(F) Lipman, M. (Complete) What-Happens-in-Art PDF

What Happens
in Art
MATIHEW LIPMAN
IRVlNGlON PUBUSHERS.INC.
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CONTENTS
PREFACE
Introdllction 1
chapter 1 Problems of Inquiry into Problems of Art A
chapter2 The Concept of Process lA
chapter3 Tertiary Qualities 19
chapter 4 Substantial Thought and Intelligible Things AS
chapter 5 The Response to the Thing SI

chapter 6 The Response to the Body ff1
chapter7 The Problem of Self SI
chapter 8 Art as Intelligence 00

chapter9 Creation 108
chapter 10 Appreciation 119
chapter 11 Critical Observation 126
chapter 12 Evalllation lA3
BIBI,IOGRAPHY 161
lNDEX 113
vii
Copyrighted material
Introduction
An inquiry such as this into the nature of art must

consider not simply the art product, but the entire art process as
welL It should further seek to show how this process and this prod-
uct are distinguishable from other works and workings of nature.
And it should acknowledge its own methodological presuppositions.
It is important to discuss questions of method first. Here we can
make sorne preliminary distinctions, and assign sorne rough but com-
prehensible meanings to a number of the more basic concepts to be
employed.
SubsequentIy presented is a more detailed consideration of the
notion of process, for we cannot understand what happens in art as
a process unless we are aware of what natural processes are in gen-
eral.
Processes are distinguishable from one another by the sin-
gular qualities with which they are each infused. These are not spe-
cificaIly localized qualities like taste and color, but are pervasive and
diHuse. They are here caIled "tertiary qualities," and it is largely
through them that works of art seern to possess their expressiveness.
A further distinguishing trait of the art process is that it always
involves sorne measure of deliberation, and its product is one which
we do not hesitate to caIl "inteIligible." Indeed, the intelligibility of
a work of art is its rnost erninent tertiary quality.
Since the process of art involves conditions whose effects are not
necessarily visible in the finished art product, we may be ternpted
to conclude that such conditions are unimportant. But this would be
a rnistake. Our awareness of physical things and of our own bodies
makes a significant contribution to the creative and appreciative
phases of the art process.
The animate crea tu re lives surrounded by inanimate objects; he
1
2 WHAT HAPPENS IN ART
lives with them and on them. He develops a love for sorne, a hatred
of others, fear of this thing and pride in that. Into the thing is com-
pressed his attitude towards nature itself. The art process takes
shape in, has its roots in, this consciousness of our material environ-
ment, the things and c1usters of things amidst which we existo Little
wonder then that art, taking up where nature lea ves o/f, should con-
tain reverberations of our primitive concern for the things that have
come within range of, and entered into, our experience.
Then too there is the artist's body, invariably present in the cre-
ative situation. True, it may become part of the artistic outcome only
in such specialized arts as ballet, where the body is itseIf the me-
dium. Yet the consciousness of the body as an ever present reality is
bound to condition in sorne respect alI artistic processes. Our aware-
ness of the world, after all, is prirnarily and centrally an awareness
of our physical existence. Thus, insofar as art involves the heighten-
ing of consciousness, it may convey the artist's sense of being physi-
cally alive, of having a vital response to his own body and of being
in rapport with his physical environment. This vitality may then be
communicated to the appreciative experience, stimulating us to en-
gage in the organic relationship which esthetic contemplation can
become. Yet the awareness of the body as a totality, an awareness
capable of becoming a significant component of the art process, is
not often enough taken into account.
We must recognize that just as we can come to experience our
selves and the selves of others in our dealings with the world of peo-
pIe, so we can experience our selves an d the selves of others in our
participation in the process of arto That process is one from which
the quality of self cannot be absent, however e/fectively it may ex-
elude our daily interests and concerns. In appreciation as in creation,
our selves are tightIy bound up with the art process, and place them-
selves continually in evidence. In his art, the artist conspicuously
exhibits himself, even where he is most impersonal. And in appre-
ciating his work, in becoming acquainted thereby with his self, we
discover ourselves in the process, either by recognition of mutual
resemblances, or by disceming our own othemess.
An activity may be deemed intelligent if it involves the purpo-
sive organization of means to ends, or of parts to who)es. By either
criterion, art qualifies as a species of human intelligence. Few people
nowadays bother to contest this conelusion, perhaps, but generally
Copynghted m'llerlal
INTRODUCTION 3
the reply is a bland one: "Yes, but you must admit that, strictly
speaking, only verbal assertions capable of logical analysis can be
considered expressions of intelligence. We will agree to smile toler-
antly when you refer to painting or music as inteIligent, but strictly
speaking, you know, it's quite inadmissable." Art, however, is not an
inferior, second-c1ass form of inteIligence, for in respect to intelli-
gence no mode of judgment is intrinsicaIly superior to any other. To
describe the deliberation that occurs in the process of art, we may
often have to borrow terms usuaIly reserved for assertive thought.
But it must be emphasized that it is the terms which are borrowed,
not the qualities in question. The inteIligence in art is intrinsic, not
derivative.
The remainder of the discussion deals with phases of the art
process, with the aim of indicating to what extent they can be found
intelligible by art inquiry. Creation, appreciation, critical observa-
tion and evaluation may seem at first to occur in an orderly chrono-
logical sequence. But actually they may occur almost simultaneously,
or they may oscillate back and forth (as in our shuttling from ap-
preciation to evaluation and back again in an instant). And it may
be further observed that the relationship among these phases is very
Iikely to be a dialogical one, ea eh being a response to those preced-
ing, or an anticipation of those to follow.
Criticism is discussed in terms of the problems of decision-mak-
ing, such as when to restrict oneself to the relationships observable
within the art work, and when to move farther afield to the circum-
stantial connections of the work of art with the environing world.
This inevitably entails a rejection of a strictly formalistic critical ap-
proach, and leads to a consideration of how esthetic values may be
established from the point of view of a contextual or objective rela-
tivism.
CHAPTER 1
Problems of Inquiry into
Problems of Art
Art is a happening-and a way of happening. Its

very definition is a problem, and its nature a constant, tantalizing
enigma. Yet it does bear exploring; it does yield to investigation. To
ask just what it is that happens in art is to request an inquiry not
only into the problems of art but into the nature of that inquiry it-
self. 1 should like fust to consider what we mean by problems of art,
and then to take up sorne distinctive problems of art inquiry.
PROBLEMS OF ART: HUMAN

EXISTENCE AND ARTISTIC METHOD
Problems of art fall into two groups: the "existen ti al"

and the "methodological." One is concerned with things and events,
the other is concerned solely with artistry. There are, as we know,
those problems common to everyone simply by virtue of his member-
ship in the human community-prohlems of love, religion, politics,
and family. These are existential problems; they go to make up what
has been calIed "the human situation." Everyone, the artist included,
has his insights into the particular existential (or "human," or "so-
cial," or "experiential") problems which confront him, and many
people have ideas about how to solve them. The artist, however,
4
PROBLEMS OF INQUIRY INTO PROBLEMS 'OF ART 5
must begin where many of the others stop. To him, these insights
and ideas are part of his raw material. How are they to be integrated
into a compact, symbolic whole? That is the artistic problem, and it
requires its own kind of insights, its own kind of ideas-in other
words, its own species of thought.
Of course, the artist does not necessarily have to have important
insights into the stuff of human experience in order to create success-
fuIly. If we were to suppose a truly abstract art, it would be one in
which, as in geometry or mathematics, such considerations had been
almost completely ignored. But artists can have insights and ideas
into both sorts of problems, human and artistic. And indeed, it may
weIl be that those artists we have caIled "great" were those who
learned how to combine this experiential wisdom with a consum-
mate talent or artistry.
W. H . Auden, in one of his perceptive essays, has discussed this
same problem. H e distinguishes "poetic problems" from "the modern
problem," a distinction quite similar to the one made aboye. The
chief interest of the young poet in the work of his predecessors, Au-
den writes, is with the suggestions their poems throw out upon how
he may solve the poetic problems which now confront him:
All generations overlap, and the young poet na tu rally looks for and finds
the greatest help in the work of those whose poetic problems are similar
to his beca use they have experiences in common. He begins, therefore,
with an excessive admiration for one or more of the mature poets of his
time. But, as he grows older, he becomes more and more conscious of
belonging to a different generation faced with problems that his hero
cannot help him to solve, and his former hero-worship, as in other spheres
of l¡fe, is all too apt to turn into an equally excessive hostility and con-
tempt. . . . 1
The task of the critical poet is to determine what the problems of his
predecessor were, compared with his own. "How far do they over-
lap? How far are they different? In so far as they are different, what
can we learn from the way in which Yeats dealt with his world,
about how to deal with our own?"2 And furth er on, Auden observes:
Yeats, Iike us, was faced with the modern problem, i.e., of living in a so-
ciety in which men are no longer supported by tradition without being
1 W. H . Auden, "Yeats as an Example," Kenyon Review, X (1948), p. 187.
2 [bid ., p. 188.
6 WHA T HAPPENS IN ART
aware of it, and in which, therefore, every individual who wishes to bring
order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas en-
tering bis consciousness, from witbout and witbin, is forced to do delib-
erately for himself what in previous ages had been done for him by family,
custom, church, and sta te, namely the choice of the principIes and presup-
positions in terms of which he can make sense of bis experience.3
Tbis last pbrase of Auden's brings us to a crucial issue. Is the
artist concerned with "making sense of bis experience," or with mak-
ing sense of what migbt roughly be caBed "things in general"? In
other words, what is bis subject matter? The view that is presently
in favor, a view that is aIl the more deceptive for being balf-correct,
is perhaps most clearly expressed by Flaubert when be insists upon
the absolute separation of subject matter and method in such a
way as to locate aH esthetic merit in the latter. AH that matters for
him is artistry; like the sun, artistry can gild a dung heap. "Neither
stocks nor rOses are interesting in tbernselves; tbe only interesting
thing about tbem is tbe manner in whicb they are painted. . . . Be-
ware lest we return once more to exclusive subjects."4 One can read-
ily share Flaubert's abborrence of exclusive subjects. But can one
therefore as sume that "the subject matter is unimportant, the treat-
ment all-important"? Is it due solely to the way compositional prob-
lems are handled that such a playas Oedipus Rex appears so power-
fui? And how account for the emotional impact of Romanesque, and
even pre-Romanesque art, in view of the supposed maladroitness of
its workmanship? Something is surely amiss in the theory that sub-
ject matter is unimportant; we must discover what it is.
Tbe term "subject matter" is not, in itself, ambiguous. It implies
that something, a matter of sorne kind, has undergone a certain ac-
tion. It might perhaps be more accurate to speak of "subjected-mat-
ter." But in any case, subject matter must be clearly distinguished
from things or matters themselves. The matters of the world in
which we live are things as they exist prior to analysis. We might
call these matters "the uninquired-into." A torso, a family quarrel, a
city street after a shower-these are matters. But they are not sub-
ject matter. In order to become subject matter, they must be per-
ceived, they must enter into experience. They must become a "street-
3 lbid., p . 192.
4Gustave Flaubert, Letters, Richard Rumbold, ed., transo by J. M. Cohen
(London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1950 ), p. 226.
PROBLEMS OF INQUIRY INTO PROBLEMS OF ART 7
so-seen," a "quarrel-so-heard," a "torso-so-touched." But seeing,
hearing, touching are alI aets of a deliberating organismo They
require a method, and everyone has his own method of experiencing.
Experience is methodical. Therefore, not all of method can be set
over against subject matter for sorne of it is already contained within
subject matter. Only with matters can method be legitimately con-
trasted in this polar sen se.
The consequences of this argument appear at nrst to be exasper-
ating. If we accept the dennition of the subject matter of art as being
things or matters, as does Flaubert, then analysis leaves the more
profound levels of art untouehed. If, on the other hand, we consider
the subject matter of art to be experience, we are faced with the faet
that important segments of the artist's method are to be located only
in tbat experience itself. In the latter case, artistry becomes some-
thing more than a technical mastery of the medium. It also ineludes
one's insights into experience. There is an artistry to perception, an
artistry to reception as welI as to expression. For everything per-
eeived is to sorne extent eh osen and evaluated in the same acto In
short, there is an artistry of experience which precedes the artistry
uf cf'eatíon. It is for tbis reason that analyses which profess to re-
strict themselves solely to questions of method, as presently under-
stood (that is, to so-calIed "formal questions"), so frequently leave
us with a sense that the work of art has not been dealt with thor-
ougbly. Sometimes of course, the analyst who attempts to go beyond
the ordinary questions of method lea ves himself open to misinterpre-
tation. Diderot, for example, writes of an artist exbibiting in the
Salon of 1765, "Your passages of skillful tones, your pure and correct
drawing, the vigor of your coloring, the magic of your light and
shade, wbat do these matter to me if your subject lea ves me eold?"5
If the word "subject" here means only sorne thing or matter, then
Diderot's complaint is unjustified. But if, on tbe other band, it means
the artist's experience, the object in which was sorne thing or matter,
then the quotation is eloquent evidence of Diderot's eritical acuity.
I have said that the con sequen ces of denning the subject matter
of art as experience seem exasperating, for it is now demanded of
the inquirer who wishes to restriet his analysis to questions of artis-
try, that he also examine the method of, the method in experience.
5 Denis Diderot, CEuvres completes, Vol. X, ed. Assézat (Paris: Garnier,
1875 ), p. 376.
This kind of examination appears so vague that it easily pennits the
sort of analysis usualIy calIed "intuitive." It may, however, be intui-
tive only in the sense that any prescientmc speculation is intuitive.
If a Greek critic had attempted to maintain that the insight Sopho-
eles embodied in the Oedipus-Jocasta relationship was symptomatic
of a cultural complex, we may be certain that the fonnalist critics of
the time would have inundated him with ridicule. Yet inquiry is not
advanced by scoffing at intuitions, but by detennining their value.
In line with the distinction already made between the existential
and the methodological, we may now say that there are two kinds of
artistry: "experiential" and "compositional." Insofar as experiential
artistry is found embodied in an art work, it must not be exeluded
from art inquiry. The artist exists in the human or communal situa-
tion. He faces common problems with others, he is involved in rela-
tionships with persons and things, and he develops insights and
ideas about these problems and relationships. In order to cope most
successfully with this communal situation, he resorts to the symbolic
ordering of a diHerent medium. This new ordering therefore repre-
sents both a continuation of artistry, and a change in its kind. And
the subject matter with which the artist now works is not the world
of things common to alI; it is something uniquely his own. Thus the
experiences which are the subject matter of art are not equally
amenable to compositional artistry. Each is diHerently organized,
each contains diHerent insights, diHerent ideas. Each is already po-
tentially, perhaps fully, a work of arto As a result sorne experiences,
being profound, may be transmuted into great art works, while oth-
ers, being superficial or trivial, are not Iikely to share the same heroic
destiny.
PROBLEMS OF ART INQUIRY: SOME

METHODOLOGICAL DISTINCTIONS
Although art inquiry should restrict itself to the

analysis of creative and appreciative methods (that is, to the ways in
which material s are organized) , it is necessary to insist upon this
broader definition of artistry beca use the definition hitherto utilized
has been so narrow as to have seriously damaged the appeal to
method itself. The issue has been further obscured by a confusion of
categories carried through in the most thoroughgoing fashion. Con-
sider, for example, sorne of the various categories distinguishable in
the concept of primacy. Three of these categories are:
1. Chronological primacy: the sequential, temporal order of
events.
2. Valuational primacy: the ordering of goods determined by
consideration of worth, or structural importance.
3. Methodological primacy: the order of stages of analysis.
What so frequently occurs is that the precedence established in
one of these categories is then imputed to the subject matter of an-
other. Thus the science of the 17th century believed that certain
qualities-such as shape, size, number, and motion-should be the
first dealt with in any sequence of inquiry. Other qualities could be
postponed beca use they were unlikely to be susceptible to mathe-
matical formulation. It was a clear-cut case of methodological pri-
macy, but the 17th century confused this primacy of method with
structural primacy. It was concluded that those qualities which had
merely been taken to be the first order of business were alone real. We
run the risk, in art inquiry, of similar confusion between that which is
most urgently in need of analysis and that which is foundational in
the art process itself. Such problems as whether or not perception
precedes imagination, creation precedes ideation, or appreciation
precedes judgment are empírical in nature, and it is through empíri-
cal procedures that they are presently being investigated. But many of
these problems possess methodological difficuIties which have not
yet been fuIly explored.
Such a problem is the much-discussed distinction between "ab-
stracr' and "figura ti ve" arto lt would be foolhardy to deny that actual
diHerences of kind are involved in this distinction. A large portion of
the warrant for such a distinction, however, is dependent not upon
those differences themselves, but upon our own operations of anal-
ysis. Every work of art has certain formal characteristics. Analysis of
them is always necessary, but may not be sufficient. In painting, it is
the organization of forms and colors; in architecture, the composi-
tion of masses; in music, the deployment of tones. As a matter of
procedure then, the primary aspect of the art problem with which
inquiry deals is this formal one. Suppose, however, that this aspect
having been exhausted, the explanation obtained is still felt to be
unsatisfactory. lt is then necessary to extend the analysis beyond
consideration of the plastic organization. A literal signi6.cation may
be sought, or a symbolic one. It is therefore apparent that the class
into which any particular art work wiII fall depends upon how far
its analysis can successfuIly be pushed. If the analysis ceases satis-
factorily at the surface, we describe the work as abstract, while if it
pushes further into areas of meaning or signification, we are able to
classify it as figurative or symbolic.
Another pair of terms whose distinction must be clarified for art
inquiry are "potentiality" and "possibility." The art object is one
part of the total potentialities involved in the production of the es-
thetic experience. Its potentiality líes in the fact that certain conse-
quences wiII ensue when it is treated in certain ways. A thing is
portable, for example, if it can be carried. Its potentiality is depend-
ent upon the operanon of carrying. 1t is meaningless to speak of a
property as potential apart from a context in which the act or opera-
tion is possible. No one can doubt that stars very distant from us ex-
isted before they were first seen, but their visibility waited upon the
development of the telescope. Similarly, the qualities of an esthetic
experience may be ascribed to the art object as its potentialities, but
only when lhat object is to be treated in certain ways, such as being
perceived estheticaIly instead of used as a paperweight. There are
an infinite number of possible experiences which may involve a sin-
gle art object. The operations which actualize the potentialities in
the situation are of course among those modes of treatment that had
already been possible. Potentiality and possibility are thus reciprocal
and correlative, líke subject matter and method. One, potentiality,
signifies what can be done, the other, possibility, signifies how.
The diHerence between "property" and "quality" also is depend-
ent upon the institution of certain operations. A quality is what is
felt or recognized, speci6.caIly or pervasively, within an immediate
experience, that is, within a direct perceptual transaction. A property
is ascribable to the component conditions that have acted so as to
produce the qualitative experience. A property is, in fact, a poten-
tiality. It is a property of snow to be able to appear white when per-
ceived, and that white is a quality of the perceptual experience. But
"whiteness" is an abstraction or generalization whose reference is
limited to the realm of discourse. Similar diHerentiations between
terms proper to existential contexts and those belonging to ideational
contexts can be made in order to discriminate "connections" or "re-
lationships" from logical "relations," and to distinguish existential
"characteristics" from ideational "characters."
It is evident that, for the purposes of this inquiry, certain con-
cepts, such as "situation" and "quality," have been chosen for special
usage. Their use will be warranted only if they are helpful in de-
scribing the process under consideration. Their correspondence with
known facts is not here at issue. Thus the crucial concept of perva-
siveness (a situation is said to be pervaded by a unique quality, des-
ignated here as its "tertiary" quality) is likewise to be accepted as an
ideational instrument for art inquiry. Its function is heuristic-it is
indicative of certain limiting conditions which are to be approxi-
mated and conformed to by existential states of aHairs. There may
quite possibly be sorne extraneous and adulterate elements which
have crept into what we ca11 a "situation," and which are not perme-
ated with the qua lit y that dominates the whole. Properly speaking,
such foreign, unassimilated admixtures are not parts of the situation
at a11. And yet they undeniably exist, as when, for instance, one's
musical enjoyment is disrupted by the vague awareness of bodily
discomfort. The art objects themselves can contain incompatible ele-
ments or digressions, but not a11 digressions are incompatible. A
piece of sculpture, for example, can endure considerable textura!
change without serious damage to its pervasive quality. In long
poems or prose works, in certain types of architecture, the degree to
which parts may be varied, added, or omitted is astonishing. Yet a
Romantic cadenza inserted in a Mozart concerto may be felt so an-
noyingly out of place as to destroy the overall quality of the work.
Clearly therefore, the concept of pervasiveness is dependent upon a
principIe oE toleran c e which would a llow Eor impurities, but which
would indica te the point at which their incIusion destroys the unity
of the work of art. Once this threshold is overstepped, sub-wholes
that might have cooperated with one another battle for supremacy.
Yet such a principIe of toleran ce must vary from work to work, and
is itself dependent upon the strength of esthetic quality achieved in
each individual piece. For the greater the concentration of esthetic
quality in the whole, the more easily irrelevancies may be tolerated
or overlooked.
The distinctions being offered here are nothing more than de-
vices to assist in the prosecution of art inquiry. Were they, prior to
such an inquiry, to be assumed as inherent in the nature of things,
they would fall into the notorious category of dualisms, which a
sound methodology should aim at avoiding. "Dualism" is, in this
sense, a pejorative termo It is not applicable to those felt contrasts
or conHicts which it is possible for experience irnmediately to con-
tain. These conflicts are amenable to inquiry, wherein they can be
shown to have or not to have foundation. The stricture against dual-
isms is therefore only a rule of procedure, not an assertion about
experience or existence.
The assumption is frequently made that the reaIm of feelings
from which art supposedly emanates is subjective, as opposed to the
real or objective worId of material things. This is an instructive in-
stance of what has just been said about the pernicious function of
dualisms. For no experience is inherently subjective or objective; in
itself it is nothing or anything. Only through comparison with sorne
other experience can we say that one is more objective, the other
more subjective. And what is objective in the case of one comparison
may become subjective when compared with a third experience. All
that is constant, as Cassirer has shown, is the mutual act of corree-
tion involved when each new comparison is made. Our concern is al-
ways with the relationship between a relatively narrower and a rela-
tively broader sphere of experience. We abandon as subjective the
schema of things in our dreams when we compare it to the worId we
perceive about us in our waking Iife, but even that worId we at times
set aside for the greater objectivity of the schema arrived at by the
sciences. It is only when the operations of inquiry are begun that the
homogeneity of irnmediate experience is abandoned:
The fleeting, unique observation is more and more forced to the back-
ground; only the "typical" experienceS' are to be retained such as recur in
a permanent manner. . . . Every critical doubt that is directed against
the universal validity of any perception bears within it in germ the divi-
sion of being into a "subjective" and an "objective" sphere.6
Eventually the persistent relationships which we observe through

the institution of changes we label "objective," while those which
are les s stable, which are lirnited to sorne particular, unique here and
6 Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function (LaSalle. IIl. : Open Court,
1923). p. 272.
now, are what we calI "subjective."7 Could artistic relationships be
found as persistent and steadfast as, say, the astronomicaI, they
would be given an equivalent place in the physicist's scheme of
things, instead of being shoved to one side and all but dismissed.
Just as experiences are contrasted to determine whether we
should consider them subjective or objective, so we may contrast
thern with respect to their pervasive qualities. Sorne are felt as pre-
carious or chaotic, some as composed and harmonious. Each defines
itself against all those experiences from which it diHers, and defines
itself most c1early when compared with those from which it diHers
most greatly. Nevertheless, experiences are not a succession of iso-
lated and independent events; there are also felt transitions between
thern, and this sense of passing, oí continuity and change, need be
no Iess distinct than the sense of a situation's stability. But now we
are touching upon the concept of process, which we must analyse
further if we are to consider the process of arto
7 We can recognize the justness of Cassirer s treatment of the objective-

subjective distinction as a relative one, without lhereby committing ourselves
to his rationalistic conception of science. It is preferable to see as "objective"
the total situation with which a process of inquiry or creation concludes. Or-
dered existential elements as well as ordered ideational ones are contained
within the total situation. This resolved situation can also be considered as the
"objective" of the process, in the sense of end or goal, while the concrete prod-
uct of the process is the '·object," e.g., the ob;ect 01 arto
CHAPTER 2
The Concept of Process
THE INTELLIGENT ORDERING OF

EXPERIENCE
A process is a spatio-temporal context in which so

profound a qualitative transformation occurs that the whole can be
discriminated against the background of other natural events. There
are processes of growth and of decay, of tumescence and of disinte-
gration. There are those which develop from indeterminate situa-
tions to clarmed situations, and those which move from clarified to
indeterrninate. In selecting the process of art, we delimit the range
of our interest so as to rule out processes of decay and disintegration,
for we are concerned only with the analysis of orderings. Disintegra-
tions, when they occur, such as the collapse of an artist or of a style,
have an importan ce that is chieHy historical.
Thus the terrn "process," as defined aboye, is hardly exhaustive
of existen ce. It does not, for instance, account for habitual or rela-
tively invariant activities. lt is used so)ely in order to extract a cer-
tain variety of occurrences from their natural settings. Similarly the
general formula of "disequilibriurn-equilibrium" cannot pretend to
be capable of accounting for events in general. It is however, ca-
pable of ordering our experience to a considerable extent by articulat-
ing the structure of sorne of those events. This formula functions
heuristically, so that however fractured or dismembered these hap-
penings may be, it accords them conceptually a unity which in exist-
ence they need not possess.
14
THE CONCEPT OF PROCESS 15
Art, then, is a process of ordering. It must proceed from that
which lacks organization and must culminate in an order which is
unified and harmonious. It proceeds, that is to say, from a state of
aHairs which is felt as somehow unsatisfactory to one which is emi-
nently enjoyable. These states of affairs are examples of what are
called "situations"; they are phases of a larger occurrence or event
which unfolds in time and space, which "takes place." "Situation"
and "process" are querschnitt and langschnitt approaches to the
analysis of the qualitative manifold of experience. A "stage" of an
overall process is a phase abstracted in time so as to permit a hy-
postatization of its elements or aspects. Only through their changes
can these elements be known, but they are spoken of as if they were
fixed and immutable: "body," "thing," "organism," "medium." On
the other hand, the process cannot be reduced to any of its phases.
Art, for instance, is truncated if considered merely as creation, for
appreciating and creating go hand in hand, and each implies the
other. Nor are pro ces ses set off by themselves: they are always con-
catenated with other processes, following this one, preceding that,
mingling and c1ashing, supporting and overcoming. We live within
a panoply of processes in various stages of development.
Art is an ordering: the intelligent ordering of experience. It oc-
curs as a process developing in time, and ea eh phase of creation and
appreciation may be demarcated fairly c1earIy within the genesis,
bounds and fu16l1ment of the whole. There is a movement, a stirring
which is directed upon the medium, and, overcoming its resistance,
sweeps on to the creation of the finished work, whose unity and bal-
ance are immediately delighted in until the agitation subsides and
the process comes to rest. What many philosophies of art actualIy do
is to seize upon sorne particular phase of the process and concen-
trate most of their analysis upon it, with the implication that the
whole may be understood from the account given of the parto It is
true that sorne phases are more crucial for the total development
than others are. Yet there is a quality that links each phase to the
process as a whole, and a characteristic that sets each apart as dis-
tinctly unique, and no one phase is intrinsically better or worse than
any other.
It is customary for emphasis to be placed upon the moment of
completion, and concomitantly, of perceptuaI appreciation. Yet we
cannot ascribe to any moment in isolation a particular trait or char-
acteristic; that can be done only by comparison with sorne other mo-
mento And so the phase which each theory of art has emphasized
has been that which brackets the two moments or stages selected
for comparison. If we use this scheme of classification, we can locate
the various theories of art according to the phases which they choose
to emphasize. Where stress is laid upon the earlier phases of the
process, so that the reference is retrospective, we have a causal or
correspondence theory of arto In these cases the attempt is made to
compare the nnished art product with something earlier: the con-
scious or unconscious intent or intuition of the artist. Midway one
nnds the main importance being attributed to coherence, consist-
ency, formal organization, gestalt. Pragmatic theories of art empha-
size the later phases of th e process. The interest is anticipatory, in
terms of effects and consequences. Such pragmatic theories range
from that of Tolstoy, who stresses the importance of sincerity, c1ar-
ity, and directness in the work of art, as well as its social effects,
through to the French symbolists, who demand that a work's im-
portan ce be considered directly proportional to the richness and
diversity of the responses which it arouses. John Dewey's philosophy
of art has been accused of overemphasizing either genetic factors,
or the determining inHuence of the immediate situation, or the con-
sequences which eventually ensue. Perhaps this is the result of his
attempt to treat the total process on its own terms. Of course, other
theories also seek to be inclusive of the entire process, but most of
them differ in the weight which they accord to its several phases.
Moreover the continuity of the How of experience, the recurrence of
imbalance and restitution, is demonstrated by the fact that such in-
clusive explanations of art are both retrospective and prospective,
both causal and pragmatic, in the orientation of their analyses. Psy-
choanalytic inquiry, for instance, examines the roots of the artist's
behavior in order to determine what therapeutic function the work
of art actually performs, what consequences arise from its produc-
tion and enjoyment. It is the diagnostic and prognostic analysis of
arto
Yet the art process is not truly a cyclical one, for the situation
recurred to is no longer the initial one . There is a spiralling upward
and outward which is growth itself. Every creative transformation
lends impetus to this movement, and is included as another phase of
the ascent. Thus a poet writes:
THE CONCEPT OF PROCESS 17
Every poem is created by a journey through darkness and a return to
Iight, the journey from Iight back to Iight which cannot be made except
through darkness, and the finished poem is the image of the journey. In
the poem, you are reborn, it is a re-creation, a resurrection of the body
in which your experience is given blood and Hesh and bone: and no man,
touched by that poem, will be quite the same man thereafter, so infec-
tious, so satisfactory are the joys that spring from the poem's operative
truth. 1
ART AS A PURPOSIVE AND

CONSUMMATORY PROCESS
Two main criteria permit us to set art processes oH

from other natural occurrences. Art is the composing of a state of af-
fairs in which there had been a felt requiredness; it is a transforma-
tion whose intent is the production of an ordered exceIlence, a genial
accord of elements markedly contrasting with the perturbed and
imbalanced situation that had preceded. Since the transformation is
controIled for the sake of producing an ordered situation, art diHers
from those natural processes which do not seek whatever magnifi-
cent eHects they happen to lIchieve. A towering Alpine pinnac\e may
be, for the moment, as striking, as touching as Mont Sto Michel,
"Hinging its pass ion against the sky." But when we analyze the proc-
esses of which these objects are constituents, we find that although
there are many natural processes producing ordered objects, only
those which we can discriminate as being inteIligently directed can
be caIled artistic. We thus distinguish between those phenomena
which are merely symptomatic of a state of aHairs, as a rainbow is,
or the plumage of a cockatoo, and those that have a significance of
their own, accruing to an object so as to permit a wider sharing of
the meaning of the artistic experience.
A second point of diHerence is that the chief characteristic of
the contexts in which we find ourselves in our daily lives is their in-
completeness and partiality. They are, in their practical aspect, al-
ways capable of being considered as part of sorne larger whole.
1 C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (New York: Oxford University Press,
1947), p. 155.
Every one of these contexts not only bears to sorne Iarger context the
relation of part to whole, but also that of means to end. In itself the
natural context contains a tension, a requirement and a direction
which Ieads us to establish its completeness. The esthetic context is
distinguishable from the nonesthetic by just this characteristic. Be-
ing consummatory, it seeks no Iarger sphere in which it can be
placed and to which it may refer. It is instead wholly satisfying and
self-sufficient. It has no cosmic setting other than the one it estab-
lishes for us, and the one to which we have been accustomed is
abruptly blotted out. 2
Within the art process itself are distinguishable the major
phases of appreciation and creation. In fact the distinction is so
easily made that these phases are often taken to be themselves in-
dividual processes. But there is a continuity between them which is
unbreakable, and the pattern of the whole informs and qualifies all
or most of the constituent parts. The movement which carries the
artist along to the completed creation of his work also culminates in
his enjoyment of what he has done, and perhaps even in his con se-
quent estimation of its value. In himself he sums up the event as a
unity-only with the introduction of another observer does the sug-
gestion of a fission appear.
Thus the creation-appreciation are may be viewed as one over-
alI event, and as such it bears a structuraI Iikeness to many other
natural events. This is what is meant by speaking of the "irnitative
function of art"-not that specific contents are copied, but that the
form of the process represents and recapitula tes the fulfillment of
natural processes everywhere. Art acts then as nature does, or as
nature ideally might acto In this sense, certain of the theories which
consider art as imitation have more to recommend them than is gen-
eraIly allowed.
I.have spoken of processes as events exhibiting marked qualita-
tive changes. But the quality referred to must be one that virtually
pervades a situation, not one that is present only locally. Such per-
meating, nonspecific qualities are here designated "tertiary," and a
more detailed analysis of their nature can now be undertaken.
2It is traditional lo speak of Ihe consummalory situalion as "ideal." Such

a lerm is nol objectionable, provided that Ihe experience lo which il refers is
not gradually cut off and isolated within a realm of its own which, as "ideal," is
then set over against the "natural."
CHAPTER 3
T ertiary Qualities I
EXPRESSIVE VALUES AND THE

QUEST FOR THEIR LOCATION
The distinction between perception and enjoyment,

between apprehension and valuation, between sensation and expres-
sion has continually been questioned. Is the world we see about us
reaIly a vacuous one, devoid of emotional signmcance or intellectual
import, one that must wait for us to project its expressiveness into it?
Do we, to change Spinoza's wording a bit, do we appreciate things
beca use of their beauty, or are they beautiful because we appreciate
them? How much controversy there has been in defense of one or
the other of the positions here implied! The subjectivist contends
that expressive qualities or values are transcriptions of one's own
feelings of pleasure or pain, projected into the bleak outward world
and attributed to physical things. In fact, even the bleakness of the
outer world is projected. We do not really enjoy things, but we en-
joy the pleasurable sensations aroused by what we associate with
1 This discussion of tertiary qualities owes much to John Dewey's essay,
"Qualitative Thought," which appeared in Philosoph y and Civilization (New
York: Minton, 1931 l. In fact, my indebtedness to Dewey in this work is so
great as lo meril cilalion on virtualJy every page. 1 have relied most heavily on
him in Chapters 3, 4, and 8. His esthelic theories have fumished indispensable
guidelines for my own study of the art process. If 1 have avoided frequent
reference to them it has been only in order to avoid repetitiveness, not because
of any lack of acknowledgment of the intellectual fram ework and sense of
direction his approach provided for me.
19
those things. In Santayana, the presentative and the expressive are
cornpletely separated, and only later are they rnerged, so that what
we see and hear as beautiful is only the objectification of our own
pleasure in certain sights and sounds. It is usualIy asked of one who
holds this position, "What is it about this particular organization of
colors and textures which arouses you, and in which you find pleas-
ure? You say it is a 'power' in the object which excites you, yet is
there not sorne particular, objective characteristic to such a stimulus,
located not in one's own body but in the thing enjoyed"? Unfortu-
nately there appear to be assurnptions inherent in the very nature of
the question which prevent the possibility of a satisfactory answer.
Where then are these expressive values? We are still in the dark.
Consider the problern again: Is expression a trait of a drooping
or wavering line, or a trait of what we associate with the line when
we see it? In general, do things possess objective values, independ-
ent of our personal enjoyments and evaluations? lt is on this point
that philosophical realists and idealists insist so strenuously that their
positions are unalterably opposed. Any idealist, and for that matter
alrnost any conternporary Gestalt psychologist, would give an affirm-
ative answer to Bosanquet's query:
Is it not by more than mere reproductive memory, is it not rather by a
true sense of indwelling properties, that the hand of the free workman is
guided to the springing curve whose peculiar law of formation causes it
to be felt at once as expressing the very joy of vitality?2
WeIl, and what of the "free workman" hirnseIf? Does he believe that
the rnaterials with which he works possess their own expressive
qualities? There can be quoted such rernarks as these by Kandinsky,
in which he reveals, just as in his earlier paintings, the delightfulness
of his colorful worId:
On nw palette sit high, round raindrops, puckishly Hirting with each
other, swaying and tremblíng. Unexpectedly they unile and suddenly be-
come thin, sly threads which disappear in amongst the colors, and
roguishly skip about and creep up the sleeves of my coat. . . . lt is not
only the stars which show me faces . The stub of a cigarette Iying in an
2 Bernard Bosanquet, History 01 Aesthetic {London: G. AlIen, 1923 l, p.
467. For further useful discussion of the problem of expression, see D. W. Got-
shalk "Aesthetic Expression," Journal 01 Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XIII
{l954l, pp. 80-85, and Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1954) , ch. 10.
TERTIARY QUALITIES 21
ash-tray, a patient, staring white button Iying arnidst the litter of the
street, a willing, pliable bit of bark-all these have physiognornies for me.
. . . As a thirteen- or fourteen-year-oId boy 1 bought a box of oil coIors
with pennies sIowIy and painfulIy saved. To this day 1 can still see those
coIors corning out of the tubes. One press of rny fingers and jubilantly,
festively, or grave and drearny, or tumed thoughtfulIy within thernseIves,
the coIors carne forth. Or wild with sportiveness, with a deep sigh of
liberation, witb tbe deep tone of sorrow, witb splendid strengtb and forti-
tude, with yieIding softness and resignation, witb stubbom self-rnastery,
with a delicate uncertainty of rnood-out tbey carne, these curious, lovely
things that are called coIors. 3
This quotation only offers evidence of expressive values-it hardly

clarifies their status. Tuming to Bosanquet again, we note that he
speaks of this aspect of things as the "expressive a priori."4 The
square and the cuhe, he says, carry their steadiness and sturdiness
and equality in all directions, actualIy written on their faces. And he
says this, of course, in order to refute realism by showing the de-
pendence of tertiary qualities upon a knower or "mind":
lt is a featber in the cap of recent realism to have given the secondary

qualities tbeir due. But bere its acbievernents must end. It is impossible
on the same principIe to do justice to the tertiary qualities, say beauty or
delightfuIness. . . . You rnust eitber assign sense-contents to tbe rnind,
or aesthetic contents to physical reality.5
It is interesting that Bosanquet should intimate the connection be-

tween secondary and tertiary qualities, for not even his vehement
denial of the comparison can expunge a faint sense of its justness.
In the philosophy of Alexander, the scope of tertiary qualities is
enormously amplified. While acknowledging his debt to Bosanquet
for the term "tertiary," Alexander proceeds to assert that these quali-
ties are nothing less than truth' beauty, and goodness themselves.
Beauty-for that is the only one of the three with which we need
concern ourselves here-is a particular kind of value. Like all values,
he asserts, it is a human invention, and Iike all inventions its mate-
a Quoted by Heinz Wemer, Comparative Psychology of Mental Develop-
ment (New York; Harper & Row, 1940 ), pp. 71-72.
4 Bernard Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic (London ; Macmillan,
1932), p. 44.
5 Bemard Bosanquet, Th e Distinction between Mind and Its Ob¡ects (Man-
chester; The University Press, 1913) , pp. 36-37.
rials are to sorne extent independent of the inventor. Beauty results
from the amalgamation of the object with the human appreciation of
it. Take away the subject, the knower, and there is nothing to deter-
mine any tertiary quality whatsoever. Where we are charmed, there
are charming objects. Where we feel esthetically, there are beautuul
things perceived. The value belongs to the thing-Alexander insists
that we recognize this-but it is its property as a value only so long
as the thing is the object of our appreciation. Independent of that
relationship, beauty cannot be said to existo Values arise only as
things are experienced, felt, known. Beauty is real as an actual emer-
gent from a naturally made connection.
While this position is not unclear, Alexander is not consistent1y
disposed to maintain it. Ordinarily he asserts that expressiveness
need not be something characteristic of man, and that it is genuinely
a trait of external objects: "In every case, no matter how much of
mind or character is read into the thing by the mind for which it is
beautifu), the expressiveness remains that of the thing and not that
of the creating or appreciating mind itself."6 But elsewhere, and
later, he takes a realistic position much akin to Santayana's:
The beauty of a beautiful object is not a quality of it, but is a character it

possesses of satisfying in its material form a certain impulse of the mind.
. . . Satisfactoriness is attributed to the object as it were by a projection
on to the object of the satisfaction it gives, just as food is naturally de-
scribed as pleasant because it satisfies the impulse to eat. 7
As a final example of opposition to this sort of realism, we can

refer to one of the earlier writings of Sartre. After explaining Hus-
serl's notion of "intentionality," Sartre comes out uncompromisingly
in favor of objective values resident in things themselves. It is the
property of a Japanese mask, he say_s (evidently echoing Kahler ), to
be terrible, an inexpugnable, irreducible property which constitutes
its very nature-and not the sum of our "subjective reactions" to a
piece of sculptured wood. What are these "subjective responses" for
Sartre? They are simply "ways of discovering the world":
6 Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity, Vol. II (London: Macmillan,

1927), p_ 292.
7 Samuel Alexander. Beauty and Othe, Forms of Value (London: Mac-
millan, 1933), pp. 183-185.
Husserl has reinstalled the honor and charm in things. He has restored
to us the world of the artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous,
with harbors of grace and of love. He has cleared a place for a new
treatise of the passions which is inspired by that truth so simple and so
profoundly misjudged by our subtleties: that if we love a woman, it is
because she is lovable. 8
As 1 have already indicated, this debate over where expressive
values should be located is a fai rly hopeless one. l t is as hopeless
when Einfühlung is pitted against Gestalt as when philosophical
realism is pitted against idealismo The discussion refers to whole-
qualities of situations and processes, qualities which are not locali-
zable without doing violence to the integrity of the whole.
The historical use of the term "tertiary" extends back at least as
far as Locke, although as applied to the qualities in question, its
sense is probably due in the main to Santayana. lt was Dewey who
recognized that the distinguishing trait of tertiary qualities is their
lack of specmcity.9 Other qualities are specmed by making distinc-
tions within a total experience, so that we may call a particular thing
"green," or "bitter," or "sharp." But the qualities designated by such
words as "downcast," "melancholy," or "puzzling" are not particular
but pervasive. They permeate, color, and qualify all the objects and
events that are involved in an experience. They therefore diHer .from
the prirnary and secondary qualities of Locke in kind as well as in
content. The question still to be resolved is whether or not they dif-
fer in status.
THE ROLE OF QUALITY IN THE

ART PROCESS
1 ha ve already referred to the thesis that the artist,

in creating, is seeking to order his experience. Artistic b ehavior there-
fore, Iike the solving of intellectual problems, is directed by the qual-
8 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Une idée fondamentale de Husserl: l'intentionalité,"
Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947 ), p. 34.
9 John Dewey, Logic (New York: Holl, Rinehart and Winston, 1938), p.
69.
ity of the overall situation, a quality which carries the artist along
from stage to stage until he has traversed the field as a whole. What,
otherwise, would control the course of the development? Consider
the case in inquiry. Why do we choose this hypothesis at first and
not that? What determines how many unsuccessful trials we shall
make before dropping this plan of action and choosing sorne other?
To say that these choices which we make in inquiry and creation
are dictated by the subject matter at hand is only technicalIy correcto
What precisely about the subject matter is capable of exerting direc-
tion and control, or of acting as a guide in terms of which OUT actions
take their bearings? There seems to be no other possibility, or at
least none more likely, than the whole-quality of the situation. What-
ever is permeated with the quality pertains to the sítuation and de-
fines its horízons. Our reorganízation of the whole is always con-
trolled by our sen se of the whole.
Dewey speaks of this pervasive quality as being ín transition, so
that ít is possible to symbolize it intellectualIy. We do this by stating
the limits of the movement and the directíon of transition between
them. "Puttíng the nature of the two limíts briefly . . . ,the subject
represents the pervasive qualíty as means or condition and the predi-
cate represents it as outcome or end."10 Thus to refer to the work of,
let us say, Van der Coes is to refer to a particular qualíty which is
felt in the experience of paintings of a certain kind, just as we might
speak of a Bach quality or a Crashaw quality. To make the state-
ment that the Portinari Triptych is beautiful is to convert its con-
spicuous quality into an object of thought and to discriminate and
specify it in such a way as to establish a single term which repre-
sents the total outcome of reflection upon that object.
The quality itself is not to be thought of as an object in dis-
COUTse. It must be irnmediately felt or had, and appreciations are
massíye: the makíng of distinctions or characterízatíons comes later.
To be able to say that such a quality ís "pervasive" is undoubtedly
as much the result of subsequent ínquíry as to be able to say that it
ís "somber" or "piquant." 1t may be asked, Is the qualíty not always
emotíonal? It ís no more so than ít is cognitíve or theoretícal,u 1t
may be any of these things in accordance wíth the dístinctíons whích
10 John Dewey, "Qualitative Thought," op. cit., p. 107.
11 Cf. Jeanne Wacker, "Hartshome and the Problem of the Immanence
of Feeling in Art," Journal 01 Philosaphy, LlV ( 1957 ), pp. 635-45.
can be made within it upon analysis. In thinking about an experi-
ence, we may Rnd there to have been sorne quality so dominant that
the entire experience could be characterized by it. A public lecture
may thus be a predominantly intellectual event; a debate may hap-
pen to be a stirringly emotional one. The quality which binds all
parts together into a whole is al so that which makes each individual
situation unique. But we do make divisions and find or establish
connections within a situation, and it is these divisions and connec-
tions which recur in our considerations of one state of affairs after
another. In discourse about an experience, a reHective object takes
the place of the tertiary quality. In this new situation, the reHective
one (having its own organization ), the original quality is no longer
had, but can only be referred tooFor the function of discourse is not
necessarily to reproduce the quality of that to which it refers (ex-
cept, of course, in the case of esthetic discourse) . When the perva-
sive quality has been determined and symbolized, a phase of the
critical inquiry has been brought to its termination. The term first
hit upon may be a loose characterization of the quality, a rough
designation which further analysis must seek to put into more deter-
minate form o To apply the term "Iush" to one passage of a string
quartet is not incompatible with applying the term ''brittle'' to an-
other passage, and "ethereal" to yet a third. What distinguishes one
part from another, providing us with continual shock and stimula-
tion, is just such differentiation in "feel" or texture. But what Iinks
parts together so as to form a coherent unity is the tertiary quality
of the whole musical structure. For although analysis discrimina tes
parts, it is not parts that are sensed in the presence of the qualitative
unity of the work of art, but a blending and fusion which is thor-
ough and unbroken. 12
The analysis of tertiary qualities should yield distinctions by
means of which their various types may be c1assified, and categories
of a higher order arrived ato 1 am not suggesting that such c1assifica-
tion is the goal of art inquiry, for it is actually only a single device
which may prove helpfuI in the prosecution of anal ysis. ( Similarly,
"color" is a higher-order category for grouping reds, yellows, greens,
12 Monroe BeardsJey characterizes tertiary qualities as "regional," to distin-
guish them from others which are more strictly localized , while that variety oE
tertiary qualities which in this chapter is designated as "physiognomic," Beards-
ley calls "human qualities." See his Aesthetics (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1958), pp. 83-88 and 328-332.
pinks, and other specific colors.) Inquiry itself must probe into the
conditions for the occurrence of a particular quality, and into the
behavioral consequences of the experience it has pervaded . If quali-
ties produce or induce diHerent kinds of behavior, they can be dis-
tinguished in terms of the kinds of behavior evoked. ( Consider again
the analogy of color. The inquirer need not himself perceive a traffic-
light installation in order to observe that certain stimuli cause mo-
torists to proceed and others cause them to halt. For motorists do
behave diHerently as the result of the qualitative experience of red,
and of that of green.) Now, what forms of behavior can art inquiry
analyze to determine the behavioral consequences of experiences
marked by tertiary qualities? One suggestion would be linguistic be-
havior, and so an analysis of the realm of discourse in general would
be required.
If we follow the implications of this suggestion, 1 think we will
see that every function of language construction reveals some spe-
cinc direction of our linguistic behavior. It has been suggested that
the word "metaphor" be used as a verb, and \Vere it to be so used, it
would iIIustrate what is here being asserted. 13 "To metaphor" mean s
not sirnply to carry over meanings, but to align them, and such an
alignment is always based upon one specinc point and carried
through to another. These t\Vo points determine what can be called
the "direction" of the alignment. Because meaning is always contex-
tual, and since it is our fund of prior knowledge which supplies the
meaningful context for the present occasion, we learo the mea ning
of our irnmediate experience by aligning it with something else
which has been, or might be, felt, thought of, or seen.
Thus we speak of a quality as being physiog nomic when we
nnd that it is continuous with some experienced qua lit y of a human
being, of his facial express ion , or of his posture, or his gestures, or
his moods and feelings. \Ve say that a house is gloomy, a village is
sleepy, or that an accident is nasty. \Vhat may seem in discourse to
be a rather artincial or arbitrary connection is in actual, immediate
experience a felt continuity. The human being is usually the base,
the central point of reference, and all other things (ordinarily con-
sidered of lesser value) , are radially connected with it, and partake
of its qualities. The direction of reference is in this case an outward,
13 George P. Adams, Man and Metaph!lsics (1\ew York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1948), p . 131.
centrifugal one. Through this simple schematism, one may arrive at
extremely complex and ingenious results. Thus Morgenstern's line,
"Die Moteen sehen al/e aus, als ob sie Emma hiessen," does not
merely compare seagulls with women, or with women called "Emma."
It relates the appearance of the gulls to the property sorne women
have of "being called Emma."
A transensory quality is experienced as belonging to a sensory
modality other than that indicated by the organ of perception which
had selected it. The quality is unquestionably felt, but upon r eHec-
tion it is found that the mode of feeling or having was not in accord-
ance with conventional sensory compartmentalization. Thus, a critic
may refer to Rouault's paintings as having a "smouldering" quality,
and perhaps we shall find, on going back to Rouault's works, that
such a qualíty is actualIy there, and can be readily felt and distin-
guished. But the term is one which implies warmth, and yet not a
warmth which can be detected by applying one's fingers to the can-
vas. Again, another writer, in a frequently quoted if somewhat in-
scrutable remark, has referred to Beethoven's last quartets as being
"dark with excessive light." Here the implication is that the music
possesses certain qualities which can be described only in terms of
visual imagery, and yet music is not primarily a visual arto
Meyer Schapiro has suggested that transensory qualities are not
to be shunted aside as illusory, but that a different mode of testing
should be found for them. The distinction between transensory and
other qualities is initiated within the procedure of inquiry, not within
immediate experience. Colors do have "warmth," but it is not a
warmth whose degree can be determined by a th ermometer. We
speak of a line as "having weight," but we would h ave little suc-
cess if we tried to find the warrant for our assertion by means of a
balance scale. Since th ere can be methods for testing transensory
qualities (Schapiro has spoken of them as "metaqualities") which are
as objective and as valid as those used for testing primary and second-
ary qualities, it would be an error to consider the older procedures
exclusive.
Dimensional qualities are those which are felt to be inherent in
an experience, where the object seems ordinarily to exclude related
temporal or spatial dirnensions. ' Ve may therefore speak of sounds
as being "hollow" or "voluminous," although sounds are not usually
considered as having spatiality. Similarly we speak of architecture
as "rhythmic," of sculpture as showing "movement," and of paintings
as having "depth." As with transensory qualities, the direction of dis-
cursive reference is not from man outward to the environing world,
but from one existential quality to another. These qualities may be
strong and pronounced, or fugitive and evanescent, but it is doubt-
fuI that any esthetic experience is wholly without them.
In direct contrast to physiognomic qualities are the intro¡ectory
qualities. The direction of reference of the former is always centrif-
ugal, but that of introjectory qualities is inward-seeking, centripeta!.
External objects, when physiognomicaIly experienced, are seen to be
endowed with specificaIly human properties. Human beings, when
introjectively experienced, are viewed as being on the same plane
with other natural objects, so that the person is described as pos-
sessing the qualities of physical things. In painting one can treat a
landscape physiognomically, by depicting it as possessing human
characteristics, so that it enters into the composition as an active
protagonist. Or one can treat the human figure introjectively, de-
scribing it as mechanical, as made of wax, or of wood, or of straw.
The poet can personify the elements ( Lear's "Blow, winds, and crack
your cheeks! rage! blow!" ), or he can e1ementalize the human, as
when Hopkins calls Christ "immortal diamond." Personal experi-
ences may be given names that are usually applied to purely per-
ceptuaI facts. Thus we speak of our moods as hot, bitter, sweet, dark,
rough; we feel high, low, soft, hard, blue, sharp. Does this happen
in a purely random fashion, or is there sorne criterion which governs
each application? The quality-categories mentioned aboye may be
hypothecated as a preliminary grouping of these peculiarities of our
linguistic and artistic behavior. Let us consider them in a Iittle more
detai!.
PHYSIOGNOMIC QUALITIES
Gestalt psychology must be credited with having

stressed the structural features, the configurations of natural events,
and with having shown that the characteristic function of any part
of a process is determined by the total situation. The attitude of
Gestalt psychologists has been one which, as Arnheim says:
. . . refuses to reserve the capacity of synthesis to the higher faculties of
the human mind, hut emphasizes the formative powers, and, if 1 may say
so, the "intelligence" of the peripheral sensory processes, vision, hearing,
touch, etc., which had been reduced by the traditional theory to the task
of carrying the bricks of experience to the architect in the inner sanctuary
of the mind.14
Some Gestalt theorists, such as Werlheimer, believe that neither

past experience nor logical deduction is necessary for an understand-
ing of the elementary features of expression. Qne need not explain
the relationship of a relaxed face and a pleasant mood as a causal
one; such properties of other individuals as "happy" or "furious" are
actually meanings derived from a perceived pattem, and yet sepa-
rate from it. The meaning, the expressive quality, is perceived as
directly and spontaneously as are color and shape. True enough, "be-
ing angry" is not a spatially or temporally definable quality. Yet,
Ryan remarks :
. . . it is a spatially defin'ed person who is angry. The "squaredness" of
the character 25 has become for the adult organism a property of the
spatial pattem in the same fashion that "being angry" is a property of
sorne human organismo Because of this analogy we might use the term
"physiognomic" to describe such extra-spatial characteristics. 15
Ki:ihler has argued that if we do away with expressive values
in the case of other individuals, we must also deny that they exist in
ourselves. If express ion is to be separated from perception, then it
must be separated in the case of OUT awareness of our own body as
welI as in the perception of any other object. After all, he says, there
are "perceptual events" which seem to emerge from the interior of
the body-from the interior of a perceptual entity, a volume with a
surface, and this volume, this body, c1earIy belongs to the worId of
perceptual facts as do all other objects. But surely it would be ab-
surd to make this separation in the case of one's own bodily sensa-
tions, for are they not always charged with feelings from which they
are, in fact, indistinguishable?
14 Rudolf Arnheim , "Gestalt and Art," ¡oumal 01 Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism, II ( 1943), p. 7l.
15 T . A. Ryan, "Mathcmatical Objects and Symbolizing," American ¡oumal
01 Psychology, Ll (1938) , p. 294. See also his "Dynamic, Physiognomic, and
Other Neglected Properties of Perceived Objects," American ¡oumal 01 Psy-
chology, LI ( 1938 ), pp. 629-49.
If the organism of a human being can emit stimuli which give rise to per-
ceptual facts "with psychological ingredients," then there is no reason
why stimuli which come from other sources should never be able to cause
similar effects. Obviously pictures of people . . . fulfill the necessary
conditions. But quite apart from such banal instan ces, there are other
events and objects which impress us in the same way. Few people can
hear the rumbling crescendo of distant thunder as a neutral sensory fact;
it sounds to most of us "menacing."16
Koffka's analysis of physiognomic qualities emphasizes that we
are dealing here only with "phenomenal" objects, with perceptual
wholes. Thus, the lack of a property in a physical object in no way
entails the lack of that property (or, to c1arify Koffka's terminology
in accord with the distinction made earlier, that quality) in the cor-
responding object in direct experience. You may say that a cathedral
is not realIy aspiring, but that the perceiver only thinks it is. This
point of view, however, fails to consider the distinction between the
phenomenal whole and the physical thing. Koffka's example of a mo-
tion picture iIIustrates how our perceptual processes are the telling
ingredient which transforms a rapid succession of sta tic photographs
into a phenomenal object that has the tertiary ( i.e., the dimensional)
quality of smoothly Bowing movement. He rejects the theory of em-
pathy, as proposed by Lipps and supported by Langfeld, which
maintains that we ourselves create the art object by attributing to it
our own strains and strivings, our own tensions, feelings , and emo-
tions. But why, when we hear music, do we move to it, and why
should we feel ourselves stretched upward when we stand before
sorne magnificent column or tower? Koffka answers that we do so
because the music itself sways and the column itself rises. The theory
of empathy, he concludes, is unable to account for the appearance in
objects of physiognom ic traits, and of tertiary qua lities in general.
We do not have to feel the jealousy ' of Othello or the hatred of lago
in order to understand and enjoy Shakespeare's tragedy. Koffka
inciden tally corrobora tes the c1assification of the physiognomic as a
variety of the tertiary: "AH physiognomic characters are tertiary
qualities, whereas not al! tertiary qualities need be physiognomic
characters."17
16 WolIgang Kohler, Ges/alt PsycJ¡ology (New York : Liveright, 1947),
p.242.
17 Kurt Koffka, "Problems in the Psychology of Art," Art: A Bryn Mawr
5ymposium (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Bryn Mawr College, 1940 ), p. 210.
TERTlARY QUALITIES 31
One of the aims of Gesta lt psychology is to obtain a science of
the physiognomic. Arnheim asserts that :
. . . kindliness or aggression, straight-shooting determination or hesita-
tion, are expressed in the curves oE the physical movements (or traces oE
movements ) which accompany such mental attitudes. A geometry oE
expressive Eeatures is anticipated which would describe their character-
istics with as much scientific precision as our present geometry is able to
describe the differences between a straight line and a circular curve. The
underlying idea is that the dynamical characteristics of, say, timidity are
identical whether we trace, e.g., as to time and direction, the walking
curve oE the timid man who approaches the private office oE his boss or
whether we translate into a graph the succession of his psychological im-
pulses, inhibitive and propulsive, with respect to his aim. 18
Much of the work on physiognomic qualities has con cerned itself

with the world of the child and that of the primitive, with the im-
plication that civilization has more and more stripped away the
dynamic qualities of things. We are told that, for the civilized adult,
it is only in esthetic experience that the close association between the
external object and himself is restored. Heinz Werner has collected
and summarized much of the experimental findings concerning phys-
iognomic qualities, and he contrasts them with the "geometrical-
technical" qualities of the matter-of-fact world of most adults.19
Where there is a high degree of unity between the individual and
his environment, the apprehension of things tends to be dynamic
rather than static. As this unity begins to disintegrate, physiognomic
characteristics deteriora te, although articulation of the neld is in-
creased. The world of the primitive or the child is presumed to be a
fairly undiHerentiated continuum, a blur of activity, so that no dis-
tinction is made between the individual and the surrounding world.
Things are always things-of-action; they are viewed in their instru-
mental aspect only. The dynamization of things apprehended in
primitive perception is as much the case regarding one's aware-
ness of a landscape as in cODsciousness of one's own body. \Verner
believes that physiognomic perception is more fundamental than
simple anthropomorphism, sin ce it nnds not merely life in its sur-
roundings, but the actual qualities of human beings. Physiognomic
18 Amheim, op. cit., pp. 74-75.
19 Heinz Wemer, Comparative Psychowgy of Mental De1Jelopment (l\ew
York: Harper & Row, 1940).
experience is geneticalIy antecedent to anthropomorphism, which
can occur only when there is a consciousness of a polarity between
the personal and the impersonal. A child may pronounce such a fig -
ure as this / / to be "cruel," meaning that its physiognomic quality
is to behave cruelIy. Werner teJls of one child who, seeing a cup Iy-
ing on its side, sadly remarked "poor, tired cupl" The tiredness is
an immediate concrete experience of the boy-it would be gratuitous
to believe that there existed in his mind an anthropomorphic rela-
tionship between the idea of fatigue and that of Iying down. Num-
bers may appear mean or cross or soft, austere, voluptuous, or preg-
nanto The story is even reported of a Httle girl who, when shown the
number "10" for the first time and asked what it was, replied:
"Daddy and Mommy." The value of such evidence as this for the
theory of expression in art is asserted to be more than a mere nega-
tion of the "anthropomorphic projection" explanation. Arnheim con-
tends that art theory must not necessarily start with the attitudes of
the human body and explain as mere projection ". . . the Baming
excitement of Van Gogh's trees or El Greco's clouds . .. , but
should rather proceed from the expressive qualities of curves and
shapes and show how by representing any subject-matter through
such curves and shapes express ion is conveyed to human bodies,
trees, clouds . . . or whatever other thingS."20
While Dewey would certainly not embrace the dualism implicit
in the Gestalt theory of isomorphism (that is, the identity of forms
in physical and psychological processes), his agreement with this
statement of Arnheim's would appear quite likely, for he has written:
The live animal does not have to project emotions into the objects ex-
perienced. Nature is kind and hateful, bland and morase, irritating and
cornforting, long before she is mathematically qualilied or even a con-
geries of "secondary quallties" like colors and their shapes. Even such
words as long and short, solid and hollow, still carry to all, but those who
are intellectually specialized, a moral and emotional connotation. 21
He offers this expressiveness, of lines as mere lines, of sounds as mere

sounds, as proof of the immediate esthetic values of sense qualities
in and of themselves. But how does Dewey explain this expressive-
ness, which is at times so forceful as to have actually a moral power?
20 Arnheim, op. cit., p. 75.
21 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, 1934 ), p. 16.
TERTIARY QUALlTIES 33
Why should sounds be "whining, soothing, depressing, fierce, tender,
soporilic" in their own quality?t2 Because, Dewey says, they carry
with them the properties of objects. The lines we experience in na-
ture are not isolated, but are the boundaries and demarcations of
the things with which we live and which are, for us, filJed with
meaning. Lines carry over the signilicance of the objects which they
define. "One who has run into a sharply projecting comer will ap-
preciate the aptness of the term 'acute' angle. Objects with widely
spreading Iines often have that gaping quality so stupid that we can
it 'obtuse'."23 Lines mean for us what we have known them to do and
to be capable of dOing, in the interactions of things upon one an-
other and upon uso Sense qualities carry meanings as a woman car-
ries a child while it is still part of her own organismo Suggesting and
suggested interpenetrate and unite. It is this fusion, Dewey con-
eludes, which the expressiveness of lines, colors, and sounds reports
and celebrates.
In concluding this section dealing with the physiognomic, it is
necessary to calI attention to several points not previously empha-
sized. First, it is preferable to consider the physiognomic as a tertiary
quality instead of as a property of objects, for we then avoid the old
realism-idealism controversy of location, since the quality is not lo-
calized but pervasive. Secondly, Dewey's emphasis upon the role of
past experience is an important antidote to occasionalIy made Ce-
stalt assertions that the physiognomic is inherent in things. Lastly, it
may be pointed out that subjectivistic arguments against physiog-
nomic qualities frequently rest upon a narrowly conceived prefer-
ence for sensory warrants. As a result, the associated mental contents
of an experience are accorded a lesser reality than associated phys-
ical contents. If someone says, "That box looks heavy," his statement
may be accepted as descriptive of the appearance, beca use it is
known that he has associated kinesthetic impulses with the visual
perception. But if he should announce, "That box looks stolid," the
statement is dismissed as "poetic," because the associations which
contribute to the feeling of stolidity ha ve been psychological rather
than sensory. But for scientilic practice, the only difference between
the two statements is the way in which they are to be tested. Other
conditions being equal, psychological facts are as val id as sensory
22 ¡bid., p. 238.
23 ¡bid., p. 100.
Copyrightoo mall>rlal
facts. This is in no way to deny, of course, that both are dependent
upon physical conditions. 24
TRANSENSORY QUALITIES
There is a place where Charles Peirce says, in one of

those calm, lucid, and sensitive passages which suddenly emerge
from the dark turgidity of his writings :
We can hardly but suppose that those sense-qualities that we now ex-
perience, colors, odors, sounds, feelings of every description, loves, griefs,
surprise, are but the relics of an ancient ruined continuum of qualities,
like a few columns standing here and there in testimony that here sorne
old-world forum with its basilica and temples had once made a magnifi-
cent ensemble. And just as that forum, before it was actualIy built, had
had a vague underexistence in the mind of him who planned its construc-
tion, so too the cosmos of sense-qualities, which 1 would have you to
suppose in sorne early stage of being was as real as your personal life is
this minute, had in an antecedent stage of development a vaguer being,
before tbe relations of its dimensions became definite and contracted.25
24 The transactional approach appears to avoid most of the difficulties in-

herent in Gestaltism. For a valuable critical survey of the Iimitations and
achievements oE Gestalt theory, see Irwin Rock, "The Present Status of Gestalt
Psychology," in John G. Peatman and Eugene L. Hartley, eds., Festschrilt lor
Gardner Murphy (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 117-144. See also
N. Rescher and P. Oppenheim, "Logical Analysis of Gestalt Concepts," British
Joumal for the Philosophy 01 Science, VI (Aug. 1955 ), pp. 89-106; and Emest
Nagel, "Wholes, Sums, and Organic Unities," Philosophical Studies, III ( 1952),
pp. 17-32. For further discussion of the logical status of tertiary qualities, see
Frank Sibley, "Aesthetics and the Looks of Things," reprinted in Marvin Lev-
ich, ed. , Aestl, etics and the Philosophy 01 Criticism (New York : Random
House, 1963 l. Sibley suggests that tertiary qualities "reRect our vital interests,"
while primary and secondary qualities do nol. ". . . redness as such means
nothing to uso If it impresses us, il is by its vividness or brilliance or warmth,
or else by what it indicates, suggests, or stands for, ripeness, richness, violence"
(p. 280 l. See also Sibley's article "Aesthetic Concepts," reprinted in Philosophy
Looks at the Arts, Joseph Marp:olis, ed. (New York : Scribner, 1962), pp. 63-87.
25 Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Charles Sanders Peirce,
"The Logic of Continuity," Collected Papera, Vol. VI, Paul Weiss and Charles
Hartshorne, eds. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1935,1963l,p.135.
Peirce goes On to remark, characteristicaIly, that "The general in-
dennite potentiality beca me limited and heterogeneous." But it is
important to note his stress on the way the separate sensory activities
had so long been misconstrued, for we speak of the individual senses
as if it were their true natural state to be independent and self-suf-
ncient, and what relationships they have are considered to be wholly
external ones. That is, we still hold, commonly, to the belief that per-
ceptions are received simply and are then combined. The powers of
perception coopera te, they may even be said to interact, but they are
nevertheless held to be intrinsicaIly individual. How similar this
sounds to the political theorizing of the past several hundred years!
Men were once assumed to be independent creatures in "the state
of nature," who later agreed to a social contract for their mutual
beneflt. Romantic criticism of this notion turned it upside down, nnd-
ing society to be primary, out of which individuals were subse-
quently generated. It has been much the same in the history of theo-
ries of perception. Criticism of the concept of an original, primordial
group of independent sensory functions attempted to replace it with
the concept of a primal, synaesthetic unity, in which sensations were
only later difIerentiated. Thus the "personalistic" approach, as AlI-
port teIls us, maintains that :
... experience mediated by the separate modalities is "dissociated" from
the non-specillc total perception that is deeply embedded in the person,
and originally represented by a state of diffuse feeling. "Sharpness," for ex-
ample, in smell, taste, hearing, and touch is not to be explained by the
association of various specillc sensations. It is a prior total experience that
under certain conditions may become ascribed primarily to one modality
or another. The Gestalt theory of course does not take into account the
unifying substratum of the person, nor does it imply, as does Stem's
theory, a genetic process of differentiation among modalities. 28
It is now possible to reject the controversy over which came
flrst, parts or whole, since we see that the gradual development and
organization of the sensory system has led to more renned and more
discriminating specialized functions. The more comph;x our experi-
ence, the more likely it is that we can distinguish within its texture
qualities which are obscure and delicate, but which are nevertheless
of immense signincance. Especially in esthetic analysis is the opera-
28 Cordon W. Allport, Personality (New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston ,
1937), p. 554.
tion of such factors of importance, beca use of their very pervasive-
ness and subtlety. If we attempt to examine any particular sensation
to see whether or not it realIy is "pure," we nnd that it is also warm
and loud, or perhaps thick and heavy. How is such an experience
possible? One answer is that alI perception is basicalIy synaesthetic,
while another, which has been suggested aboye, is that these sense
contents are transensory, and that such categories as we afterwards
use for their classincation, according to strictly denned perceptual
modalities, are not antecedent realities but subsequent (and fre-
quently imperfect) distinctions. The chief difference between the
two explanations is that the former attempts to explain synaesthesia
in terms of an isomorphism which is said to exist between alI per-
ceptual channels, while the latter dispenses with the theory of iso-
morphism by revision of the manner of specifying the sensation in
question.
The chief proponents of the doctrine that the sen ses are iso-
morphicalIy constructed have been the Gestaltists. Werner is one of
the foremost advocates in recent psychology of the view that alI
sensation was originalIy wholly synaesthetic, and that our relatively
distinct modalities have been gradually developed and have become
increasingly isolated among themselves. For this reason he protests
against the charge that synaesthesia is a bizarre and aberrant way of
perceiving. The psychology of elements, he says, admitted a close
associative relationship between tonal and color sensations, but in
synaesthetic perception it is no longer a joining of two dissimilar en-
tities that occurs, but an indissoluble identity :
If a synaesthetic individual who asserts that a vowel is blue for hirn is
asked where he sees this blueness, he does not say that he sees it near the
vowel, hovering about it in sorne fashion or other, but that he sees the
vowel itself as blue. And tone, for such a person, is just as rnuch blue as
it is characterized by a certain intensity or pitchP
Werner has developed a theory to account for sensations which
seem to imply no distinction between perceiver and perceived, and
this theory may help to illuminate the problem of transen sor y quali-
tieso He has endeavored to show that if a series of tones is played on
a piano, the degree of "subjectivity" in the hearing of the tone so
varies that several different stages of a wareness can be distinguished.
27 Wemer, op. cit., pp. 92-93.
In ordinary perception, a sound seems to come from sorne specmc
external source, such as a musical instrument, and we may caIl this
an "instrument tone." In another type of tonal experience, the tone
does not appear to reside primarily in the object producing it, but
BIls the whole space around it, the entire room. This may be called a
"spatial tone," and is analogous to the "atrnospheric colors" described
by Katz. But both instrument and spatial tones possess an objective
characteristic, which is completely lost in the third case. The tone is
experienced as actually vibrating within the hearer-he himself be-
comes the resounding instrument. One subject, describing this ex-
perience, exclaimed: "1 am BlIed with tone, as if I were a beIl that
had been struck."211 Werner calls these experiences "vital sensations";
they are devoid of "objectivity," undifferentiated and pervasive. It is
apparent that the splitting of the perceiver from his environment is
the achievement of developing perceptual and reHective "objectivity"
-it is not due to a pre-existent cleavage in the nature of things.
The work of Goldstein has been extremely important in demon-
strating that all the single senses owe their delimitation to the proce-
dure of isolation, rather than to speciBc processes for such definite
qualities as color, tone or pitch. The isolating procedure is one which
segregates single experiences from the total pattern of organic re-
sponse. As we make further discriminations, we continually Bnd new
senses, such as that of equilibrium and vibration. Several diverse
sen ses seem to be lumped together under what are presentIy consid-
ered "cutaneous" phenomena, and the discovery of many more dis-
tinct sen ses does not seem at alI unlikely. For every sense stimulation
there is a specmc response pattern for the entire organismo In fact,
it is even possible to say that the formation of this pattern is not
controlled by the senses insofar as they are considered speciBc. The
differential effect of colors is not Iimited to stimulations of the eye,
but is said to hold for light stimulations of the skin in general, where
no vis ion is involved, although to a much les ser degree. Sensory or-
gans are thus not the only inlets for the influences of specinc stimuli,
although they playa preferred role. -
So close is the relationship of colors to total behavioral attitudes
that behavior patterns actually do inBuence color perceptions. Gold-
stein asserts that the experience of a specmc color, the dennite state
of the organs, the mood, attitude, and performance of the organism
28 Ibid. , p. 96.
-aIl these factors are but artificialIy separated aspects of a "unitary
process which represents a coming to terms of the organism with a
dennite happening in the outer world, called light of a definite wave
length."29 Only this total homologous pattern of response can account
for the phenomenon erroneously called synaesthesia. This does not
mean that the specificity of the sensory structures becomes a super-
Huous notion. These pattern pro ces ses, functionalIy localized during
perception, "gain their specificity only by virtue of the whole-process
in which they are embedded."30
It is apparent from the work of both Goldstein and Werner that
transensory qualities are not in themselves specific, but that they are
distinguished in the procedure of inquiry. And since they cannot be
localized in the same way as colors, shapes or sounds, they belong
to the general group of qualities which have here been caIled "ter-
tiary."
DIMENSIONAL QUALITIES
Monet saw haystacks. He sought to catch them in

the moment of sensation, Tich with color, luxuTious with textures. He
sought to fix in paint, vigorously, lyrically, yet with an easy detach-
ment, their instantaneous blending with the sunlight. But how full is
a moment? Some said it was timeless, that it included lines and
points, surfaces and volumes, COlOTS and textuTes, but certainly not
time. And hence, being timeless, it was eternal. For otheTs, each
moment mirroTed the world, echoed all its melodies, all its fra-
granees, all its lusters. We had only to be sensitive enough to gTasp
it in its fullness. And hence it was eternal. F o,. teas not time felt as
keenly, as poi{!nantly as the struck notes tchich, in a flight of music,
succeeded and mingled with one another? Did they, did we merely
pass through time-was it not Tather that time flowed through them,
thTOUgh us? To feel time as thick, to clot it for a second: this seemed
as possible for the artist as for the poet. Why, after all, should the
29 Kurt Goldstein, The Organism (New York; American Book, 1939), p.
266.
30 ¡bid., p. 268.
poet monopolize the portrayal of a feeling so genuine and pervasive?
He WC18 not the only one who lay
. . . face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night ... .3\
Monet painted haystacks, watching, as he díd, how secretly and
swiftly the shadow of the night came over them. The shadows
moved, but he paínted them as he saw them, sprawling and askew.
One knows, looking at them today, one feels the sun which stvept
overhead, dividing the land into movíng patterns of líght and dark,
one feels the passage of time and the terrible impermanence of things.
Faust sought to make the moving moment Unger au;hile; Monet
caught it in its passing.
Now if the distinctions which we make upon reBection were
themselves inherent in the na ture of experience, as categories of per-
ception and understanding, or inherent in nature itself, so that it
carne with clefts and bunches ready-made, the artist would feel no
need to transcend the apparent limitations of his medium. The com-
poser could deal with tones in progression, the painter could deploy
his colors across the canvas, and perfect justice would be done to the
experience that gave birth to the art product, as either purely tempo-
ral or purely spatial. But since no existential process occurs in only
one dimension, the artist who wishes to be faithful in his symboliza-
tion to alI that he has undergone must somehow convey these im-
pressions of his to the appreciator of his work. And in fact, great
artists, as Monet, have always done this, if the need of doing so was
strongly felt. Where the suggestion of another dimension would
contribute to the total effect, some means of accomplishing this has
usualIy been devised.
It must be understood that there is a distinction made here be-
tween physicaI time or space and experienced time or space, just as
we distinguish between the physicaI thing and the work of art. The
time of the physicist is divided into units which can be dealt with
quantitatively; experienced time consists of sIabs of duration having
their own felt quality. Every situation has its own unique temporaI-
31Archibald MacLeish, from "You, Andrew Marven" in Collected Poems,
1917-1952 (Boston, Houghton MiIBin, 1952) .
Copyrighted malerlal
ity. Waiting an hour for a train and waiting an hour for an infantry
assault are two different periods of experiential time-they feel dif-
ferentIy. A person may not be precisely twice as happy when he
drives his automobile at seventy miles per hour rather than at thirty-
five, but the qualitative difference is undeniable.
The quality of depth in painting is so taken for granted that the
most refin ed and intricate techniques have been developed since the
early Renaissance for its exploitation. It may have been argued then,
as it is indeed often argued today, that the third dimension of depth
can ha ve no part to play in an art which is (excIuding surface ef-
fects) necessarily two-dimensional. Yet even the "nonobjective"
painting which attempts to adhere strictly to the height and breadth
dimensions of the can vas frequently manifests a quality which we
caIl "rhythm," although it is not a rhythm to be tested by mean s of
a metronome. But as with any recurrence of perceptual relationships,
we feel this quality immediately as "musical" and temporal. One es-
thetician, Souriau, has gone so far as to maintain that time is more im-
portant to the plastic arts than to music, the dance, or the cinema,
for plastic time opens perspectives which are more delicate and
more profound. In the obviously temporal arts, he says, time is the
palpable stuff of wh ich the works are fashioned, and the task of the
creator are relatively simple in that regard.
But the painter, the architect, and the sculptor are masters, by a more
subtle magic of an immaterial time which they establish when they
create a universe whose temporal dimension can extend or contract in a
moving and curious way .. .. However fragile, delicate, unsubstantial
may be these means of suggesting time, they are the key to the greatest
success in these arts. Plastic time is an essential time, of which the par-
ticular characteristics in each work forro the most moving evidence of the
power of the artist, in creating a masterpiece, to flash before our eyes a
world to which he invites us, and where we may live.32
It is very doubtful that it is necessary to give as much weight to

dimensional qualities, granting their importan ce, as Souriau seems to
believe. It is equaIly questionable whether recognition of temporal
quality necessitates a comparison with the space-time theory in
physics, as a number of writers have recently done. To confuse phys-
32 Etienne Souriau, "Time in the Plastic Arts," Joumal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, VII ( 1949 ), p. 307.
ical time with experienced time is to confuse a quality of direct ac-
quaintanee with an abstraet symbolization of it. The experience of
time in the plastic arts is not derived from the artistic methods uti-
lized in their construction, as has been suggested regarding Cubismo
That an artist, in painting, has moved from one point of view to an-
other, now cIose, now far away, need not evoke a similar feeling of
movement in ourselves; appreciation does not necessarily recapitu-
late creation. But when Picasso, in sorne of the paintings done be-
tween 1920 and 1923, depicts the flight of a girl chasing a ball
towards the sea through a distortion of the body-the great legs, the
narrowing torso, the tiny head-we obtain an unmistakable sense of
her movement. And when we eonsider the symbolism of the sea (la
mer-la mere), the flight of the girl appears as a movement back-
ward in time, to infaney. This interpretation is perhaps supported by
Pieasso's great interest, during the same period, in c1assic madon-
nas, and in the mother-and-child theme in general.
Thus we see that these qualities-volume and spatiousness in
music, movement in sculpture and architecture, depth in painting,
though often oblique, subtIe, and recondite-have an intense and
powerful effect in our esthetic experience. If occasionalIy we are an-
noyed to Snd one of these dimensional qualities exploited in and for
itseIf, as in the depiction of action merely for action's sake, we are
nevertheiess compeIled to recognize its existence, so long denied by
the c1assic distinction between spatial and temporal arts, and perhaps
to aceord it the status appropriate to it.
INTROJECTORY QUALITIES
Introjectory qualities are reflected in the comparison

of the human to the nonhuman. When this takes the form of actual
reductiveness, it may be symptomatic of a prevalent sadism or mas-
ochism. It has been suggested that the essence of the comic lies in
treating the human being as a mere thing. 33 When Hart Crane com-
pares love to "a burnt match skating in a urinal," or when he asks,
33 Wyndham Lewis, The Wi/d Body (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1928), p. 245.
"Whose head is swinging from the swolIen strap?," the imagery is
bitterly reductive. But introjectory qualities may also be expansive
of the human. Countless locutions testify that we attempt to express
or enhance the human by references to nonhuman traits. One pres-
ent-day poet has dedicated himseIf to the exposition of what is idio-
syncraticalIy human solely by an examination of the nonhuman. It
is not enough, Ponge writes, that man be described as "proud" or
numble," "sincere" or "hypocritical," and aH possible combinations
of these "pitiful" qualities. For he also has the qualities of things.
"The richness of propositions contained in the smaIlest object is so
great, that I do not yet conceive the possibility of taking into con-
sideration anything other than the most simple: a stone, a grass, the
me, a piece of wood, a piece of meat."34 The more complicated sights
are too difficuIt, such as man on the point of speaking, or aman
asleep. "The whole secret of the happiness of the contemplator is in
his refusal to consider as an evíl the invasion of his personality by
things."35
It is therefore possible to use introjective imagery to extol man
by expressing the admirable qualities he shares with physical nature.
Banal instances of this are to be seen when we speak of someone as
"a jewel," or as "a peach," or as "a pearl." It may take the form of
extravagant sentimentality, or it may be an attempt to state with a
delicate precision similarities which do in fact exist. A single poetic
image may exhibit a great number of tertiary qualities at play. For
instance, when Arie! sings, "Those are pearls that were his eyes," we
can detect two mutuaIly opposed directions of movement, one re-
ductive (that one's father's eyes should be turned to mere stones),
the other expansive (the crystallization of eyes into pearls). For the
artist, who must continually transmute his personal energy into the
physical form of his medium, this image can come to have an enor-
mous symbolic value.
Another related variety of tertiary qualities can be found where
the Hat statement of a connectedness is made, with no value distinc-
tion between "higher" and "lower." The quality can have no "direc-
tion" assigned to it, for it moves neither from things to man, nor
from man to things. It is neither truly introjectory nor truly physiog-
nomic. Perhaps it should be given the sub-heading of "naturalistic."
34 Francis Ponge, Pro~mes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 137.
35 lb/d., p. 138.
1 would say that, on the whole, the work of Lucretius is of this latter
kind, for it achieves a sort of integrating equation between human
and natural values without denigration of either referent. It aims at
being both esthetic and yet accurately, even "scientificalIy," descrip-
tive. Thus Ponge is able to compare, at once literalIy and poeticalIy,
his smalI periodic issue of poems and a woman's menstruation; and
so, to the reproach that he has not written a great work, Ponge re-
plies with dignity that although his regular but limited expression
displays that he is not pregnant, it al so signifies that he can become
so.
It is therefore the valuatíon accorded the various portions of our
world that determines the referential direction of qualitatíve align-
ments; the direction does not determine the valuation. Poe complains
that it is unpoetic of Longfellow to compare a snow-laden tree to a
crystal chandelier (the latter being merely man-made), but that it
would be poetic to compare a crystal chandelier to a snow-laden
tree. The bias here is of course in favor of works of nature and
against the products of human skill. It shows that the human-non-
human dichotomy persists even in instances where only inanimate
objects are concemed.
The "nonhuman" is admittedly an exceedingly broad category.
One way of making it less unwieldy would be to break it down into
segments. The bestial, the vegetal, and the elemental are three va-
rieties that might be suggested. Bachelard's fine studies of literary
imagery36 provide an amazing wealth of examples of how the quali-
ties of the elements-of air and fire, water and earth-are grasped
and transformed into expressive statements. In his study of Lautréa-
mont, he writes of our tendency to animalize our griefs and fatigues
and frustrations. 37 This bestiary of our dreams we may explore
through the active function of metaphor (a process which Lautréa-
mont calls "an indomitable and rectilinear pilgrimage"). It is the
bestiary of the world of Goya, or of the Gothic sculptors. There is
more than a literary Bourish to Bachelard's contention that "the di-
verse animal species are diverse forms of mental alienation. Instinct
is a monomania. . . . The quickest manner of describing human
36 Gaston BacheJard, La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, undated) ;

fEau et les nloes ( Paris, J. Corti, 1942); rAir el les songes (Paris, J. Corti, 1943 );
La Terre et les reveries du repos (Paris, J. Corti, 1948) .
37 Gaston Bachelard, Laulréamonl (París : J. Corti, 1939), p. 210.
aberrations is to associate them with animal behavior. The animal is
a monovalent psychism. "38
There is then a continual "symbolic osmosis" which takes place
in our attempt to render the qualities of our experience of the physi-
cal world. Both introjectory and physiQgnomic qualities are examples
of this. Scientific thought must be always on the alert for these ani-
mistic and anti-animistic tendencies. Thus, for example, we can per-
ceive today that the concept of mechanism was to a certain extent
guilty of interpreting nature after man's experience with his own
behavior. AH processes different from what man conceived bis own
to be he reduced to the mechanical pushing and pulling he noticed
in his own control of himself. Zilsel therefore observes that "the me-
chanical conception of nature is anthropomorphic and interprets nat-
ural processes after the pattern of human actions" ;39 an electric eel
gifted with intelligence would probably look everywhere for electro-
magnetic explanations. These tertiary qualities therefore appear to
play an important role in scientific as well as artistic thought.
38Ibid., p. 172.
39Edgar Zilsel, "Problems of Empiricism," The Development of Rational-
ism and Empiricism, Intemational EncycIopedia of Unified Science, Vol. n, No.
8 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), p. 63.
CHAPTER 4
Substantial Thought and
Intelligible Things
The transaction which occurs between the human

and nonhuman is one which has a correlative in the phenomenal in-
terchange between the mental and the physical. If we wish to leam
how we feel about thoughts and things, one method would be to in-
quire into the ways in which we are accustomed to refer to them,
how we attempt to render the qualities of physical or mental expe-
riences in our linguistic behavior. Why is this pertinent to art in-
quiry? Because art, it would seem, may be considered as a peculiar
activity in which the physical becomes inteJligible and meaningful,
and in which thought becomes materially incarnate.
HOW THOUGHTS AND THINGS

ARE CONFOUNDED
What thought actuaJly is, we are wholly unsure, but

there is much evidence indicating what we believe it to be like. Think-
ing, we know, is a form of behavior taking place in a world of physical
events, but the thought content itself, far from dissolving into the
physical environment, bids for recognition as an independent actu-
ality. There is apparently something about the quality of thought
45
which invites the analogy with the quality of the visible, tangible
world in which we live. We refer to "the life of the mind," "the
world of thought," and this is, however trite, a linking through meta-
phor of two experiences which share, in sorne respect, a common
quality. We seek to describe what we .know poorly in terms of what
we know better, and so in choosing physical terms with which to
describe thought, we move from the determínate and well-defined to
the ill-defined and problematic.
If we explore further this manner of bestowing verbally upon
thoughts such properties as life or action, visibility or tangibility, we
can see that a whole realm of qualitative experience has been ac-
corded a phantom existence of its own. This "metaphysical" universe
is inhabited by meta-animals, meta-plants, meta-sticks and stones. It
is not unusual to find the proliferation of ideational forms being re-
ferred to by means of "vegetal" figures of speech, as for example in
Whitehead and ]esperson, while Freud uses for the mind the colorful
image of a great ancient city, building continually upon its ruins.
We consider OUT thoughts sometimes as though they lived like toads,
in the dungeons of the mind, or like slugs, cached beneath rocks,
fearful of light. Thoughts, we say, "weigh heavily" upon us, as
though they were ponderable, subject to that gravity which is inca-
pable in fact of ever affecting them.
Thoughts thereEore appear to most oE us (and not just to philos-
ophers as Pascal charged) confused with things, and like erring phi-
losophers we speak oE the body as iE it were mind and oE the mind
as if it were body. Thoughts seem to have a spectral, a quasi-mate-
riality, for there is apparently a tendency to petrify the "ideational
world," just as the latter is asserted to be a pt'trification of existence.
That this phenomenon is most marked in childhood has been dis-
cussed by a great many writers. The development of the concept of
the child's world as monis tic is accredited by Piaget to Mach and to
Baldwin. The separation of thought and thíngs is a genetic develop-
ment of the later stages of childhood. Piaget says that thought is
first equated with speech, and words are equated with things.
Thought itself is accorded a filmy materiality, like that of sound, of
breath, or oE light. It has attained this more or less explicitly "ma-
terial" status by about 8 years, but at about 11 or 12 it begins to
"dematerialize." For sorne years there is a confusion between the
"signifying" and the "signified." At first, the names of things are sup-
SUBSTANTIAL THOUGHT, INTELLIGIBLE THINGS 47
posed to be embedded in things, later they are said to be everywhere
or nowhere-they are delocalized, and finalIy they are attached only
to human speech or thought. Dreams too are endowed with a materi-
ality, though it be only the thinness of air or of smoke. In the earliest
stages, the child believes that the dream emanates from the thing
dreamed about, that it is rust situated without and consequently ir-
rupts upon him. 1
When asked about the status of his thoughts, the child often as-
serts that they can be seen or touched. ( Roger Fry once told of the
child who remarked, "1 have a think imd I draw a line around my
think.") He may even express the fear ( probably not unfounded)
that his thoughts may be taken away from him. Instead of attribut-
ing human qualities to the external world, he introjectively assigns
physical characteristics to the mind.
A thought is never so palpable as when one is haunted by it. In
obsessional neurosis the attempt is to isolate a thought so as to pre-
vent it from being touched. lt becomes the central point of a system
of prohibitions, and all contact with it is taboo.2 In another type of
disorder, the thought is something to be attained or achieved-it be-
comes an end in itself, and when had, becomes fixed and unalter-
able. For the alternative to it, as Jaspers writes, is a mood of frenzy
without determinate content which is evidently excruciating. The
acquisition of a determinate thought comes to the sufferer like a
solace. His feeling of instability and uncertainty drives him instinc-
tively to seek a fixed point that he can cling to and so maintain him-
self. He finds this complement, this tonic, and this consolalion in a
mere thought. 3 And al so Dambuyant, in his moving account of the
psychological aspects of lHe in a concentration camp, remarks how
thoughts play the role of a system of reference, how "any certitude
can be clung to in order to preserve the continuity of the self, to
prevent a fissure at the worst moments."4
It is therefore possible for certain types of thoughts to assume a
I J ean Piaget, La Représentation du monde chez l'enfant ( Paris: Alean,

1926 ).
2 Sigmund Freud, Inh/bitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (London: Hogarth,
1936).
3 Karl Jaspers, Psychopathologie générale, transo by A. Kastler and J. Men-
dousse (Paris: Alean, 1928). pp. 87-88.
4 M. Dambuyant, "Le Moi dans la déportation," Joumal du pS!lchologie,
XXXLX (April-June 1946), pp. 191-192.
phenomenal forro that gives them, all question of their structure or
import aside, great weight and power. They may recur endlessly,
like the rock of Sisyphus, or like, to use Flaubert's words, "the
bloated bodies of dogs that rise to the surface, whatever stones one
has tied round their necks to drown them."5 Yet the continual pres-
ence of a thought, irresistibly felt, may also be wholly delightful. "Mes
pensées," confesses Diderot to Sophie Volland, "ce sont mes catins."
And how else could Proust give us so pleasant a passage as this?
The constant thought of Odette gave to the moments in which he was

separated from her the same peculiar charm as those in which he was at
her side. He would get into his carriage and drive off, but he knew that
this thought had jumped in after him and had settled down upon his
knee, like a pet animal which he might take everywhere, and would keep
with him at the dinner table, unobserved by his fellow guests. He would
stroke and fondle it, warm himself with it. . . .6
QUALITATIVE INTELLIGIBILITY
Now the intrinsic quality of a thought is just what it

is when it occurs. The way it affects other thoughts, its tendency to
bring other thoughts along with it, these factors do not influence its
quality. Only in contrast with sorne other thought can we call it
"calm" or "turgid," "vivid" or "blurred." If we can speak of the "lu-
cidity" of a thought, we may also refer to it as being "tangible" or
"solid," especially if it touches us and moves uso But although
thoughts often appear endowed with this pale kind of sensory em-
bodiment, they are not sensorily embodied in the way we ordinarily
use these descriptive terms. lt would be an error to speak of the
tangibility or the color or the weight of thoughts without specifying
the manner in which such distinguishing terms were being used. We
describe the qualities of thoughts in terros borrowed from our sen-
sory experience, but it is the terros which are borrowed, not the qual-
ities. And it is only in this sense that the "reality" of the "inner life"
5 Gustave Flaubert, Letters, Richard Rumbold, ed., transo by J. M. Cohen
(London : George Weidenfeld and Nicholson, Ud., 1950), p. 39.
6 Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (New York: Modero Library, 1940), p. 388.
SUBSTANTIAL THOUGHT, INTELLIGIBLE THINGS 49
is to be understood. It is not a reality to be measured by the instru-
ments we usually employ. The depth of a thought cannot be
plumbed with a bob, nor can its luminosity and that of a Iight bulb
be placed in comparison-who indeed would be so foolish? But it
would be equaIly foolish to dismiss them beca use of the practical
difficulties in volved in their testing. These qualities (perhaps they
should be called "aplastic") are to be contrasted with the indigenous
quality of thoughts whose description in vol ves no borrowing from
another realm. 1 mean the íntelligibility of thoughts, which is imme-
diately discernable in their organization (provided, of course, that
the thought occurs in a hospitable frame of reference).
The point is a crucial one. Thoughts, it is here maintained, are
intelligibilities which are found to be imbued with certain "aplastic"
qualities whose names are borrowed from the categories of sensory
experience. Things, on the other hand, are originally nonintelligible.
They may indicate significantly in certain contexts, as clouds portend
rain and as ashes imply there having been fire. But nothing in their
internal structure is detectable as being meaningfulIy, purposively
organized. The exception is the object of art, and for this reason 1
have insisted that it not be confused with other sets of physical con-
ditions.
The art object is an intelligible thing. In what sense is it intel-
ligible? lt is intelligible in the same sense as ideas have color, tex-
ture, and warrnth. To indicate this quality of the artistically con-
structed thing, we must borrow a terrn usually appropriate only to
the description of thoughts, just as to describe thoughts we employ
terms ordinarily applicable only to things. The things which are ob-
jects of art are accepted by us as signincant, as having the status of
thoughts. In the world of art, as in the world of the child, things and
thoughts are phenomenally equivalent. Signification and materiality
are generalized and diffuse; the distinction between ideational and
existential is no .longer apparent, and meaning becomes incarnate in
the organized medium.
The transaction between thought and things may thus be sum-
marized by an equation indicating how thoughts are found to have
"aplastic" qualities, and how things can appear "intelligible." But
again, the "intelligibility" of the object of art is not precisely equiva-
lent to the intelligibility of our thought as it is ordinarily conceived.
It is not something strictly logical but something qualitative. We
may therefore speak of the art object as possessing a "qualitative
intelligibility," and it will be necessary later on, in discussing artistic
creation, to inquire into the peculiar process of plastic thought which
is able to produce such objects. But it is this materialized meaning-
fulness which, along with other tertiary qualities, appears embodied
in the work of art, appears even, like the dream of the child, to ema-
nate mysteriously from the object and to irrupt spontaneously upon
us and within uso
CHAPTER 5
The Response to the Thing o
When one contempla tes a painting, it is indeed a

marvel that, from one's relationship to this Bat rectangle of color,
this painting, this thing, there should emerge so wondrous an ex-
perience as this picture, this work of arto To examine the conditions
for such an occurrence, it is necessary to probe into its unseen
springs, the world of the primitive, the world of the child, the mys-
terious, magical world where things, possessed of mighty powers,
can bewitch us if we so much as think of them, look at them, or
touch them, however gently, with our hands. For the esthetic re-
sponse is a complex organization of a large number of what are usu-
ally caBed "more primitive" responses, and just what weighting is
given to each of these latter reactions evidently varies greatly from
time to time and from person to persono The art object can be seen
as a plaything or toy, as a magic fetish , as an article of religious de-
votíon, but íf it ís seen merely as any of these things, it is no longer
being viewed estheticalIy. lt is only when the religious, magic, and
other connotations of the objects sufficientl y recede ( though stiB,
perhaps, relied upon ), that its specifically esthetic sense may come
to the fore. Nevertheless, the analysis of the esthetíc experience
must be an analysis of each of these more primitive responses insofar
as each contributes to and helps construct the experiential whole .
• Part of this chapter has been reprinted from the author's "The Physical
Thing in Aesthetic Experience" in The ¡oumal 01 Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
XV, No. 1 (September, 1956).
51
THE PARTICIPATION OF THE

THING IN THE . ART PROCESS
In artistic creation, the thing has a role of great im-

portance. Since it is usually not novel, but is that with which the
artist has had sorne acquaintance in the past, he has already form ed
certain impressions of it, expectations of what can be done with it.
This past experience that is carried over into the immediate situation
is steeped in much that is mysteriously unremembered, so that the
thing may retain sorne of the inutterable magic power with which it
was imbued at infancy. Furthermore, in the very process of atten-
tion, the thing is found to be endowed with a nature so kindred to
that of the organism itself as to charge the relationship with a pow-
erful undercurrent of emotion, a bond of profound sympathy. Even
before the creative act then, the thing has emerged as a residuum of
prior knowledge upon which a quantum of feeling has already been
brought to bear. There is thus a temporal background which ante-
dates every specific creative situation, a background which is both
intellectual and existential, and which contributes to the overall set-
ting of the process. 1
With the formulation of the artistic problem, all the materials
of the situation become altered: they become means. Until this point
1 This background is not explained merely by calling it "temporal. " W e

must see that it constitutes, to use Goethe's phrase, a "living heuristic." It has
been the great achievement of the neo-Kantians, such as Cassirer, to demon-
strate the conceptual schematisms which are brought to bear upon living ex-
perience. They have stressed the intellectual aspect of ordering percepti ons by
showirlg that concepts are ideal categories to which things are expected roughly
to conform. It seems to me that the contribution of Cantril and Dewey, of
Sartre and Bachelard, has been their emphasis upon the affective side of these
schematisms. They have shown that there is an affective heuristic as well as a
conceptual one. In the case of the thing, for example, we not only excise the
thing from its surroundings, in the act of perceiving, through our prior assump-
tion which stipulates that it must be conceived as isolated; \Ve also endow it
irnaginatively with all sorts of other properties. As Cassirer insists \Ve perceive
conceptually, Bachelard insists we perceive irnaginatively, and De\Vey and Can-
tril that we perceive socially.
THE RESPONSE TO THE THING 53
a tube of paint, for example, is simply a thing. It has emerged suffi-
cientIy from the background of events so that it can be referred to
by name- "Veridian green," or "Mars violet," or "Venetian red"-but
it is not yet a medium. To become one, it must be treated artfully,
artistically. Since not anyone can treat a thing in this fashion, most
things do not become media; the cooperation of the medium is the
achievement of the artist. If the person who is not an experienced
artist attempts to create an art product out of things (such as paints,
words, thoughts, or his own body ), he wiII usualIy find them intran-
sigent and intractable. The term "medium," therefore, does not con-
vey, as "thing" does, the prior nature-the sullen, obstinate, refrac-
tory nature of this material.
The response to the thing is a factor in appreciation as well as
in creation. Since the art object is part of the human being's environ-
ment, and since it is itself a set of physical conditions, it is legitimate
to suppose that the more general characteristics of the organism-
thing relationship will also appear in the esthetic experience. The art
object is not merely a physical thing, but there are good reasons for
supposing that our most hidden or implicit responses to the thing are
incorporated in our express response to the object. The higher levels
of behavior are of course not reduced to a lower level, merely be-
cause certain forms of activity can be better explained by resorting
to more primitive responses. It is all too easy to dismiss analysis of
necessary conditions ( the economic, the sexual, the mythic) simply
beca use non e of them is, in itself, sufficient to account fo r the phe-
nomenon in question.
The sense of the term "thing" to be employed will be in accord-
ance with the usage generally favored by G. H. Mead. Things are
thus considered to be sets of physical conditions which have not yet
b een con verted in to instrume nts, m e ans, or m edia. D ewey, in con-
trast, prefers the broad, idiomatic sense of the word, because of its
very looseness and generality, so that for him it means "events, situ-
ations, persons, groups, causes, movements, occupations, pursuits of
alI kinds."2 The two usages are not mutually exclusive. Things are
still matters "one is concemed with in action, speech or thought,"3
2 John Dewey, "The Field of Value," in Ray Lepley, ed ., Value: A Coop-
erative Inquir y (New York : Columbia University Press, 1949 ) .
s Ibid.
but they are here contrasted with objects in that the latter are the
determinate outcomes of processes of inquiry or creation.
A physical thing, as Mead has also de6ned it, is that which may
be indicated to others or to oneself, but which does not respond to
such gestures of indication. When Mead says that we are able to
"assume the attitude" of a physicaI thing, he mean s that we can
anticipate the way it will behave when we experiment with it. The
thing itself can take no attitude but that which might animisticalIy
be calIed its own. Before the social, communicative act occurs in
which, as Mead puts it, the individual becomes an object to himself,
there is undoubtedly a world of things, but just what sort of world
it is we must now make an effort to understand,4
4 See G. H. Mead, "The Physical Thing," Philosophy af the Present (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), p. 124. Undoubtedly, Mead's devel-
opment of a behavioral theory of the thing was greatly indebted to the brilliant
work of Maine de Biran, done over a century before. Both of them can be found
attempting lo explain how we become aware of the insides and outsides of
things. [See Maine de Biran, The lnfluence 01 Habit on the Faculty 01 Think-
ing (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1929).1 Mead showed specifically that
the boundedness of the thing, its resistance or innemess, the uses lo which it
could be put, aH these are static characteristics of the thing which await the
actual carrying out of the responses they involve. They must be serially organ-
ized if the desired consummation is to be efficiently brought abou!. There is
thus a conlest among responses over priority of action, and this competition is
resolved by an integrative process in which the terminal altitudes of the act
control the approach to the thing. Although the "prepotent" responses inhibit aH
the rest, the responses that are not carried out are imporlant in Ihat they con-
situte what is known as the thing upon which or with which the action takes
place. They fix the conditions of the actual response, so that what is don e is
always seen as definEd by a background 01 what cOtlld be done bu! is noto
(This recurrent theme in Mead's philosophy, in which an activity is always dis-
tinguished from its selting, is identical with the fi gure-ground relationship of
Gestalt psychology.) Thus it would seem that the responses held back in the
organizing of the act of consummatory perception also provide the thing with
a charge of emotional values. The impulses which are inhibited in order to bring
the prdcess to fruition generate the emotion whose values are then localized in
the desired object. This resistance lo being taken and had, this inwardness,
closed, yet open to us, is capable of enhancing to an exquisite degree the value
of that which is so strenuously sought foro For example, a dramatic presentation
may arouse our impulse to destroy the villain, yet simultaneously it excites our
interest in beholding the play without interference. The lalter response is usually
more powerful and wins out, but it gains its significan ce only in contrast with
the responses that have been inhibited. Each perception of the play is therefore
an entire collapsed act, which we might have taken but which, for esthetic
reasons, we suppress.
THE RESPONSE TO THE TRI NG 55
TRE PRIMITIVE RELATIONSRIP

BETWEEN MEN AND TRINGS
Prior to the emergence of consciousness, prior to the

elaborate mechanisms of social integration, the organism exists
merely as a brute physical thing. But in this dim, primordial world,
lumps of bone and flesh have no preferential status. They are solid,
tangible surds, shaped and wrought and driven by the same force
which molds and surges through aH their surroundings. Here are to
be found things of aH kinds, things porous, opalescent, granular,
luminous, fleshy; things slimy, brittle, impenetrable. There is no
communication here, no intelligibility, only a terrifying unknow-
ableness. In such a world, it has been said, there can be no com-
munion, only tentative and erra tic movements, which seek to pierce
the oppressive darkness, as insects feel, with painfully sensitive an-
tennae, along a cold, moist wall. s
There are times when we strain for another glimpse of that near-
forgotten world, when we Snd the values we had held ephemeral,
and so struggle desperately to establish anew our relations with the
universe. As Virginia Woolf has said, it is just like the way one
awakes from a nightmare, and tums on the light, and "lies worship-
ping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping the
impersonal world which is a proof of sorne existence other than
ours." In one of her more remarkable stories, she teHs of aman for
whom this experience was singularly profound :
One day at the beach he had discovered a lump of green glass so rnys-
teriously significant that he began to search everywhere for similar things
for his mantel. Soon he found, in an obscure recess, an extraordinary
fragment of china. "Set opposite the lump of glass it looked a creature
from another world-freakish and fantastic as a harIequin . The contrast
between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contem-
5 Marjorie Brace, "Worshipping Solid Objects: The Pagan World of Vir-

ginia Woolf," Accent A nt/¡olog !l ( New York : Halcourt, Brace & World, 1946 l.
plative, fascinated him." He now neglected everything in order to hunt
among rubbish heaps and demolished houses, at last discovering with
elation "a most remarkable piece of iron, massy and globular, but so
cold and heavy, so black and metaIlic, that it was evidently alien to the
earth, and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder
of a moon. And yet it stood upon the same Iedge with the lump of glass
and the star-shaped china."6
How could it have come about that man should take so keen,
one may even say so obsessive an interest in the dumb, inhuman
things which surround him on every side? It is as though we were
pagans, and they talismen. One could understand our having a
predatory regard for things, exploiting them for our own ends. But
why shoul d we have interrupted these processes of sheer utility to
notice in each thing a qua lit y of its own, and rightfully so, not be-
stowed gratuitously upon it? Even the utility of a thing, being one
of its properties, can b e enjoyed.' lbink of how one can be stopped
by perceiving a mere shape or a mere sound, stopped and held by
it, not beca use it presages sorne pleasant eventuation not yet in sight,
but beca use it is so fulIy and completely satisfying in itself, because
of its own gracefulness of contour, or majesty of proportion, its
timbre or its uncanny iridescence. Such happenings are the matrix
of the attitude which men take towards the products of their own
arts. With the addition of the element of human intelligence, the
thing acquires new signincance, and we are impelled to seek the
sources of the meaning which we are certain it contains. Thus, in
the attention focussed on the products of the various arts, in the
devotion accorded these unthinking yet meaningful objects, man
achieves a mystical sense of communion not only with their human
manufacturers, but with the objects themselves, and with alI the
things of creation.
Ir is within a context marked by overt preoccupation with things
that social organization takes place. In the rudimentary forms of
6 Virginia Woolf, "Solid Objects," from A Haunted House (New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World, 1935), p. 83.
7 See Martín Heidegger' s discussion of the mere thing, and of the thing as
characterized by serviceability, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," transo by
Albert Hofstadter, Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, eds., Philosophies of
Art and Beauty (New York: Random House, 1964 ), pp. 649-701.
society, physical things are treated as selves. We are al! able to de-
tect in ourselves social responses to things which assist or hinder us;
and in this early stage of development, such personalized responses
are dominant. The world of the child and of the savage is moreover
a world of action, and things tend to be considered practical!y and
functionalIy. Things do not stand out amidst their surroundings,
distinctly delineated and everlastingly fixed in meaning. Instead,
they are intrinsic portions of the entire vital affective situation, pos-
sessing imperative attractions and repulsions.
The power of magic pervades the situation of the savage beca use
it functions suggestively and persuasively, as a mode of dealing with
a difficult state of affairs. The thing itseIf is only the vehicle, the in-
strument for the evocation and employment of this magical power.
It is a means for producing a requalified existential situation, just as
the art object is a means for producing the esthetic expetience. In
situations where there is a magical intercourse between men and
things, events are as "syncretic" as in the world of the child. Heinz
Werner has discussed how phenomena which to a mature and criti-
cal individual would appear as specific, discrete, and unambiguous
become merged, where the mode of magic is utilized, without dif-
ferentiation into a diffuse whole. 8 In nonmagical thought, as in
nonesthetic thought, the properties of things are considered strictIy
localized and heterogeneous. The roughness of an object, for in-
stance, is considered to reside in its surface. But magical qualities
are homogeneous, pervasive; every part of a thing contains the
quality of the whole of the thing. The swiftness of an antelope can
be traced not only to its leg muscles, but to its skin as welI, and its
saliva, and even its name. Although unstable and ambiguous, the
magic thing persists as long as the syncretic situation persists. Like
the art object, its unique efficacy is not consumed by use but can be
recalIed an infinite number of times, for it is enduring and immortal
wherever there is this magical confluence among things. To recapitu-
late: the main stem of continuity between the magical and the
esthetic líes in the dependence of both upon nonspecific qualities
which permeate a congeries of things and conjure up from them a
specific and unique situation.
8 Heinz Wemer, Comparative Psychology 01 Mental Development (New
York: Harper & Row, 1940), pp. 67-82.
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
MEN AND THINGS
There is a great difference between, on the one

hand, our response to the thing and the notions we consequently
form of it, and on the other hand, the concept of the thing as a
category of scientiRc inquiry. With the latter, we need not be at all
concerned-it has only proven a hindrance to scientiRc procedure
by rigidifying the object of inquiry.9 But our response to the thing
9 In this sense, the thing is the subject matter of observational rather than
of experimental science. But even when the concept of thing was abandoned
as a scientific category, the thing's individual traits \Vere substituted as guar-
antors of "reality." Thus tangibility was long considered a criterion of certainty.
The error in this is that it erects an existential structure which is taken for
granted a p riori, before inquiry. Emphasis upon it is correlated with the exag-
geration oE the importance oE the tactile sense, and the frequ ent derogation oE
it by contrasting it with the ideality of the visual. "Touch, touch, ye holy divini-
ties of the gods, the body's feeling is'" Lucretius exclaims. But epistemologically,
touch is no more important than any other mode of sensing. It is simply one of
the physical conditions for the manifestation of the presence of things. If one
distrusts a visual appearance, considering it a poor indication of the object
sought for, one may resort to the production of another appearance, just as in
any experiment there is an intentional variation of conditions. A pillow which
looked invitingly soft may be found , when p laced under one's head, to be hard
and unyielding. It is not that the tactile appearance is more real than the visual,
but that as a sign, in this case, it proved to have been more reliable. Appear-
ances are auguries of things to come, and until the performance of actual opera-
tions, one promise is as good as another and stands, eXistentially, on the same
level with the rest.
Substantiality and tangibility are criteria that we have established for
things, conditions to which they are expected to conformo The existence of these
criteria is reflected quite clearly in our Iinguistic behavior. Our language tes-
tilles to the tendency we have of creating things out of processes, a tendency to
hypostatize the characteristics of a doing into a thing done. An action commonly
designated by a verb may in the course of time confer upon its object its original
meaning , and the name of the thing then survives to commemorate in our vocab-
ulary the long-forgotten custom from which it sprang. "Talks" and "drinks,"
"plays" and "farms," "dreams" and "kisses" are substantives which usually refer
not to substances but to the processes of behavior involved. The name of the
thing may thus come to replace the name of the process by which it was orig-
inally identilled or enjoyed. Even the proper names with which we endow things
are Iinked to the behavioral method and not the ind ividual contents of OUT sepa-
rate identilications. That proper names arouse distinctly different associations in
THE RESPONSE TO THE TRING 59
is certainly a Iegitimate subject matter for science. And the notion
of the thing has become inexpugnable in our imagination, in our
living experience. So frequently have the arts dealt with experiences
in which men were pitted against things, or somehow allied with
them, or Ioving them, that the notion of the thing has come to have
a fairly respectable status, not only among artists and their audi-
ences, but in certain philosophical quarters as well. The notion bas
come to suggest a persistant and profound complex of meanings,
and these meanings sbow tbemselves so intricately involved in our
lives that a philosophical analysis of qualitative experience can
hardly avoid dealing with them.
It is possible that the thing has taken on a status as symbolic for
our time as was the human body during the Renaissance. But we
may not extol the thing as the body was extolled, for a harmony
was found in the symmetry of the body, a moral beauty in its pro-
portion and discipline, which our non-Platonic constitutions cannot
digest. We now more gravely sense, if vaguely, the interdependence
of men and things, not simply in that awesome opposition of the
inanimate to the animate which causes us to shrink from things, nor
in tbat burst of compassion by which we would fraternize with
them. It is the realization of the impossibility of defining men apart
from things, or things apart from men, which strikes us now. Each
plays pattern to the other's ground. Yet the history of the failure to
discriminate the one from the other is a history of criminality. To
exploit men as if they were market commodities, to pour them into
crowded rooms like Iumps of coal, to butcher them like swine or
oxen-this is the abdication of humanity. Surely, to treat human
beings as things is to be a thing oneself, for being human is a special
way of behaving, and one can become human only by treating
others so.
Jean Grenier writes that to love things is to be touched by that
fidelity of theirs which we caIl inertia. And Rilke counsels his young
dilferent minds need not aITeet the effieaey and preeision oE Our relations \Vith
the objects to whieh they have been appended. That to which the Parisian and
1 both point, and whieh líes at the intersection oE the direetions \Ve indicate, is
one and the same object, and although the connotations \Ve each have oE Ihe
name "Eilfel Tower" may dilfer, our agreement on the name is based on our
using a common method oE identification. It is the implicitly agreed upon
method which is universal; the end produets themselves-this play by Racine,
that stillliEe by Chardin-are wholly individual and partieularized.
poet friend that "if there is no communion between men and you,
try to be near things; they will not abandon you." These expressions
are characteristic of a widespread community of interest, whose
enigmatic genesis and function begs for a thorough sociological
analysis. Quite possibly, the need forothings would then appear as
a corollary of the isolation of human beings from one another. When
the normal channels through which people express their affection to
each other become clogged, a compensatory activity may be sought
in the world at large, in the form of a torrent of feeling for inanirnate
things. It is therefore no coincidence that the Puritanism of New
England, with its simultaneous yearning for and shrinking from hu-
man contacts, should have attempted to thaw its icy love of hu-
manity by composing dithyrambs on man's continuity with and
inclusion within the natural universe. The philosopher who seeks to
demonstrate the sociality of the physical universe may be impelled
to do so out of the abundance of a genuinely social love which he is
not permitted to share with his feJlow meno
Again, the emphasis upon the personal possession of things
(that is, of "property"), as entaíled by the rise of individualism, must
have been psychologicaIly necessitated to compensate for the in-
creasing isolation of persons from one another. lo Correspondingly,
the notion of the sharing of property is based as much upon the
assumption that a consequent sharing of experience will result, as
that basic physical needs will in such a way be more easily satisfied.
Thus, only in a terribly fractured society such as ours of the present
day could there emerge the neurotic behavior toward men and
things by which we are characterized.
If the concern for things may be sometimes neurotic, it may pos-
sibly be even worse. To the sociologist of Iiterature, express ion s of
a pantheistic infatuation with inert things can be symptomatic of a
type of personality which is manifested elsewhere in a ruthlessly
authoritarian attitude. Leo Lowenfeld has suggested that in fascist
behavior there is a combination of sentirnentality and brutality
which is betrayed in a jumble of emotional anxiety and mawkish
sympathy for the physical things of nature. He quotes, as an iIIus-
tration of this, from Knut Hamsun's novel Pan:
lO Karl Abraham has suggested that spending-buying things for others-
may be a symbolic compensation for the inability to express one's emotions
adequately.
THE RESPONSE TO THE TRING 61
1 pick up a Httle dry twig and hold it in my hand and sit looking at
it, and think my own thoughts ; the twig is almost rotten, its poor back
touches me, pity fills my heart. And when 1 get up again, 1 do not throw
the twig far away, but lay it down, and stand liking jt; at last, 1 look at
jt once more before 1 go away and leave jt there.lI
One might place alongside this passage an entry to be found in the

joumal of the Jesuit monk, Gerard Manley Hopkins :
The ashtree in the comer of the garden was felled. lt was lopped first : 1
heard the sound and looking out and seejng jt majmed there carne at that
moment a great pang and 1 wished to die and not to see the inscapes of
the world destroyed any more.12
This neurotic feeling for things may also be exhibited as a posi-

tive desire to equate oneself with things , to reduce oneself to their
brute status. The tormented Kafka suddenly enters in his diary a
chilling analysis of his condition:" 1 am more and more unable to
think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to
speak, to share an experience; 1 am turning to stone, this is the
truth." 13 Sartre has proposed an "existential psychoanalysis" to ex-
amine those instances of a longing to become whol1y absorbed in
the world of physical things , as ink is soaked up into a blotter. 14
11 Leo Lowenthal, "The SOciology of Literature," in Wilbur Schramm, ed.,
Communications in Modem Society (Urbana: University of IlIinois Press,
1948), pp. 82-10l.
12 Cerard ManJey Hopkins, The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Humphrey House, ed. (New York : Oxford University Press, 1937),
p. 174. The combination of a sentimental attitude towards things, or towards
nature, together with a great severity towards human alfairs, is to be found also
in the art of painting. According to the art historian Otto Demus, the Cermanic
tradition of painting, unlike the predominance of Italian or West European art,
has shown a marked preference for a gentle, dreamy, romantic Irealmenl of the
objects af nature, toge ther with scenes af great brutality among m e n o This ob-
servation may be chccked by noting the co-existence of Cermany's short-Iived
experiment with democracy, the deep human feeling of Cerman Expressionism,
and the harsher treatment accorded things by the Neue Sachlichkeit and Bau-
haus movements.
13 Franz Kafka, T/¡ e Diaries of Franz Kafka, Vol. n, Max Brod, ed. (Lon-
don: Secker and Warburg, 1949), p. 68. Italics in original.
14 Or one may wish to erase all vestige of his humanity by placing himself
on any sub-human leve!. Franz Marc is quoted by Porlnoy as having said: "Is
there a more mysterious idea for the artist than the conception of how nature is
mirrored in the eyes of an animal? How does a horse see the world, or an eagle,
or a doe, OT a dog? How wTetched and how soulless is OUT conviction of placing
animal s in a landscape which belongs lo our eyes, instead of sinking ourselves
Such a desire, he suggests, is analogous to the strong wish to return
to the prenatal, embryonic state, as envisioned by Freudian theory.15
This mauvaise foi, as Sartre caJIs it, is an urge to escape from free-
dom by submitting to the absolute necessity of the physical universe;
hence the attraction for the solid and tangible as opposed to the
genuine "liberty" of the impalpable an d unbounded. This sta te of
indecision Sartre characterizes as a state of "viscosity." It might also
be possible to construct a paraJIel theory of the concrescence of
thought into fixed and tangible ideas.
Contemporary psychological writing has only just begun to pay
attention to "object-relationships."16 Novelists and other artists, how-
ever, have long dealt with the subject. 17 It is necessary to probe
deeper into such connections as those between the farmer and the
soil he plows, between the lumberjack and the tree he cuts, between
the coal miner and the vein he foJIows. An occupational psychology
in the soul of the animal in order to imagine his perceptions." (Cited to be in
Franz Mare, by Robert J. Goldwater, Buchholz Gallery, New York.) Evidently
this bizarre interest in "abasement" may spring from very diverse motives. WiI-
Iiam James, in urging a greater sympathetic interpersonal understanding, begins
by wondering what it must be like to be a dogo [See his Essays on Fai!h and
Morals, "On a Ce rtain Blindness in Human Beings," Ralph Barton Perry, ed.
(New York: Longmans, 1947 ). ]
15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947 ). An example of a
contrasting desire-the desire of an embryo no! to beeome a thing, is to be found
in a poem by Louis MacNeice, "Prayer Before Birth," from Eighty-Five Poems
(New York : Oxford University Press, 1959; London : Faber, 1959 ). lt concludes
with these Iines:
1 am not yet born ; O 611 me
\Vith strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, \Vould dragoon me into a lethal automaton ,
would make me a cog in a machinc, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me Iike thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kiil me.
16 In addition to the works of Bachelard already cited, see W. R. Fairbum,
"Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object Relationships," Interna-
tional ¡oumal of Psycho-Analysis, XXV ( 1944 ), pp. 70-93; and Henry Ezriel,
"A Psycho-Analytic Approach to Group Treatment," British ¡oumal of Medical
Psychology, XXIII, Parts 1 and 2 (1950), pp. 59-74.
17 Cf. Heidegger, Martin, "Das Ding," Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen:
G. Neske, 1954) .
TRE RESPONSE TO TRE TRING 63
might include an analysis of such material relationships. Custom-
arily, the products of these relationships are characterized as "crude
art forms," which is a way of dismissing them. But the interest ac-
corded in many occupations to the physical material may be, unlike
the case with art, quite irrelevant to the product eventually arrived
ato A carpenter can work in a factor y which mass-produces chairs
by the thousands, and yet the preoccupation of his entire day is not
so much with the outcome of his work, the chairs which he knows
are all identical, but simply his relationship to the wood, the curl of
the shaving as the plane separates it from the board, or the smooth-
ness of the surface produced by rubbing with sandpaper and steel
wool. It is the same with the machinist at his lathe, watching the
blue-hot chip spiral rhythmically away from the spinning steel, or at
the punch-press, where the metal is chopped so cleanly that its shiny
interior flashes for a moment before it oxidizes. It is the same with
the smith at his forge, the baker with his dough, and the butcher
with his carcasses. 18
To be sure, a certain portion of this interest in occupational
materials and processes may be a sublimated erotic one. Thus a
film dealing with the drilling of an oi! well may tap in us a certain
sexual responsiveness. But ordinarily the .response to the thing can-
not be reduced to its sexual aspect: the person who likes to relax
upon a grassy lawn is far from being a fet ichist. Things can appear
to have "friendly, reassuring, restitutive powers," as Meyer Schapiro
remarks that they seemed to have had for Van Gogh. One may seek
a fixed and stable thing to give one stability as one seeks a fixed
and stable thought upon which to orient the mind. "Sorne crystal
of intensity ..." writes Virginia Woolf, "single, hard, bright, like a
diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure."19
And elsewhere:
It was odd, she thought, how, if one was alone, one leant to things, inani-
mate things; trees, streams, Howers; felt they expressed one; felt they be-
carne one; felt they lcnew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational ten-
demess thus (she looked at that long steady light ) as for oneself. 20
18 See Georges Navel, Travaux ( Paris: Stock, 1946), for a worker's account
of a worker's attitude towards his tools and materials.
19 Virginia WooU, To the Lighthouse (Paris: The A1batross, 1948), pp. 154-
155.
20 lbid., p. 76.
and fresh, passive and obstinate in its single vice: heaviness, deploying ex-
ceptional means in order to satisfy this vice : twisting, piercing, eroding;
flltering. . . . At the interior of itself this vice plays also: it coIlapses
without cease, renounces at each instant a1l form, tends only to humiliate
itself, lies down flat on its belly on the ground, quasi cadaver. . . . One
could almost say that the water is mad, beca use of this hysterical need to
obey only its weight, which possesses it like a fixed idea. 22
This image is arare and moving one. Ponge has likened the water
not merely to a cadaver, but to a living person deprived of sense,
one of those mad beings, haunted by unknown fears , convinced of
vice, who spend their days convulsed upon the earth or Hoor, writh-
ing their en tire bodies in uncontroIlable anguish. lt is hardly the
image produced by a writer who equates things with meno lnstead
it appears as the forerunner of a new form of humanism, also to be
seen in the paintings of Hélion, which recognizes more specificaIly
the bonds of the human with the physical.
The poetic interest in the thing can also be interpreted as a form
of prirnitivism, as an appeal for a return to "immediate experience."
It urges that a freer play be !?,iven the ordinarily thwarted primordial
relationship between the human being and his physical environment.
For haIf a century now we have been exhorted, by Rilke and by
Hofmannsthal, by Husserl and by Heidegger, to return "to things
themselves, to the little things." "Aux choses, allons-y aux choses,"
but the way to them is difficult. To begin afresh requires the de-
termination of a Cézanne or of a Descartes, a brutal wilI that comes
with the feeling of being alone in the world, without any of the
comforting myths of the savage, with only a language and one's
wandering feIlowmen.
It is also to invoke the past, and to seek in the past those
childhood connections that were centered on a family of things
rather than on a family of persons. Try to recaIl, Rilke tells us, if
there was ever anything more cIose to you than one of these things,
more intimate and more necessary. If among your first experiences
was a fullness, a confidence, a sense of not being alone, was it not
due precisely to that thing. Was there not, he asks, "a thing with
which, first of aIl, you shared your heart, as a piece of bread which
22 Francis Ponge, Le Partí pris des choses (París: Gallimard, 1942), p. 40.
In a lighter vein, Richard Wilbur has also sought to reveal the poetry of things.
See Things 01 This World (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956) .
THE RESPONSE TO THE BODY 69
structed. Every new focal experience must be fitted into the sche-
matic matrix already built up, so that the image in its entirety is
thereby altered. The notion we have of our bodies thus appears to
possess in part a hypothetical status, for it is based upon direct per-
ceptions, but requires continual testing and experimenting for verifi-
cation. The more impressions we receive, the more likely we are to
come to a fairly definite and distinct conception of our bodies. 2 In
its actual or immediate aspect, the body image is a percept; in its
expectant aspect, it is a concepto That is, like any other concept, it
represents the deferring of overt action due to the absence of certain
specifically necessary eonditions. In this sen se, to know the body is
to be able to predict or foresee how it will acto But the organized
knowledge we have of our body is the result of continuous effort, of
trial and error, of attempts, failures, and successes.
The body image is never static; there are always tendencies
which threaten to disrupt or dissolve it. If we close our eyes and re-
main as motionless as possible, our body seems to slip away, to fade
into nothingness. If we want to maintain it as a unity, we must forci-
bly exert ourselves, for directed action is a necessary condition of all
perception. There are centrifugal forces or tendencies which disrupt
the body image, and which demand new structuralizations if ongo-
ing behavior is not to be frustrated. Forros arise out of funetions and
processes, out of actions and resistances. So bodies arise, generated
out of contacts with other bodies, as knives are sharpened by being
rubbed one against the other. Construction of the boundaries of the
body image is based upon the obstruction encountered from those
objects which "object" to being included within it.
The shaping of the body image is related not only to the actual
sensations of the various areas but also to the relative value which
is aceorded to ea eh parto The emotionaI attitude taken towards the
body can so alter its subjeetive appearance that little correspondence
is left between one's own conception of himself and the idea which
his associates have of him. Pain is an extremely important sorna tic
factor, and it eontinually distorts the body image by exacting a tre-
menous quantum of emotion for the affected region. 3 The libidinous
2 See Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, Body-Image and Persona/-
jty(Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1958 ).
3 Dambuyant describes how pain and fatigue in the concentration camp
brought about a dividing, a desolidarization of the persono As in drunkenness,
the body tended to foJlow its own way, and as a result the feeling of its "be-
characteristic of social relationships determines much of the empha-
sis which we place upon our own body parts, and parts of the bodies
of others. In appersonization, we may ourselves assume character-
istics, functions, or whole regions of the bodies to which we are at-
tracted. 4 There is a continuous intercourse of body imagery within
the community, which is expressed in the norm of a "social image" of
the body. It is in connection with this social norm that we base what-
ever standards we have of nakedness and shame.5 Bodies are bound
especiaIly c10se together in their erogenous zones. Schilder writes
that "erotic changes in the body image are always social phenomena
and are accompanied by corresponding phenomena in the body
image of others."8
longing" was increased. Also, after a period in which one had lost much weight
and where undressing had not been allowed, when the body was again seen, the
sudden change rendered it foreign, and one looleed at it nearly as if it belonged
to one's comrades. 1M. Dambuyant, " Le Moi dans la déportation," Jouma/ du
psych% gie, XXXIX ( April-June 1946) , p. 192.)
4 Leo Stein remarks : "Exhibitionism always involves identification. If a
woman shows her leg on purpose it is felt effectively because the male excitation
is localized there by an act of identification ." [Leo Stein, Joumey into the Se/f,
Edmuncl Fuller, ed. ( New York: Crown, 1950 ), p. 110.) It may also be remarked
that whenever there is an abnonnality in one' s own body, the same parts of others
are watched .
5 Lawrence Kubie has observed that our notion of filth is derived from a
feeling we have that anything brought out of the interior of the body is dirty .
Thus saliva, for example, clean enough when in its usual place, becomes some-
thing to eringe from when extem alized. [See Lawrence Kubie, "The Fantasy of
Dirt," The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, VI ( 1937 ), pp. 388-425.1 Perhaps only
the erotic impulse is strong enough to overcome this feeling. But we may go on
to say that the body serves as the material receptacle for most of ou r notions of
evil or disgusto We impute to it our shame, O UT loathing, our nausea; it becomes
shameful , loathsome, nauseating. It presents itseU in material fonn as the ani-
malizEd concrescence of OUT moral notions. Our body image is largely the effect
of these notions: therefore, by a neat logic, \Ve consicler the bocly their cause.
8 Paul Schilder, Th e Image and Appearance of the Human Body (London :
Routledge, 1935). Schilder recalls for us this passage from Spinoza : "The man
who imagines that the woman he loves prostitutes herself lo another is not
merely troubled because his appetite is restrained, but he turns away from her
because he is obliged to connect the image of a beloved object wilh the privy
parts and with what is excremental in another man." [Spinoza, Ethic, Part 3,
Prop. XXXV, Scholium , transo by W . Hale White ( London : Oxford University
Press, 1910 ), p. 136.1 The phenomenon of body imagery had already been
cornmented on by Descartes, and was later discussed al sorne length by Diderot.
For an example of the ' artistic use of the transference of body imagery , consider
this passage from a novel by Jacobsen : " . .. he began to rock her in the chair-
very-softly-very-softly . . . . She Iifted her eyelids for a loole at his shadowed
pro/He, and lowered them again in quiet conten!. It was like a long embrace;
We Httle realize how complex a matter the knowledge of our
body can actualIy be. Yet there is evidence that a disturbance of
body imagery can be found in virtualIy every case of neurosis or
psyehosis. If this is so, it is a fact of fund amental importance to in-
quiries into the nature of what is usualIy calIed "the seIf" (although
it must be insisted upon that the body image and "the se!f' not be
eonfused). According to one neurologist, the cortical mechanisms
upon which body imagery depends are among the highest levels of
association systems. Disruptions of body imagery are therefore said
to belong to the same class as distubanees of language and other
types of symbolie function! Much of this can be seen quite clearly
by a skilled analyst simply from the sketches we make of ourselves.
There are few symbols which are so charged with emotional signifi-
canee as are drawings of the human figure. It is Httle wonder that
psychologists have found projective techniques whieh exploit this
fact, so important for personality investigations. 8 A person's drawing
it was as though she gave herself into his anns when the chair went back, and
when it swung forward again, and her feet touched the floor, there was some-
thing of him in the pressure of the boards against her foot. He felt it too; the
process began to interest him, and he rocked more and more vigorously. lt was
as though he carne nearer and nearer to taking her as he drew the chair farther
back; there was anticipation in the instant when it was about to plunge forward
again, and when it carne down there was a strange satisfac!ion in the soft tap of
her passive feet against the /loor; then when he pushed it down yet a little further
there was complete possession in the action which pressed her sole gently
against the floor and forced her to raise her knee ever so slightly." [J. P. Jacob-
sen, Niels Lyhne (New York : American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1919), pp.
137-38.)
7 Harry A. Teitelbaum, "Psychogenic Body-Image Disturbances," ¡oumal
01 Nen;ous and Mental Diseases, XCII ( 1941 ), p. 612.
8 For example, see Karen Machover's Personality Proiect ion in the Drawing
01 the Human Figure (Springneld, Ill .: Charles C Thomas, 1949) . Margaret
Mead tells us that civilization depends upon "an orderly transformation of the
primary experience of childhood into the disciplined symbolism of adult life. "
"The all-pervading body-imagery of the little child is muted, overlaid, trans-
formed into acceptable social behavior. . . . " She refers to a case of a child in
a psychotic ward as exemplifying "the whole significanl and benign funchon of
the transformation of primary body experience inlo culturally approved elabora-
lions . . . . The liule girl had lived with her mother in a brothel. When she
entered the hospital, she drew, over and over, pictures of a house and a tree
and a church, bul which she spoke of as herself, a phallus, and her mother's
genitals. Among the indications of the child's recovery was that she became able
to cal! these drawings by their commonly accepted names." [Margaret Mead ,
Mole and Female (New York: Morrow, 1949 ), pp. 58-59.) This case reveals
beautifully how the symbolic content of even "innocent" drawings can be ex-
tracted by means of verbal association and elaboration.
of himself reveals in an amazing variety of details the complex in-
terpenetraton of body images within his mental world. Parts of him-
seIf are transposed, rejected, ignored, or borrowed from others, ac-
cording to the demands of his psychic economy. Our bodies are too
involved in our lives for us to be able to represent them in any way
objectively or realisticaIly. This continual and pervasive intercourse
of body images within the community attests that shared experience
is already an irreducible factor within our lives. The problem is not
how it can be possible, but how the sharing of experience can be
made more lasting, more fruitful, and more profound.
THE BODY AS INSTRUMENT
For many an artist, such as the painter or the singer,

the body is simply an instrument which he employs to produce sym-
bolic objects external to himself. But we must not neglect the inBu-
ence of that instrument itself upon the act of creation. The impress
of its felt content persists both aboye and below the threshold of
awareness, as when John Marin explains to us that "the pressure of
the air against rny body, my body against the air, aIl this I have to
recognize when building the picture."9
Artistic techniques are intimately connected with cultural or
personal conceptions of the body. Thus Michel has suggested that
perhaps one of the reasons for the lack of perspective in Romanesque
frescoes was not a simple ignorance of the principIes of vision, so
much as a conviction that the bodily organs of perception distorted
their objects, while the sights seen through the eyes of the soul were
uncorrupted by diminishment of size or shape.1o Can the resultant
deforrnations therefore be considered as due not solely to an inade-
quacy of knowledge but also to a definite prejudice against the ways
of worldly vision? And was the mOre recent rejection of perspective
similarly related to deep-Iying social attitudes towards the physical,
and to an anguished search for "purely spiritual values"?
9 Cited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves. in Artists on Art (New
York: Pantheon. 1945). p. 468.
10 Paul-Henri Michel. Fresques romanes des églises de France (Paris: Les
Editions du CMne, 1949) . pp. 25-26.
Sorne art forms demand that the instrumental use of the body
should itseIf be the object of esthetic enjoyment. Ballet, pantomime:
acrobatics, are these not wrought out of the Bexings of marvelously
graceful bodies? The driving expressive force is not diverted into
pigment or stone, but compels and directs the ongoing movements
of masses in space. Pivots, thrusts, leaps, and glides becorne rec-
ognizable parts of harmoniously formed wholes. The body sinks,
meIts, envelops itseIf, or opens, as Bowers open, embracing the air
and the light. There is something poignant in the fact that the artist
who works his art upon himself can separate less than anyone else
the material conditions of his production from its consurnmatory ap-
preciation.l1 Yet it should not be surprising that the rnost wonderful
of instruments should be arnong the oldest of artistic media. It seems,
in fact, most natural : "if the discovery of our bodies is the discovery
of our ownership by Nature, what then must that owner' be? We
moun t t oge th er .. . ."12
To say that the body is an instrument of crea ti ve accornplish-
ment is to say that it is already an object, and no longer a mere
thing. As an object, it is the outcorne of a previous process of de-
termination, and its capabilities are now so weIl known that they can
be caIled upon habituaIly or autornaticaIly, as means towards sorne
particular end. The characteristic of the object qua instrument is
that it be self-effacing as weIl as subservient. Familiarity with it per-
mits us to use it without nrst having to learn its identity. Frequently
the objects of which we are most igonorant-the body is an exceIlent
example-are the menial instruments we consider most obvious.
When something is continuaIly present to us, we nnd great difficulty
in focussing our attention upon it, for we have nothing with which
to contrast it. We prefer to concentrate upon those objects more
sharply delineated in their comings and goings. Once we do manage
to nx our attention upon it, however, it haunts us with the same per-
sistency with which it once avoided our gaze.
Prior to its status as an instrument, then, the body exists as a
simple thing, but it is aIready a thing of great importance. Ulti-
mately, Whitehead has observed, the human body is the origin of
11 For an analysis of body image problems in the dance, see Franziska
Boas, "Psychological Aspects in Ihe Practice and Teaching of Creative Dance,"
Joumal 01 Aesthetics, II (1943), pp. 3-20.
12 F. ]. E. Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature (New York : Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1940), pp. 36-37.
reference upon which are based aH statements about the geometrical
relationships of physical objects: "A traveHer, who has lost his way,
should not ask, Where am I? What he really wants to know is,
Where are the other places? He has got his own body, but he has
lost them."13 Thus Whitehead's famous phrase: the "withness of the
body."
Yet this withness of the body is never an unmodified withness.
Bodies are always with us in sorne qualified way: they are hateful to
us or enchanting, grotesque or exquisite, and we appreciate these
qualities in them just as we do in landscapes or in precious stones.
Our bodies are the most intimate parts of the world that we know,
but this attachment is based on and bred by our love for them. Con-
tempt, on the other hand, breeds unfamiliarity : the body is rejected,
cast out into the common world of impersonal things. Only Santa-
yana, with perhaps a touch of sanctimony, could have remarked
that the wretchedness of deformity is to be met with compassion not
so much beca use the individual is misshapen, as beca use he has not
been fortunate enough to find himself in a world of creatures shaped
like himself, where he might indeed be the most handsome one of
aH.
And so even in the case of the body, the "mine" precedes the
"me." Thus Auden comments that Narcissus did not fall in love with
his reHection because it was beautiful, but because it was his,H and
13 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Marmillan,

19!'9), p . 258. Proust has admirably expressed this fact of physical eentrality
and bodily orientation. " . . . when 1 awoke at midnight, not knowing where 1
was, 1 could not be sure at 6rst who 1 was; 1 had only the most rudimentary
sense of existence, such as may lurk and Ricker in the depths of an animal's
consciousness; 1 was more destitute of human qualities than a cave-dweller.
. .. It always happened that when 1 awoke Iike this, and my mind struggled
in an unsuecessful attempt to discover where 1 was, everything would be mov-
ing ro\md me through the darkness: things. places, years. My body, stiB too
heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to eonstrue the form which its
tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that
where the wall lay and the fumiture stood. to place together and to give a name
to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of
its ribs, knees, and shoulder blade" offered it a whole series of rooms in which
it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept ehanging. adapt-
ing themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered , whirl-
ing madly through the darkness." [Mareel Proust, Swann's Way (New York:
Modem Library, 1940), p. 6.1
14 It is one of the sophistications of our eivilization that permits us to aet
as though we see our bodies when we look ¡nto a mirror; the poor ehimpanzees
as the "great central ground underlying all symbolic reEerence."16
For to symbolize something artistically is, in a very pertinent sen se,
to symbolize oneself experiencing that something, and so one comes
not only to a better knowledge oE the denning characteristics oE the
thing, but also to a better knowledge oE oneselE. Since that which is
unmediatedly experienced may remain ineffable as long as one can-
not indicate to oneself the traits that distinguish it, creating symbols
is equivalent to putting one's nnger on the traits oE things rather than
on the things themselves.
As we know, the animal body was itself Eor a time the only
means oE communication. It signalled and gestured, and eventually
responded to its own gestures as it had expected sorne other creature
to do. For instance, one offers a bit oE Eood to an inEant, and at the
same time involuntarily opens one's mouth. It is not imitation; it is
simply that one has made a gesture-extending one's hand with food
in it-that is signrncant to oneself as well as to the child. But the
communicative functions of the physical body, which had consisted
in a cascade oE sounds, grimaces and gesticulations, were eventually
arrol!ated by a lin¡!uistic system which became an objective, external
artifact, with its own way of growing and of congealing into nxed
and solid forms.
It appears that talking to others made it possible to talk to one-
self, and as an event, there was something quite novel about solilo-
quy. Not the speaking process itself was now unique, but the person
to whom one spoke. It is out of this reflexiveness that bodies, as ob-
jects, arise, for it is out of the same process that mental reHection
arises. The mental functioning of the organism transforms the body
into an object capable of being surveyed and examined by itself.
This is not the same as experiencing one's body as an immediate part
of the environment. There is little difference between shaking a stick
and sbaking one's arm that has fall en asleep: both are environmen-
tal. We act on the environment when we pinch ourselves to make
sure tha t we are awake, or when we bite our nails or comb our hair.
There is considerable difference between acting against or upon the
body, and acting with it. The kitten chasing its tail is simply acting
upon its body; it is treatin g its body as it would a physical thing. For
the infant too, the body is something to be worked upon before it
can be worked with. From a mere thing, the body thus becomes an
16 Whitehead, op . cit., p. 259.
instrument, and from an instrument it becomes both a medium and
a primary subject matter of the arts.
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY

AS SUBJECT MATTER
I have already mentioned the important effect which

the immediate presence of the body evidently has upon the eventual
quality of the work of arto One of the causal conditions of the ethe-
reality of The Enneads must have been that, as Porphyry tells us in
the very beginning of his biographical sketch : "Plotinus, the philos-
opher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body."17
Now if, as Gabriel Marcel says somewhere, we base all our ideas
about existen ce upon the feeling of our connection with our bodies,
then the symbolic or mythical presentation of this relationship must
possess, as a prior emotional commitment, an incalculable dramatic
advantage. Attitudes towards one's own body, towards the bodies of
others, and towards the very notion of corporeality, seem to have
played a large part in the genesis of the Christian legend. In Ro-
manesque art, in Gothic, in Renaissance, the body remains a sym-
bolic receptacle, first for moral notions, then for esthetic. Upon the
body of Grünewald's Christ appeared the sores symptomatic of the
manifold sicknesses of mankind. The body of human suffering had
found its mythic incarnation in the agony of a man nailed to a cross
of wood. After Grünewald, the theme of the crucifixion was still a
viable one, but by the time of the Issenheim Alter, one of its possi-
bilities had been exhausted, for it had been pushed to its Iimits as
Rubens and Bach were later to push to its limits the Baroque. Now,
unless one were to repeat what had already been done at Issenheim,
a fresh expression of the theme needed to be found . Already its com-
munal aspect was heing depicted, as in Breughel, where the hearer
17 Porphyry, Plotinus, transo by Stephen Mackenna ( London: The Medici
Society, 1917 ), p. 1. And what were the causal conditions of Plotinus' shame?
AIl we know is one incident from his childhood : "Thus he told how, at the age
of eight, when he was already going to school, he still clung about his nurse and
loved to bare her breasts and take suck: one day he \Vas told he was a 'per-
verted imp,' and so was shamed out of the trick." (Ibid., p. 3).
of the cross, though centrally located, is swallowed up by the mass-
ing crowd. With Goya, its social implications became even more ma-
terialized, but the metaphorical device, in uThe Executions of the
Third of May," was partially retained. In the early 1930's, Picasso
had painted a crucifixion. But when he followed it with the "Guer-
nica," it could be felt, if it was not explicitly recognized, that this
was the crucifixion of society itself. No longer could there be the fig-
ure of the one standing for the many; the tormented body imagery
of the many now was symbolic of the individual. The symbolism had
been inverted, stood on its head, and someone who, in Sherwood
Anderson, said that we are all Christ and we are each crucified, each
of us, showed how far we had come from Autun, from Souillac, from
Saint-Savin and from Chartres.
The role of the body as esthetic model is already a vast field of
exploration. We can hardly understand its successive historical de-
form ations apart ITom the changing inRectíons of cultural develop-
mento Meyer Schapiro has pointed out that, in Vézélay, the figure of
Christ has a head one-ninth the size of the body, while the figures
on the lintel have heads about one-fourth body size. This is in sharp
contrast with Greek art, where the search for the norm is the same
for men as for gods. In our own day we have observed the great
differences in the body types of the sculptures of Lehmbruck and
Barlach, concurrent with fresh inquiries (such as those of Kretsch-
mer ) into the relationship between psychology and bodily phy-
sique.18 Similarly, in the period of the physiognomical studies of
Lavater, a sculptor like Messerschmidt was to be found making busts
depicting the various "types of emotions." In the same era as a con-
siderable psychological interest in the feeling of bodily emptiness,
we find the hollowed sculptures of Archipenko and Moore; yet these
follow by more than half a century the references to the sensation of
void Olade repeatedly by Baudelaire, Poe, Mallarmé, and other nine-
teenth-century writers.
It is of course necessary to guard against a confusion of socially
established norms for the body image with distortions produced by
artistic requirements. There is a great difference between creating
a head so that it seems much larger than it normally would in pro-
18See the discussion of El Greco's treatment of the body in Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty, The Structure 01 Behavior, transo by Alden L. Fisher (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1963), p. 203.
portion to the body, and those heads of statues which are larger in
order that, when placed high up within a frieze of a Creek temple,
they will then appear harmonious and precisely proportionate from
below.
The manner of depicting the body can be symptomatic never-
theless of a great and complex state of aHairs within the artist's so-
ciety. Among a number of ltalian artists of the early sixteenth cen-
tury, for instance, the body was painted as something fantastic and
grotesque. Often it was shown constituted of ploughs, spades and
scythes, of flowers, fruits and vegetables, of landscapes and cities, of
nre, or of monsters from the sea. These bizarrie also depicted the
body as automaton, an idea which, as Wescher writes, "also un-
doubtedly carried the further implication that the instruments cre-
ated by man had overpowered mano . . . Objects formed by man,
man formed by objects."19 In modem art the same idea has been
expressed repeatedly-in Chirico, Léger, Max Emst, Masson, and
Tchelitchew. Many of Picasso's pictures represent bodies as made of
physical objects, of formed twists of straw or of plaster, and fre-
quently his paintings are an attack upon the very integrity of the
body itself. But this is an attack that has been made since the re-
motest period of savagery. The body has always been a battle-
ground, William Carlos Williams has said:
Slash it with sharp instruments, rub ashes into the wound to make a
keloid; daub it with c1ays, paint it with berry juices. This thing that
terrines us, this face upon which we la y so much stress is something they
have always wanted to deform, by hair, by shaving, by every possible
means. Why? To remove from it the terror of death by making of it a
work of art. 20
To Schapiro, however, Picasso's distortions are frequently represen-

talions of body imagery itself, rather than of the physical body, and
of the "Cirl Before a Mirror" he is quoted as having remarked:·
Picasso proceeds from his in tense feeling for the girl, whom he endows
with a corresponding vitality. He paints the body contemplated, loved
and self-contemplating. The vision of another's body becomes an in-
19 Paul Wescher, "The 'Idea' in Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Art," Magazine 01
Art (January, 1950), pp. 3-8.
20 Quoted in "The Figure," (New York : Louis Carré Gallery, January,
1950).
tensely rousing and mysterious process. Picasso and other modems have
discovered for art the intemality of the body. . . .
Thus the body is represented both from the outside and within, and in
the mirror is still another image of the body. 1 think that is a wonderfuI,
magicaI, poetic idea, to show the human body which is ordinarily repre-
sented in one way-in its familiar surface form-as belonging to three dif-
ferent modes of experience, within one picture. 2 1
We see then that the body provides an inexhaustible souree for

a voeabulary of expressive forms , a voeabulary that is continuaIly
being enriched. Whether we eonsider the immense sensuous appeal
of the living body, the equaIly powerful asee tic revulsion from it, or
any of the host of intermediate experienees, we are eompeIled to
reekon with the response to the body as an integral and ineradieable
component of artistie and esthetic experienee.
21 Quoted by R. W. Davenport and W. Sargeant, ··A LlFE Roundtable on

Modem Art," LIFE Magazine (Oetober 11, 1948), p. 58. Copyright 1948 Time
Ine.
CHAPTER 7
The Problem of Self
Few discussions of art faH to include sorne refer-

ence to "the joyfulloss of self in the workmanship of art," or to "find-
ing oneself in esthetic contemplation," but the attempt is not often
made to go beyond such phrases to determine just what is there be-
ing lost or found. One person will charge that "the self" is a wholly
fictional or mythical entity that should be exorcised summarily from
our thollght. Still another will contend that, whatever "the self' may
be, its compass is no greater than that of the organism, and it is cer-
tainly in no way inclusive of objects that are external and foreign, as
are objects of art.
Now if art were nothing more than the contents of libraries and
museums, there would be little need for devoting time to an inqlliry
into the nature of "the self." If "the self," moreover, were internaI
and private, it wouId be impossibIe to treat it as having the Ieast
connection with art or with anything else. What must be shown is
that "the self" is not an agent to which experiences adhere, or which
actively engineers its own experience. Rather is self a factor-pos-
sibly the most crucial factor-in what is prodllced by those function-
ings within which are discriminable a living organism and a dynamic
environment. For art is the esthetic organization of experience, and
self is a realized qllality of that organization.
That there seems to be a genuine sense of self is provocation
enough for inquiring how that sense can have come about. But such
a feeling is hardly proof of the existen ce of a structured object, a 50-
called "anchorage" for our experiences. "The self" is in fact a pre-
81
posterous quiddity, fully as preposterous as "the spirit" or "the soul."l
As an isolable, stable, personal entity, the private possession of a
"subject," remaining undisturbed throughout even the most moving
of experiences, "the self" simply does not existo But we may speak of
"self" as the felt quality of certain patterns which are form ed and
persist in experience, alld which, it may be added, are functions of
that ordering of experience which is the process of arto
It is an error to confuse the immediate quality of an event with
the conditions that give rise to it: the fallacy of converting an out-
come of a process into an actuating cause. I t is equally erroneous to
fail to distinguish between the total location of those conditions and
their proxirnate centering. The only occasions upon which we seek
to determine the !atter ("simple" or "specrnc" location ) are those in
whicJ:¡ we are attempting to exercise sorne manner of control over
the phenomena in question. We know that music is not identical with
the air that carries the vibrations of sound, nor with our ears, nor
with the trumpets and tympani of the orchestra-these are al! simply
sets of conditions constituting the totality necessary for the produc-
tion of the musical evento But if we should want to control the
sounds, then it is usually the instruments which must become the
focus of our attention. So too with the pervasive quality of self: it is
realized among real things.2 It is an aspect of a total neld of condi-
tions whose structure has been organized by means of sorne com-
pleted act of creation or inquiry. To denne it within a more rigidly
circumscribed region of the neld is in fact to focus upon sorne par-
ticular condition whose status has become dubious. This centering
of interest occurs only for the purpose of control, that is, where sorne
alteration of the qua lity of self or sorne assignment of responsibility
is desired. Since this act of specrncation retains a certain measure of
constancy, we all too frequently ascribe to the quality of self a per-
manence and rigidity that is far more descriptive of the operation of
inquiry.
t There is a certain simil arity with Ihe notion of "group." People may be
"grouped," and there are "groupings" in nature, but groupings are phenomenal
gestalten, and Ihey are incapable of independent action. "Groups" cannot talk,
Ihink, or remember, although grouped people can, and do so di/ferently when
aeting conectively than when aeting distributively. Groupness therefore is a
qualitative designation, not a causal one.
2 Whitehead has spoken of perception as a display of Our own "multiplc
loeation, and Bergson has said Ihat when one sees poin! O, one is at poin! O.
THE PROBLEM OF SELF 83
To say that self is a quality of experience is precisely the op-
posite of saying that an experience belongs to or is located in the
self. It is that experience which, as subject matter, is begun with,
and we can speak of it without having to specify its location or own-
ership, just as we can speak of the liner Queen Elizabeth, of its
cabins and funnels and decks, without specifying where it is at pres-
ent, or to whom it belongs.
Certainly, grammar is a major culprit here. The pronoun "1" is
too easily assumed to represent an active agent which initiates and
directs experiencing. If we have come to believe in the existence of
"the seIf' as an object, it is due at least in part to this faIlacy of lin-
guistic remcation. We want sorne thing for the word "seIf' to refer
to, in the way that, as A. G. N. Flew remarks, "cows" refers to cows:
For where but in the writings of philosophers do we ever Snd 'seU' used
as an independent word rather than as an assimilated reHexive suffix?
The plain man may hurt himself: he never hurts his self. We may re-
proach ourselves: we never have occasion to reproach our selves. Still
less does anyone count up the number of selves in a room or ask a self the
way to the nearest telephone booth.3
In order to protect ourselves from exposure to pure subjectivism,

it would be better, Gabriel Marcel writes, to use the formula es
denkt in mir rather than cogito. "The 'je pense' is not a fountain-
head but a stopping-place."4 Dewey too h as asserted that "it thinks"
is a juster phrase than "1 think."5 And Whitehead has specmcalIy
pitted his own philosophy against that of Kant on this point: "For
Kant, the worId emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of
organism, the subject emerges from the worId-a 'superject' rather
than a ·subject'. . . . The feeler is the unity emergent fram its own
feelings."6 Elsewhere he makes a similar criticism of Descartes:
Descartes in his own philosophy conceives the thinker as creating the

occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the order, and
conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of an
3 A. G. N. Flew, "Selves," Mind, LVIII (July, 1949 ), pp. 358-359.
4 Gabriel Mareel, Etre et avoi, (Paris: Fem and Aubier, 1935) , p. 35.
5 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (LaSalle, Ill. : Open Court, 1925),
p.232n.
6 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York : Macmillan,
1929) , pp. 135-136.
occasional thinker. The thinker is the final end whereby there is the
thought. 7
And in the philosophy of Heidegger, the seIf appears, not as a causa-

tive force, but as an ideal integration of a process of change. It is
"not yet," but is "to be." The realization of self becomes the goal of
an endless process of striving, and self itself is an ideal Gestalt, a
limit, an aImost Nietzschean heuristic.
THE STATUS OF SELF
The word "self' may refer, depending upon the con-

text, to either a property or a quality. Furthermore, in its specmcalIy
conceptual status, it is an ideational character. This set oE distinc-
tions can be illustrated with an example drawn from another do-
main. Consider the process of combustion. A rough description
would show a thing (a "fuel") in a surrounding medium (such as a
gas) . Upon the institution of certain operations, it is probable that
combustion wiII occur. The observation of the resulting fire is a
qualitative experience: the combustibility of the fu el is experienced
as a quality of the burning process. The perception is of "fu el-bu m-
ing-in-air," and it is "so-seen." The quality is therefore pervasive. But
we may localize the individual conditions for its occurrence, and de-
termine those most critical, those most Hable to yield control. We
then assign to that particular set of conditions the property of com-
bustibility, in the sense of potentiality. The statement, ''kerosene is
combustible," stipulates that, given the necessary con genial condi-
tions (the presence of a fuel, a spark, a gas, etc.), a situation will
manifest the activity which is an actualization of the property in
question. Should we wish to universalize this property-quality, we
might refer to it as "combustible-ness." This barbarism designates a
conceptual trait rather than an existential one. It may be said, "Com-
bustible-ness is a trait of fuels," as distinguished from "This fuel is
combustible," just as it may be said, "Greenness is a trait of lawns"
as distinguished from "Thís Iawn is green."
7 Ibid ., pp. 227-228.
To return from combustion to the process of art, we note that,
instead of a fuel burning in air, we have an organism, in a given
situation, operating upon a specific medium. Let us say it is an artist
known as "Klee." The observed process of creation shows an or-
ganism engaged in the manipulation of paints. A prolonged perlad
of observation would detect the idiosyncratic quality of the artist's
behavior, and it is by virtue of this uniqueness that the name "Paul
Klee;' applies only to this singular organismo Similarly, observation
of the flnished paintings reveals a common, pervasive quality, and
again, by virtue of its uniqueness, we speak of each painting itself
as a "Klee." Are there then two different qualities each designated
by the same name? If so, there is yet a third: the sensed continuity
between artist and work, projector and projected. This felt con-
tinuity may also constitute the quality of irnmediate experience de-
noted by the word "Klee."
Suppose now that the artist is just about to begin work on a new
canvas. He is poised, about to acto A moment in which there is no
behavior at alI is thoroughly specious, but we may say that, in such a
flctive moment, there is no quality of seIf. It can be referred to only
as a property. We know from the past that, given his paints, his
canvas, his needs, and his abilities, the artist will very likely act in
such a way (unless his personality is psychotically split) that there
will be that "Klee" quality to his behavior and that "Klee" quality
to his paintings. Therefore we are able to attribute to him, prior to
the creative act, the property of Klee self, as potentiality. If we
should wish to conceptualize this specific property-quality so as to
make it applicable to any art process, we speak of "the quality of
self." That is to say, the terrn "Klee" denotes the quality of the man
and his work, as "green" denotes the color green. "Self' is the con-
ceptualization of such a quality as found in any person, as "green-
ness" is the ideational counter of any green. "Self' is not a sub-
stantive, as is "behavior"; it can, however, be adjectival or adverbial
of "behavior," when the latter terrn is applied to physical objects
and organisms. Strictly speaking, therefore, the man Klee does not
ha ve self: he has the quality of being Klee.
It makes sense to speak of self as a property and as a quality.
It makes no sense to speak of it as a thing. It is a function of defi-
nitely physical conditions, varying as those conditions vary. The no-
tion of self as an entity persisting through change is therefore an
of Mead's followers "in the sense of interesting comments on an ob-
ject in independence."8
The work of Mead and Freud demonstrating the social genesis
of self is too welI known to require detailed recapitulation here.
They have shown that the child takes into hirnself the attitudes of
others, p rimarily of his parents, and eventualIy he responds to hirn-
self as another would respond to him. The transition from observa-
tion to self-observation origina tes in the awareness of being ob-
served. The child begins to pay to hirnself the attention paid to him
by other persons in his environment. To do this, he must himself ac-
quire the standpoint of someone else. The newly achieved attitude,
together with others sirnilarly derived, is what Mead ca 115 the "me,"
or what Freud calls the "superego." Both of these hypothetical enti-
ties are explanatory constructs resorted to for the furtherance of in-
quiry into the process of introjection.
It can readily be seen from this that what we think of ourselves
is usualIy the aggregate of what we believe other people think of uso
By taking the role of another, the child determines his own position
and status; by taking the role of the parent to himself, he also es-
tablishes hirnself as a child. GradualIy, in this way, the quality of
the child self emerges in the situations in which the child partici-
pates. In this early period the child may even refer to hirnself in the
third persono But he loca tes himself by means of the relationships of
which he becomes aware, so that often he may Snd hirnself situated
at the intersection of the references made by others. There is the
story told by Theodore Reik of the little girl playing in the park who
suddenly asks her mother, "Mommy, why do you smile whenever
that lady there smiles at me?" EventualIy, by recognizing friendli-
ness in others, she will become aware of herself as the object of feel-
ing,
It would seem that art has at least sorne of its roots in the more
primitive forms of behavior in which one's action stirnulates oneself
as it stirnulates the person to whom it is addressed. The caress is
such an action. The infant is caressed by its parents, but does not
initially return the caresses. It attempts rather, in the absence of
parental solicitud e, to aro use in itself the same pleasurable responses
which its mother's or father's caresses had provoked. This may take
8 John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1949 ), p. 306n.
subtle fonns , as skin and muscle movements, or it may be more
overt, but the pleasure attained would appear to 'be consistently
associated with the infant's surrounding social group. The gratifica-
tion of such activity is reduced when the force of the associated
pleasure-giving individual has become too feeble to give the act any
social significance, too weak to make it contain any meaning capable
of being shared in fantasy. The activity is continued not merely for
its pleasure as sueh, but aIso for its meaning as su eh, and when the
meaning decreases the gratifieation decreases. This interpenetration
of pleasurable feeling, sociality, and personal identity is reflected
in the way in which, for instance, when one thinks of someone
deeply loved, one's own name springs to mind as the other would
earessingly speak it.
The qualitative surface of adult behavior usually varies imper-
turbably: it is "just so much weather." But that of the child reveals a
deRnite development, which is exhibited nowhere so well as in his
arto For the child self is almost wholly a function of the immediate:
there are few strong connections with past or future. The child does
not have a core or matrix of intricately structured, funded experi-
ence about which the meanings of new events can cluster, but the
consisteney he therefore lacks is compensated for by the imposition
of a certain order upon the world about him. Things are perceived
in the world of the infant, only as they are emotionally felt, and they
are unhesitatingly classified in accordance with the inflexible cri-
terion of their desirability. Thus the infant does not separate him-
self from his environment-everything is affective; the whole world
is shot through with his feelings, as they are felt. Everything eenters
on him, revolves about him. "Me-fulness" is for him the necessary
condition of meaningfulness. lt is a world in which a unified struc-
ture has been magieally imposed upon all events. Affective thought
is omnipotent, and since it is, the world it creates is not diverse and
manifold, but hannonious and complete. This is the world the ehild
symbolizes in his arto And perhaps this is one explanation of the
ability of the child to obtain balance and proportion and unity in
his work with so Httle apparent effort : he cannot help doing so, for
he has not yet reached the stage of self-criticism in which his uni-
fied world-view will begin to break down. For when, gradually, he
beeomes aware that things in the environment behave independ-
ently of his feelings about them, it is neces5ary that the fonnal or-
sound, fTost . . . a dream? .. Yes, indeed, a wild, wild, wild dreaml
- It has dreamed-no, rather 1 have dreamed. . . .13
The reverse of this situation, the breakdown of the individual un-

der great stress, has been described by Dambuyant, to whose arti-
cle 1 have already referred. The field determination of the process
was not difficuIt to ascertain, but it was revealed to him in a bizarre
fashion. He found that prisoners placed in solitary confinement
were less subject to a complete rupture or breakdown of self (for a
limited time, at least) than were those in the concentration camp at
large. For in the former case, one is simply cut off from a world in
which nothing has lost its value and with which one is ready and
able to enter again into numerous relationships as soon as that
becomes possible. But in such a camp as Ravensbruck one finds in-
surmountable reasons for not entering into contact with others, and
the world of nature has cea sed to be helpful, permeable or inteIligi-
ble. One has lost the desire and the force to establish a relationship;
one no longer can, one no longer wishes to participa te. And by that
rupture of contact between oneself- and' others, between oneself and
aIl that has value, one also loses contact with himself as a persono
"Obliged to be only seIf, one can no longer be self." There is the
necessity for a mediation, physical or human, between seU and self.
To be, Dambuyant goes on, and to be seU-the two are, if not
identical, at least connected. To be is to participa te:
NormalIy one possesses more than self, one is a center where arrive
and whence arrive gestures and preoccupations-greeting, response, ex-
change; here, one is reduced to the minimum, and without being dead
one is on the verge of it, so that one can no longer situate oneself. It is
necessary to have a retrospective and prospective view, and both these
are a lmost forbidden . 14
It has already been suggested-and Dambuyant has expressed

much the same thing-that the quality of self is not limited to the
behavior of the organism alone. It is situational; it includes the ob-
jects associated with the organismo Between object and organism,
or rather inclusive of them, lies a felt continuity, a qualitative pat-
13 Kurt Ko/fka, Principies 01 Gestalt Psychology ( New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1935 ), p. 323.
HM. Dambuyant, "Le Moí dans la déportation," ¡oumal du psycho/ogie
(April-]une 1946), pp. 190-191.
tem which is the phenomenal or experiential totality of seIf. Within
this .totality, this qualitative rather than causal aspect of the resolved
situation, certain distinctions can be made. We may speak of a focal
or central region of the phenomenal field, and a peripheral or mar-
ginal region. The focal segment can . be ascribed, for purposes of
responsibility or control to the organismo The outer edges, the pe-
numbra cannot be attributed to the same organism, for this periph-
eral region has developed within the behavior of other organisms,
and of objects of personal significance. The two regions are united
by a pervasive or tertiary quality. We can observe how this occurs
if we consider again the genesis of the situation. It has been shown
that the child becomes a social being by assuming within hirnseIf
certain roles or attitudes, by means of which he is able to criticize
his own or¡going conducto He takes over the part of the parent to-
wards hirnself in order to alter his behavior according to the way
his parent might respond to it. This introjection of attitudes is not
limited to the attitudes of human beings, but it includes the assump-
tion of possible responsive behavior of the entire dynamic environ-
mento
To the child then, there is a felt presence of the father with hirn
almost continually (although not necessarily in the foreground of
consciousness) regardless of whether or not the father is presently
alive. The quality of this felt presence is experienced by the child as
an íntrojectory quality. To the father, because of the reversal of di-
rection and perspective, this feeling is recognized as a physiog-
nomíc expression of his own personality in his child. Thus, when the
child makes sorne gesture which is imitative of an idiosyncratic ges-
ture of the father, each feels through the act his continuity with
the other. Self is the situational quality of continuity which is phys-
iognomic from the point of view of the father, in this particular
act, and introjectory from the point of view of the child.
We may therefore refer to the focal region of the field as its
"introjectory aspect," and to the penumbral region as its "physiog-
nomic aspect." Although the qualitative content of these regions
varies considerably from one situation to another, there is a genu-
ine continuity to be found in the way of organizing situations as they
arise, a continuity which is not one of content, but is instead meth-
odological.
of choice, and in each act, in choosing this or that quality or action
or object, being this or that kind of person is also decided. Art then
is the consummate as welI as disciplinary dimension of choice (in-
sofar as choice is construed as intentional judgment rather than
blind, impulsive preference) . By deli,berate choosing among ways
of doing things, the sort of things we are to have and the sort of
selves we are to have is determined. Choice al so decides how we
are to be aHected in the future. Is this not the case in one of Tol-
stoy's most biting stories, when Pyotr Ivanovitch decides how he is
to act, to feel, and thus what sort of person he is to be?
Praskovya Fyodorovna, recognizing Pyotr lvanovitch, sighed, went right
up to him, took his hand, and said, '1 know that you were a true friend of
lvan Ilych's . . . .' and looked at him, expecting from him the suitable
action in response to these words. Pyotr lvanovitch knew that, just as
before he had to cross himself, now what he had to do was to press her
hand, to sigh, and to say, 'Ah, 1 was indeedl' And he did so. And as he
did so, he felt that the desired result had been attained; that he was
touched and she was touched.18
The art form represents a searching, a casting-about within one-

self, and when, out of this, an organized poem or painting emerges,
the sense of personal achievement permeates the entire situation as
the immediate, qualitative experience of self. Thus Auden notes:
The girl whose boy-friend starts writing her love-poems should be on
her guardoPerhaps he really does love her, but one thing is certain: while
he was writing his poems he was not thinking of her but of his own feel-
ings about her, and that is suspicious. Let her remember Sto Augustine's
confession of his feelings after the death of some0ne he loved very much:
" 1 would rather have been deprived of my friend than of my grief."17
Creation implies self-creation; the making of an esthetic object im-

plies the generation of an artistic individual. 18
18 Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of lvan I1ych," Ivan Ilych and Had¡i Murad
and Other Slories, transo by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford : World's Classics,
1935), p . 6.
17 W. H. Auden, in Charles D. Abbot, ed., Poets al Work (New York: Har-
cour!, Brace & World, 1948), p. 174.
18 Cf. Martin Buber, "Productivity and Existence," in Maurice R. Stein,
Arthur J. Vidich, and David Manning White, eds., Identj/y and Anxjely (New
York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), pp. 628-632. See also, by Buber,
"Existence and Relation," PSflchjalry, XX ( 1957), pp. 97-104.
CHAPTER 8
Art as Intelligence
Art has been described as a process developing in

time and space, permeated by qualities that have been designated
as "tertiary." It wilI be made cIear, in the chapters to foIlow, that
this process is not only a qualitative one but an intelliger.t one. As
qualitative, it is merely one among many processes that are qualita-
tive. But as a process that is inteIligently directed, deliberately or-
dered, it is rare indeed.
An inteIligent action is a deliberate one. Deliberation is in fact a
weighing, an achieving balance. If conduct is to proceed, choices
must be made, and only through deliberation as to anticipated con-
sequences of various courses of action can they be made inteIli-
gently. Is the procedure of the artist any different in its basic nature
then from the procedure of the inquirer faced with a problem in
his science? In creation as weIl as in inquiry and conduct, inteIli-
gent decisions can be made by active and imaginative weighings of
various modes of procedure. Every choice narrows the range of
succeeding deliberations. As the painter proceeds, laying on brush
stroke after brush stroke, his freedom of choice becomes more and
more circumscribed. The poet can contempla te an almost infinite
number of combinations to succeed the first word he has already
set down, but the space left by the one which he fin ally lacks may
be filIed by annoyingly few possibilities. The process is one of in-
creasing ordering and determination, and where it eventually
achieves a consummatory completion and fulfilIment, it is as de-
serving of the term "intelligent" as of "artistic" or "esthetic."
96
ART AS INTELUGENCE 97
This can also be put in another way. An action is intelligent if
its direction has been such as to achieve both the satisfaction of an
initial impulse and an agreeable resultant situation. The Drst require-
ment is of the adequate adaptation of means and ends; the second
is of a harmonious organization of part and whole. Too frequentIy
the adaptation of means and ends is taken as the sole criterion of in-
telligence. But individual impulses may be satisfied at such great
cost to other functions that one's overall economy of satisfaction is
seriously impaired. Thus "moral behavior," the adjustment of means
and ends, must continually be assisted by taste and sensibility. We
may say that wherever the process of experience is so directed as to
be fulfilled with an enjoyment not seeking or requiring another ex-
perience going beyond itself, that direction may be called "intelli-
gent," those processes are processes of art.
If intelligence is to be operationalIy defined as that which is
testable by the indefinite totality of aIl devisable intelligence tests,
then artistic intelligence may also be defined in terms of the range
and thoroughness with which specifically artistic problems are re-
solved. To consider art as problem-solving is no diHerent from
treating any other organic phenomenon as problem-solving. That
it is such is not dogmatically affirmed, but only hypothecated.
DoubtIess there are other modes of explanation, aIthough perhaps
non e of which is equalIy fruitful. The problem-solving aspect is
preferred here because it is the common factor, the common de-
nominator, in terms of which art and intelligence admirably dis-
play their affinity. It is by virtue of this shared aspect that it is
possible to speak of art as intelligence, without thereby "reducing"
one to the other. 1
But are there not events which elude the rigid embrace of this
pattem of problem-solving? The way a child draws, for instan ce, is
it not as spontaneous, as unmeditated, as necessary and yet, in a
way, as brutaIly arbitrary as the thaw in the spring of the year?
Why should his activity be ineluded among the workings of intelli-
gence any more readily than we would inelude a stream's overflow-
ing its banks? The answer is simply that the "stream of conscious-
1 One of the most interesting attempts to make use of the problem-solving
approach in esthetics has been that of Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning
in Music ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), esp. pp. 92-102. See
also, David Ecker, "The Artistic Process as Qualitative Problem-Solving," Jour-
nalol Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXI (1963), pp. 283-290.
ART AS INTELLIGENCE 99
formed, thought need not be restricted to problematic or critical pe-
riods, but may al so be found in moments of relative security and re-
pose. That it may frequently be sterile and unimaginative does not
deny its existence. In the case of artistic thinking, it is not difficult to
see how, frequently, creation may have its inception in sorne ran-
dom, aimless play with the medium. At this stage, thought may not
be problem-solving, but it is still in terms of the medium that the
thinkíng occurs.
There is still another objection to the problem-solving hypothe-
siso Art, it is asserted, is a probing, an exploring of experience, but
not necessarily an ordering of it. Works of art are valuable not only
because they solve problems, but al so beca use they raise them. As
an example, it is shown that the Aristotelian doctrine of art is super-
ficial, because it does not make provision for the work which is
intent on bringing problems to light; rather, it demonstrates merely
the inevitable logic of their working-out. Nothing therefore could be
so shallow as an interpretation which makes of Hamlet a mode! of
clarity and simplicity, bent first on stating a problem and then .on
solving it.
One is reluctant to find oneself opposed in any way to so splen-
did an argument, which has the merit of refuting completely the
widespread tendency to reduce art to a mere purgative, a means of
reconciling ourselves to the universe. But the reply which must be
made to it is that it fails to distinguish between the two types of
problems which were mentioned at the outset: the existential or
experiential and the artistic or methodological. We are all concerned
with existential problems, and no doubt artists are particularly sensi-
tive to many of them. They make them the subject matter of their
creations. But the problem of the way to deal with the depiction of
these existential problems is a problem of artistic m e thod. In many
cases-examples are numerous in contemporary literature-the intent
is simply to state an existential problem without oHering any solu-
tion whatsoever, or to make it appear actually insoluble. But this has
nothing to do with the quite separate problems of creative method.
An author may present us in one of his stories with a crushing para-
dox, but his utilization of means for doing so may yet be a paradigm
of economy. The form of a work of art does not have to mirror its
subject matter, and a depiction of chaos need not be chaotic. Art is
always an ordering; whether or not it can bring new existential
person who seeks to rephrase it in his own terms. Insofar as a quali-
tative expression can be translated into nonqualitative language
(and we are certainly not referring here to the degree to which it
can be analyzed), the specifically esthetic nature of the work is di-
minished. Analysis, on the other hand, does not reduce esthetic qual-
ity; it may very well enhance it. But we stipulate of an artwork that
its qualitative surface be rationally impenetrable, discursively indu-
plicable. We exact of art that it create in us a sense of awe and
wonderment that such things can be, just as the child demands this
in the performance of a prestidigitator. And similarly as the child ac-
cords credulity to such a demonstration so long as its secret is not
exposed to all the world, so we as adults make our own mystiflcation
a condiHon of the esthetic experience. That mystification is the baf-
Hing only of our nonqualitative thou¡¡ht; qualitatively we can com-
prehend the work thoroughly; qualitatively it can be wholly intel-
ligible. 3 Art therefore resides upon a tension between these two
modes of thought, and though the one continuaIly impinges upon
the other, it is, at least in part, their very strife that makes possible
the intensity of our appreciation.
The inadequacy of words to cope with the qualitative forms oE
thought has been most genially described by Mendelssohn:
What any music 1 like expresses for me is not thoughts too indefinite to
cIothe in words, but too definit e. If you ask me what 1 thought on the
occasion in question, 1 say, the song itself precisely as it stands. And if, in
this or that instance, 1 had in mind a definite word or words, 1 would not
utter them to a souI, beca use words do not mean for one person what
they mean for another; beca use the song alone can say to one, can awake
in him, the same feelings as it can in another-·feelings, however, not to
be expressed by the same words. 4
C. Day Lewis, in turn, illustrates the incapacity of our ordinary logic
to cope with the logic of qualitative thinking. There is, he explains,
a rational void between the two lines, "Brightness falIs from the air"
and "Queens have died young and fair"; But, "... a spark leaps to
filI the gap, and the spark does not expire but glows on, so that the
sadness of evening and the sadness of untimely death illuminate
Cf. Yvon Belaval, "Poésie et connaissance," in Poemes d'au;uurd-hui
3
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 193-222.
4 Quoted by J. W. N. Sullivan, Beethoven, His Spiritual Development
(New York: Knopf, 1927) .
ART AS INTELLIGENCE 103
each other reciprocaIly, a light which is extended beyond them ·a nd
reaches out sorne way over the human situation aIl round." s
INSIGHTS AND IDEAS
Qualitative thinking is the origination and embodi-

ment of artistic insights and ideas. One who paints delibera tes with
colors and textures, compares weights and values; one who works
in wood thinks in terms of the wood itself, its grain, its "give," the
way it splits, the whorl and twist and the knot of it. Suddenly to
perceive and grasp these relationships is to have an artistic (or
esthetic) insight. Insight is therefore, in this sense, the perception of
the rapports which constitute an artistic problem: it is the ·formula-
tion of the problem in terms of qualitative thinking. One might also
say that it is the "clickl" or "aha!" experience of Gestalt psychology
as applied to the recognition of the conditions and needs of an ex-
istential situation. As such, it is quite far from Bergson's "inteIlectual
sympathy" or "metaphysical intuition."
To have sensed these needs, and then to be struck by the pos si-
bility oE resolving the problem by transforming the medium into a
unified whole, is to have an artistic idea. There has recentIy been a
good deal of taIk about ideas in art, especiaIly in Iiterature, and it
must be confessed that much of it seems unclear. It is doubtful, for
instance, that we can accept Lionel Trilling's observation that "when-
ever we put two emotions into juxtaposition we have what we can
properly caIl an idea."6 Somewhat more commendable is his state-
5 C. Day Lewis, The Poetic lmage (New York; Oxford University Press,
1947 ), p. 35. It is the pervasive quality of the poem which Iinks atomic word
to atomic word, image to image, perception to perception. It is that quality
which enables us to bridge the gaps, gaps which, as another poet writes, "must
be leapt across if they are to be crossed at all . The X factor, the magic, is when
we come to those rifts and make those leaps . A religious devotion to the truth,
to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in
itseU; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed of abysses and we find
ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the othe r side-tha!'s ecstasy."
from Denise Levertov, "Some Notes on Organic Form," Poetry, CVI, No. 6
(September 1965) , p. 425.
6 Lionel Trilling, Th e Liberal lmagination (New York ; The Viking Press,
1950), p . 283. 1 suspect Trilling has here inverted Robert Graves' view tbat
poetry is the fusion of contradictory ideas.
ment that an idea is "the very form of a literary work, considered
apart from its content, so far as that is possible."7 Yet this formulation
is also troubling, for it seems to leave out of account the way that
ideas actualIy function. Surely they are not so amorphous that their
status cannot be clarified better than this. To child artists, for in-
stance, ideas are apparently not the least bit vague, for see the re-
freshing directness with which they refer to them :
Sometimes ideas work me and sometimes I work them. . . . It is like
this . . . you start to work . . . you have an idea . . . you are forming
the idea . . . and then it begins to work you or you would stop.8
I like to experiment beca use sometimes you find ideas that are bigger
than you are and then you work awfuJly hard . . . it gives you courage.
You are sure you are somebody.9
One artist who has given us a succinct statement of what he

believes an artistic idea to be is Arnold Schoenberg. At first he speaks
of it, not as synonymous with "theme, melody, phrase or motive,"
but as "the totality of a piece." But immediately he seeks a better
definition:
Every tone which is added to a beginning tone makes the meaning of that
tone doubÚul. If for instance, G folJows after e, the ear may not be sure
whether this expresses e Major or G Major, or E minor; and the addition
of other tones may or may not clarify this problem. In this manner there
is produced a state of umest, or imbalance which grows throughout most
of the piece, and is enforced further by similar functions of the rhythm.
The method by which balance is restored seems to be the real idea of the
composition. 10
Note how Schoenberg here conceives the work of art to be the arti-
ficial production of an unbalanced situation, and its consequent re-
structuring through the use of artistic ideas.
How then are we to define an idea? 1 think that, considered in-
7Ibid.
8Cited by Helen Parkhurst in E. Ziegfeld, V. Murphy, and V. D'Amico,
eds., Art Education Today-1949-1950 (New York: Bureau of Publications,
Teachers College, Columbia University, 1950), p. 32.
9 Ibid., p . 29.
10 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, transo and ed. by Dika Newlin (New
York: Pbilosophical Library, 1950 ), p. 49. For the problematic conception of
music, see Julius Bable, Der Musikalische SchafJensprozess (Leipzig: Hirzel,
1936).
its effect, not upon our mode of choosing, but upon the range of
altematives among which we may selecto Yet, how can this be?
Surely, one insists, the same alternatives are present in the common
situation as in the critical one. This is just where the error lies. In
the common situation, we automatically restrict or truncate the range
of altematives so as to exclude the extremes, and so as to permit to
ourselves only the altematives which are mediocre. We therefore
do choose between altematives when it comes to trivial matters-
here Wahl is correct-but the altematives have already been drasti-
cally limited, and so we select only the best of the mediocre. But in
the crisis situation, the mechanism which had previously censored
from our consideration the extreme ends of the scale of alternatives
can no longer efficiently operate. It breaks down under the pressure
of events, and a whole wave of new possibilities is let loose upon us.
At one end of the gamut are the extraordinary (and perhaps dan-
gerous) alternatives, at the other are the ridiculous and absurdo To
choose the absurd is to choose what is best suited to defeat one's own
purposes. That this is an important category of choice cannot be
denied. Choice is choice, whether neurotic and compulsive or intel-
ligent and deliberate.
But the crisis situation also opens to us an array of extraordinary
possibilities which we had refused previously even to considero In
the crisis situation, it is not the possibility we create by our action
so much as the courage. If we now dare to do what previously we
had only deigned to contempla te, we may still be acting "intelli-
gently" rather than "intuitively." We have created no new alterna-
tives; we have simpIy taken cognizance of oId ones.
If intelligent behavior is the seIection of and action upon the
best among possible alternatives, then it must follow that such be-
havior will be most brilliantIy manifested only in crisis situations. It
is less likely to be exhibited where less strenuous ways of acting can
be found, which will meet less exacting requirements. The common
situation opens out into a world of unlimited horizons; the prospect
ahead is vast and encouraging. Consequences may be anticipated
far in advance. for the unvarying mediocrity of events may be de-
pended upon. The notion of progress is prevalent-optimism is in the
airo But in moments of crisis, the future exists onIy as a terrifying
blackness ahead. Not simply the individual con sequen ces but the
future itself has become probIematic. It is only then that one seizes
ART AS INTELLICENCE 107
upon the altemative hitherto reserved as extraordinary. And in one's
own times, this is outrageous. For to go beyond the bounds of estab-
lished conventions, to act upon altematives on which a taboo has
been set in thought as well as in act, to disrupt the status quo-this
has always brought down upon itself the wrath of the contemporary
society as much as it achieves the cautious tribute of generations to
follow.
Artistic experiment is the laboratory of value. It assists us,
through continual reappraisal, to distinguish the extraordinary from
the mediocre. And we come to see that the great works of art are
produced by men who live in crisis. 1 am not speaking, when 1 say
"crisis," of great suffering necessarily, or of great anguish. But 1 mean
that the major artist is one who recoils from, more than he accepts,
the common set of altemative ways of composing. For him there can
be no rigid esthetic, no canon of artistic conduct, except that which
he himself establishes, and which he himself breaks and establishes
anew. Even the artist who chooses to work within a particular style
must struggle with the problem of whether he is to be its slave or
its master. The artistic situation is a critical one, for unless dennitive
decisions are taken, impulse and energy evaporate in the swift dis-
integration of events. Art is lasting, but the artist must create in time,
and it is this sense of urgency that gives to his every choice its
weight and its permanence.
CHAPTER 9
Creation
Art inquiry, like many sciences that are already

well-advanced, must deal with objects that are particular and
unique. However, its main problem is not to describe uniqueness, but
to derive general laws or hypotheses which wilI indicate how
uniqueness comes about. Of course, uniqueness is not the only at-
tribute of art objects whose occurrence we would like explained.
There are countless others, and it makes the task of art inquiry a
formidable one. It would seem that art inquiry must therefore always
retum to the crude subject matter of human behavior, out of which
such qualities arise.
The varieties of behavior capable of constituting a creative ex-
perience are almost shameless in their profusion.t For every case
where an artist is said to have created by ingenious calculation of
effects, there appears another purporting to be an instance of the
workings of sheer inspiration. A demonstration is made that art is
spontaneous, joyful play, and immediately there are counterposed
examples of creation as tedious labor or agonized effort. Cite a case
where art is plainly a search for communication of sorne sort of mes-
sage, and another case wilI be proposed to which no communicative
intent appears ascribable. Speak of art as problem-solving and it
may sensibly be asked if it is not also problem-creating. Show that
artists follow rules, and it wilI be shown in retum that rules are pre-
cisely what they insist upon breaking.
1 A useful survey is to found in Douglas Morgan, "Creativity Today,"
Joumal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XII (1953 ), pp. 1-24. See also Vincent
Tomas, " Creativity in Art," Phílosophícal Review, LXVII (1958 ), pp. 1-15.
108
CREATION 109
Yet if these are paradoxes, it is only because they have been
paradoxically formulated. If artists break rules, they do so according
to detenninate principIes of behavior, exactly as when they do not
break them. The behavior of the artist who works with such a quick,
natural ease that we caH it "spontaneous" is no less subject to hy-
potheses in universal fonn than is that of the artist who cautiously
weighs every move or the one whose progress is marked by continual
tunnoil and struggle. 2 Similarly, the behavior of artists who are mad,
drunk, or savage is no less amenable to scientific analysis than is
that of artists who are sane, sober, or civilized.
It would not be necessary to belabor this point so much, were it
not for the common and deep-seated fear that scientífic analysis is
destructive of aH values, and of esthetic values in particular-the fear
that if our ignorance about artistic creation is dispelled, art will be
dispelled itself. Even Freud, though he admitted he did not under-
stand art sufficiently to analyze it well, maintained for many years
that the nature of creation was not amenable to psychological inves-
tigation. And this despite the fact that, for him, religion did not ap-
pear to be an inscrutable problem. It was not until 1930 that he
could assert, in one of his most pessimistic works, that psychoana-
lytic method would sorne day be able to leam the structure of the
artistic process. 3 The example of Freud is instructive. Yet there is no
cause to worry that the psychological probings into the unconscious
artífices which the artist employs will be destructive of arto New
artifices are being and will continue to be created, while the old ones
will reveal themselves, as R. L. Stevenson remarks, "indications of a
delicacy of the sense finer than we can conceive, and hints of ancient
harmonies in nature."
SUGGESTION AND F ANTASY
No problem is more tantalizing, in all the study of

inventiveness and creativity, or more bafHing, than that of "how the
2 Thus Ihe elusive nolion of "originality" is subjected lo a searching analysis
in Milton C. Nahm, The Artist as CreatoT ( Baltimore: Iohns Hopkins, 1956).
3 Sigmund Freud, Civiliza/ion and 1Is Discontents (London: Hogarth,
1946), p. 33.
suggestion arises." One way out is to link the suggestion to wishing
and to fantasy, considering these latter as phases of the creative
process on its way to fulDllment. Art is most certainly not reducible
to passive reverie, and I do not think Freud means this whell he
draws an analogy between art and daydreaming. He shows simply
that both activities are derived from the repression of instinctual im-
pulses; whether or not they can be shown to be similar in fact is a
matter for further inquiry. Of course, to the delay in carrying out
immediate responses, or to their wholesale repression, may be at-
tributed not merely our wishes and fantasies and daydreams, but all
our emotional and intellectual processes as well. But thought, writes
Freud, is "an experimental way of acting," while wishes are attempts
to gratify ourselves by imaginatively transforming the world to fit
our desires, without really acting at all.4 Both imaginative creation
and daydreaming are continuations of or substitutes for the play of
childhood. But wishes and reveries must be con verted into means out
of which a finished art product can be constructed.
Similarly for Dewey, wishes are infantile, sin ce they indicate a
regression to the child's attempt to control events through fantasy,
or the savage's attempt to inHuence by magic. A wish is the im-
mediate response to a thwarted organic impulse. It is a suggestion
which leaps up quite suddenly and "spontaneously." There is noth-
ing intellectual about such an occurrence, Dewey says; the intellec-
tual element consists in what we do with it, how we use it after it
arises. What we must do with such a suggestion, if it is not to remain
a merely idle speculation, is to make of it a design for reconstruc-
tion, an idea. Wishes are dreams of ends that neglect to specify the
means to be used for their achievement. What Dewey calls desires
are, on the other hand, not premature, compulsive imagery, but cog-
nitive and deliberate directives of behavior within a specific means-
end continuum.
This analysis of how we think was not altogether satisfactory to
sorne students of problem-solving behavior. What Dewey somewhat
casually referred to as "the leap of the mind to a suggestion" (or
better, the leap of a suggestion to mind) seemed to Duncker and
other Gestalt psychologists a yawning gap in the whole approach to
productive thinking. James himself had felt this difficulty, and asked
4 S¡~und Freud, "Two PrincipIes of Mental Functioning," CoUected
Papera, Vol. IV (London: Hogarth, 1925), p. 16.
Copyrighted m'llenal
CREATION 111
why the "mind" should, after alI, leap to just tbe suggestions that it
does? Why does it so often require the advent of a genius to bring
to light the suggestion that can be transformed into a workable hy-
pothesis? James recognized that this was not an act of mere leam-
ing, but was instead something absolutely singular which he calIed
"sagacity." But he was unable to carry his study further, while
Dewey, Duncker complains, does not ¡zive more than an "extremely
important, general hygiene of thinking."~ Nevertheless the later work
of the Gestalt school bears out rather than contrasts with Dewey's
own position and its elaboration in terms of the problematic situa-
tion. Wertheimer, for example, maintains that thinking is a dynamic
process with an intense directedness. Its direction is the improve-
ment and restructuring of a given situation which is somehow found
to be ambiguous or unclear. The original situation contains struc-
tural strains or vectors which, in their direction, quality and inten-
sity, lead to the operations required to resolve the difficulty. The
occurrence of individual suggestions is therefore said to be controlIed
by the overalI structure of the fleld. 6 .
Another solution which deserves careful attention is that pro-
posed by BelavaJ.7 It brings us once again to the possible connection
between suggestion and reverie or fantasy, and it gives us a new in-
sight into the role of the body in artistic creation. What Belaval does,
in effect, is to tum Kant's theory inside out. Kant maintains that our
sensory images are ordered by mental or conceptual mechanisms;
the inchoate sen se-data becomes located in time and space by the
regulation of the mind. Belaval, on the other hand, seeks to deter-
mine how it is that a specific suggestion of form may arise from
amidst the confused mas s of sensory images and associations that
fioat about in one's consciousness. And he concludes that what ties
these images together into a deflnite organization is, at least in cer-
tain cases, sorne immediate sensory awareness: specificalIy, the
awareness of the body. The evidence he offers is obtained from
images formed in half-sleep, their form having been dictated appar-
ently by bodily posture, or by sorne partial body recognition. Thus,
~ Karl Duncker, "A Qualitative Study of Productive Thinking," Pedagogical
Seminary, XXXIII (1926 l , p. 646.
6 Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking (New York : Harper & Row,
1945 l.
7 Yvon Belaval, "Sur les sources sensorielles des visions du demi-sommeil,"
/cumal de psychologie, VII-VIII (July-October, 1933 ), pp. 812-826.
a migraine pain behind the eyebrows manifested itself in the form

of a double-arched Crecian temple; pressure upon the nose and fore-
head resulted in the ÚDage of a palm tree, and so forth. The content
of this imagery-the trees, buildings, and other objects he mentions
-may have been derived at any time from among varied mem-
ories, but the overall structure of the ÚDagery, when put together,
was in each case directed by sorne specinc and ÚDmediate sensory
awareness.
In the light of Belaval's thesis, a nrm distinction between sug-
gestions and associations appears possible. An association is the pro-
duction of an ÚDage (in response either to a thought or a sensation)
whose content is elemental: one sees or thinks of a knife, and then
thinks of a fork. A suggestion is the production of an image (in re-
sponse either to a thought or a sensation) as the result of a swift
and sudden ordering of previously inchoate ÚDages, or of congeries
of associations. Not merely a new content (like the thought of the
fork) is originated, but a whole new organization or formo In other
words, the process of ordering is carried much further in the case
of suggestion than in the case of association, just as ordering is im-
plied much more by the transformative "idea" than by the prehensile
"insight. "
QUALlTY AND WHOLE-STRUCTURE
The process of association is fundamental to artistic

creation. But what, precisely, dictates how association comes about?
What determines, given one thought, the other thought which we
align with it? At least four answers have been proposed:
l. Temporal or spatial contiguity of the objects involved.
2. Structural similarity of the objects involved.
3. The structure of the entire neld, of which both associated
objects are parts.
4. A pervasive, tertiary quality which is present in the experi-
ence of both objects.
The nrst explanation, that assodation is due to the coexistence
or sequence of physical objects or events, to mere juxtaposition, fails
CREATION 113
to account for the multitude of objects simultaneously involved in
our experience which are not so associated. Thus one ordinarily as-
sociates a chair with the table that is next to it, rather than with the
Hoor that is under it. The contention that structural similarity is the
cause becomes absurd, as Dewey has shown, when we choose any
examples at random, whether tables with chairs, or someone's smile
with the scratching of chalk on a blackboard. The third explanation
has been proposed by Gestalt psychologists, the fourth by Dewey.
One emphasizes structure, the other function or process, but both
insist that the production of an association is controlled by the situa-
tion as a whole. Actually the disagreement between the two alternate
solutions would seem to be one of formulation. Dewey writes that
what Iinks forms and pattems is sorne "directly experienced quality,
something present and prior to and independent of aH reHective
analysis, something of the same nature which controls artistic con-
struction."8 And Ehrenfels, a progenitor of the modern Gestalt move-
ment, in 1890 used the term Gestaltqualitiit to signify the unity and
continuity of the whole. 9 The later abbreviation of this term has been
in accord with the increasing Gestalt emphasis upon pattern rather
than quality. The more that stress has been laid on conngurational
"isomorphism," the more exponents of the Gestalt theory have re-
treated to a position akin to that listed aboye as the second altema-
tive: association on the basis of structural similarity.
Quotations from Arnheim will serve to show how, in at least one
instance, contemporary Gestalt theory vacillates between insistence
upon determination of aIl parts by the form of the whole, and claims
of structural isomorphism. In his article upon the process of poetic
creation, he writes in one place that the term "pathetic faIlacy" im-
plies:
. . . a painful misunderstanding based on a conception of the world

which stresses material differences and neglects structural analogies.
When Torquato Tasso relates the wailing of the wind and the dewdrops
shed by the stars to the departure of his love, he is not pretending to be-
lieve in a fallacious animism, which endows nature with sympathetic feel-
ing, but is using genuine structural similarities of the perceivable behavior
8 John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization (New York : Minton, 1931), p .
113.
9 Christian Ehrenfels, "On Cestalt-qualities," Psycholcgical Review, XLIV
( 1937), p . 521.
of wind and water on the one hand and the experience and expression of
grief on the other. IO
Arnheim is here employing as a principie of explanation the very

theory of structural similarity which earlier Gestalt writers had ridi-
culed. But a few pages further on, where he again illustrates the
point he is trying to make, he stresses determination by the whole-
structure of the situation, so that his argument becomes far more
convincing:
When, in Henry V, it is said of the contending kingdoms of France and

England that "their very shores look pale with envy of each other's happi-
ness," the purpose is not to describe the looks of the chalky coasts by a
reference to the more familiar paleness of faces, or vice versa. Is this
metaphor useless to a reader who, from first-hand experience, knows the
channel coasts and also the paleness of jealous faces? On the contrary, he
will find it more powerful. . . . When heterogeneous segments of reality
are forced into one grammatical whole a structural conflict resuIts, which
must be resolved. Structural unity can be obtained on the basis of certain
physiognomic qualities which the components have in common. There-
fore, the discordant aspects of the components wil\ retreat, the common
ones will come to the fore. 1I
Gestalt theorists speak of the artistic process as one in which the
whole-structure tends to obtain its optimal sta te. What is superflu-
ous is eliminated, and simultaneously, barriers are erected which
serve to separate individual parts from one another. The quality of
the whole must be clarified and intensified, at the same time that it
is being used to guide the sequence of artistic choices. Wertheimer
has treated the artistic process as a special case of problem-solving.
It begins, he says, by the envisioning of sorne features of a resolved,
final situation that is to be created:
Characteristically, the more or less clearly conceived structural whole-
qualities of the thing to be created are determining in the process. A com-
poser does not usually put notes together in order to get sorne melody; he
envisages the character of the melody in statu nascendi and proceeds
from aboye as he tries to concretize it in all its parts. . . . When ideas
10 Rudolf Arnheim, "Psychological Notes on the Poetical Process," in

Charles D. Abbott, ed., Poels al Work (New York : Harcourt, Brace & World,
1948). p. 151.
1I1bld., pp. 154-155.
culated long beforehand."14 On the other hand, 1 suppose that an
approximately equal number of artists can be found to assert that
they had no specmc idea or intention when they began to work, and
that only when they had nnished did they realize what they had de-
sired to express. Stravinsky, for instan~e , writes that inspiration is in
no way a prescribed condition for the creative act, but is rather a
manifestation that is chronologically secondary. One works with the
medium, or plays with it, but in any case observes its responses. An
accident happens, but "one does not contrive an accident: one ob-
serves it to draw inspiration therefrom. An accident is perhaps the
only thing that really inspires uso A composer improvises aimlessly
the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go grubbing about
because they yield to a compulsion to seek things OUt."15
Is there then a genuine dichotomy in the case of genetic prece-
dence? Probably noto It is not contradictory to the method just de-
scribed by Stravinsky for an artist to begin with a vision or inspira-
tion which later guides him in his ordering of the medium. 1 think
that many artists are able to entertain imaginatively the actual phys-
ical operations that are later to be required. The possible responses
of the medium are so brilliantly anticipated that the creative act can
be almost wholly internalized. 16 The ordinary physical manipulations
are waived until the last possible moment, and are then considered
a labor of mere transcription. Artists do diHer in their capacity for
this anticipatory ordering, but this should not be taken to constitute
an insoluble enigma for art inquiry.
THE TRANSFERENCE OF
PROBLEMATICITY
The crucial point in the creative process is that at

which the developing quality of the artwork becomes dominant. The
14 Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo, Irving Stone, ed. (New York : Double-
day, 1946), p. 429. He adds, "When anyone says that such and such a work
was done too quickly, you can reply that he has looked at it too quickly."
15 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics 01 Music, transo by Alfred Knodel and Ingolf
Dahl (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947) , p. 55.
16 This is, in other words, the introjection of the responses of the physical
thing which was discussed earlier.
CREATION 117
medium being ordered seems to take on a IHe of its own, and to
make its own demands on how it is to be completed. Up until this
point, every decision is taken only in conformity with the artist's
psychological needs. When the medium begins to manifest its own
qualitative requiredness, the artist has a standard to which to appeal
in his decisions. His actions are no longer merely symptoms of an
inner state of affairs; they are intelligent choices beca use they follow
the intelligibility and significance of the art work as a whole.
It would be illuminating to consider here an analogous develop-
ment in the psychoanalytic process. Initially, the patient is uncertain
and confused, for he may have begun to question parts of what he
had hitherto assumed, and he now has no nrm guide for his behavior.
According to Freudian theory, he originally had such a guide in the
family situation, in his attitude toward his parents, and in his an-
ticipation of their attitudes toward him. If now he retains this atti-
tude emotionally while rejecting it intellectually, he becomes subject
to a tremendous tension. A crucial phase of the psychoanalytic proc-
ess is therefore that of the transference, in which the irrational por-
tion of the emotional cathexis initialIy directed upon one or both of
his parents is transferred to the analyst. The analyst becomes a
touchstone for the further conduct of the patient, who now refers
decisions he must make to their possible effects upon the relationship
between the analyst and himself. To sum up: the patient had entered
analysis after (and while stilI engaged in) a struggle to cope with
the world about him. He lacks a criterion of judgment which wilI
enable hirn to consider his behavior intelligently. One of the neces-
sary steps is therefore to transfer his irrational emotional orientation
from his parents to his analyst.
There is no need to push this analogy any further. The point is
simply that the artist, coming likewise from a struggle with the
world, is, prior to the creative act, in an unsettled. even precarious
position. He may have renounced the method of direct, transforma-
tive action in the world for that of indirect, symbolic behavior. But
his artistic conduct must nnd a guiding quality to which he can ap-
peal. And the medium, at the critical point, does begin to possess
that quality for hirn. It possesses it only beca use there has been
transferred upon the medium (which stiII retains alI of the reassur-
ing stability of the brute physical thing) the emotional cathexis
originalIy directed upon the world. The problematic existential situa-
tion is transfonned into a problema tic artistic situation. The quality
of existential problematicity is so "Ient to" the medium that the reso-
lution of the artistic problem becomes the dominant aim of the
artist's life. He adopts the mode of artistic behavior then, not to
escape from the pressures of the worId at large, but in direct re-
sponse to that pressure. The problematicity of the artistic process is
carried over directly from the world of natural events. Thus the artist
may attack his medium most savagely, or feel quite inhibited by it.
It takes on for him something of the nature of an analyst-an agent
in tenns of which his problems may be worked out. He becomes an
author, but only through nrst submitting himself to the authority of
the creative situation.
CHAPTER 10
Appreciation
An appreciation is the apprehension and enjoyment

of a quality. The quality may be indigenous to the percept~on of an
object, or it may accrue to the experience by virtue of our knowledge
of the object's external relationships. This means that there are two
kinds of appreciation. In the nrst case, it is the quality of the very
structure of the object that is valued; such an appreciation is esthetic.
The second variety is of nonesthetic a ppreciations, as for instance an
object's being treasured for its rarity, or its usefulness. Thus a novel
may be liked because one knows it will serve to reform people's no-
tions about sorne matter of current controversy. It is then valued for
its utility, and the appreciation is a nonesthetic one. It may possess
or be lacking in esthetic quality-this need not interfere with one's
appreciation of its nonliterary values. These two types of apprecia-
tion must continualIy be distinguished, but it cannot be asserted
that, in general, one is superior to the other.
DETACHMENT AND
DISINTERESTEDNESS
Objects of art function in different kinds of contexts,

and evoke different forms of behavior, than do other objects of craft
or skilI-when each is performing its proper function. If we consider
works of propaganda or of pornography, we see that they are in-
tended to serve a strictIy instrumental purpose, urging individuals
on to a specmc course of action. Their intention is not, in the main,
119
the observer's unperturbed contempIation. But that a commerciaI
poster may be genuinely esthetic is undeniabIe, and the esthetic in-
terest evoked would likely enhance rather than dirninish the instru-
mental value of the work. The propaganda billboard which, in the
interests of charity, depicts the most pathetic details of human star-
vation and suffering, may arouse the compassion of the observer and
may simultaneously arouse in hirn an interest in correcting a situa-
tion which is morally deplorable. But the latter interest-in the action
which, if taken, would correct the situation-is inhibited. PracticaI
difficuIties arise which prevent our immediate feeding of the hungry.
Were such obstades not present, if we could, promptly upon percep-
tion of the distress, remedy the situation, the emotion we would feel
would be wholly a function of our sympathetic identiflcation with
the victims. The artistic portrayal of a human crucilixion exploits
much the same human impulses as does a propaganda poster depict-
ing human suHering anywhere. But the attitudes provoked cannot
be carried out in action, or, in the case of the esthetic works, even in
imagination. The instinctive energy which is thus dammed up
heightens the intensity of the esthetic experience. The art product
does not attempt to incite us to action, although it may invite our
experimenting with other modes of perception, as a piece of sculp-
ture invites the caress of one's hand. But the basic impulses aroused
are promptly inhibited beca use no possibility of action is concomi-
tantly presented. It is only the work of propaganda that can be re-
ferred irnmediately to sorne specilic existential context in which a
deflnite means-end continuum can be established. The so-called
"detachment" of an observer in esthetic perception is thus not an
altogether voluntary one, and if disinterestedness is to be ascribed to
any of the participants in such an experience, it would perhaps be
more appropriate to accord it to the art product itself, which is, after
all (if one may speak in this animistic sense) totally indifferent to
the passion it arouses in its beholder.
ESTRETIe INSIGRT
To speak even more fancifully, it might be said that

the appreciative experience is a narcissistic one. That is, sorne such
bad, the only thing 1 can regard as valuable and practicable, is to show
that certain ways of seeing wil1lead to a better choice of things.3
The order of phases to be found in each individual act of ap-

preciation, as it has been outlined aboye, is somewhat similar to the
order of the overall growth of esthetic sensitivity. What is first sought
is something which will answer OUT interests; what is later accepted
is a Huidity and plasticity on one's own part which will enable one
to meet the point of view of the object. A theory of this development
has been suggested by Belaval. 4 He believes that the interest in
poetry during adolescence goes through three roughly defined
phases. In the first it is the poem as anecdote which is attractive-
exploits, adventures, simply but vividly depicted in black and white.
The second stage is more sentimentaI-now it is the theme by which
the adolescent is most absorbed; love, hope, and despair are poign-
antly felt, and one is transported swiftly toward the superhuman, the
unknown, the impossible. Most complex stage of all, most difficult
to characterize is the third, but that which is dominant might be
called the atmospheTe. There is more interest now in .the plastic and
musical values of the form, in the harmonious deployment of words,
apart from their meanings, so as to produce a diffuse and melodious
effect. The pleasure of the first stage is melodrama tic, that of the sec-
ond is the pleasure of reverie, and only at the end of adolescence
does the young reader usualIy arrive at a pleasure which is predom-
inantly poetic, predominantly esthetic. 5
It has been said that appreciations recapitulate the phase of
artistic creation, but such an assertion must be taken with great careo
Certainly there are appreciations that are pleasant, even joyful, of
art works whose production caused their creator no end of anguish
and despair. Nor can the appreciator know what it must have been
Iike for the artist to choose and reject, since al! one usualIy sees is
the single version of the work in its finalIy acceptable formo But we
can say that to appreciate is to grasp the problem with which the
artist had been forced to deal, the difficulty which he either failed
3lbid., p. 172.
4Yvon Belaval, La Recherche de la poésie (Parls: Gallimard, 1944 ).
5 Note how the genetic order of the development of appreciation is the
reverse of the genetic order of analysis. In the latter case, one begins with the
plastic, formal values, and then, if necessary, considers the object's themes, its
symholisms, and the literal indications of its significance.
Gop)'lighted material
aH sound is musically enjoyable-but any sound can become musi-
cal, if only it be played and heard in a congenial contexto
The art object is a set of physical conditions, but the response
to it is not merely a sensuous response. The individual excitations it
arouses are physiological, but they are intelligibly connected. True
enough, this is not the case jf the perceiving organism lacks insight
into the object's relationships. Thus the physiological eHect of musi-
cal sounds may be responsible, as psychologists tell us, for hens to
lay more eggs and for horses to have enormous bowel movements.
But what strikes the human individual is not merely the sensuous as
such, but also the organization of the sensuous, that is to say, its
intelligibility. 7
I do not mean at all by this that such an art as literature should
be caHed more "inteHigible" and less "sensuous" than, let us say,
sculpture or music. For what is predominantly sensuous in prose is
the imagery which constitutes the evoked experience. The aplastic
quality of this imagery is the stuH of which the literary artwork is
made. If we consider specifically a single written element, such as
the period with which this sentence is being ended, we notice that
its function is hardly to appeal to the eYe' and even less does it sig-
nify anything. It serves instead as a cue or directive by mean s of
which the flow of qualitative experience is broken up for a moment,
rounded oH. It is a signal which helps direct the traffic of images.
Such punctuations guide or terminate periodically the moving pano-
ply of feeling for which the intervening words serve as lures. The
sensuousness of reading takes place in thought by calling explicitly
upon our introjected awarenesses of existential qualities. For all
that, of course, the experience is no less esthetic, just as the work of
creation is no less artistic for being plotted out prior to and in an-
ticipation of the actual handling of the medium.
1 have discussed appreciation as the immediate valuing of sorne
quality. Yet, in that very apprehension there is a cognitive germ, a
perhaps unformulated suspicion of the grounds upon which one's
enjoyrnent must rest. Evaluation is the careful nurture of that germ
into a full-fledged explication. Through critical analysis, our quali-
7 It is of course conceivable that the horses and hens mentioned aboye are
responding, each in its own fashion, to the intelligibility of the music as well as
to its sensuousness. But this is a possibility whose awesome implications for
analogous human behavior 1 must refuse even to contemplate.
CHAPTER 11
Critical Observation o
It is a secret shared by aIl who care for the subject

that criticism is an orphan-discipline-or a step-child; sorne have
even reterred to it in grosser terms. Those philosophers who take a
broad view of things may assert reassuringly that we are aIl orphans
and that aH philosophy is criticism, but few critics feel gaHant
enough to assert reciprocaIly that aIl criticism is philosophy. Criti-
cism as science and criticism as art arouse equaIly vigorous protesta-
tions. Rather than seek to expose this scandalous aHair, we need only
to make sorne observations about the subject matter upon which
criticism opera tes, the methods which criticism uses, and the proce-
dures of critical decision-making. In the process of so doing, it wilI
perhaps become cIearer not what criticism is, but what it does, what
its connection is with art inquiry, and how far it may be extended-
to the form and surface of the work of art, or to its very bowels and
víscera.
INTRINSIC AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL

RELATIONSHIPS
Every work of art has had a career. Somewhere,

sorne individual, sorne group, was moved to fashion it; it was bought
• This chapter has been reprinted from the author' s "The ReJation of CriticaJ
Functions and Critical Decisions lo Art lnquiry" in The JouNUlI 01 Philosophy,
LI, No, 22 (October, 1954) .
126
A work of art cannot be true or false, any more than vegetables can
be true or false. But we can make statements about works of art, and
about vegeta bIes, that can be c1assified according to their truthfuI-
ness, and it is these statements, when they pertain to art, that we call
knowIedge of art.
The scientinc study of art, for the purpose of obtaining knowl-
edge about art, is what we have here called art inquiry. The quest for
knowledge is the denning characteristic of art inquiry, but it may not
be its only task. For after all, it is in the nature of inquiry in general
that it must seek to arrive not merely at certain conclusions, but at
the formulation of questions more pointed and more penetrating than
those which it has just succeeded in answering. There are even those
who maintain that if inquiry is to be genuinely progressive, it must
not be content simply to solve theoretically the problems it deals with;
it must also solve them practically, existentially. That is another
matter.
Questions of fact in art inquiry are resolved by the same meth-
ods as questions of fact in any other neld. The date on a painting is
evidence of when it was done. If you have cause to suspect that
evidence, there are other ways you can go about checking it, and
when you do arrive at a result, jf you have been thorough and the
evidence adequate, you wilI have arrived at a fact that is well war-
ranted by the discoverable evidence. The same applies to other
questions which pertain to the career of the work of art: who did it,
when it was done, where it was done, who liked it, who disliked it-
all of these are among the questions to be answered by art inquiry.
These questions bear mainly upon the relationships the work of art
has had with the physical and social milieux that have surrounded
it as it has traveled through history. These circumstantial relation-
ships are more or less peripheraI or external to the work of art itself.
But, as has already been said, there are sorne relationships that
are internal or intrinsic to the work. These are the relationships
whose system is, in effect, the art work' s structure or organization.
This organization is a fairIy well isoIated system. It can withstand
a certain amount of tampering or wear without serious qualitative
deterioration; there may even result sorne noticeable improvement.
But usually the organization persists, historically, intact, while the
circumstantial relationships of the art work's career continuously
accrue.
CRITICAL OBSERVATION 129
To say that the system of intrinsic relationships persists intact is
to deny that such a system depends soIely upon intermittent esthetic
experiences for its existence. If the intrinsic relationships of an art
work existed only in the spasmodic quantum of an appreciation, they
would be similar to the relationship between a mystic and the Ab-
solute: they would be unanalyzable. Instead, the relationships in-
trinsic to the art work persist in the realrn of ordinary experience,
although it is only in the esthetic experience that they are felt. The
art inquirer is free to examine them in moments when they are not
felt. He can dispassionately observe them : the relationship of Orestes
to Clytemnestra, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral to its nave, the
poetic Iibretto of Der Rosenkavalier to its music. So it is that only
those relationships which can be observed in moments other than
moments of appreciation are genuinely intrinsic. And if sorne residue
should remain, beyond analysis, sorne ie ne sais quoi, it is not to be
attributed to relationships too Rne or subtle to be discriminated; it
can be due only to our failure carefully to observe that which we
have uncriticalIy apprehended and felt.
What must be insisted upon, then, is that the famous distinction
between knowledge and acquaintance entails a correlative distinc-
tion between observation and apprehension. The inquirer observes;
the appreciator apprehends, he participates. Observation is directed
primarily toward the acquisition of knowledge; apprehension is
basicalIy a matter of acquaintance and enjoyment. But moments of
"pure, noncognitive enjoyment" are few and fleeting. What actually
does occur in an ordinary esthetic appreciation is more likely to be
an oscilJation between noncognitive enjoyment and critical percep-
tion or observation. This oscillation can be so swift as to give the
impression of being single, steady, and unvarying. Nor does one
phase of the experiential process necessarily precede the other: ob-
servation may precede participation as well as follow it. Indeed, it
is common knowledge that sorne people feel emotion only when they
recollect the observation in tranquillity. It is also a fact that we can
observe and analyze works of art which we can no longer thoroughly
enjoyo We cannot share their values, but we can still study the ways
they are made and hang together. We may even find that the study
of their structure tends to revive our flagging responsiveness.
To retum now to the question of the art work's intrinsic relation-
ships, what is their status? Are they actually accessible to art in-
quiry? And if so, rllUSt they be reduced to the status of the art work's
external, circumstantial relationships? There is no theoretical, and
often indeed no practical, barrier to a scientific inquiry into these
intrinsic relationships. The various psychologies of perception (both
esthetic and ordinary perception) have made a start in this direc-
tion, and if their results are rudimentary and inconclusive, they nev-
ertheless represent a great advance over our previous knowledge.
Since these intrinsic relationships are themselves only the conditions
of the esthetic response, and not the qualitative esthetic experience
itself, there seems to be no reason why they cannot be known.
As to the possibility that one type of relationship might be re-
duced to the other, we should try to understand the intended mean-
ing of "reduction," rather than let ourselves be panicked by the
termo The process of scientific inquiry always works in two direc-
tions: it seeks to discriminate finer and finer relationships, and it
seeks to integrate those relationshi ps already discovered as special
cases of larger relational frameworks. The subtler relationships are
not thereby "reduced" to the "crudeness" of the larger scheme; they
are simply fitted into it, and in their own way modify it. Thus the
question of the connection between the intrinsic relationships of an
art work and the circumstantial relationships discovered by scientmc
inquiry is in reality a question of how varying groups of relations are
to be integrated into an overall pattern. In no case does the creation
of such a unmed pattern imply reduction. 1
Another question is whether the study of these intrinsic rela-
tionships requires an approach diHerent from that of other sciences.
Of course each science has its own particular approach: sorne
sciences experiment, others do not; sorne do little more than describe,
others are satisfied with nothing less than mathematical formulation .
What they have in common are rules of procedure and evidence. By
"diHerence of scientific approach," however, it is meant that the
relationships in question cannot be studied unless the inquirer has
an intuitive grasp of the art object in its totality. This necessity for
1 In saying this, I do not wish to overlook the fa et that attempts are fre-
quently made to blur the distinetion between intrinsic and eireumstantial rela-
tionships. This procedure follows, I believe, from a mista~en ideal of seientific
method. An example is the attempt lo inlerprel everything human in inlerper-
sonal terms, thereby ignoring many other important kinds of relationships, sueh
as intra-personal ones. The monolithie onesidedness of this approaeh is o1:wious,
and reveals it to be a genuine inslance of reduetion.
important than would at mst appear. We are referring to identifica-
tíon and description. By identification is meant the noting of some-
thing in the work of art that refers to something outside the work
of art, something nameable or definable: "This is a painting of the
Duchess of Alba"; "This is a poem about Stockholm at night"; "This
is a play about King Henry the Fourth"; UThis still life depicts a
pear, a bottle, and a guitar." In other words, identification refers
elements of the art work to persons, places, or events that are real
or are known outside the context of the work itself. Identification is
not always possible; it is rarely so in the case of music or abstract
arto But novels and plays usuaIly have identifiable settings, even
when the characters themselves are not otherwise known to uso
In description, critical statements again reHect a minimal de-
gree of personal choice, but reference is now made to the work itself
rather than to anything lying outside the work: uThe predominant
colors of this mural are gray and blue"; "This is a play in three acts";
"The rhyrne scheme here is abcbc." Like identification, description
pretends to be indiHerent to value. The number of words in a poem
are as important to it as the intricacies of its rhythm.
Another function is explication. This is a matter of choosing from
the describable material certain facts deemed worthy of attention.
These facts are not interpreted, they are merely pointed out as nota-
ble or remarkable. The existence of a tension between two masses
of architecture may be noteworthy enough to require considerable
explication. But explication, on the whole, is simply emphasized
description. Like description, it does not push itself beyond the
boundaries of the art work. It limits itself instead to the esthetic
surface. What is made explicit is a matter of fact, but why it is made
explicit depends on other things which may not be facts.
In addition, there are the functions of explanation and interpre-
tatian. Here, once again, we go beyond the surface of the work to
sorne outlying contexto For instance, the manner of supporting the
domes of the Pantheon and of Saint Sophia can be made explicit and
can be described, but we would have to go to the historical contexts
of these works to understand why the change occurred, why a dome
that would seem almost to float on air had become desirable and
what the architectural problems were in consequence. We must often
refer to a change of values, but we need make no particular evalua-
tions. Both explanation and interpretation seek to formulate the
problems which the artist, in creating, had faced. But they deal with
düferent kinds of problems. Explanation attempts to delineate the
artistic problems involved, and to show their relationships within the
context of our know Jedge of artistry in general. (SimilarIy, scientific
explanation consists in finding the framework in terms of which any
given behavior can be most readily understood.) Interpretation, on
the other hand, has more distant horizons and ranges over a vaster
area. It extends into the realm of living experience and attempts to
formulate the human problems involved. It seeks relationships link-
ing the continuum of men's experience with the qualities and rela-
tionships of the art work. Perhaps this can be made cIearer with the
help of a simple illustration. It is a fairly simple matter to establish,
by means of historical data, that this painting by Courbet is calIed
UThe Burial at Omon." We can identify certain painted spots as a
grave, a dog, sorne moumers, and so on. We can describe the ar-
rangement of colors, the placement of figures. We can make certain
relationships explicit, such as the grouping of a number of figures
together, and we can explain the artistic problem involved of main-
taining interest in spite of relative uniformity. It is still another mat-
ter to interpret the painting. Is it sad or cynical? Does it indicate
compassion for the meanness of man's fate, or is it derisive of the
meanness of human society? To answer these questions, to interpret,
is to link the persistent, intrinsic relationships of the painting with
relationships that obtain in the duration of human experience or
in the known organization of the natural worId. 3
Once we understand what the artist's problems were, we can
ask how he went about solving them, and how successful was the
solution he actuaIly employed. This analysis of the degree of success
of the solution is in fact the point at which analysis reaches the phase
oE evaluation. And evaluation, like all the other functions just dis-
cussed, is also a matter of disceming relationships, of the fitness of
proposed solutions to proposed problems.
In the process of critical analysis as it actualIy occurs, the vari-
3 Inte rpretation is not Jimited to esthetic matters. The economist who inter-
prets business trends (i.e., shows their connection with larger aspects of social
Jife) is a scientinc interpreter. The pagan priest who sees cosmic portents in the
state of an anima]'s intestines is a nonscientinc interpreter. (Nonscientific, be-
cause he cannot specify any connections between the involutions of the intesti-
nal structure before him and the structure of the world.) Fortunately or un-
fortunately, art critics emulate sometimes the one, sometimes the other.
ous functions we have referred to need not come in any particular
order, and sorne of them may be skipped altogether. The justification
for omission depends upon how satisfied the critic is with his finished
analysis. He may very weIl be satisfied to skip the matter of identifi-
cation when it comes to music or abstract arto But what if he does not
feel satisfied? Then he goes on from the description, the explication
of surface qualities and relationships-he goes on to pin down, if he
can, something stilI more elusive. Not satisfied with the trivial state-
ment that, at this point in a novel, the action becomes quicker, not
satisfied to make explicit how one of the characters counterbalances
another, he may feel it necessary to define the quality of a passage,
or the quality of the book as a whole. Let us say that he decides to
refer to the book with a word, say "morbid." That this represents a
judgment is undeniable. But is it an evaluation? After al!, what was
labeIed by the word "morbid" was only the quality of the passage,
not the quality of the critic's response. To evaluate, the critic must
determine by introspection or experiment the type and degree of
intensity of his response, and then use these indexes or "pointer-
readings" as evidence upon which evaluational decisions may even-
tuaIly be based. The critic, in other words, uses the responsiveness
of his organism in a way analogous to the way the scientist uses re-
sponsive mechanical instruments. The instruments are not for the
purpose of making evaluations; they are for the acquisition of evi-
dence. This evidence must now be checked to see how it fits in with
other evidence: the responses of the same critic to other passages,
the responses of other critics to the same passage, the responses of
other critics to other passages in the same work, and so on. This evi-
dence is then used for the determination of the artistic problem in-
volved and the determination of the aptness of its solution. The
critic's dependence upon his responses does not place the existence
of the art object itself in doubt, any more than the scientist's depend-
ence upon his "pointer-readings" jeopardizes the existence of the
universe.
We have used this analogy connecting the critic's behavior with
that of the scientist, but that is not to imply that it is any more than
¡m analogy. For the airo of the scientist is knowledge and truth, while
the critic (whose operations are much more involved in direct ac-
quaintance, often without formulation of the relationships involved)
may have an airo that is very different.
THE LEGITIMACY OF CRITICAL

DECISIONS CONCERNING
CIRCUMSTANTIAL RE LATIONSHIPS
We shall n.ow turn t.o the matter .of h.ow we are t.o
classify th.ose acti.ons .of the critic which are duplicati.ons .of the
acti.ons .of the art inquirer : are they t.o be called "scienti6c" .or "n.on-
scientific"? In .order t.o understand the issues inv.olved here, 1 think
it necessary t.o c.onsider the processes .of decisi.on-making as they
.occur in art, in criticism, and in science.
There are, t.o begin with, decisi.ons t.o be made regarding which
meth.ods t.o use, and decisi.ons t.o be made regarding which pr.oblems
t.o attack. A c.ommunity is faced, Jet us say, with the questi.on .of de-
ciding whether t.o use magic .or science. It may settJe the matter
acc.ording t.o superstiti.on; .or it may settJe it by a process that we
usually call "reas.on" .or "c.omm.on sense" (even t.o the p.oint .of in-
cluding a peri.od .of crude triaJ-and-err.or behavi.or); .or it may settle
it scientifically, by the pr.ocurement and analysis .of evidence. The
basis up.on which the decisi.on is reached may theref.ore be (1) a
n.onscientilic .one, (2) what we sh.ouJd like t.o call an infrascientific
.one, .or (3) a scientific .one. NeedJess t.o say, there is littJe c.ontinuity
between the scientific and the n.onscientific; there is a great deal .of
c.ontinuity between the scientmc and the infrascientific.
Decisi.ons must similarly be made regarding the seJecti.on .of
pr.obJems. If, f.or exampJe, the community ch.o.oses t.o empl.oy scien-
tinc method, should it apply it t.o the problem of vaccination, to the
pr.oblem .of the religi.ous ind.octrinati.on .of children, .or t.o both? And
again, the decisi.on can be reached .on a n.onscientinc, infrascientinc,
.or scientific basis. Thus if a scientist cann.ot pr.ovide reas.ons f.or hav-
ing ch.osen t.o w.ork up.on s.ome specific pr.oblem, but appears t.o have
decided .on the pr.oblem as a result .of psych.ol.ogical c.ompulsi.on, we
may say that his choice has taken place on a nonscientific basis. If;
.on the .other hand, the inquirer is led t.o the problem by the ines-
capable f.orce .of evidence (i.e., evidential c.ompulsi.on ), the nnding
of the right pr.oblem on which to w.ork bec.omes as scientific a matter
matters is not simply the force they have, but also how welI that
force is controlled.
In the case of attitudes, the outlook is more bleak. The question
is easily phrased: What attitude should one assume? But this may
not be a meaningful question if we do not possess the capacity to
assume and manipulate our attitudes, or to choose among them, or to
create attitudes in ourselves that had been wholly foreign to our
previous way of life. In other words, can attitudes be cultivated, and
if so, by what means? Suppose a man wishes to adopt the same atti-
tude that is possessed by his friend, an expert critico Presumably this
is not impossible, if he aIready has native propensities for criticism
which may be guided and sharpened. But suppose he does not ap-
pear to have such propensities? His noncritical attitude might pos-
sibly be transformed into an infracritical attitude, but it is unlikely
that it can become a wholly critical one. The same is true of aman
without artistic inclinations, or of a man ",hose outlook is wholIy
unscientific. Exceptional cases may and do occur, but the mecha-
nisms involved in such conversions usually go far beyond what most
of us would normal!y be able to undertake. The question of the
modiflability of attitudes may appear to be a relatively nebulous and
speculative one, but its importance toward achieving critical agree-
ment is quite crucial.
If we assume that, to a fairly Iimited extent, changes in attitude
are possible, the question arises of how such changes are to be
achieved. Before this can be answered, we must define what an atti-
tude is. Let us say, therefore, that it is an orientation toward the
world that has been determined both by the facts one knows and the
values one holds. In this case, attitudes may be changed by the intro-
duction of either new facts or new values. Leaming a fact about a
friend may tum our attitude toward him in to an inimical one. Find-
ing a new boyfriend (which is to say, a new value ) can cause a girl
to change quite drasticalIy her attitude toward her old boyfriend.
She is stil! susceptible, but no longer to the same attraction.
\"'hile it is not difficult to see that attitudes may be changed by
introducing new facts or new values, the real problem is, How are
such facts or values to be introduced? For the obstacle to their in-
troduction is not the fact- value system already held, but the condi-
tions which underlie that system and determine whether it is to be
flexible and receptive or rigid and impenetrable. Certain systems
may be flexible to a point: sorne facts are admitted, but others are
sensed to be too destructive in their ultirnate effect and are excluded.
Thus a woman may refuse to accept a fact about her husband be-
cause to accept it would entail a change in her attitude toward hirn,
and this is what she does not desire to happen. Clearly, then, that
which underlies any given fact-value system and passes upon the
entry of new values and new facts is another, more comprehensive
fact-value system, which must itself be altered, and so on. Thus the
changing of attitudes is dependent upon the fundamental receptivity
of the individual to new experiences. It is intirnately related to the
problem of growth itself.
We may go so far as to suppose a perfectly flexible and recep-
tive disposition on the crític's parto In such a case, what are the
effects of factual information upon the way he makes infracritical
decisions, such as how to observe or what attitude to take? Accord-
ing to Charles Stevenson, the effect of information is causal and psy-
chological rather than logical. And knowledge, in a formulation
upon which Stevenson lays great stress, "guides, but does not con-
strain," the process of decision-making.
Now it seems to me that constraint by information, taking ad-
vantage of a man's empirical temper of mind, does not materially
differ from constraint by any other means. Aman may be compelled
to admit something by torture and he may also be compelled to ad-
mit it by logic. What occurs in both cases is constraint, and there
are, in both cases, psychological processes intimately involved.
To accept a new fact is to carry through the change in attitude
that may be entailed if the fact is to be properly integrated. We can
perceive the necessity of altering our attitude, and we can make
attempts to comply with that obligation. In doing so, we obey a
logical as welI as a psychological compulsion.
Moreover, that which distinguishes the wholly scientific dispo-
sition is that the inquirer's psychological processes are not merely
held in abeyance during periods of logical reasoning, but actively
cooperate and move in a consistent fashion . Similarly, the purely
critical attitude is distinguished by the critic's capacity to utilize his
psychological processes in a controlIed and coherent fashion, rather
than haphazardly and illogicalIy. The critic has presumably trained
his faculties of perception to aid him in distinguishing ordered rela-
CRITlCAL OBSERVATlON 139
tionships: his choices are not made in spite of his psychological
processes, hut rather with their active assistance.
We may therefore have to admit that the effect of information
upon infracritical and infra-artistic decisions can be logical as well
as psychological, and that, to the extent that knowledge guides, to
that extent does jt constra.in. The practical effect of this point is this :
it means that the critic cannot be restricted to analyzing the purely
intrinsic relationships of the work of art; it frees him to extend his
operations legitimately to the relationships involved in the infra-
artistic situation. It similarly frees the inquirer into criticism to extend
his inquiry into the infracritical situation.
INFRA-ARTISTIC AND
INFRACRITICAL DECISIONS
AH of these questions (for purposes of clarity they

have not been caBed "problems") that the critic has to resolve before
he can de al with the main problem itself-questions of which method
to use, which problem to select, how to observe, what attitude to
assume-aB of these are not, strictly speaking, critical problems. That
is, they do not pertain to the analysis of the intrinsic relationships of
the work of art itself, but are questions of the methodological pre-
suppositions upon which the critic presumes to acto The same might
be said, as has already been pointed out, in the case of the scientist:
there are questions which lie quite outside the range of the immedi-
ate problem under investigation, and, while we cannot say these
questions are resolved scientiflcally, neither can we say that they are
resolved nonscientiflcaHy. We can therefore refer to questions deal-
ing with critical presuppositions as being "infracritical," just as we
are able to refer to similar questions in a scientillc context as being
"infrascientific."
Analogously, the artist must come to decisions which are not
strictly artistic, for they do not perta in to the actual structure of the
work of art, yet neither are they nonartistic, for they require the use
of all of his artistic sensibility and faculties of deliberation, and they
cruncAL OBSERVAnON 141
cisions must be made in respect to it. The artist may at first be drawn
toward a style beca use it appears to be the best way of formulating
and expressing the problems with which he wishes to dea!. But later
he may find that the style is not flexible enough. lt cannot be
changed proportionately as his problems change. He may find that
those who remain with the style do so at the cost of constant imita-
tion and technical elaboration, without real impulse from experience.
Those who use the style in its last phase may be those who never
really experienced the problem as it was originally felt, but only
sense it vicariously through the preceding artists whom they now
imita te. And so the career of a style is concatenated with a sedes of
infra-artistic decisions that have to be made in reference to that
style: when to use it, when to try to change it, and when to drop it.
As an illustration of the infracritical question, the following can
be considered: Which works should the critic analyze, and how does
he decide upon them? Most of us are not as free as we would like
to be in choosing what we are to see or listen to, but we may assume
that the critic does frequently make su eh choices. Even the lowliest
book-reviewer must say yes or no to the periodical's request for his
review. Does he do so blindly or knowingly? lt must be admitted, 1
think, that his decisions are not necessarily mere stumblings or grop-
ings. They caH into play his knowledge and his sensibility. If a movie
critic chooses to see Charlie Chaplin instead of Gregory Peck, it is
because he is aware of possibilities. His choice is based upon expect-
ancies, appreciative anticipations. lt involves a sense of the field of
what is visible-an insight into that field, and a sense of its needs and
potentialities. lt involves a grasp of relationships, if not a knowledge
of them, and these are matters that function in art, science, and
criticism alike.
Can we, then, criticize an artist or a critic for the problems upon
which he chooses to work? Is it not a principIe of their freedom that
they be allowed to choose whatever problems they like? 1 think it
is, but 1 think they must al so bear th e responsibility when they
choose sorne problems that are less fruitful than others. Certainly
the case in science is not much different. 'Ve commend Freud and
Einstein for having brilliantly dealt with the right problems; would
we commend them so heartily if they had dealt just as brilliantly
with the wrong ones? True, we may not be able to speak dogmati-
cally of '\vrong problems," for no problem is intrinsicaHy right or
CHAPTER 12
Evaluation
Inquiry into esthetic values takes place at the junc-

ture of the analysis of art and the analysis of values in general. Both
of these fields are as vast as they are vaguely defined, but it is not
OUT purpose here to convey a sense of their extent. It is necessary
only to discuss a few aspects of the problem of inquiry into the
evaluational phase of experience. The matter can be taken up spe-
cifically in four points: the methodological aspect of inquiry into
esthetic values; the notion of requiredness or need; the role of qual-
ity in evalution; and th-e social nature of values.
SOME METHODOLOGICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
In the immediate moment of an appreciation, there

is an unmistakable awareness of value, and the experience can
be caUed one of valuing as appropriately as caUing it one of enjoy-
ing or appreciating. But valuing can occur on occasion after occa-
sion, without ever bringing with it a critical evaluation of the
grounds for such an occurrence. We do not, as a matter of fact, try
to evaluate experiences which are satisfactory on their own. Ordi-
narily, we simply accept them for what they are. We may, Dewey
reminds us, esteem a friend our whole lives without ever finding it
143
necessary to estímate him; we may prize the picture we have painted
without ever being able critically to appraise it. Only in cases where
a keen social demand for comparisons exists, as in sports, for in-
stance, and often in the arts, do we usually feel obliged to evaluate
these satisfactory experiences.
But the feeling of value, as it has already been remarked, is not
without its cognitive strain; it is the strengthening of this strain that
makes of evaluation a predominantly intellectual procedure. Within
every complex enjoyment there is already an element of recognition
of what is valuable in the object, of the ground of appraisal. Critical
evaluation represents an elaborate, systematized development of a
process of intelligence which had its D.rst stirrings in the appreciation
itself. Valuing is e\"oked by a sense of the problem the artist is posing
for himself, the need or requiredness of a solution, and the enjoy-
ment of the solution offered. Evaluation is a more explicit formula-
tion of the problem , a consideration of the way means have been
employed to solve it, and an assessment of the particular enjoyment
as it relates to the wider span of one's interests.'
Valuing, then, is the result of a directly-made comparison, in
which the difficulty, pertinence, and urgency of the problem are
contrasted with the success of its solution. But evaluation deals not
only with this internal structure of the appreciative experience; it
also seeks to view that experience from without, as part of a larger
whole. Having an enjoyment is consummatory, but an enjoyment
having been had, one seeks to appraise it for the assistance its mean-
ing can furnish in the future. The immediate esthetic situation is only
a "proxirnate" one. Because there are larger contexts, the demand
arises for a more general ordering over a \Vider span of the contin-
uum of experience. Every consummatory experience is therefore
antecedent to a feeling of requiredness to assess this particular ex-
perience, just had, in terms of interests, that is, dispositions which
endure over a long period of time, and are not dispensed with due
, The tenn "value" is delinitely ambiguous. lt can mean both the valued
and the valuable-both that which is initialIy satisfying , and that which inquiry
reveals can be satisfying. Perhaps a new tenn is needed to designate the object
of evaluations, in the same manner that valuations are c1early referred to by the
term "value. " The word "valuable" m ight be employed, since it is already a
legitimate noun. But we may alsc continue to use the ambiguous word "value,"
provided that the conlext leaves no doubl as lO which of its applications is
intended .
EVALUATION 145
to individual consummations. Esthetic experiences are then eval-
uated in terms of their anticipated consequences, just as are other
experiences. Unlike valuing, evaluation requires that indirect com-
parisons be made, comparisons which are intellectual and imagina-
tive rather than perceived and felt. In evaluation, therefore, the ap-
peal is made to the quality of sorne yet larger context, that of an
organization of possible cxperience which remains to be actualized. 2
What makes the massive totality of an enjoyrnent a valuable can
be determined by reference to its consequences. These possible con-
nections with future events are evidential in function. They indicate
the extent to which the enjoyment is itself of worth. The worth or
valuableness resides in the enjoyrnent only in this anticipatory sense
of connectedness, not in the sense of intrinsicness, just as a log's
worth as fuel is dependent upon what it will do towards provid-
ing us with warmth. Evaluation is therefore always predictive in
reference.
The altemative to this approach is to assert tbat an appreciation
is a valuable by its bare occurrence, by virtue of its own immediate
quality. But an experience is not a valuable beca use it is immediately
satisfying, nor is it of negative worth beca use it happens to be im-
mediately painful. Only when the experience is to be taken as in-
dicative of a particular course of action does the question of its value
determination arise. An enjoyment indica tes tbat the conditions
which have produced it may well be sustained or enhanced, as those
which have produced a grief are thereby marked as needing to be
changed. The qua lit y immediately had is, in evaluation, taken as
evidence of what to do or not to do, to sustain or to refrain, to cher-
ish or to destroy. The supposition that valuables are determined as
such by immediate qualitative experience must therefore be re-
jected, aIthough such an expe rie nce is always necessary towards
confirmation of any value-hypothesis.
In Chapter 10 we referred to two kinds of appreciation: esthetic
and nonesthetic. In the one case the object is enjoyed for the qual-
2 This is why one may justifiably feel that even the finest ar! works we
presently possess are not necessarily the finest that could be created. 1t is the
par! of conservatism to judge the present by the past, and it is also possible to
judge the past by the present. But with genius we might so conceive the possi-
bilities of the future that, projecting ourselves into it, we could look back upon
the arts of both present and past, and see them, in that wider perspective,
more clearly for what they are.
ity of its own internal relationships, while in the other it is enjoyed
for the quality of sorne connection it has with the worId at large.
Since evaluation is the articulation of appreciation, we should not
be surprised to Bnd that it exhibits these two varieties as well. A non-
esthetic evaluation is one which considers an individual appreciation
solely as a means to sorne end-in-view. The occurrence is treated in
terms of its anticipated consequences within a wider context of hu-
man aHairs. The last several pages of that chapter dealt mainly with
the question of nonesthetic evaluations.
An esthetic evaluation,3 however, examines the internal structure
of the esthetic transaction. The requiredness which the object gen-
erates for itself is brought to bear, in analysis, upon aH the details
of its composition. The awareness of just what is required is depend-
ent upon the insight had into the creative problem. It is in terms of
that problem and its needs that the solution offered by the artist
can be judged. How the esthetic context is capable of developing
internal tensions and needs is what must now be considered.
CONTEXT AND NEED
Dostoevsky, in his notes, tells of overhearing a con-

versation among su drunken workmen which consisted simply of
a single unmentionable word. By pronouncing this one noun harshly
and vigorously, or contemptuously, or negatively, or questioningly,
aH their feelings and reHections were expressed. Without saying any-
thing else, they repeated su times that favorite word and under-
stood each other perfectly. It is clear that when there is a context
that is mutuaHy understood, even ejaculations can be perfectly
meaningful. The context in Dostoevsky's anecdote is not an explicit
one of sentences, but nevertheless it exists implicitly within the be-
havior of the participants. The universe of discourse has its setting
within a behavioral Beld, and to discover the quality of this Beld, we
may have to ¡ook to forms of behavior which, though nonverbal,
3 Naturally 1 mean here that the subject matter is esthetic, not the method
of analysis.
EVALUATlON 147
immediately convey the felt significance of the whole. Lewis CarroIl
mockingly points this out in "The Hunting of the Snark":
Yet neither betrayed, by a sign or a word,
The disgust that appeared in his face .
Specific meaning is always determined by the nature of the situa-
tion in which the expression occurs. If-to have recourse to an ab-
surdity-if a thing could be found which could be placed in no con-
text at aH, it would have no significance. Within a context it is a part,
and to be a part is to partake of the quality of the whole. To be a
part is to function within the whole so that every other detail gains
in significance; it is to impart meaning to the remainder of the con-
text just as it attains its own meaning in return.
Within an art product, every sub-whole has its own weight and
tension which contributes to the mas sed force of the entire object.
In addition to a tension, it must also have a movement, a directed-
ness which carries us on to its neighbors and thereby throughout
every portion of the work. A spot of color in one comer of a canvas
must balance and qualify every other area of the painting. It must
bear its share of the work, if the painting is to work as a whole, as a
picture. Any weakness or faltering may cause dissatisfaction with the
object in its entirety, as it certainly will if the object's "threshold of
tolerance" is overstepped. When sorne difficulty or lack is felt in a
work, we are forced to go beyond its bounds and to seek sorne larger
context in order to explain it. Biographical and social criticism then
become particularly relevant, for the object does not carry its own
load of meaning inherent within it, but must be referred to the life
of its creator for an understanding of what it had attempted to
convey.
If there were no overall quality which pervaded every segment
of the work of art, we would not be able, upon hearing a snatch of
music, to say "This is Berlioz" or "That is Bartok." The "this" and
"that" do not refer to the fragments themselves but to the qualities
with which they are imbued. Sometimes we may come acrOss a
broken bit of sculpture, or a few lines of poetry, al! that remains of
larger works which may have been the glory of sorne now all but
forgotten period, the products of its greatest craftsmen. And yet the
fragment is not reaHy unsatisfactory, it may even be perfectly de-
ligbtful, as a marble hand often is, or a foot or part of a wing, for it
is brimful of tbat which surged through tbe en tire object and
wrought it into a unity. But if the fragment was unable to conduct
that current along, or to contain its own share within itself, it will be
of little interest to us on its own.
It can therefore be seen that just as the quality of the creative
pbase of the art process determined the quality of the eventualIy
produced object of art, so it must guide the phase of esthetic analy-
sis. If, at sorne place in the object, tbere is felt to be a lagging, a
diminution of effectiveness, we make our judgments in terms of the
requirement of the whole-quality. Only relative to it, as a standard,
can comparison of individual parts be made, and their contribution
ascertained. The intensity of tbe requíredness of the artistic whole
reflects the profundity of the original artistic problem. For the
greater the original conflict, the greater the insight and effort it ca lIs
out, and the more the finished work moves US in perception.
QUALITY AND ESTHETIC

EVALUATION
The evaluation of tbe art object is the exploring of

an exploration, and the quality of the art work is its guide. How are
we to assess this quality? Where is it to be placed in regard to other
perceptual qualities? Can tertiary qualities be ranked or graded?
Can they be compared witb one another? Is their persistency the
criterion of their excelIence? These are sorne of the questions which
an anaIysis of tbe function of esthetic quality in evaluation must
seek to answer.
It is perhaps unfortunate, but it is hardly a matter of accident,
that so condescending a term as "tertiary" should have been chosen
to denominate those pervasive qualities which mark off works of
art, and IHe situations in general, and make them the unique and
inexpressible things they are. How often it is the case that a quest
is conducted far afie Id, while overIooking its object Iying ever so
close at handl The search for the "real," so long the occupation of
EVALUATION 149
philosophy, had evidently to begin at the periphery of things, and
only graduaIly was it able to contract its horizons, eventuaIly relin-
quishing aItogether its notions of the ultimacy of external structure
and of the primacy of the properties of tangible formo With the
abandonment of the belief that the physical thing is exhaustively
definitive of the "real," it becomes possible to approximate more
cIosely the only complete and unadulterated realism-that based on
pervasive qualities realized in experience. And thus, with this shift
in emphasis, "objective reality" becomes not what was antecedent to
inquiry or to creation, but what can be brought to realization by
the institution of experimental operations.
Because of their very consummatory nature, tertiary qualities
cannot easily be treated as signs and means in the more abstract,
inteIlectual phases of experiments. Their uniqueness frequently gets
in the way of using the things they qualify as portents of other things
yet to come. But the difficulty we thus encounter can be traced more
easily to the deficiencies of our critical apparatus than to any in-
trinsic, arcane characteristic of tertiary qualities themselves. They
do not arise in a manner different than do primary and secondary
qualities. Just as we never see mere apples, but see them red, yeIlow,
or apple green, so do we see these apples as not merely round and
red, but as reds which are gay, dazzling, somber, warrn, 50ft, or
garish. If we accord warrnth to the quality of red, or majesty to
purple-gold, it is not because we believe that one is the property of
another, for aH qualities are qualities only of sets of physical condi-
tions. It is because, for the purpose of control, we are localizing a
pervasive quality in terrns of one that has already been made more
specific, for we know that by varying the color \Ve can vary the
warrnth.
Just as it is possible to predict, under certain speciRable condi-
tions, an experience as bitter or audible, so it might be possible to
predict, with far finer equipment than we possess today, that an
experience wiII be depressing, exhilarating, charrning, or sublime.
The alternative, that realizable tertiary qualities are unpredictable,
would strike equaIly at the role of primary and secondary qualities
in induction and experiment, and would render forecasts and con-
trols impossible. With sufficient knowledge of the mechanisms of
individual taste and perception, there seems reason to believe that
EVALUATION 151
accorded on the basis of the difficulty of the problern encountered as
related to the degree of success attained in solving it.
Perhaps even greater elucidation of this rnatter rnay be obtained
by referring to several passages written by a philosopher who dis-
claims any positive understanding of art, and who prefaces these
isolated paragraphs with an apology for treating the rnatter at aH.
Peirce begins with sorne staternents that are strongly rerniniscent of
more recent discussions of "good and bad gestalts," and he d evelops
his point with great insight and originality. To be "esthetically good,"
Peirce writes:
. . . [an object] must have a multitude of parts so related to one another
as to impart a positive simple immediate quality to their totality; and
whatever does this is, in so far, estheticaIly good, no matter what the par-
ticular quality of the total may be. If that quality be such as to nauseate
us, to scare us, or otherwise to disturb us to the point of throwfng us out
of the mood of esthetic enjoyment, out of the mood of simply contemplat-
ing the embodiment of the quality . . . then the object remains none the
less esthetically good, although people in our condition are incapacitated
from a calm esthetic contemplation of it. 5
If this suggestion should happen to be correct, Peirce goes on, it will

follow that:
. . . there is no such thing as positive esthetic badness; and since by '

goodness we chieBy in this discussion mean merely the absence oE bad-
ness, or EaultIessness, there will be no such thing as esthetic goodness. AII
there will be will be various esthetic qualities; that is, simple qualities of
totalities not capable of EuIl embodiment in the parts, which qualities may
be more decided and strong in one case than another. But the very reduc-
tion oE the intensity may be an esthetic quality; nay, it w ill be so; and 1
am seriously inclined to doubt there being any distinction of pure esthetic
bettemess and worseness. My notion would be that there are innumerable
varieties oE esthetic quality, but no purely esthetic grade of excellence. 6
Insofar as the consurnrnatory quality of an esthetic experience is

not to b e considered as a factor contributing to sorne larger situa-
tion, as a rneans to sorne future end, evaluation of it is inapplicable
5 Charles Peirce, Co/lected Papers, Vol. V, Pau\ Weiss and Charles Hart-
shorne, eds. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1935,
1963 ), p. 84.
e Ibid., p . 85.
EVALUATlON 153
Nowhere in art is comparison so odious as comparison of quali-
tieso Only when a comparison in sorne respect is specified does this
statement lose its force. Qualities are inflnitely plural, inflnitely vari-
ous and diverse. That no absolute scale can be devised against
which they can be measured is not something to be deprecated, but
is rather something which reassures us that both variety and equity8
can be at once possible and desirable. It is nevertheless a fact that,
in certain respects, qualities can be ranked topologically. There
seems no reason why a veriflable statement cannot be made that,
under certain specifiable conditions, one piece of music is more lu-
gubrious than another. But there is no external standard of lugubri-
ousness against which any particular symphony can be checked, nor
is the lugubrious intrinsically better or worse than the pensive, the
sardonic, or the jocose.9
It is important to seek to determine why, historically, certain
qualities have persisted in being appreciated-such as the quality
of Aristophanes or the quality of Chaucer-while others have slowly
or suddenly disappeared from sight, submerged by works of more
immediate appeal, with promises of greater reward upon acquaint-
ance. But if persistency is an excellent guide to the prizeworthy, it
is not an infallible one. What we admire and cherish today may have
been ignored for centuries, and may be overshadowed centuries
hence. Yet were this not so, reevaluations would never occur, the
new could never be accepted, and criticism and art would eventu-
alIy collapse together under the weight of tradition. Art itself is a
reevaluation of the past as well as a response to the presento We must
also recognize that, helpful as it is to inquire how persistent a qual-
ity has been, the argument in favor of it rests, to a considerable de-
gree, upon the assumption of an inflexible, unchanging "human na-
ture" possessed by the perceiver. How often w e hear that great
artists are the ones who "probe to the heart" of that nature, or who
"reveal its essence"! Such statements do not take time seriously, nor
change, nor growth, and for them there is only the timeless relation
8 "Equity" is not to be confused with "equality." The latter is a descriptive

term, whereas "equity" is prescriptive of the mode of equitable treatment.
9 Cf. W. C. Clement, "Quality Orders," Mind, LXV (1956), pp. 185-199;
a1so, Nelson Goodman, The Structure 01 Appearance (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1951) , Part 111.
EVALUATION 155
from the great glacial reservoir of human culture, and enjoy them
more nearly for what they are.
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF EVALUATION
Samuel Johnson, ID his Preface ta Shakespeare,

wri tes tha t :
Works tentative and experimental, must be estimated by their proportion
to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long
succession of endeavors. Of the first building that was raised, it might be
with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was
spacious or lofty must have been referred to time.
1 think Johnson does well to locate a major function of evaluation
in the contrast between the achievement displayed by the individ-
ual creative work and the "general and collective ability of man,"
insofar as the latter phrase is a rough designation for the broadest
context of social interest. It is just that contrast which marks oH
minor from major works of art-the one kind seems possible enough
in the light of human abilitíes, but the other seems downright in-
credible. What is done is therefore always measured by what con-
ceivably can be done, and the latter is not a complex of personal
potentialities, but a social one.1l
It is possible to discem at D.rst that there are two social aspects
to esthetic evaluation : firstly in that the appeal is made to sorne dis-
tinctly social context, and secondly in that the mechanism of evalua-
tion is itself socially responsive. The former aspect is prirnarily a
genetic consideration, while the latter has perhaps more implications
for evaluational method. This genetic aspect has been frequently
analyzed, and Tufts' account of it is not without merito He points out
that our first judgment, particularly of a new work in a rather spe-
11 This is. in effect. the application of Mead's theory (previously outlined
in Chapter 5) to the process of evaluation. We may say that every awareness of
an achievement takes place against a background of possible achievement. and
the value imputed to the object is determined by the degree the pattem approxi-
mates the ground. But this is the case only where the possibilities not carried out
are already considered to be values and not disvalues.
cialized Beld, may take the fonn "this pleases me," but this judgment
is not yet "objective." Only when we find that it appeals, not merely
to a passing mood, but to the wider ranges of human interest, do we
say instead, "this is fin el this is beautifull" The development is not
to be interpreted on Santayana's hypothesis that we are simply fall-
ing back upon a more naive attitude, projecting our delight into the
object admired. Rather, Tufts says (using a Kantian approach):
. . . in making the change we pass from a private or individual to a social
standard of value. The elimination of a personal and subjective attitude is
equivalent to the substitution of a social and objective attitude, and, so
far as 1 can analyze my own processes, the universalizing or socializing
of the standard is the ground, rather than the consequent, of the objec-
tifying. 12
To the degree that we hesitate to pronounce a thing beautiful and
say only that we Iike it, we are admitting our inability to view the
object expertly. For what we say of an object which stirs in us a
genuinely social feeling is normative and objective. Tufts emphasizes
that he does not mean by "social" merely an appeal to actual spec-
tators; esthetic universality is not quantitative but qualitative. What
he means specificalIy, he says, is that in pronouncing judgment our
standpoint is allgemein-menschliches, a standpoint which has been
developed within us by social experience. In any case, the appeal is
always to the quality of a whole, and the point of view which we
adopt is usualIy of the social group with which we would like to feel
identmed.
What must obviously be guarded against, if we accept Tufts'
theory, is a too ready confusion of "the social" as category with
specific societal groups, or with such groups as introjected ("the
super-ego") . There is little doubt that we refer the choices we make
to sorne sort of tribunal in our minds, constituted of the images we
have of people whose esteem we desire. "What sort of hearing,"
Longinus tells us we ask, "would Homer, had he been present, or
Demosthenes have given to this or that when said by me . . . ? In
what spirit will each succeeding age listen to me who have written
thus?" One's tribunal is as unique in its organization as one's per-
sonality. But the judgment of such a group is, in itself, no mOre
12 James H . Tufts, "On the Genesis of the Aesthetic Categories," Decennial
Publications 01 the University 01 Chicago, III (1903), p. 8.
EVALUATION 157
"objectíve" as an evaluation than that of a group that had not been
íntrojected. If we refuse to acknowledge any one person's experience
ín particular as prímary, we must al so refuse to accord primacy to
similar states where found among groups-whether actual or íntro-
jected. Durkheím correctly maintains, "Between the two proposítions
1 like this and A certain number of us like this there ís no essential
diHerence."13
Yet the fact that appeals are made to social contexts, while it
enlightens us concerning the genesis and conditions of valuing or
prizing, does not provide us with the methodological knowledge and
equipment by means of which we are properly to evaluate. The
masses of evidence as to what people value, and how they have come
so to value, is certainly indispensable, but one is forced to admit its
insufficiency. What must be worked out is a theory which will clarify
the logical status and function of evaluations. It is a commonplace
of ínstrumentalist philosophy that such evaluations (not to be con-
fused with propositions about value-facts, that is, "value-proposi-
tions") can be conceived of as hypotheses. The evidence required
to conflrm or negate these hypotheses is, of course, supplied by the
continued institution of experimental operations and observations.
As logical forms, they are not judicial in function, but ministe-
rial. They refer, that is, to possible modes of interpretation and ac-
tíon. Evaluations are ways of construing evidence, and thereupon
function as modes of guidance in further operations. J4
We are very far from possessing a science of art inquiry whose
propositions concerning esthetic values and perceptual behavior
could be used to estimate the probable esthetic worth of sorne par-
ticular art work in sorne anticipated experience. (This is partialIy
due to the fact that the rate of development of individual sciences
is controlIe d by social n eeds and pressures. These latte r are not pres-
ently hospitable to sciences of low commercial or military value.)
We may say, as a matter of form, that the body of propositions
deducible from the principIes of such a science would best be kept
unifled and consistent, and that harmony with the general body of
knowledge is a good indication of the applicability of any particular
13 Emile Durkheim, Sociologie et phi(osophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France, 1951), p.122.
14 Cf. Albert Tsugawa, "The Objectivity of Aesthetic ]ud gments," Phi/o-
sop/¡ical Review, LXX (1961) , pp. 3-22.
evaluation. Thus the acceptance or rejection of an hypothesis con-
cerning esthetic value would have to be worked out in terros of the
possible consequences upon the existing body of more or less vermed
propositions (in addition to the institution of individual experi-
ments). It is unlikely that we could. accept an hypothesis which
created more difficulties than it solved. Such a statement, for in-
stance, as that "the paintings of Bouguereau display deep pathos"
could not be accepted without casting doubt upon a great area of
other evaluations, just as the historian could not accept the statement
that Napoleon was an unimportant figure in European history, with-
out immense revisions in the organization of his data.
It is not so much the function of art inquiry to derive from in-
dividual appreciations a general certainty as to esthetic values, as it
is to enable individuals to achieve a far broader and more profound
acquaintance with su eh values than they might hope ordinarily to
obtain. Certainly one would like to arrive, through experience, at
the sort of convictions which the majority of subsequent experiences
would tend to confirro rather than disavow. (Indeed, conservatives
believe they always succeed in this.) But in doing so, the danger is
far greater than if one were to hold his values always somewhat
tentatively, contrasting his judgments continualIy with what the
evaluations of art inquiry maintained to be valuable or worthless.
Evaluation is also a socialIy responsive process, in that our modes
of knowing, perceiving and inquiring are not everywhere alike, but
are dependent upon deSnite cultural conditions, su eh as modes of
symbolization, communication, nurture, and cooperation. Individual
constitutional differences further complicate the process. We may
hope that the development of sociologies of perception and evalua-
tion will eventualIy indicate how and when differences in assump-
tions, in points of view, or in frames of reference are to be taken into
account. It must be remembered that the variety of modes of know-
ing does not prevent our attaining the object of knowledge, but
rather, once they are recognized and criticized for what they are,
such a variety of modes can be a positive advantage.
FinalIy, the evaluation of art is not only socialIy responsive, it
is also socialIy responsible. Its functioning has direct effects upon its
cultural context, and it must therefore be judged in ethical terros as
weIl as in terros oE its relationship to its strictly esthetic subject
matter. The temptation is great, in times of crisis, such as those in
Copyrightod material
EVALUATION 159
which we presently live, to insist that the artist conform to, in his
work, and indeed to express, some speciGc moral formula. In the
name of "critical evaluation," attempts are made to legislate art into
capsulized statements of morality. Artists who do not do so are con-
demned as "irresponsible." Why? One answer has been suggested
by Robert Penn Warren:
Because they have tried, within the limits of their gifts, to rema in faithful
to the complexities of the problems with which they were dealing, beca use
they refused to take the easy statement as solution, beca use they tried to
define the context in which, and the terms by which, faith and ideals
could be eamed. But this method will scarcely satisfy the mind which is
hot for certainties; to that mind it will seem merely an index to lukewarm-
ness, indecision, disunity, treason. The new theory of purity would purge
out aH complexities and aH ironies and aH self-criticism. And the theory
will forget that the hand-me-down faith, the hand-me-down ideals, no
matter what the professed content, is in the end not only meaningless but
vicious. It is vicious because, as parody, it is the enemy of aH faith. 15
This quotation makes it admirably elear that the social responsi-

bility of art analysis is the strengthening of the contribution of art
to human culture, not its weakening and eventual exhaustion. For in
thus condemning the integrity of artistic variety, the analysis of art
reveals itself as irresponsible. As a matter of fact, what tbe artist
requires is simply the freedom to be responsible in his own way. The
inquirer would do well to inelude among his projects the establish-
ment of a society which would guarantee that freedom, both for the
artist and for himself.
15 Robert Penn Warren, "Pure and Impure Poetry," in John Crowe Ransom,
ed., The Kenyon erities (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1951), pp. 41-42.

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What Happens

A11 rights reserved. No part of this book may be

ISBN 0-8290-1503-5 (pbk.)

chapter 1 Problems of Inquiry into Problems of Art A

chapter2 The Concept of Process lA

chapter3 Tertiary Qualities 19

chapter 4 Substantial Thought and Intelligible Things AS

chapter 5 The Response to the Thing SI

chapter7 The Problem of Self SI

chapter 8 Art as Intelligence 00

chapter 11 Critical Observation 126

chapter 12 Evalllation lA3

An inquiry such as this into the nature of art must

Art is a happening-and a way of happening. Its

PROBLEMS OF ART: HUMAN

Problems of art fall into two groups: the "existen ti al"

PROBLEMS OF ART INQUIRY: SOME

Although art inquiry should restrict itself to the

Eventually the persistent relationships which we observe through

7 We can recognize the justness of Cassirer s treatment of the objective-

THE INTELLIGENT ORDERING OF

A process is a spatio-temporal context in which so

ART AS A PURPOSIVE AND

Two main criteria permit us to set art processes oH

2It is traditional lo speak of Ihe consummalory situalion as "ideal." Such

EXPRESSIVE VALUES AND THE

The distinction between perception and enjoyment,

This quotation only offers evidence of expressive values-it hardly

lt is a featber in the cap of recent realism to have given the secondary

It is interesting that Bosanquet should intimate the connection be-

The beauty of a beautiful object is not a quality of it, but is a character it

As a final example of opposition to this sort of realism, we can

6 Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity, Vol. II (London: Macmillan,

THE ROLE OF QUALITY IN THE

1 ha ve already referred to the thesis that the artist,

Gestalt psychology must be credited with having

Some Gestalt theorists, such as Werlheimer, believe that neither

Much of the work on physiognomic qualities has con cerned itself

He offers this expressiveness, of lines as mere lines, of sounds as mere

There is a place where Charles Peirce says, in one of

24 The transactional approach appears to avoid most of the difficulties in-

Monet saw haystacks. He sought to catch them in

It is very doubtful that it is necessary to give as much weight to

Introjectory qualities are reflected in the comparison

36 Gaston BacheJard, La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, undated) ;

The transaction which occurs between the human

HOW THOUGHTS AND THINGS

What thought actuaJly is, we are wholly unsure, but

I J ean Piaget, La Représentation du monde chez l'enfant ( Paris: Alean,

The constant thought of Odette gave to the moments in which he was

Now the intrinsic quality of a thought is just what it

When one contempla tes a painting, it is indeed a

THE PARTICIPATION OF THE

In artistic creation, the thing has a role of great im-

1 This background is not explained merely by calling it "temporal. " W e

4 See G. H. Mead, "The Physical Thing," Philosophy af the Present (Chi-

TRE PRIMITIVE RELATIONSRIP

Prior to the emergence of consciousness, prior to the