion I is to be found in E. H. Gom-brich, Art and Illusion (London, 1960). On Gombrich, seeRudolf Arnheim's review of Art and Illusion in Art Bulletin,

L73

.-',""" ,'".~"--, .'.0-"'-""J-' ~~--

Art an~ its OBjects

Vbl. XLIV (March 1962),pp. 75~, reprinted in his Towards aPsycH'ology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966); andRichard Wollheim, 'Art and Illusion', 13.J.A.~Vol.JII (January1963), pp. '15-37.

On representation more generally, see J.-P. Sartre, The,,"Psychology of Imagination, trans. anon. (New. York, 1948);Vincent Tomas, 'Aesthetic Vision', Phil. Rev., Vol. LXVIII(January 1959),pp. 52-67; MauriceMerIeau~Ponty,I.'CEiletI'Esprlt (faris, i964); Richard Wollheim, On Dr~wing allObject '(Londbn, 1965-); and Nelson Goodman " Languages of.,

Art (Indianapolis and New York, 1968).it

"

'" Section 13 " .'

'II If>

Sections 15-19

For the first view of expression, see Eugen~{Veron, Aesthe"t-ics, trans. W. H. Armstrong (London, 1879). Veron deeplyinfluenceQ. Leo Tolstoy, Whauis Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude(Oxford, 1930). A latter-day version of this view occurs inHarold Rosenberg, The Tradhion of the N"ew (New York,1959).

For a criticism 'of this view, see Susanne Langer, Phil-

osophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), Chap. VII,where a distinction is made between a 'symptomatic' and 'a'semantic' reference to feeling; and Monroe Beardsley, Aes-

thetics (New York, 1958). See also Paul Hindemith, A Com-poser's World (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).

For the second view of expression, see 1. A. Ricpards,Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1925).

For a criticism of this view, see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, and

174

Q , An Ess,ay

rMonroe Beardsley, 'The Affective Fallacy', Sewanee Review,tVII (Winter 1949),"pp. 458-88, reprinted in'W. K. Wimsatt,Jr, The yerbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954).

A composite view is to be found in,.e.g. Curt]. Ducasse,The Philosophy of'Art(New York, 1929)'"' ,

On expression more generally, see John Dewey, Art as Ex-perience (N~w York, 1934);Rudolph Arnh~jm, Art and .visualPerception (Berkeley and Los Angeles~"I954), Chap. X" and'The G,estalt Theory ofvExpression', Psych. Review, Vol. 56(May 1949), pp. 156-72, reprinted in his Towards a,Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966); LudwigWittgens\~in, ,Philosophica~.Investigations, el G. E. !'1M.Ansf=ombe (Qxford, 1953); Richard Wollheim, 'Expressionand E)(pressi~riisIn" Revue In~il'nationplede Philosophie, 18(~964), pp., 27°;;;89,!:,and""Expression',Royal Institute of 'philo-"sophy Lectures 1966-1967, Vol. I:~ The Humall Agent (~oncdon, 1967), Chap. XIII, pp. 227-44; Nelson ~Goodman,banguages of Art (Indianapolis and New York~,1968);and,GuySir.<::ello,Mind and Art (Princeton, N.J., 197~).

~~~2~ .:For the Ideal theory, see~Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, 2nd

edn, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London, 1922); and R. G.Collingwood, The Principles' of Art (London, 1938). Inhis later writings Croce considerably diverged from the theoryhere attributed to him.

For criticism of the theory, see W. B. Gallie, 'The Function

of Philosophical Aesthetics', Mind, V;ol LVII. (1948), pp.302-21, reprinted in Elton.

On the importance of the medium, see Samuel Alexander,Art and the Material (Manchester, 1925), reprinted in hisPhilosophical and Literary Pieces (London, 1939); JohnDewey, Art, as Experience (New York, 1934); Edward Bul-lough, Aesthetics, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (Stanford,1957); and Stuart Hampshire, Feeling and Expression(London, 1960).

175

~.

Art and its Objects

The defence of the Ideal theory in terms of 'conceived'versus 'physical' medium is to be found in John Hospers,'The Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art', Philosophy, Vol.XXXI (October 1956),pp. 291-308.

On images, see Alain, Systeme des Beaux-Arts (Paris, 1926),Livre I; J.-P. Sartre, The Psychology of Imagjnation, trans.anon. (New York, 1948);and Hideko Ishiguro, 'Imagination',British Analytical Philosophy, ed. Alan Montefiore and Ber-nard Williams (London, 1966).'

Section 24

For the Presentational theory, see e.g. D. W. Prall, AestheticAnalysis (New York, 1936); S. C. Pepper, The Basis of Criti-cism in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), SupplementaryEssay, and The Work of Art (Bloomington, Ind., 1955),Chap.I; Harold Osborne, Theory of Beauty (London, 1952); andMonroe Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York, 1958).

A special variant of the theory is to be found in SusanneLanger, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953),and Problems inArt (New York, 1957).

Section 25

On the 'music of poetry', see A. C. Bradley, 'Poetry forPoetry's Sake', in Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London 1909);1.A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London, 1929); CleanthBrooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, rev.ed. (New York, 1950),Chap. III; Northrop Frye, Anatomy ofCriticism (Princeton, 1957); T. S.Eliot, 'Music of Poetry', inOn Poetry and Poets (London, 1957).

Section 26

For the Shaftesbury-Lessing Theory, see Shaftesbury,Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1714),Chap. I; G. W. E. Lessing, Laocoon (1766), Chaps. 2, 3, 24 and25.

176

An Essay

On the depiction of movement, see also Alain, Systeme desBeaux-Arts (Paris, 1926); Rudolf Amheim, Art and VisualPerception (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954),Chap. VIII, and'Perceptual and Aesthetic Aspects of the Movement Re-sponse', Journal of Personality, Vol. 19 (1950-51),pp. 265-81(with bibliog.), reprinted in his Towards a Psychology of Art(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966); and E.H. Gombrich,'Moment and Movement in Art', Journal of the Warburg andCourtauld Institutes, Vol. 27 (1964), pp. 293-306 (withbibliog.).

Section 27

For the theory of 'tactile values', s,ee Bernhard Berenson,Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (New York, 1896).

The origins of the theory are to be' found in the writings ofAdolf V0nHildebrand, Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps.'For the weaker version of the theory,' see Heinrich

Wolfflin, ClassicArt, trans. Peter and Linda Murray (London,1952), and Principles of Art History. trans. M. D. Hottinger(New York, 1932). .

See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books,ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1958),pp. 9-11.

Sections 28-31

For Gombrich's account of expression, see E.H. Gombrich,Art and Illusion (London, 1960), Chap. XI, and Meditationson a Hobby Horse (London, 1963). See also Richard Woll-heim, 'Expression and Expressionism', Revue Internationalede Philosophie, 18 (1964),pp. 270-89, and Preface to AdrianStokes, The Invitation in Art (Londom,1965).

On the iconicity or 'immanence" of works of art, seeGeorge Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York, 1896);Carroll C. Pratt, Meaning in Music (New York, 1931);Samuel Alexander, Beauty and Other Forms of Value(London, 1933);Morris Weitz, PhilosophY'of the Arts (Cam-

I .177

L..

,',,~-,-

Aft and its Objects

bridge, Mass., 1950); and Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Syrn~bolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, I953-Z).

Attempts to give this account a more rfgpr°\t,~ formulationare to be found in Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key(Cambridge, Mass., 1942), and Feeling land Form (New York,I953);~and G. W. Morris,' 'Esthetics and the Theory of Signs',Journal of Unified Science, 8 (1939), pp. '13-50. Both.Morrisand Langer are criticized (by C. L. Stevenson) in Language,Thought and 0ulture, ed. P. Henle (Ann Arbor, 1958), Chap'.8. See "also Richard Rudner, 'On Semiotic Aesthetics',

J.A.A~C., Vol. X (September 1951), pp. 67-'77, reprinted inBeardsley. On Langer, see Ernst Nagel's review of Philosophy

in a New KfY, ]. Phil., Vol. XL (IO JuneiI943), pp.323--9,reprinted as ~A Theory of Symbolic Form'; in his Logi/'\:Yith-out Metaphysics (Glencoe, Ill.:" 1956); Arthur "Szathmaryr''Symbolic and Aesthetic Exp~ession in Painting', J.A.i.e.,Vol. Xm (SkPtember 1954), pp. "'86-96; and P. Welsh, ,'Dis-cursive and Presentatipna'l Symbols', Min1, Vol. LXIV (April1955), pp. 181-'99. On Morris, see B'enbow Ritchie)' 'Th~Formal Structure of the Aesthetic Object', ].A.A.C., Vol. lIt,,(April 1943), pp.5-I5; and Isabel P.!Creed, 'Iconic Signs andExpressiveneSs', J.A.A.C, Vol. III' (April I943),Pp.I5-2T. 'Morris withdrew from the view that'art can be distinguished

by reference to a special class of, sign in Signs, Language andBehavior (New York, 1946).

The distinction between symbol and icon as kinds of sig:p.goes back to Chaifles S. Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge,Mass., 1931-5), Vol. II, Book II, Chap. 3.

On the notion of style, see Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles ofArt History, trans. M. D. HottiJ).ger (New York, 1932), andClassic Art, trans. Peter and Linda Murray (London, 1952).More generally, see Meyer Schapiro, 'Style', in AnthropologyTo-day, ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago, 1953), reprinted in Phil-ipson; James S. Ackerman, 'Style', in James S. Ackerman and,Rl1Ys Carpenter, Art and Archaeology, (London, 1963). Seealso Paul Frankl, Das System der Kunstwissenschaft (Leipzig,1938), and The Gothic (Princeton, N.J., 1960).

178

An Essay.Section 32

For tne argument against genres or aesthetic categories, see'Ben,edetto Croce, Aesthetic, 2nd ed., trans. Douglas Ainslie(London, 1922), Chaps. I2 and 15, and Breviary of Aesthe&,trans: Douglas Ainslie (Houston, Texas, 1915). The issues are,reviewed in Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of

J!itera~lf,re(New York, .1949),Chap. 1Z' ~

iFqr the argument that would connect genre-classificationand the criteria of evaluation, see Harold Osborne, Aesthetics

~' , ~ ~

,,(ing Criticism (London,~i955).,For the defence of genr,e-c,

riticism, see Northrop Frye, Th,., e.! "-A'natomY ,of .Criticism(Princeton, 1957). See also William

:;Empson, Som~",Version$ of. Pastoral (London, 1935); apd'R.Q5; Crane, Tfle""banguHgeso~ Cr{t{~ism and the Structur;,? of:P'\f!try (Toronto, ~953).A most interesting discussIon, is to be~urid"in KenaaH L. Walton, 'Categories 8fArt';,p'hil,itev.;,Vol.LXXIX (July 1970),PP. 334-67.

FOJl~the'lliinsistenceon thehP~rtic~larity of a work ~f art, see,.e.g;, Stuart Hampshire, 'Logic and Appreciation', World

IIIl,ReView (1953), reprintecl in Elton. 1/" '1:,jr

,Section 33. ,,;

~Fot' the view that knowledge of the problem to which thework of art is a solution is essential to a~sthetic under-standing, see Erwin, Panofsky~ 'The History ;f Art as a Hu-planisilc Discipline', in hi~ Meaning in the V,isual Arts (NewYork, 1955). Also Ernst-Gombrich; The Story of Art (London,I950);~ and Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History(London, 1959).

For critieism of this, see Edgar Wind, 'Zur Systematik derI).i.instlerischen Probleme', Zeitschrift Wr Aesthetik undallgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Vol. XVIII (1925), pp. 438-86;and a much publicized article by Monroe Beardsleyand W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, 'The Intentional F.allacy', Sewanee,Review, LIV (Summer 1946), pp. 468-88, reprinted inW. K. Wimsatt, Jr, The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954)

179

Da

Art and its Objects

and also in Margolis. The discussion is taken up in e.g. Isabel~Hungerland, 'The Concept of Intention in Art .criticism',]. Phil., Vol. LII (New York, 1955), pp. 733-42; F. Cioffi, 'Inten-tion and Interpretation in Criticism', P.AS, Vol. LXIV(1963-4), pp. 85-106, reprinted in Barrett; John Kemp, 'TheWork of ArJ and the Artist's Intentions:! B.].A., Vol. IV(April 1964) pp. 146-54, and Anthony cSavile,'The Place of In-tention in the Concept of Art', P.AS, V;pl. LXIX (1968--9),pp.101-::-21:

Sections 35-6

On types and tokens, see Charles Sanders Peirce, CollectedPapers (Cambridge, Mass., 1931-5), Vol. IV, pars. 537 ff.

See also Margaret Macdonald, 'Some Distinctive Featuresof tl1e Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts', P.A.S, Supp.Vol. XXIII (1949), pp. 183--94, reprinted in a revised form inElton; R. Rudner, 'The Ontological Status of the Aesthetic ,

Object', Phil. and Phen. Res., Vo~.X (March 1950), pp. 380-88;C. L. Stevenson, 'On "What Is a Poem?" " Phil. Rev~, Vol.

LXVI (July 1957), pp. 329-60; J. Margolis, The Language ofArt and Art Criticism (Detroit, 1965); P. F. Strawson, 'Aes-thetic Appraisal and Works of Art', The Oxford Review No.3 (Michaelmas 1966), pp. 5-13.

Sections 37-9

On interpretation, see Paul Valery, 'Reflections on Art',printed in' his Collected W'orks, trans. Ralph Manheim(London, 1964), Vol. XIII.

See also William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity(London, 1930); Ernst Kris and Abraham Kaplan, 'AestheticAmbiguity', in Ernest Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations inArt (New York, 1952).

On the eliminability of interpretation, see Susanne Langer,Feeling and Form (New York, 1953). This view is criticized inJeanne Wacker, 'Particular Works of Art', Mind, Vol. LXIX(1960), pp. 223-33, reprinted in Barrett.

For the distinction between interpretation and description,

180

An Essay

see' Morris Weitz, Hamlet cmd the Philosophy of Literary(Criticism (Chicago, 1964); Charles L. Stevenson, 'On the"Analysi~' of a Work of Art', Phil. Rev., Vol. LXVII(JanuaryI958), PP. 33-51, and 'On the Reasons that can be given forthe Interpretation of a Poem', printed in Margolis;W. K..Wimsatt, Jr, 'What to say about a Poem', in,.his Hate-ful Contraries (Lexington, Ky., 1965); and the 2ontributions

, 'by Monroe Beardsley and" Stuart Hampshire to Art and Phil-osophy, ed. Sidney Hook (New York, 1966).

~or the suggestion that the two kinds of interpre!ation areielated, see Margaret Macdonald, 'Some Distinctive Featuresof kguments used in Criticism of the Arts', P.A.5.Supp. Vol.XXIII (1949), pp. 183-94, reprinted (in a revised form) inElton; and J. Margolis, The funguage of Art and Art Criti-cism ~Detroit, 1965). .

I'j

Sections 40-42

)The thesis th,at art may be defined in terms of our attitudetowards it, or 'the aesthetic consciousness', is most clearlyformulated in Edward Bullough, Aesthetics, ed. Elizabeth M.Wilkinson (Stanford, ~957). The forerunners of this approachare Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans.J. c. Meredith (Oxford, 1928);and Arthur Schopenhauer, TheWorld as Will and Idea, trans. R.B.Haldane and J.Kemp.(London, 1883).

For'more recent discussions, see H. S. Langfeld, The Aes-thetic Attitude (New York, 1920); J. O.Urmson, 'WhatMakes a Situation Aesthetic', P.A.S.Supp. Vol. XXXI (1957),pp. 75-92, reprinted in Margolis, which attempts a linguisticformulation of the thesis; and F. E. Sparshott, The Structureof Aesthetics (Toronto, 1963).,See also Virgil C. Aldrich, Philosophy of Art (Englewood

Cliffs, N.J., 1963), which defines art in terms of a specialmode of perception; and Stanley Cavell, 'The Avoidance of:Love:a Reading of King Lear', in his Must We Mean What

, We Say?(ijew York, 1969).

IS!

.~

Art andits Objects1

An interesting development; of. this approach from "aphenomenological point of view is ~to be found in ,MikelDufrenne, Pht'in'omenologie de l~Experience Esthetique(Paris, 1953).

For a criticism of this approach, see George Dickie, 'TheMyth of the Aesthetic Attitude', Amer. Phil. Q., t'(January1964),pp. 54-65; and Marshall Cohen 'Aesthetic Essence', inPhilosophy in America, ed. Max Black (New Yorkt,1965). '

u"Forthe view that all objects can be seen aesthetically, see -,e.g. Stuart Hampshire, 'Logic and Appreciation', in WorldReview (19,52),reprinted in Elton.~t Paul Valery, 'Man andthe Sea Shell', in his Collected Works, trans. Ralph Manheim(London, 1964),Vol. XIII. j ,

:1:

Section 43i!b.'

See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934).For anextreme or crude version of the view t11atlife and art aredistinct, see Clive Bell,Arth(London, 1914).Such an' approachis (rather ambiguously) cri~icized in I, A Richards, Prin-ciples of Literary Criticism (Lqndon;"I925).

Section 44

On the concept of art in primit1ve society, see Yrjo Him, TheOrigins of Art (London, 1900); Franz Boas, ,Primitive Art

, (Oslo, 1927); Ruth Bunzel, 'Art', in General Anthropology, ed.Franz Boas (New York, 1938); E.R. Leach, 'Aesthetics', inThe Institutions of Primitive Society, ed. E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Oxford, 1956);Margaret Mead, James B. Bird andHans Himmelheber, Technique and Personality (New York,1963);and Claude Levi-Strauss,The SavageMind, trans. anon:(London, 1966). See also Andre Malraux, The Voices ofSilence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London, 1954).

On the modern concept of art,' see P. O. Kristeller, 'TheModern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aes-thetics', Journal of tile History of Ideas, Vol. XII (October

182"

j'-" '

I An Essay

1951),pp. 496-'-527,and Vol. XIII (January 1952),pp. 17-46.Cf. W. Tatarkiewicz, 'The Classification of the Arts in Anti-quity', Jpurnal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XXIV (April1963),pp. 231-40; and Meyer Schapiro, 'On the Aesthetic At-titude in Romanesque Art', in Art and Thought: Issued in

Honour pf Dr AnandG K. Coomaraswamy, ed. K. BharathaIyer (London, 1947).

Section 45

For the notion of form of life, see Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953).For the analogy between art and language, see John

Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934. ); Andre Malraux,I

The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London, 1954);E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1960); andMaurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Indirect Language and the Voices I

of Silence', in his Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary(Evanston, IlL, 1964).

For the reciprocity between artist and spectator, which isthe' theme of much of this essay, see Alain, Systeme desBeaux-Arts (Paris, 1926); John Dewey, Art as Experience(New York, 1934); also (surprisingly enough) R. G. Colling-wood, The Principles of Art (London, 1938); and MikelDufrenne, Phenomenologie de I'Experience Esthetique (Paris,1953). Many of the crucial insights are to be found inG. W. F.Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art: Introduction, trans.Bernard Bosanquet (London, 1886).

Section 46

For the idea of an artistic impulse, see e.g. Samuel Alexander,Art and Instinct (Oxford, 1927),reprinted in his Philosophi-cal and Literary Pieces (London, 1939);and Btienne Souriau,L'Avenir de I'Esthetique (Paris, 1929).

A nineteenth-century version of this. approach took theform of tracing art to a play-impulse. This approach, which

183

...>h

Art and its Objects

derives rather tenuously from Friedrich Schiller, Letters onthe Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (NewHaven, 1954); is to. be found in Herbert Spencer, Essays(London, 1858-74); Konrad Lange, Das Wesen der Kunst(Berlin, 1901); and Karl Groos, The Play of Man, trans.Elizabeth 1. Baldwin (NewYork, 1901).

Another version of this approach in terms of a specific.Kunstwollenor artisticvolitionis to be found in Alois.Riegl,Stilfragen (Berlin, 1893); and Wilhelm Worringer, Abstrac-tion and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (London, 1953).

For criticism of the whole approach, see Mikel Dufrenne,Phenomenologie de l'Experience Esthetique (Paris, 1953).

Section 47

There are scattered implicit references to the bricoleur prob-lem in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans.J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1928); G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy ofFine Art: Introduction, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London,1886);John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934).Seealso D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (New York, 1929);T. M. Greene, The Arts and the Art of Criticism (Princeton,1940); Thomas Munro, The Arts and their I~terrelations(New York, 1940).

Section 48

For the argument that, if a work of art expresses anything, itmust express something otherwise identifiable, see EduardHanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (NewYork, 1957).Hanslick's assumptions are criticized, somewhatperfunctorily, in Carroll C. Pratt, The Meaning of Music(New York, 1931),and Leonard B.Meyer, Emotion and Mean-ing in Music (Chicago, 1956).A view diametrically opposedto Hanslick is to be found in J. W. N.Sullivan,Beethoven:His Spiritual Development (London, 1927).

See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Inves-

184

~

An Essay

tigations, ed. G. E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953),.I, paras.519-46, II, vi, ix, and The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford,1958),pp. 177-85, and Letters and Conversations on Aesthet-ics, etc., ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1966),pp. ~8-40.

Section 49

The argument against paraphrasability is to be found inCIeanthBrooksand RobertPennWarren, UnderstandingFic-tion (New York, 1943), and Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (NewYork, 1947).

The position is criticized in Yvor Winters, In Defence ofReason (Denver, 1947).

See also Stanley Cavell, 'Aesthetic Problems of ModernPhilosophy', in Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black (NewYork, 1965),reprinted in his Must We Mean What We Say?(New York, 1969).

Section 50

For a criticism of the identification of the artist's achieve-ment with the having of images, see Alain, Systeme desBeaux-Arts (Paris, 1926),Livre I; J.-P.Sartre, The Psychologyof the Imagination, trans. anon. (New York, 1948); HenriFo<;illon,The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles BeecherHogan (New York, 1948).

For the distinction between the artist and the neurotic, seeSigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis,trans. Joan Riviere (London, 1929), Lecture 23, and 'Form-ulations concerning the two Principles in Mental Func-tioning' and 'The Relation of the Poet to Day Dreaming', inCollected Papers,ed. Ernest Jones (London, 1949),Vol. IV.

See also Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint, 2nded. (London, 1957);and Hanna Segal, 'A Psycho-Analytic Ap-proach to Aesthetics', and Adrian Stokes, 'Form in Art', bothin New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, ed. Melanie Klein etal. (London, 1955).

185

."

Art and its Objects An Essay

Theory', ].A.A.C., Vol. XV (June 1957),pp. 412-24, and 'SomeRemarks on Value and Greatness in Music', l.A.A.C., Vol.XVII (June 1959),pp. 486-500, reprinted in Philipson and inBeardsley. See also Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York,1958),pp. 215-17; and E. H. Gombrich, 'Art and the Languageof the Emotions,',P.A.S.Supp. Vol. XXXVI(1962),pp. 215-34,reprinted as 'Expression and Communication' in, his Medi-tations on a Hobby Horse (London, 1963).

Section 51

For the notion of understanding in connexion with art, seee.g. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge,Mass., 1942); C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge andValuation (La Salle, Ill., 1946);Ric,hardRudner, 'On SemioticAesthetics', l.A.A.C., Vol. X (September 1951),pp. 67-77, re-printed in Beardsley, and 'Some Problems of NonsemioticAesthetics', ].A.A.C., Vol. XV (March 1957), pp. 298-310;Rudolf Wittkower, 'Interpretation of Visual Symbols in theArts', in A. J. Ayer et al., Studies in Communication (London,1955); Language, Thought and' Culture, ed. P. Henle (AnnArbor, 1958),Chap. 9; John Hospers, Meaning and Truth inthe ~rts (Harnden, Conn" 1964).

See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversationson Aesthetics, etc., ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1966).

Section 57

For the distinction between cognitive or referential and emo-tive meaning and its application to aesthetic theory, see~. K.Ogden and I. A. Richards, The. Meaning of Meaning(London, 1923); and I. A. Richards, Principles of LiteraryCriticism (London, 1925). The theory has, of course, beenwidely discusse<;l,but, for its releVianceto aesthetic theory, ,

see William Empson, Structure of Complex Words (London,1951);and Language, Thought and Culture, ed. P. Henle (AnnArbor, 1958),'Chaps.5 and 6.

For the view that ,poetry 'is a verbal structure, see e.g.W. R. Wimsatt, Jr, The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954).For a more radical view, which involves a contrast betweenlanguage (langue) and literature or writing (ecriture), seeRoland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Laversand Colin Smith (London, 1967).

Section 53

See Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Exploration in Art (NewYork, 1952).See also E. H. Gombrich, 'Psycho-Analysis andthe History of Art', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,Vol. XXXV(October 1954),pp. 401-1I, reprInted in his Medi-~ations on a Hobby Horse (London, 1963),and 'Freud's Aes-thetics', Encounter, Vol. XXVI (January 1966)',pp. 30-4°.

Section 54

Se"eAdrian Stokes,'Three Essays on the Painting of Our Time(London, 1961),Painting and the Inner World (London, 1963),and The Invitation in Art (London, 1965).

Section 59

For a historical account of the classical conception of orderin the visual arts, see Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Prin-ciples in the Age of Humanism (London, 1949). Con-temporary attempts to revive' the Renaissance ormathematical conception are to be found in George D.Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge,Mass., 1933);and L,eCorbusier, The Modulor, trans. Peter de Francia and AnnaBostock (London, 1951).

.'Section 56

For the application o~ information theory to aesthetics, seeLeonard ~. Meyer, 'Meaning in Music and Information

186 187

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--Art and its Objects

An explication of the notion of order in terms of Gestaltpsychology .is attempted by Kurt Koffka, 'Problems in thePsychology of Art', in Art: A Bryn Mawr Symposium (BrynMawr, 1940); and Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Percep-tion (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), and 'A Review of Pro-portion', ].A.A.C., Vol. XIV (September 1955), pp. 44-57, re-printed in his Towards a Psychology of Art (Berkeley andLos Angeles, 1966). This approach is criticized in Anton Eh-renzweig, The Psycho-Analysis of Artistic Hearing andVision (London, 1953); and Harold Osborne, 'Artistic Unityand Gestalt', Phil. Q., Vol. 14 (July 1964), pp. 214-28.

For critical discussion of the notion of artistic unity, see

E. H. Gombrich, 'Raphael's Madonna della Sedia' (London1956),reprinted in his Norm and Form (London, 1966);and abrilliant essay by Meyer Schapiro, 'On Perfection,' Co-herence, and Unity of Form and Content', in Art and ,Phil-osoph'y, ed. Sidney Hook (New York, 1966).

Sections 60-61

On the essentially historical or transformational character ofart, see Heinrich WOlfflin, Principles of Art History, trans.M. D. Hottinger (London, 1932); Henri Fo<;illon, Life ofForms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan (New York,

1948); Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart'Gilbert (London, 1954); Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of ArtHistory (London, 1959). See also Meyer Schapiro, 'Style', inAnthropology To-day, ed. A. Kroeber (Chicago, 1953), re-printed in Philipson.

Section 62

For the social theory of art, the classical texts are Karl Marx,Economicand Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,tr<;ms.MartinMilligan (Moscow, 1959); Friedrich Engels, 'Ludwig Feu-erbach and the End of a Classical German Philosophy', inKarl Marx; and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics

188

,.. ."",'. - ___1111'AnEssay

and' Philosophy, ed; Lewis S. Feuer (New York, 1959);G. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life, trans. Eleanor Fox et al.(London, 1953); William Morris, Selected Writings, ed. AsaBriggs (London, 1962).

See also F, Antal, 'Remarks on the Methods of Art History',Burlington Magazine, Vol. XCI (February-March 1949), pp.49-52 and 73-5; Richard Wollheim, 'Sociological Explanationof the Arts: Some Distinctions', Atti del III Congresso Inter-

nazionale di Estetica (Turin, 1957), pp. 404-10 (with bibliog.);Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art, trans. Anna Bostock(London, :£963).

I

Section 64

For the interaction between art and theories or conceptionsof art, see e.g. Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans.Stuart Gilbert (London, 1954); Michel Butor, 'Le Livre commeObjet', Critique, Vol. XVIII (1962), pp. 929-46; Maurice Mer-leau-Ponty, 'Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence', inhis Signs," trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill., 1964);Paul Valery, 'The Creation of Art' and 'The Physical Aspec~tsof a Book', in his Collected Works, trans. Ralph Manheim(London, 1964), Vol'. XIII; Michael Fried, Three AmericanPainters (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); Harold Rosenberg, The

Anxious Object (London, 1965); Claude Levi-Strauss, TheSavage Mind, trans. anon. (London, 1966); Leo Steinberg,'Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public', Harper'sMagazine,reprinted in The New Art: a Critical Anthology,ed. Geoffrey, Battcock (New York, 1966); Adrian Stokes,Reflections on the Nude (London, 1967); Stanley Cavell,'Music Discomposed', in Art, Mind, and Religion, ed.W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (Pittsburgh, 1967), reprintedin his Mu,st We Mean What We Say? (New York, 1969), andThe World Viewed {New York, 1971); and Richard Wollheim,

'The Work of Art as Object', Studio International, Vol. 180,No. 928 (1970), pp. 231-5, reprinted in his On Art and theMind (London, 1973).

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