Review

Author(s): James L. Jarrett

Review by: James L. Jarrett
Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 173-177
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331585
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BOOK REVIEWS

AESTHETIC CONCEPTS AND EDUCATION edited by Ralph A.

Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970, 455 pp., $9.50.
Literally, an anthology is a bouquet. More realistically, an anthology may be
defined as an uneven collection of pieces. In general, this kind of book has
one of two sorts of justification: it brings together for the sake of convenience
material otherwise scattered, or its intended publication may promote the
composition of works around a theme or a topic. Aesthetic Concepts and
Education belongs to the latter category. It does not transcend its own type by
achieving uniform excellence, but there is a high enough incidence of excel-
lence to make us glad its editor stimulated some seventeen authors to think
hard about some aesthetic concept or other and its relation to the educative
process.
Although it would be possible to do some grouping of the articles - for
instance several of the writers have a go at the notion of how the teaching
or learning act itself can have aesthetic components, whether or not it be
concerned with aesthetic objects-I am particularly impressed with the
wide range of ideas and problems contained in the volume. Yet there is
none, even among those that make little direct reference to education, that is
inappropriate to the title: no one with more than a casual interest in
aesthetic education can afford to neglect this volume.
I will comment briefly on the articles that especially interested me, or that
happened especially to interest me, which may have been only because in
most cases they touched upon matters I had been thinking about in the
recent past.
Ralph A. Smith, the editor (and "onlie begetter"), invokes in his brief
introduction Monroe Beardsley's distinction among three sorts of writings on
aesthetics, the scientific, analytic, and synoptic. Since these writers are chosen
for their particular interest in philosophy (or, in a couple of the cases, the
teaching of literature), no one should expect to find scientific aesthetics here.
The essays are too short, I should think, to be synoptic. Therefore, analytic?
Well, nobody with qualms about what that might portend need fear.
Beardsley himself in the opening piece, "Aesthetic Theory and Educational
Theory," having expressed his preference for "metacriticism," spends a
good portion of his space answering the good old-fashioned question, "What
is aesthetic experience?"--and not in analyzing how the concept "aesthetic
experience" tends to function in art criticism. He also inquires into the

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174 BOOK REVIEWS

nature of the educative experience, and finds that the educative and the
aesthetic have their most important overlap with respect to the qualities of
coherence and completeness. One implication of this for the educator who
seeks to make his instruction more aesthetic (in a way more fundamental
than is suggested by the advice to modulate one's voice and to project slides
from time to time) is that he should enhance the sense of interconnectedness
of the various elements in the classroom experience, should unify their variety.
Yet, in recognizing that it is seldom appropriate for the educational ex-
perience to be as self-contained as the most intense aesthetic experience,
Beardsley would remind us of the important differences, too, between the
aesthetic and educational.
Donald Arstine in "Aesthetic Qualities in Experience and Learning" is
more impressed with how the aesthetic and the educational can come
together. Very much in the Dewey tradition, Arstine characterizes educa-
tional experience as problem solving and aesthetic experience as consum-
matory and form-centered; but problem solving affords an immediate
gratification, from which he concludes that
Learning and aesthetic quality. .. are not disparate, distinct events; they are
but different dimensions, or ways of looking at, the same sort of thing. Thus
it can be said that if an experience had aesthetic quality, it resulted in learn-
ing (even if the learning was unintended). And if one has learned (i.e., if his
disposition has changed), he has had experiences which were aesthetic in
quality. [p. 41]
This seems to be a non sequitur, and in more than one way. In the first place,
it is not clear how anything he has said justifies speaking of the educational
and the aesthetic as different dimensions, nor yet of "different ways of looking
at," something or other. Even on his own terms, the consummatory or intrin-
sic quality of problem solving is only one of the qualities of a problem-
solving experience: the other principal characteristic is "a fairly long-lived
change in disposition" (p. 39). But also, he has plainly made "perception of
form" an essential aspect of the aesthetic; if he intends this to be essential
to problem solving, he has not said so, and it is not clear how he could so
argue, though of course any situation recognized as problematic will have to
have some form, since otherwise it would be simply chaos. Now, if the point
comes down to there being a consummatory moment in both problem
solving and aesthetic experience, Arnstine would seem open to the charge
of having not so much beaten a dead horse as re-vivified a live one.
One of the most impressive articles in the book is Brian S. Crittenden's
"Persuasion: Aesthetic Argument and the Language of Teaching." Crittenden
sees the literary critic and the teacher of literature as alike conducting an
aesthetic argument that is aimed not merely at understanding but more im-
portantly at having an aesthetic experience. By helping others name, identify,
classify, and describe perceptual features of a poem or novel, the critic-
teacher can be said to be persuading others to share the very kind of aesthetic
experience he has attained. Of course the same thing is true of critics and
teachers of music, the visual arts, and all the other aesthetic arts. But - and
here is Crittenden's most interesting point - it is true also of the teacher of

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 BOOK REVIEWS 175

mathematics. In short, of the educator. "The educator is involved in initiating

others into a distinctive style of life characterized by specific values, attitudes,
and ways of proceeding" (p. 254). In making out his case, Crittenden does
not content himself with vague characterizations of how a critic proceeds,
but, leaning on F. R. Leavis (the less cranky Leavis of an earlier day),
shows how the critic, at his best, conducts one inside the work of art in all
of its value-richness, so that one can feel how it is to live there. So too a
teacher, of any subject, at his best. My only hesitation about Crittenden's
essay is with respect to his insistence upon the rationality of this process.
Presumably to guard against indoctrination masquerading as education,
Crittenden says that "The important question is how the teacher persuades.
Clearly, as an educator he is bound to limit himself to rational methods"
(p. 261). It is not at all clear to me that the teacher is or should be so
bound. I think he is bound to tolerate a wide range of differences in attitude
and feeling and not to inflict his judgment upon students, and that he is all
the better a teacher for whatever ability he has to connect responses to objec-
tive features of the world, but I fancy some of my best teachers-teachers
I most prize in retrospect-persuaded me to beliefs and appreciations
which I don't yet know fully how to justify.
Harry S. Broudy in "Tacit Knowing and Aesthetic Education" warns
against the dangers for humanistic education of the input-output model and
its insistence upon behavioral objectives. These ways of thinking, however
valuable for instruction in the social and natural sciences, tend to exaggerate
the place in aesthetic education of skills and factual knowledge, and thus
to encourage neglect of "understanding of feeling" and other sorts of tacit
knowing. I think there is no question but that some teachers in the human-
ities have been stampeded by those educators infatuated with systems models.
There is indeed a danger in the teacher's reaching the point, consciously or
unconsciously, at which he feels that he is only really teaching to the extent
that he is improving scores on typical kinds of examinations. But perhaps at
the same time that we warn ourselves and others of this tyranny, we ought
also to try to persuade the behavioral objectivists (what I think a very few
are beginning to do) to extend in subtlety and depth their previous, often
macroscopic, ideas of what behavior is.
Another writer who draws upon Polanyi is Louis Araud Reid, who with
his "Feeling and Understanding" puts us all further in his debt, this time
with an unusually sensitive and helpful analysis of what it is to feel and of
how feeling relates to value. Having distinguished feeling-as-immediate-
awareness from what is felt, feeling's content or object, he defines value as
the relation between the two. "Value is feeling-for-content (or object) . . ."
(p. 61). From that point he proceeds to show that value is necessarily in-
volved in all subject matters, and therefore in all teaching of biology and
history as well as of literature and music. "The historian, surely, has to
make history live, in the first instance for himself, then for others. How
otherwise can he do it than by the distal process of imaginative feeling?"
(p. 67).

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176 BOOK REVIEWS

If a number of people today are following the lead of Polanyi and

Bronowski in attacking the strong distinction between science-as-cognitive and
the humanities-as-valuational or art-as-feeling, some others, like Joseph
Margolis in "Aesthetic and Moral Judgments: Against Compartmentaliza-
tion," are attacking another ancient and rigid separation of the aesthetic from
the moral. Margolis wisely does not identify the two, but only tries to show
that proposed rules and asserted judgments in both areas can be argued
about, attacked and supported, in the same way.
Walter H. Clark, Jr., draws upon Wittgenstein's distinction between seeing
objects, like ducks or blobs of ink, and seeing a drawing now as a duck, now
as a rabbit; he finds "that talk of aesthetic experience can be translated into
talk of seeing as" (p. 184). He is not primarily interested in the representa-
tional aspects of the arts, say seeing an abstract painting as subtly portraying
the New York skyline, but rather in such a claim as to see a certain picture
as warm or as unified. I am not persuaded that there has not been an im-
portant shift in meaning, here, of "seeing as," but however that be Clark
interestingly goes on to suggest a relationship between teaching students to
play games and teaching them to see works of art as having this or that
quality. He ends his discussion by some queries as to whether there are close
analogies in the nonvisual arts to seeing as in the case of painting, but since
his use of seeing is more like generic perceiving than like using one's eyes, I
don't see why not. But suppose in a painting or a poem one saw the work
as true. Now what becomes of the verification process that was found to be
appropriate to seeing objects or knowing that, but not to the other mode
of perception?
I must be even briefer about the other articles. Michael Parsons tackles
the problem of "medium" in art and education, but beyond making a rather
elementary distinction between medium as simply a means of communicating
a message already complete in advance and the artistic medium which is
more a part of the message, Parsons does not offer me much help. In fact, he
often puzzles me, as in saying that when one watches TV, "the TV is one
medium, the eyes and ears another" (p. 272). Maxine Greene's treatment
of "Imagination" is itself imaginative and sensitive. She could have picked
no better texts than those she selects from both the poetry and prose of
Wallace Stevens, and she ends by showing how poetic imagination is a kind
of paradigm for teaching and learning. Peter F. Neumeyer disputes the
dogma that ascribing intention to a poet is a fallacy, arguing instead that
"Teaching readers to observe and to appreciate the author's intended and
created speaker is one of the most important tasks of the teacher" (p. 363). He
is refreshingly concrete in his presentation, and among other things demon-
strates that he himself must be an unusually skillful teacher of literature.
Finally, in an ambitious article C. M. Smith explores the place of "style"
in art and education. Having stated that "perceiving style in anything means
having acquired an expectation that qualities identified in one part of a work
might be echoed or repeated in another," she goes on to suggest some
interesting ways in which style may occupy a central place in historical and
theoretical approaches to the arts. She is wary about the extent to which the
development of style can be realistically held up as an educational objective,

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 BOOK REVIEWS 177

but does find teaching of the arts an important mode of value education
through its fostering appreciation of certain life styles:
Through thoughtful selection of exemplars it should be possible to lend to
desirable life styles dramatic impact in the theater arts, vividness in literature,
expressivenessand sensuous appeal in painting, and noble form in sculpture, to
name only the most obvious cases. It is in this sense that aesthetic education
could support the larger ends of formal schooling while at the same time pro-
moting its own objective of enlighted preference. [p. 444]
There are also essays by F. E. Sparshott on "Play," Eugene F. Kaelin on
"Epoche and Relevance in Aesthetic Discourse," Iredell Jenkins on "Perfor-
mance," D. W. Gotshalk on "Creativity," Barbara Leondar on "Metaphor in
the Classroom," and Allan Shields on "Unity or E Uno Plures." All in all, an
admirable, wide-ranging, perceptive collection. I ordered it for use in a
graduate seminar in Aesthetic Education. Now that I have gone beyond
scanning to read it, I'm pleased that I did.
JamesL. Jarrett
Universityof California,Berkeley

MNEMOSYNE: THE PARA TEr,r BETWEEN LITERATURE AND

THE VISUAL ARTS (Bollingen Series XXXV.16) by Mario Praz.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970, xvi + 261 pp., $15.00.
Praz urges us not to be persuaded to deny the affinities (obvious to most
people) between the literature and the visual arts of any period by the diffi-
culty of saying exactly what such an affinity amounts to. Most attempts to
explain affinities fail because they look in the wrong place, relying on icono-
graphic borrowings and other factors that turn out on inspection to be sec-
ondary to the particular style traditions to which individual works belong, or
seeking fanciful and tenuous likenesses between the designs of chance pairs of
works. One should look rather to something like the common "handwriting"
of an age, analogous structural tendencies in the ways in which practitioners
of all its arts "memorize facts aesthetically." For example, the dominant
Gothic ductus lies in a quasi-organic articulation within articulation; Renais-
sance form tends to treat parts as elements within a consistent geometrical
scheme; Mannerist form favors serpentine progressions and abrupt reversals,
as in Salviati, Donne and Sir Philip Sidney; the Baroque binds incongruous
details with ecstatic curves; Rococo likes curls; and Romanticism alternates
between a microscopically realistic enumeration of banal minutiae and a misty
yearning for the Absolute.
Illustration of the successively favored ways of aesthetic memorizing is
carried through with daunting erudition, but the argument is neither wholly
clear nor, where it is clear, convincing. Praz seems to claim novelty for his
approach, but does not explain how it differs from that of Wylie Sypher
(whom he mentions with approval) or of T. B. L. Webster (whom he ignores).
He knows he has to defend his procedures from those who deny a priori that
any formal analogies between paintings and writings could possibly hold, but
quite ignores the simpler and perhaps more common objection that such like-
nesses, far from uniting as he alleges "all the works of art of a period," hold

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