Art Critisicm

art, philosophy of, the study of the nature of art, including such concepts as interpretation, representation and expression, and form. It is closely related to aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste.
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Distinguishing characteristics
The philosophy of art is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with the analysis and evaluation of particular works of art. Critical activity may be primarily historical, as when a lecture is given on the conventions of the Elizabethan theatre in order to explain some of the devices used inShakespeare’s plays. It may be primarily analytical, as when a certain passage of poetry is separated into its elements and its meaning or import explained in relation to other passages and other poems in the tradition. Or it may be primarily evaluative, as when reasons are given for saying that the work of art in question is good or bad, or better or worse than another one. Sometimes it is not a single work of art but an entire class of works in a certain style or genre (such as pastoral poems or Baroque music) that is being elucidated, and sometimes it is the art of an entire period (such as Romantic). But in every case, the aim of art criticism is to achieve an increased understanding or enjoyment of the work (or classes of works) of art, and its statements are designed to achieve this end.
The test of the success of art criticism with a given person is: has this essay or book of art criticism increased his understanding or enhanced his appreciation of the work of art in question? Art criticism is particularly helpful and often necessary for works of art that are more than usually difficult, so that the average person would be unable adequately to understand or enjoy them if left to himself.
The task of the philosopher of art is more fundamental than that of the art critic in that the critic’s pronouncements presuppose answers to the questions set by the philosopher of art. The critic says that a given work of music is expressive, but the philosopher of art asks what is meant by saying that a work of art is expressive and how one determines whether it is. In speaking and writing about art, the critic presupposes that he is dealing with clear concepts, the attainment of which is the task of the philosopher of art.
The task of the philosopher of art is not to heighten understanding and appreciation of works of art but to provide conceptual foundations for the critic by (1) examining the basic concepts underlying the critic’s activities to enable him to speak and write more intelligibly about the arts, and by (2) arriving at true conclusions about art, aesthetic value, expression, and the other concepts that the critic employs.
Upon what does the philosopher of art direct his attention? “Art,” is the ready answer, but what is art and what distinguishes it from all other things? The theorists who have attempted to answer this question are many, and their answers differ greatly. But there is one feature that virtually all of them have in common: a work of art is a human-made thing, an artifact, as distinguished from an object in nature. A sunset may be beautiful, but it is not a work of art. A piece of driftwood may have aesthetic qualities, but it is not a work of art since it was not made by a human. On the other hand, a piece of wood that has been carved to look like driftwood is not an object of nature but of art, even though the appearance of the two may be exactly the same. This distinction was challenged in the 20th century by artists who declared that objets trouvés (“found objects”) are works of art, since the artist’s perception of them as such makes them so, even if the objects were not human-made and were not modified in any way (except by exhibition) from their natural state.
Nevertheless, according to the simplest and widest definition, art is anything that is human-made. Within the scope of this definition, not only paintings and sculptures but also buildings, furniture, automobiles, cities, and garbage dumps are all works of art: every change that human activity has wrought upon the face of nature is art, be it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, beneficial or destructive.
The ordinary usage of the term is clearly less wide. In daily life when works of art are spoken of, the intention is to denote a much narrower range of objects—namely, those responded to aesthetically. Among the things in this narrower range, a distinction, although not a precise one, is made between fine and useful art. Fine art consists of those works designed to produce an aesthetic response or that (regardless of design) function as objects of aesthetic appreciation (such as paintings, sculptures, poems, musical compositions)—those human-made things that are enjoyed for their own sake rather than as means to something else. Useful art has both an aesthetic and a utilitarian dimension: automobiles, glass tumblers, woven baskets, desk lamps, and a host of other handmade or manufactured objects have a primarily useful function and are made for that purpose, but they also have an aesthetic dimension: they can be enjoyed as objects of beauty, so much so that a person often buys one brand of car rather than another for aesthetic reasons even more than for mechanical reasons (of which he may know nothing). A borderline case is architecture: many buildings are useful objects the aesthetic function of which is marginal, and other buildings are primarily objects of beauty the utility of which is incidental or no longer existent (Greek temples were once places of worship, but today their value is entirely aesthetic). The test in practice is not how they were intended by their creators, but how they function in present-day experience. Many great works of painting and sculpture, for example, were created to glorify a deity and not, insofar as can be ascertained, for an aesthetic purpose (to be enjoyed simply in the contemplation of them for their own sake). It should be added, however, that many artists were undoubtedly concerned to satisfy their aesthetic capabilities in the creation of their work, since they were highly perfectionistic as artists, but in their time there was no such discipline as aesthetics in which they could articulate their goals; in any case, they chose to create “for the greater glory of God” by producing works that were also worthwhile to contemplate for their own sake.
This aesthetic sense of the word “art,” whether applied to fine art or useful art, is the one most employed by the majority of critics and philosophers of art today. There are two other senses of “art,” however, that are still narrower, and, to avoid confusion, their use should be noted: (1) Sometimes the term “art” is restricted to the visual arts alone or to some of the visual arts. But as philosophers of art use the term (and as it is used here), art is not limited to visual art; music and drama and poetry are as much arts as are painting, sculpture, and architecture. (2) Sometimes the term “art” is used in a persuasive sense, to include only those works considered good art. “That’s not art!” exclaims the viewer at an art gallery as he examines a painting he dislikes. But if the term “art” is to be used without confusion, it must be possible for there to be bad art as well as good art. The viewer, then, is not really denying that the work in question is art (it is a human-made object presented to be contemplated for its own sake) but only that it is worthwhile.
The word “art” is also ambiguous in another way: it is sometimes used to designate the activity of creating a work of art, as in the slogan “Art is expression”; but it is more often used to designate the product of that process, the completed artwork or artifact itself, as in the remark “Art is a source of great enjoyment to me.” There will be occasion later to remark on this ambiguity.
Countless proffered definitions of “art” are not definitions at all but theories about the nature of art that presuppose that the ability to identify certain things in the world as works of art already exists. Most of them are highly unsatisfactory even as theories. “Art is an exploration of reality through a sensuous presentation”—but in what way is it an exploration? Is it always concerned with reality (how is music concerned with reality, for example)? “Art is a re-creation of reality”—but is all art re-creation, even music? (It would seem likely that music is the creation of something, namely, a new set of tonal relationships, but not that it is the re-creation of anything at all.) “Art is an expression of feeling through a medium”—but is it always an expression (see below Art as expression) and is it always feeling that is expressed? And so on. It appears more certain that Shakespeare’s King Lear is a work of art than that these theories are true. All that seems to be required for identifying something as a work of art in the wide sense is that it be not a natural object but something made or transformed by a human being, and all that is required for identifying it as art (not as good art but as art) in the narrower sense is that it function aesthetically in human experience, either wholly (fine art) or in part (useful art); it is not even necessary, as has been shown, that it be intended by its creator to function in this way.
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The interpretation of art
Works of art present problems of both interpretation and evaluation. Evaluation is not the concern of this article (see aesthetics), but one problem about interpretation deserves to be mentioned. Works of art are often difficult, and how to interpret them properly is far from obvious. The question then arises as to what factors should guide efforts at interpretation.
At one extreme lies the view known as isolationism, according to which a knowledge of the artist’s biography, historical background, and other factors is irrelevant to an appreciation of the work of art and usually is harmful in that it gets in the way, tending to substitute a recital of these facts for the more difficult attempt to come to grips with the work of art itself. If the work of art is not understood on first acquaintance, it should be read (or heard, or viewed) again and yet again. Constant re-exposure to it, so that the recipient is totally absorbed in and permeated by it, is the way to maximum appreciation.
At the other extreme, contextualism holds that the work of art should always be apprehended in its context or setting and that not merely knowledge about it but total appreciation of it is much richer if it is approached with this knowledge. According to the contextualists, not only literature (ordinarily appreciated contextually) but also the other arts, even nonrepresentational painting and music, should be apprehended in this way.
No critic or art lover need hold to either position in its undiluted form: a person could well be an isolationist about some kinds of art, such as music, a contextualist about others, such as historical dramas and religious paintings. It is essential to be more specific, however, about the factors—other than careful and repeated perusal of the work of art itself—that the contextualist holds are either necessary or extremely helpful in the appreciation of works of art:
1. Other works of art by the same artist. If the artist has created other works, particularly in the same genre, acquaintance with them may enhance appreciation of the work at hand. Quantity of works has no particular merit in itself, but when, say, one of the piano concertos of the 18th-century Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is heard, the auditor may (often largely unconsciously) compare its mode, thematic material, and method of development and resolution with some of Mozart’s 25 other piano concertos. Knowledge of the entire corpus of his work in a certain genre may heighten enjoyment of a particular work.
2. Other works of art in the same genre by other artists, particularly in the same style or tradition. Appreciation of the pastoral poem “Lycidas,” by the English poet John Milton, is doubtless enhanced by a study of the pastoral tradition in poetry, with which Milton supposed his readers to be acquainted. To study “Lycidas” in isolation would needlessly deprive the reader of much of the richness of texture of the poem and would even make some of the references in it unintelligible.
3. A study of relevant facts about the artistic medium, such as the instrumental limitations or advantages of pipe organs in the time of the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) or the modes of presentation of ancient Greek tragedies in the Athenian theatre. An acquaintance with the artistic conventions and idioms in which the artist operated often leads to better understanding of certain aspects of his work and helps to avert misunderstandings of it.
4. A study of the age in which the artist lived—the spirit of the time and its current ideas, the complex influences that molded the artist, even the social, economic, and political conditions of the time and place in which he worked. Sometimes such knowledge is of dubious relevance: it can be argued that no aid to the study of the 82 string quartets and 104 symphonies of the 18th-century Austrian composer Joseph Haydn is provided by reading about the political and economic conditions of his day. It is interesting to study the evolution of the string quartet or symphony from its origin through Haydn to the present, but this would appear to be an evolution traceable entirely within the art form and not dependent on factors outside it. This, however, is not always so: particularly in literature, where a study of such exterior factors seems to be of much more relevance. It would seem important to know, for example, that Milton was aware of the new Copernican astronomy but deliberately chose in Paradise Lost to make his cosmos Ptolemaic, the antiquated astronomical system that was already steeped in literature, mythology, and tradition.
5. A study of the artist’s life. Anthologists of literature constantly assume that this is an important consideration, since they supply detailed biographies prior to their selections by each author. It is true, of course, that knowledge of the artist’s life can distract attention from his work, as with those who cannot hear Ludwig van Beethoven’s late quartets without constantly thinking, “What a pity it was that he was deaf at the time!” Yet such knowledge may also heighten experience of a work; some would say, at any rate, that it helps to know that Milton was blind when he wrote the sonnet “On His Blindness.” It is the relevance of this kind of knowledge to an appreciation of the poem, as a poem, that is in dispute. In every case, however, it should be kept in mind that acquaintance with the artist’s biography is a means toward an end, the enhanced appreciation and understanding of the work of art, and that otherwise it is aesthetically irrelevant. The facts about the artist’s life are the means and the enhanced appreciation the end, not the other way around, as is often found, for example in psychoanalytic essays attempting to infer facts about the artist’s subconscious conflicts from his work; in these cases the work is being taken as the means and the study of his life as the end.
6. A study of the artist’s intentions. When difficulties arise as to what to make of a work of art or when several conflicting interpretations come to mind, how is the difficulty to be resolved? One obvious suggestion is to consult the artist or his records or memoirs or the testimony of people who knew him, to discover what his intentions were with regard to the work or the passage. It is tempting to believe that, whichever way he intended it, this is the way the work should be interpreted, for in regard to his own work surely the author’s own word should be law.
This temptation is hotly decried by other critics as “the intentional fallacy”—the fallacy (if it is a fallacy) of believing that whichever way the artist intended it is by definition the way it really is. A work of art should stand on its own, without help from the artist; if he has not sufficiently realized his intentions within the work, forcing the recipient to go outside for help, this is held to be an artistic defect. Once the artist has completed his work, moreover, and presented it to the world, it belongs to the world and no longer exclusively to him: in the interpretation of it he now becomes just one critic among many, whose word should be respected but not taken as the final authority. Perhaps other critics can think of better interpretations than he did, which give a greater aesthetic reward in subsequent encounters with the work; perhaps there are even acceptable interpretations (such as the Freudianinterpretations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet) that he could not possibly have thought of himself at the time.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set forth three criteria for critics to consider in interpreting and evaluating a work of art: (1) What was the artist trying to do? (2) Did he do it? (3) Was it worth doing? The first of the three is intentionalistic, and, says the intentionalist, surely this is plausible: an artist can hardly be blamed for failing to do what he had no intention of doing. It must first be known, then, what he was trying to do.
But the anti-intentionalist points out that the intention makes no difference, only the product does. If the ballerina excuses her fall in the middle of the dance by saying that she intended it, the dance is just as marred aesthetically as if she had fallen accidentally. And if a poet admits that he wrote rubbish and says that this is just what he intended to write, one does not rate the poem any higher because the poet’s intention was fulfilled.
The persistent questioner might ask, however, if there are not at least some works of art in which the intentions of the artist have to be known? Suppose that a contemporary critic reads a dull, stodgy, moralistic Victorian novel and says at the end, “What an excellent parody of a Victorian novel!” But it was not a parody; its intentions were deadly serious—and should not this be known in order to interpret and evaluate it properly? Not at all, replies the anti-intentionalist; all the critic has to say is, “As a Victorian novel, this is deadly dull; as a parody of a Victorian novel, it is brilliant; if the author intended it in the former way, so much the worse for him—his work can still be praised for being brilliant parody, even if it wasn’t intended as one. He just achieved something better than he knew at the time.”
Still, the intentionalist has a point: sometimes the clue to unlock an otherwise intransigent work may come from the author’s statement of intention, and a plausible interpretation might be unobtainable without it. Such a suggestion might have come from a reader other than the author, but there is no point in disdaining helpful hints, regardless of their source. If the suggestion does come from the artist himself, that is nothing against it. Perhaps a work is less aesthetically perfect because it requires outside clues to its interpretation, but few works of art even approach perfection, and they may yet amply repay attention, all the more if some plausible suggestion comes from the outside. The 20th-century Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev intended hisClassical Symphony to be a parody of the classical symphonies of Mozart and Haydn—and regardless of whether the suggestion that it be construed this way came from Prokofiev (as it did) or from someone else, if it is rewarding to listen to it in this way, then no one gains by refusing to accept the suggestion. A statement of intention is not the only key to unlocking the secrets of works of art, but it is one key among many, and there appears to be no good reason why it should not be used.
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The mediums of art
In the context of every work of art there are three items to consider:
1. The genesis of the work of art.
2. The artifact, or work of art, which is a publicly available object or thing made by the artist and viewed by the audience.
3. The effects of the work of art upon the audience.
The first item comprises all the artist’s mental states, both conscious and unconscious, in the creation of the work, including his intention with regard to the work, as well as all the factors that led to these states of mind: for example, the spirit of the age, the socio-economic conditions of the times, his exchange of ideas with other artists, and so forth. Whatever factors helped to form the work of art in the artist’s mind fall under this heading. The experiences undergone by the artist in the creation of the work constitute the artistic experience.
The third item includes all the effects of the work of art upon those who experience it, including both aesthetic and nonaesthetic reactions, the influence of the work of art upon the culture, on the state of knowledge, on current morality, and the like. The experience that involves the observer’s attention to the work of art for its own sake and not for the sake of some ulterior end is called aesthetic, but of course art has many effects that are not aesthetic. The aesthetic experience belongs to the consumer of art, as opposed to the artistic experience, which belongs to the creator of art.
The second item is what is usually called the work of art itself. According to some writers, such as the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), the work of art exists only in the mind of the artist, and the physical artifact then counts as an effect of the work of art. But in ordinary usage, as well as the usage of most philosophers of art, the work of art is identified with the physical artifact, as it exists in the physical medium. What goes on in the creator’s mind is already contained in the first item.
Every work of art occurs in a medium; that is, there is some physical object or series of events by which the work is communicated to the recipient (listener, observer, reader) by means of his senses. In painting, the medium is paint; in sculpture, such materials as stone or wood or plastic. It might at first be thought that the medium of music consists of the musical score on which the composer writes the notes, but the written notes are not music; they are a set of visual cues for the production of the tones to be emitted by the various instruments. If every player had a perfect memory, he would have no need for the written score; indeed, music existed long before there were any written scores and was played or sung from memory from one year or generation to the next. It could be said more plausibly that the medium of music consists of the physical sound waves by means of which the sound sensations enter the consciousness of the listener. The medium of literature can truly be said to be words, yet not words as abstract entities conceived in the mind but words as spoken (in oral presentation) or written. The physical medium of literature, then, is either auditory or visual, although what is conveyed through the medium is not.
Classifying arts by their mediums
There are many ways of classifying the arts—by their purpose, by their intentions, by their effects. But the most usual and the most fundamental method of classifying the arts is by their mediums:
VISUAL ART
This includes two-dimensional visual arts such as drawing and painting and also three-dimensional visual arts such as sculpture and architecture. Some of these should doubtless be called visuo-tactual art: buildings are ordinarily touched as well as seen, sculptures could be more fully appreciated if touched as well as seen, and even paintings may sometimes have enough three-dimensionality to repay touch experience. At any rate, all these arts appeal first and foremost, though not exclusively, to the sense of sight, and the artifact is an object in the visual medium.
AUDITORY ART
This includes music in all its forms but not song, opera, and those arts that combine music with literature (see below Mixed arts). Just as the medium of visual art is sight, so the medium of auditory art is sound.
In auditory art there is—unlike visual art—no physical object (other than the score, which as has been seen is not the music). There is only the temporally successive series of sounds: sound waves emanating from the various instruments. While no such tones are being emitted, no sounds exist; only the musical score exists (and the memories of listeners, some of whom might enable the score to be reproduced if it were lost), from which music can be reproduced. Unlike the existence of paintings and sculptures, the existence of musical sounds is intermittent. In what sense, then, does the music exist between performances? It exists only in the sense that it is reproducible from the written score.
VERBAL ART
The art of literature is clearly different from both visual and auditory art. There are sound values in poetry, particularly when read aloud, but literature as sound alone would be the most poverty-stricken of arts. What makes the sounds of poetry effective is (at least 99 percent) knowledge of the meanings of the words heard. Listening to the sounds of a poem or play uttered in an unfamiliar language gives some idea of the importance in literature of knowing the meanings of the words. Note that “murmuring,” one of the most pleasant sounding words in English, has almost the same sounds as “murdering.” It is almost exclusively a knowledge of word meanings that makes it possible to appreciate the art of literature.
Nor is literature a visual art, although it is customary to read works of literature from a printed page. A critic who said, “I think this poem is a bad one, because it is written in unpleasant small type in double-column pages on yellowed paper,” might be giving advice to typesetters and book designers (these two groups are engaged in the practice of visual arts), but he would be saying nothing about the merits of the poem. The printed or written word or for that matter the spoken word is only a vehicle for the meanings. Literature, then, must be placed in a separate class from either auditory or visual arts.
MIXED ARTS
Other arts variously combine the above three types of arts; this group includes all the arts of performance. Drama combines the art of literature (verbal art) with the visual arts of costuming, stage designing, and so on. Opera combines the art of music (its predominant component) with the art of literature (the libretto) and the visual arts of stage design. Dance combines the visual spectacle of moving bodies (the principal component) with musical accompaniment, sometimes with accompanying words and often with stage design. Song combines words with music. The motion picture combines the visual component (a series of pictures presented in such rapid succession that they appear to be moving) with the verbal component (the script) and usually an intermittent musical background as well.
All the visual arts are also spatial arts, or arts of space. Music and literature are both temporal arts, or arts of time. This leads to very great differences in the things each can do. In temporal arts, the parts do not appear together before the audience but appear successively in time, the second moment not beginning until the first one has finished. In spatial arts, the entire work of art is present simultaneously; attention to the parts of it is successive—it is impossible to concentrate on the whole at once, at least on first viewing—but the entire object is nevertheless there, and it is up to the viewer which part he shall examine first. In three-dimensional art, such as sculpture and architecture, the entire object is present, but it is impossible even to see (much less to look at) all of it at once: the back of a statue cannot be seen at the same moment as the front and the exterior of a cathedral cannot be viewed by someone inside it.
Temporal arts must be attended to in a certain order: it is impossible to hear the symphony played backward, or the drama, or the movie; even when technically it can be done (as in running a motion picture in reverse), the results usually are an aesthetic catastrophe. The recipient is supposed to attend to the temporal work’s various parts in an order predetermined by the artist. For this reason, painting is not capable of telling a story in the way that a novelis, for a story is a series of temporally successive happenings. A painting can at best take a series of represented persons and objects and show them as they exist at one moment only, one knife-edge of time, whereas a novel can depict the temporally successive happenings in the order of their occurrence (or in a different order, such as flashback).
The German aesthetician and dramatist Gotthold Lessing (1729–81) made this distinction the basis of his study Laokoon (1766), contending that the function of visual art is to create beautiful objects and that the artist should select that stance or moment at which the person or object appears most beautiful, to enable the viewer to continue looking at it with pleasure; whereas literature, being temporal, is equipped to tell a story that includes many moments other than pleasing ones (moreover, the scenes in literature are not seen with the eyes but only imagined). Lessing’s thesis that each art should restrict itself to what it can do best or is peculiarly equipped by its medium to do is a highly controversial one: it would virtually eliminate program music, for example, and descriptions of nature in novels. The tendency of art today is to attempt to curtail distinctions between time and space rather than to preserve them.
Differences in the arts related to mediums
Very significant differences among the arts occur because of the differences in their mediums:
LITERARY AND NONLITERARY
The greatest difference among the arts is between the literary and the nonliterary. Literature consists of a system of symbols with assigned meanings. A word is not simply a noise (or a mark on a printed page); a word is a noise or a printed mark with an assigned meaning. In different languages, different noises have been assigned meanings, and the language must be learned in order to understand what is being said. To appreciate the work of the 11th-century novelist Murasaki Shikibu, one must learn Japanese; to fully appreciate Molière, the 17th-century playwright, one must learn French. No other art has this problem: the English can appreciate German music as well as the Germans—or, if they do not, it is not for lack of learning a language.
Shapes, colours, and tones do not have assigned meanings. That is not to say that these elements when present in art cannot be said to have some sense of the term “meaning.” There are many meanings of the word “meaning,” and a colour, for example, can have meaning in that it may symbolize something, as red symbolizes courage. or it may have strong emotional or other effects upon the viewer, evoking all manner of strong associations. But a colour or a tone has no assigned meaning: if the question were asked, “What does middle C mean?”, the answer would be, “It has no assigned meaning at all; in that sense, it means nothing—it just has certain effects.” But if the meaning of a certain word in a poem is not known, the reader is to that extent prevented from appreciating the poem, for the medium of poetry is not noises, not printed marks, but words, and the difference between a noise and a word lies in the fact that a word is a noise with a meaning.
This fact makes for an enormous difference between literature and the other arts. A colour in a painting may be the colour of an object represented. A colour may even “mean” something; for example, the white of a white flag that a person depicted in a battle painting is holding up as a sign of surrender. But a colour, as a colour, has no meaning at all, and the same is true of musical tones. A pattern of musical tones may occasionally acquire a meaning (the first four tones of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were used to symbolize victory in World War II), but when this happens it really has very little to do with the music, and in any case most music is appreciated without any such symbolism being present. But a noise, however pleasing to the ear, is only a noise and not a word unless it has an assigned meaning, and one must know what that meaning is in order to appreciate a poem or any other work of literature.
THE TRANSLATION PROBLEM
Because literature consists of conventional symbols, there exists in literature the problem of translation, which does not exist in the other arts. When one seeks to make a work of literature available to a wider audience than that composed of only the native speakers of the language in which the work was written, the process of translation must be resorted to, and, in this process, a great deal of the work’s original character is lost.
In a poem there are (1) the sounds, (2) the dictionary meanings of the words, and (3) the connotations of the words—the manifold associations that they evoke (sensory, intellectual, and emotional) in the minds of readers. The sounds are the least important of the three, and many a great poem as sheer sound is hardly even pleasing. The finding of like dictionary meanings is usually a simple matter, and when there is a word that has no rough equivalent in the other language, it may be simply retained in the original language (for example, the German word Weltanschauung, meaning something like “world outlook,” is often retained in English translations of German works). As for the associations that hover about a word, they may vary from language to language, so that if a work is translated rather literally, the associative values of the words are lost. Thus, “My God!” is a much stronger expletive in English than “mon dieu” is in French, so that if the French expression is translated into the English one, it is, though literally correct, quite unfaithful to the weaker emotive force of the French expression. Words can often be found in the second language that have a roughly equivalent associative value to the original one, but these will usually not provide a literal translation; thus, the translator is faced with the dilemma of being able to provide a literal-meaning translation or a translation that renders the spirit or “feel” of the original but not both.
THE QUESTION OF CORRESPONDENCE TO ACTUALITY
The arts also differ from one another, according to their mediums, in whether the items in the medium correspond to items in the world. Objects with colours and shapes are represented on canvas, and objects with colours and shapes also exist in the outside world. Even when a painting is nonrepresentational, it consists of colours and shapes, which are items in the outside world (even though certain individual colours and shapes in the painting may not exist in the outside world). But the case with music is different: though the visual arts may (to varying degrees) convey the sights of nature, music does not convey the sounds of nature. Even when a work of music attempts to represent the sound of an iron foundry or the clattering of horses’ hooves, it really does not sound like these things: musical instruments emit tones, and in nature are found largely noises, and between the two there is an enormous auditory difference. Some rhythms of nature can be duplicated by musical instruments but hardly the sounds themselves.
The medium of literature, words, is indeed human-created, but of course this feature is far from unique to literature. Words were devised and employed in countless situations of daily life before they were ever embodied in literature, so in literature, as in visual art, a medium is being employed that existed before the art itself.
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Art as imitation (representation)
The view that “art is imitation” is at least as old as the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428–c. 347 bce), and, although not widely held today, its long and distinguished history is evidence of its continuing hold on human beings as an account of the distinctive function of art. A terminological point, however, is in order here: in the interests of clarity, an artist should be spoken of as representing in his work the persons and things and scenes of the world but as imitating the work of other artists. Thus, “In this painting he represents a barn and some wheat fields, and in his style he is imitative of Vincent van Gogh.” This distinction will be employed here, with the result that these traditional theories of art will be spoken of as theories of representation rather than of imitation.
At some period in the history of art, aestheticians and critics wrote as if nature should be recorded by the artist with photographic fidelity. The invention of photography (which can do this better than any painter) could plausibly be said to have relieved the artist of any such responsibility. Still, art can represent reality: the representation of a house in a painting may not look exactly like a house—it cannot, since the real house is three-dimensional and the painting is two-dimensional—but it looks enough like one to enable everyone unhesitatingly to identify it as a house.
A distinction should be made between depiction and portrayal. A painting may be said to depict a house if it looks more like a house than like anything else. Thus, most persons unhesitatingly classify this as a man, that as a tree, and so on; only when the painter has distorted or abstracted so much that a thing looks somewhat like a wolf and also somewhat like a bobcat do they hesitate in saying what the object represented is. A picture may depict a rather short man in a French general’s uniform of the early 19th century, but it may in addition portray Napoleon. It portrays Napoleon if (1) the artist intended it to represent Napoleon (for example, if the title of the painting is “Napoleon”) and (2) the painting does look like Napoleon to some degree at least—at any rate it contains no important characteristics known to be incompatible with those of Napoleon. Clearly, if it is a painting that depicts a tree in someone’s yard, it cannot be considered a portrait of Napoleon, no matter how much the artist said he intended it to be one. Depiction subjects can ordinarily be recognized at once with a little knowledge of the world and the names of the things in it. Portrayal subjects require knowledge of whomever the artist intended to portray; even when that seems obvious, as in the case of Napoleon (who would be instantly recognized, unlike the portrait of a private in his army), the viewer would have to be told, by the title or otherwise, that not only does the painting depict a man in a French general’s uniform but that it was intended by the artist to be a portrait of this particular man. Otherwise, how would the viewer know that it did not actually portray his double, or his stand-in? The word “represent,” as used in connection with art, can mean either “depict” or “portray.”
Analysis of representation
Representation always involves a certain degree of abstraction—that is, the taking away of one characteristic or more of the original. Even a fairly realistic painting of a person, for example, lacks some features that characterize actual persons: the painting is two-dimensional, whereas every actual person is three-dimensional; the surface of a painting is paint, but not so the person; the actual person has very numerous pores and other marks on his face that are lacking (in whole or in part) in the painting, and so on. The depiction of a person in a painting is usually sufficient to enable human viewers to recognize the figure as a person—though it is apparently not sufficient for most animals, who see only a coloured canvas where people see on the coloured canvas a representation. When the degree of abstraction is so great that it is no longer possible to recognize this shape as a human shape or as the shape of any identifiable object, the painting is then spoken of as non-representational. (In popular parlance such paintings are called abstract, but this is misleading, for abstraction is a matter of degree, and, as has just been shown, all depictions are necessarily abstract—that is, abstracted from reality to some degree.) The actual object with all its millions of qualities is at one end of the spectrum, and the painting so abstracted that a depiction subject is unrecognizable is at the other end; between the two extremes lie all the possible degrees of abstraction.
Literature can be representational but not in the same way as visual art. It is quite natural to say that in a novel or drama a number of characters and actions are represented. The representation is, of course, not a visual one; it is representation through language. The painter portrays Napoleon by making a portrait of him; the writer does so by describing him in words. The writer, unlike the painter, can also depict action. Not all literature, of course, is representational in this way: a sonnet may contain no characters at all and no action, consisting solely of an expression of feeling by some unspecified speaker.
Any of the mixed arts that include words as part of their medium, such as drama or film, can be, like literature, representational. Indeed, they have a further advantage: they can depict action not only through words but also by showing the characters and exhibiting the action before the spectator. These arts are visual as well as verbal, and since they are not limited to one moment in time, as painting and sculpture are, they are temporal arts as well as spatial. These mixed arts, then, can be doubly representational.
Is it possible for music, too, to be representational? Music cannot visually show characters or objects, nor can it describe them in words. Can it “depict them in tones”? Program notes at concerts usually assume without question that it can. The audience is told about the tone poem Don Quixote, by the Austrian composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949), “The composer has given us a musical representation of the Don’s adventures. The 17th-century Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes has described them in words, and Strauss has done so in tones.” But the claim to representation in music is, to say the least, quite dubious. Without the title, with the music alone, would there be any clue that the music was supposed to be “about” the adventures of Don Quixote? True, there is a passage that resembles the bleating of sheep sufficiently for that much to be guessed, but even to conjecture that this passage is a representation of sheep bleating is a far cry from being able to reconstruct the entire story. Suppose that Strauss had left every note in the score just as it was but changed the title. Would the piece then have been a representation of something else? The very fact that this question can be asked shows how different music is from visual art. If a painter has drawn a house but indicated in the title that it was supposed to be a tree, the viewer could still say, on the basis of what he saw in the picture, that it was not a tree but a house. But in music the listener is never in this situation: if he says that this series of tones represents the adventures of Don Quixote, he says this because of the title Strauss used. If the composer had given it no programmatic title, one listener might think of one represented subject, another a different one, and a third none at all, and there would be no way of showing who was right or even whose opinion was to be preferred. The conclusion seems to be that music by itself—without title, without words, without depicted action (as in a combination of music and drama such as opera)—is incapable of representing anything. There is simply a series of musical tones that may suggest differing associations, programmatic or otherwise, but the musical tones by themselves cannot be said to represent anything at all.
This might be objected to as an overstatement. If a picture can represent a house by looking more like a house than anything else, cannot a work of music represent the sea by sounding more like the sea than any alternative? And is this not the case in, for example, the French composer Claude Debussy’s tone poem La Mer? Even this, however, is highly questionable. Almost no one guesses the title to Debussy’s tone poem without first knowing what it is; it may seem obvious enough after the composer has channelled the listener’s response by means of his title but not beforehand. And surely this is because the sounds in the tone poem do not sound more like the sea than like anything else: the tone poem consists, after all, of a series of complex musical tones, emitted by violins, cellos, clarinets, flutes, trumpets, and so on, and it would be difficult indeed for these sounds, which are musical tones, to sound very much like the sea, whose sounds consist after all of a series of complex noises. There is no great similarity between any one series of musical tones and any one series of nature’s noises. Hence, the first cannot be said to constitute a representation of the second.
The matter is even more obvious in the case of those numerous programmatic titles in which the supposedly represented subject contains no sounds at all. Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water) is taken by some as a musical representation of reflections in the water. But reflections in the water emit no sounds at all, not even noises. No one, then, could say that the sounds in Debussy’s piano composition resemble the sounds of reflections in water. The resemblance, if there is any, is much more remote: it may be that the feeling obtained when Debussy’s composition is heard is somewhat like the feeling that arises when reflections in water are seen. This is highly improbable without knowledge of the title, but at most it would provide a mood resemblance, which is far removed from a representation by music of things in the world. The conclusion seems inescapable that music is not to be classified as a representational art, at least not in the same straightforward meaning of “representation” that applies to the other arts.
So much, then, for the capacities of the various arts as far as representation is concerned. But the question remains: in those arts that are properly called representational, what should be the nature of the representation?
That art should be an outright duplication (incorrectly called “imitation”) of reality is a view that was put forward by the French novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902) in his book Le Roman expérimental (The Experimental Novel) and has been occasionally held (though not practiced) by painters reacting against Romanticism, such as the 19th-century French artist Gustave Courbet. Zola advocated a novel that resembled a scientific investigation into reality. Plot was to be of no importance, rather an aspect of reality was to be examined searchingly, and from this the story would unfold without imaginative effort. Persons or groups of persons would be depicted, and from them the action would evolve.
It would be impossible, of course, to carry out such an ideal of art as “report” and undesirable even if it were possible. First, the author or painter must select a subject and, within the subject, must select which details to treat, for he cannot in a hundred lifetimes describe them all: since every object and event has an indefinitely large array of qualities, there is no point at which a description of it would be completed. Besides, the very language used (no matter how neutral a description is attempted) will colour the account. Even if the words were colourless, the mode of putting them together would yield a style, which would colour the account once again. Indeed, should such an ideal be achieved (as in the verbatim transcription of an actual trial) it would be the deadliest possible bore.
Art, even representational art, is not a reproduction of reality; it is a transformation of reality. How, specifically, is reality transformed in being represented in art? There is probably no general satisfactory answer to this question. Each art, each style of art, and each work of art transforms reality in its own way—the 19th-century French painters Paul Cézanne in one way, Pierre-Auguste Renoir in another; the 19th-century Russian writers Fyodor Dostoyevsky in one way, Leo Tolstoy in another. No set of rules can lead to predictions as to what transformation of reality will be conceived in the mind of the next creative artist. Reality is the common base, but each artist deals with it in his own unique way.
Subject matter
Do all works of art have a subject matter? The answer to this depends on what is meant by the term subject matter, which signifies basically what the work is about. There are several senses of being “about” that may be referred to:
1. “What is the subject matter of the Odyssey by the ancient Greek poet Homer?” The most natural answer would be: “The wanderings of Odysseus.” This is the “representational content” of the work. A person who read it simply for the story could easily give this answer. There is contained in the work itself an account of the wanderings of a character named Odysseus, who has no counterpart in the outside world (that is, he is a fictional character) but who does resemble people in the outside world in that he is a man, he is away from home, he is beset by many vicissitudes, and so on. If the subject matter were stated in greater detail, the result would be an account of the plot.
Does painting have subject matter in this sense? If “subject matter” is taken to mean representational content, the answer is often yes; representations of people and trees and the like are easily identifiable in the painting. Sometimes the subject could not be ascertained except for the title, which is not strictly a part of the painting (the title is not a piece of visual art, consisting as it does of words). But quite clearly it cannot be said that the subject matter of the painting is whatever the title says it is: if the title says “Clouds” and the painting is obviously a still life with pears and grapes, it can hardly be said that the painting has clouds as its subject matter simply because the title says so. It was long said that the painting called “Sacred and Profane Love” by the 16th-century Italian artist Titian had sacred and profane love as its subject matter, but Titian himself gave it no such title—the title was added more than a century later by someone else. It cannot be said that the subject matter is what whatever title it came to be given says it is (it could be given numerous incompatible titles); the subject matter, in this sense, must be evident from—or at least not incompatible with—what is seen in the painting itself. The same remarks apply to music: music cannot be “about” anything that the composer happens to seize on as a title. If it were, and he changed the title without changing a note of the music, would the subject matter of the music have changed? Strong reasons already have been given to doubt that music can have a subject matter at all.
2. In addition to a subject matter in the sense of representational content, a work of art may have subject matter in the sense of theme, or underlying idea. The subject matter in the sense of representational content of Jude the Obscure, by the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, is the intellectual ambitions of the main character, Jude, and the vicissitudes befalling him along the way, but the subject matter in the sense of theme or underlying idea is the individual’s struggle to realize his ambitions, and the thesis (implicit message) of the novel is (or may be) that the individual’s highest ambitions are doomed to frustration. Not all novels and dramas and poems have a theme or thesis; they may simply tell a story and nothing more. Works of literature do sometimes operate in both dimensions: a story and a theme or thesis underlying the story. Works of representational visual art may also do so: one might allege that the theme of “Guernica,” by the 20th-century Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, is the horror of war. Again, it is doubtful whether works of music can be said to have a theme at all (indeed, the term theme applied to music has a very different meaning: it refers to a set of tones around which variations or developments are composed). If someone were to say that the theme of a work of music was the human condition or the human fear of death, how would such a view be supported? Since music is not representational, what musical passages would he take as evidence for his theory, and why? A composer might indeed title his work “The Human Condition,” but this would no more show that the music was about the human condition (had the human condition as its subject matter) than giving the programmatic title “Clouds” to amusical composition shows that the composition actually is about clouds.
Symbols in art
Works of art may not only have subject matter, they may also contain symbols. Certain elements in a work of art may represent, say, a whale, but the whale thus represented may be (as it is in Moby Dick by the 19th-century American writer Herman Melville) a symbol of evil. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is represented a gallery of characters dominated by Anna herself, and a tremendous number of actions in which these characters engage, but there is a constantly recurring item in the representational content—namely, the train. Time and again the train causes or accompanies frustration, disaster, betrayal, and other evils—so much so that before the novel is ended it becomes apparent that the train here is a symbol of the iron forces of material progress toward which Tolstoy had such great antipathy.
What is it that makes an item in a work of art a symbol? It is something represented in the work of art—an object, an action, or a pattern of objects and actions, or even (less frequently) simply a nonrepresentational item such as a colour or a line—that does the symbolizing; what is symbolized is a characteristic, such as evil or progress or courage. But by virtue of what does the first (A) become a symbol of the second (B)?
The answer is not the same for all symbols, since some are conventional and some are natural. The cross is a symbol of Christianity, and it is a conventional symbol of suffering; in order for it to become a symbol, people had to adopt or accept the cross as standing for suffering. Other symbols are natural—the Sun as the symbol of life and strength, a river as the symbol of eternal change and flowing, and so forth; in these cases there was no agreement (convention) as to what would stand for what, for the relation is too obvious—the symbolism is much the same in the tradition of all nations and civilizations.
Various symbols have, to varying degrees, elements of both the conventional and the natural: the eagle on the standard of the United States of Americasymbolizes strength—this is natural, because the eagle is strong, and conventional, because the eagle was officially adopted as the symbol of the United States. In the case of many symbols, the natural relation between symbol and thing symbolized is not strong enough by itself to achieve the symbolism, and the conventional relation was entered into in order to effect a symbolism that already had a certain natural basis. When A is a symbol of B, there must be some relation, either natural or conventional, between the symbol and what is symbolized. When the natural relation is strong, the conventional is minimal or nonexistent, and vice versa.
But there is another element to symbolism if it is to function with full-bodied effectiveness in a work of art, and that is what has been called a “vital basis” provided by history and tradition. In the U.S. flag there is very little natural basis for symbolism; it is almost wholly conventional. But the fact that it has been saluted for so long, that it has been present on battlefields, that the bodies of military dead have been wrapped in it, and so on—that is, the fact that it has acquired a life, a history—has given it an “affect” (humanemotion or mood) it did not have before. Melville and Tolstoy not only represented the whale and the train. They invested these representations with such strong emotional affect that the reader is much more inclined than he would be otherwise to say that these objects are the symbols of the qualities ascribed to them.
When some item in a work of art is construed as a symbol, it is always infused with these vital qualities. Clearly, not every case of one thing standing for something else is a symbol in this sense. A carrot in a painting does not, just by itself, symbolize growth. But barbed-wire fences do symbolize tyranny, not only because many prisoners have been enclosed in barbed-wire fences (this is the natural basis for the symbolism) but also because ofconcentration camps and the countless tragic events of modern history that have provided the “vital basis” for the symbolism.
Meaning
Do works of art have meaning? The answer depends once again on how the question is construed: the word “meaning” is an equivocal term that can itself mean many different things.
Clouds mean rain, a falling barometer means that a storm is coming, a twister in the sky means an approaching tornado—that is, the one is a sign of the other; these relations exist in nature and were discovered, not invented, by humans. On the other hand, a bell ringing means the end of class, this note on the score means that D sharp is to be played on a certain instrument, and the word cat to someone who knows English means a certain species of domesticated quadruped; these relations are conventional, established by humans. But both the natural and the conventional items are examples of meaning in its most general sense—one thing (A) standing for another (B).
Since the medium of literature is words, and words are conventional vehicles of meaning, literature has meaning in a way that the other arts do not, since every word, to be a word at all, must have a meaning. In the sense in which the word cat means something, middle C and an ellipse do not have meanings at all.
When the question is asked about meaning in art, however, it is not usually the individual ingredients in it that are being referred to. If it were, the answer could simply be, “Yes, this word has a meaning and that word has. So does the sentence as a whole. And items in paintings sometimes have meaning; for example, the halo over the Madonna’s head symbolizes holiness.” What is being asked is whether the work of art as a whole has a meaning. But what does the question itself mean? Several different things can be meant: (1) The inquirer may be asking, “What is it about?”—in which case the question is about subject matter, already discussed. (2) He may be asking, “What is its theme?” For example, is the motion picture He Who Must Die really a parable about the life of Jesus? (3) He may be asking, “What is its thesis?” For example, what is the message of the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift to the reader in “A Modest Proposal”? (4) The inquiry may be about the effects of a work of art on the recipient—either what these effects are or what they could or should be. In this sense, all works of art have meaning, since they all have effects (whether there is one type of effect that a given work of art should have is another question). This is, however, an extremely misleading use of the word “meaning.” Indeed, the entire discussion of “meaning in art” is a most confusing one—and the fault does not lie in art, but in the human users of words. Endless unnecessary mysteries can be created by using such nebulous words as “meaning” as if they were simple, straightforward, and susceptible to one interpretation. It would contribute greatly to the clarification of discussions of philosophy of art if the word meaning were not used in them at all but some conception clearer and more specific.
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Art as expression
The view that “art is imitation (representation)” has not only been challenged, it has been moribund in at least some of the arts for more than a century. It was subsequently replaced by the theory that art is expression. Instead of reflecting states of the external world, art is held to reflect the inner state of the artist. This, at least, seems to be implicit in the core meaning of “expression”: the outer manifestation of an inner state. Art as a representation of outer existence (admittedly “seen through a temperament”) has been replaced by art as an expression of humans’ inner life.
But the terms “express” and “expression” are ambiguous and do not always denote the same thing. Like so many other terms, “express” is subject to the process–product ambiguity: the same word is used for a process and for the product that results from that process. “The music expresses feeling” may mean that the composer expressed his feeling in writing the music or that the music when heard is expressive (in some way yet to be defined) of human feeling. Based on the first sense are theories about the creation of art. Founded on the second are theories about the content of art and the completion of its creation.
Expression in the creation of art
The creation of a work of art is the bringing about of a new combination of elements in the medium (tones in music, words in literature, paints on canvas, and so on). The elements existed beforehand but not in the same combination; creation is the re-formation of these pre-existing materials. Pre-existence of materials holds true of creation quite apart from art: in the creation of a scientific theory or the creation of a disturbance. It applies even to creation in most theologies, except some versions of Christian theology, in which creation is ex nihilo—that is, without pre-existing matter.
That creation occurs in various art mediums is an obvious truth. But once this is granted, nothing has yet been said about expression, and the expressionist would say that the foregoing statement about creation is too mild to cover what he wants to say about the process of artistic creation. The creative process, he wants to say, is (or is also) an expressive process, and for expression something more is necessary than that the artist be creating something. Great care must be taken at this stage: some say that the creation of art is (or involves) self-expression; others say that it is the expression of feeling, though not necessarily of one’s own feeling (or perhaps that and something more, such as the feeling of one’s race, or of one’s nation, or of all humanity); others say that it is not necessarily limited to feelings but that ideas or thoughts can be expressed, as they clearly are in essays. But the distinctively expressionist view of artistic creation is the product of the Romantic movement, according to which the expression of feelings constitutes the creation of art, just as philosophy and other disciplines are the expression of ideas. It is, at any rate, the theory of art as the expression of feelings (which here shall be taken to include emotions and attitudes) that has been historically significant and developed: art as specially connected with the life of feeling.
When a person is said to be expressing a feeling, what specifically is he doing? In a perfectly ordinary sense, expressing is “letting go” or “letting off steam”: an individual may express his anger by throwing things or by cursing or by striking the person who has angered him. But, as many writers have pointed out, this kind of “expressing” has little to do with art; as the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) said, it is more of a “spilling over” or a “spewing forth” than expression. In art at least, expression requires a medium, a medium that is recalcitrant and that the artist must bend to his will. In throwing things to express anger, there is no medium—or, if the person’s body is called the medium, then it is something he does not have to study to use for that purpose. It is still necessary to distinguish a “natural release” from an expression. If poetry were literally “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” asWilliam Wordsworth (1770–1850) said, it would consist largely of things like tears and incoherent babblings. If artistic creation can plausibly be said to be a process of expression, something different from and more specific than natural release or discharge must be meant.
One view of emotional expression in art is that it is preceded by a perturbation or excitement from a vague cause about which the artist is uncertain and therefore anxious. He then proceeds to express his feelings and ideas in words or paint or stone or the like, clarifying them and achieving a release of tension. The point of this theory seems to be that the artist, having been perturbed at the inarticulateness of his “ideas,” now feels relieved because he has “expressed what he wanted to express.” This phenomenon, indeed a familiar one (for everyone has felt relieved when a job is done), must still be examined for its relevance. Is it the emotion being expressed that counts or the relief at having expressed it? If the concern here is with art as therapy or doing art to provide revelations for a psychiatrist, then the latter is what counts, but the critic or consumer of the art is surely not concerned with such details of the artist’s biography. This is an objection to all accounts of expression as process: how is any light at all cast upon the work of art by saying that the artist went through any expressive process or through any process whatever in the genesis of it? If the artist was relieved at the end of it, so much the better for him, but this fact is as aesthetically irrelevant as it would be if he had committed suicide at the end of it or taken to drink or composed another work immediately thereafter.
Another problem should be noted: assuming that the artist does relieve his oppressed state of mind through creating, what connection has this with the exact words or score or brushstrokes that he puts on paper or canvas? Feelings are one thing, words and visual shapes and tones are quite another; it is these latter that constitute the art medium, and in it that works of art are created. There is doubtless a causal connection between the feelings of the artist and the words he writes in his poem, but the expression theory of creation talks only about the artist’s feelings, while creation occurs within the art mediums themselves, and to speak only of the former is not to tell anything about the work of art—anything, that is, that would be of interest other than to the artist’s psychiatrist or biographer. Through what paroxysms of emotion the artist passed does not matter anymore, insofar as one’s insight into his work is concerned, than knowing that a given engineer had had a quarrel with his wife the night before he began building his bridge. To speak of anything revelatory of works of art, it is necessary to stop talking about the artist’s emotions and talk about the genesis of words, tones, and so on—items in the specific art mediums.
The expressionists have indeed brought out and emphasized one important distinction: between the processes involved in art and in craft. The activity of building a bridge from the architect’s blueprint or constructing a brick wall or putting together a table just like a thousand others the artisan has already made is a craft and not an art. The craftsman knows at the beginning of the processes exactly what sort of end product is wanted: for example, a chair of specific dimensions made of particular materials. He knows at the beginning how much material it will take to do the job, which tools, and so forth, and, if he does not know these things, he is not a good (efficient) craftsman. But the creative artist cannot work in this manner: “The artist doesn’t know what he is going to express until he has expressed it” is a watchword of the expressionist. He cannot state in advance what the completed work of art will be like: the poet cannot say what words will constitute the completed poem or how many times the word “the” will occur in it or what the order of the words will be—when he knows that, he has completed the creation of the poem, and until then he cannot say. Nor could he set about working with such a plan: “I shall compose a poem that contains the word ‘the’ 563 times, the word ‘rose’ 47 times,” and so on. What distinguishes art from craft is that the artist, unlike the craftsman, “does not know the end in the beginning”; he cannot state until his work is finished what the completed product will be like—if he could, he would not have to undergo the “divine agonies” of creation in order to produce it.
The distinction seems valid enough, but whether it supports the expressionist’s view is more dubious, for it can be held regardless of the attitude assumed toward the theory of expression. The open-ended process described as art rather than craft characterizes all kinds of creation: of mathematical hypotheses and of scientific theory, as well as art. What distinguishes creation from all other things is that it results in a new combination of elements, and it is not known in advance what this combination will be. Thus, one may speak of creating a work of sculpture or creating a new theory, but rarely of creating a bridge (unless the builder was also the architect who designed it, and then it is to the genesis of the idea for the bridge, not to its execution, that the word creation applies). This, then, is a feature of creation; it is not clear that it is a feature of expression (whatever is being done in expressing that is not already being done in creating). Is it necessary to talk about expression, as opposed to creation, to bring out the distinction between art and craft?
There does not seem to be any true generalization about the creative processes of all artists nor even of great artists. Some follow their “intuitions,” letting their artistic work grow “as the spirit moves” and being comparatively passive in the process (that is, the conscious mind is passive, and the unconscioustakes over). Others are consciously active, knowing very much what they want in advance and figuring out exactly how to do it (for example, the 19th-century U.S. writer Edgar Allan Poe in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition”). Some artists go through extended agonies of creation (the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms, weeping and groaning to give birth to one of his symphonies), whereas for others it seems to be comparatively easy (Mozart, who could write an entire overture in one evening for the next day’s performance). Some artists create only while having physical contact with the medium (for example, composers who must compose at the piano, painters who must “play about” in the medium in order to get painterly ideas), and others prefer to create in their minds only (Mozart, it is said, visualized every note in his mind before he wrote the score). There appears to be no true generalization that can be made about the process of artistic creation—certainly not that it is always a process of expression. For the appreciation of the work of art, no such uniformity, of course, is necessary, greatly though it may be desired by theorists of artistic creation.
The main difficulties in the way of accepting conclusions about the creative process in art are (1) that artists differ so much from one another in their creative processes that no generalizations can be arrived at that are both true and interesting or of any significance and (2) that in the present stage of psychology and neurology very little is known about the creative process—it is surely the most staggeringly complex of all the mental processes in human beings, and even simpler human mental processes are shrouded in mystery. In every arena hypotheses are rife, none of them substantiated sufficiently to compel assent over other and conflicting hypotheses. Some say—for example, Graham Wallas in his book The Art of Thought—that in the creation of every work of art there are four successive stages: preparation, incubation, inspiration, and elaboration; others say that these stages are not successive at all but are going on throughout the entire creative process, while still others would produce a different list of stages. Some say that the artist begins with a state of mental confusion, with a few fragments of words or melody gradually becoming clear in his mind and the rest starting from there, working gradually toward clarity and articulation, whereas others hold that the artist sets himself a problem, which he gradually works out during the process of creation, but his vision of the whole guides his creative process from its inception. The first view would be a surprise to the dramatist who sets himself from the beginning to write a drama in five acts about the life and assassination of Julius Caesar, and the second would be a surprise to artists like the 20th-century English artist Henry Moore, who said he sometimes began a drawing with no conscious aim but only the wish to use pencil on paper and make tones, lines, and shapes. Again, as to psychological theories about the unconscious motivations of artists during creation, an early Freudian view is that the artist is working out in his creation his unconscious wish fulfillments; a later Freudian view is that he is engaged in working out defenses against superego charges, “proving something to himself.” Views based on the ideas of the 20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung reject both these alternatives, substituting an account of the unconscious symbol-making process. Until a great deal more is known about the empirical sciences that bear on the issue, there is little point in attempting to defend one view of artistic creation against another.
The expressive product
Although talk about expression as a process is hedged with difficulties and in any case seems irrelevant to the philosophy of art (as opposed to the psychology of art), there is another way in which talk about expression may be both true and important to the philosophy of art. Mention is made about expressive properties as belonging to works of art: for example, it is said that a certain melody expresses sadness, that there is a feeling of great calm expressed in a particular painting, or that tension is expressed in the thrusts of a tower or the development of the plot of a novel or drama.
The question arises at once of what it means to say such things. Melodies and sentences are not joyous or tense or melancholy; only persons have these qualities. The artist can have them, but how can the work of art? Clearly, to speak of a work of art as having emotions, if it is not to be utter nonsense, must be metaphorical. But what is the meaning of this metaphor? What does it mean to say that the music expresses sadness, if not in the sense of process (i.e., that in writing it the composer expressed his sadness)?
The music is heard, the painting is seen; each presents itself to the senses. But there is much more involved in music than simply hearing (or even listening to) the sounds and in visual art than simply seeing (or even looking at) the colours and shapes. Even very simple combinations of sounds and shapes and colours seem to express certain qualities of life: a curved line, it is said, is graceful or sprightly; the drooping willow tree is sad, as are certain passages in music. It is virtually impossible for most persons to view art as a series of sensory stimuli only. Even when a picture contains no story, no plot, no program, the viewer “reads into the script”: he attributes to works of art qualities of human moods, feelings, emotions—in short, “affects.” It would be safe to say that in all art, every percept is suffused with affect. The problem is: What is it that makes certain percepts expressive of certain affects?
The simplest answer, that “The melody is sad” means no more or less than “Hearing the melody makes me (or other listeners, or most listeners) feel sad,” is surely inadequate. (This would be a theory of evocation, not of expression.) “The music expresses whatever feelings it arouses in me when I hear it.” But often the listener does not feel emotions at all (he may imagine them), or, if he does, he feels very different emotions from the ones he believes to be expressed in the music. He may consider the rondodelirious with joy, but if he is grief-stricken on a given day he hears it without feeling joy, and if he has heard the same rondo 30 times that day he feels only boredom or fatigue, while still believing that the piece is expressive of joy. Nor is it an adequate analysis to say that “The melody expresses joy” means “I am disposed to (or inclined to) feel joy when I hear it,” for many people seem to recognize joy as a quality of the music without feeling it at all: or they may imagine it or just recognize the emotion without feeling it or believe that what they hear sounds the way joy feels—or any of a number of other accounts.
The true analysis of expressiveness in art must be more complex than this: it is not that the melody evokes emotion X, but that emotion X is somehow embodied in the music. But this leads back again to the question, how can an emotional quality be in a work of art? There is no single answer to this question that would be accepted by all philosophers of art, but most accounts begin by noting certain similarities, or analogies, between features of music and features of human feeling, so that when X (a passage of music, for example) is said to express Y (a state of feeling), there are certain similarities (for example, of structure) between X and Y. The physical accompaniments to a mood, say, of restlessness, such as rapid breathing and drumming fingers, have their musical equivalents: trills, quavers, increases in tempo, and the like.
When a listener says that a certain melody is sad, he is saying that the music literally has certain qualities A, B, C, D that can be perceived in the music. Slowness is surely one such quality (the same melody played fast would not be called sad); another is the absence of large intervals between tones; another is that the sounds tend to be hushed rather than, for example, strident; another is that the tendency of the musical movement is downward rather than rising. When a listener says that the music is sad, he is saying that it has these qualities.
But why these qualities rather than others? Why is it said that the music is sad when it has A, B, C, D rather than when it has M, N, O, and P? Because A, B, C, D are the qualities that also characterize people when they are sad, such as slowness and soft and low speaking voices. If this theory or anything like it is true, it explains how emotional characteristics can be attributed to works of art—why it can be said that the melody is sad, that the horizontal lines in a painting make it calm (horizontal being the position of rest and peace, sleep and maximum relaxation, and from which one does not fall), why the lines in a painting are droopy (they are lines similar in shape to that of, say, an old woman with hunched shoulders), and so on. These qualities, it should be noted, are qualities of the work of art, not of the artist (whether he was sad when he wrote sad music is a separate question, to which the answer may sometimes be no) and not of the listener or observer (the melody is sad even if I am not sad when I hear it). They are, so to speak, embodied in the music, quite independently of the state of the artist or of the observer, or listener, though of course it requires the presence of a listener to recognize them and be moved by them.
Talk about artistic expressiveness, then, can be justified. But there is no need to resort to the language of expression in order to state it: instead of saying, “The music expresses sadness,” it can simply be said, “The music is sad.” But regardless of the terminology employed, it is important to have justified this conclusion.
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Art as form
The formalist position
Against all the foregoing accounts of the function of art stands another, which belongs distinctively to the 20th century—the theory of art as form, or formalism. The import of formalism can best be seen by noting what it was reacting against: art as representation, art as expression, art as a vehicle of truth or knowledge or moral betterment or social improvement. Formalists do not deny that art is capable of doing these things, but they believe that the true purpose of art is subverted by its being made to do these things. “Art for art’s sake, not art for life’s sake” is the watchword of formalism. Art is there to be enjoyed, to be savoured, for the perception of the intricate arrangements of lines and colours, of musical tones, of words, and combinations of these. By means of these mediums it is true that objects in the world can be represented, scenes from life depicted, and emotions from life expressed, but these are irrelevant to the principal purpose of art. Indeed, art is much less adapted to the telling of a story or the representation of the world than it is to the presentation of colours, sounds, and other items in the art medium simply for their own sake.
Most people who claim to enjoy paintings, for example, enjoy them not as presentations but as representations of things and situations in life, and thus their response is not of a kind that is unique to art but one that takes them back to the emotions of life, from which they came. They could use art to take them into a realm of pure form unknown to anyone who is unacquainted with art, but instead they use it to direct them back to the feelings and situations of life. Thus, according to the formalists, these viewers miss the opportunity of being taken into a fresh world of purely aesthetic experience and get from a work only what they bring to it: familiar experiences and emotions they employ the work to recall.
What, then, should be brought from life to art? Knowledge of life’s struggles and emotions? Knowledge at least of what people are like, and what visual objects look like? Not even these things, for even they get in the way. Representation is not bad in itself, it is merely irrelevant. Only if the representation is satisfactory as form and contributes to the general abstract design can it be said to matter aesthetically.
Most formalists have directed their attention primarily to visual art. The prerequisite for appreciating this, they believe, is a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space (the last required because otherwise a cube, for example, would appear in a painting as a flat pattern and would be unable to play the architectural role intended for it). Armed with this bit of knowledge from life, they have all they need (as far as knowledge of the world outside art is concerned) for appreciating visual art. Armed with more than this, they would find their attention drawn away from the sublimities of art to the more approachable concerns of humanity (such as representation). Shorn of this extraneous knowledge and coming to painting with eyes innocent of extraneous concepts, the viewer could then be in a position to look at what painting presents directly to his vision—complex arrangements of forms and colours—which, for reasons thus far unexplained, have the capacity to move the recipient deeply with emotions utterly alien to the emotions of life.
The formalist’s account of music runs along similar lines: not only representation (program music) is excluded but so is the entire realm of human feeling—not the feeling that the contemplation of pure form can give but only the feelings of life, such as love or terror. As to literature and all those arts in which words play a part (song, opera, drama, cinema), the formalist position would seem to be impossible, and indeed formalists have seldom attempted to extend their theory to literature. The medium of literature is words and sentences, and words and sentences are not merely noises but noises with meanings, and these meanings inevitably have to do with the objects, actions, qualities, and situations of life. As sound, literature is a poor thing—as a complex of meanings, it can be profound and beautiful. Take these away, and literature could cease to be. Literature does have formal properties—a drama can be as tightly knit as a fugue or a symphony—but the appreciation of it can never consist of these formal properties alone, and the reason lies in the very nature of the medium. It is the role of words to indicate images and meanings and emotions, and these are the stuff of life—therefore verbal art is inescapably humanistic. Whatever sensory beauty words have in their sounds is slight and secondary; not so with painting, where colour, line, and space have a beauty all their own and need stand for nothing outside themselves to satisfy the eye.
Formal principles in art
What, then, are the specific qualities in works of art that the formalist is seeking? Most formalists have held that a partial account can be given of these but that, in the end, the presence of the qualities must be felt intuitively and cannot be described. Accounts of formal qualities in works of art go back as far as Aristotle’sPoetics, written in the 4th century bce, and usually include (though sometimes in different terminology) the following as principal ingredients:
ORGANIC UNITY
A work of art must have what Aristotle called “a beginning, a middle, and an end”; it must be unified, it must “hang together” as one entity. Everything, of course, has some degree of unity or other. Even a collection of things, such as a woodpile, has some unity inasmuch as it can correctly be called one thing: it is a collection, but it is a single collection. But the unity desired in works of art is much greater than this: it is more like the unity of the higher organisms in which every part functions not independently of the others but interdependently with them, and it is this interdependency of the parts that constitutes an organic unity. Take away one part, and the remainder of the parts fail to function as before. This is only approximately true of organisms: without a heart or a brain a person could not continue to exist (and the activity of the other organs would cease), but a person without an ear or a toe surely would. Philosophers of art have often noted that the purest examples of organic unity in the universe are not organisms but works of art: here the interdependency of parts often achieves a state of such perfection that it could often be said, of a melody or a sonnet, that if this note (or word) were not there, in just the place that it is, the effect on the entire remainder of the melody or poem would be disastrous.
COMPLEXITY, OR DIVERSITY
This principle is the natural accompaniment of the first one. A blank wall has unity but no variety and is not long worth contemplating. Nor is there any triumph in achieving unity at so small a price. The work of art must hold in suspension (as it were) a great diversity of elements and unify them—the greater the complexity that is integrated into a unity, the greater the achievement. This fact is so universally recognized that the two criteria are often stated as one, unity-in-diversity, or variety-in-unity.
Very many great works of art are much less than perfect organic unities (which is another way of saying that unity-in-variety is not the only criterion for excellence in works of art). Particularly in long poems or novels or operas, some parts are clearly more important than the others, though contributing to the whole, and some parts may be simply “padding.” One could hardly allege that Homer’s entire epic the Iliad is an organic unity and that if (for example) the catalog of ships were removed the entire epic would be ruined (some even say it would be improved). In Dostoyevsky’s novels there are whole chapters that are unnecessary from the point of view of relevance to the rest of the story, and, aesthetically (though perhaps not in other ways), these are a pure excrescence. In most works of art there are high spots and low spots, and there is a great deal of elasticity as to what could follow what. But in spite of this, unity-in-variety is quite universally recognized as a criterion for artistic excellence. If a drama consisted of two plots that never connected with one another, even at the end, such a play would be condemned at once for lack of unity; a work of art is never praised for being disjointed or disunified, though it might be praised in spite of being disunified.
THEME AND THEMATIC VARIATION
In many works of art there is a dominant theme, or motif, which stands out and upon which the other portions are centred. This theme is then varied in different ways in other portions of the work. This is a special case of unity-in-variety. If every line in a work of music or literature were entirely novel and different from the other ones, there would be enormous diversity but no unifying connecting links, and if there were simply a repetition of the initial theme or of entire sections of the work (as sometimes happens when a composer does not know how to develop the thematic material with which he has begun), there would be unity but no variety. Both unity and variety are preserved by having central themes with other material that is related to them (unity) but not identical with them (variety).
DEVELOPMENT, OR EVOLUTION
In works of temporal art, each part develops or evolves into the next, each part being necessary to the succeeding part, so that if an earlier part were altered or deleted, all the subsequent parts would have to be altered in consequence. If a portion of Act IV could be interchanged with a portion of Act II without loss of effect, the principle of development has not been observed, for then the material occurring in between would not have made any difference.
BALANCE
The arrangement of the various parts should be balanced, usually in contrasting ways (the adagio movement coming between two faster movements, for example). In painting, there should be a balance between the right and left halves of the canvas. The many ways, other than simple mechanical symmetry (“for every item on the left there should be an item on the right,” which soon becomes monotonous), in which a painting may have variety and yet retain balance are too complex to be discussed other than in a book of art criticism. But in its simplest essentials, the principle is acknowledged by everyone: the person who places all the furniture on one half of the living room while leaving the other half empty finds the arrangement aesthetically displeasing because the room lacks balance.
There are many descriptions of principles of form in art, which differ from one another in their terminology more than in their final outcome. In general, however, few if any of these principles would be denied (only the detail of their formulations might be) by most philosophers of art. Why certain principles of form are found satisfactory and others are not is a fascinating psychological question, leading back to a discussion (necessarily vague in the present state of knowledge) of the nature of the human organism and the discriminatory powers of the human mind. But however obscure the explanation, the facts of the case seem clear enough: certain formal principles in art must be observed, and, to the degree that they are ignored or violated, aesthetic catastrophe occurs: the work of art cannot evoke our interest or sustain it long once it is initiated.
Although a discussion of these formal principles is helpful particularly to those who have little native sense of form and who want “to know what to look for” in art, they are sufficiently vague so that many critics can agree on a formal principle, such as unity, and yet disagree on the degree to which a specific work possesses it.
In addition, these principles are far from complete: a work of art can possess unity and the other requirements in high degree and yet be unsuccessful even as form. The requirements listed seem only to have skimmed the surface. Yet what more is required to distinguish a formally correct but dull work of art from a brilliant one seems to defy precise analysis. Moreover, the majority of critics who have assented to these principles are not formalists: they have acknowledged and even insisted on the great importance of form in works of art, but they have not alleged, as formalists do, that these principles constitute the sole criteria of excellence in works of art. They have held that the fulfillment of formal criteria counts as a necessary condition for artistic excellence but not a sufficient condition.
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Pragmatic theories of art
There are theories of art that differ from one another in what they allege to be the real purpose or function of art but are at one with each other in the belief that art is a means to some end, whether that end be the titillation of the senses or the communization of the nations of the world or the conversion of humankind to belief in God or the improved moral beliefs or moral tone of the reader or viewer. In every case, the work of art is considered as a means to some end beyond itself, and hence what counts in the final analysis is not the nature of the work of art itself but its effects upon the audience—whether those effects be primarily sensory, cognitive, moral, religious, or social.
Hedonistic theories of art
According to one kind of theory, the function of art is to produce just one kind of effect upon its audience: pleasure. It may also inform or instruct, represent or express, but first and foremost it must please. The more pleasure it gives, the better the art.
If the theory is left in this simple form, it yields the result that glossy and superficial works and those containing nothing difficult or obscure are the best works of art. Thus, on the hedonistic account, King Lear might come out far behind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, or Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” in view of the difficulty of comprehending Shakespeare by many people and the pleasant, easy lilting quality of Longfellow’s poem; similarly, a simple ditty might come out ahead of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. True, Shakespeare and Bach might produce more pleasure in the long run since their works have endured through more centuries, but, on the other hand, the simple works can be apprehended and enjoyed by vastly more people.
In any case, the theory has often been amended to read “aesthetic pleasure” rather than simply “pleasure”—thus placing great importance on exactly how the term “aesthetic” is to be defined. The definition of this troublesome term is beyond the scope of this article (see aesthetics); it will simply be said here that no quick and easy way of distinguishing aesthetic pleasures from other pleasures will suffice for the task at hand. If it is said, for example, that aesthetic pleasure consists in satisfaction taken in the contemplation of sensuous particulars (tones, colours, shapes, smells, tastes) for their own sake—that is, for no further end and without ulterior motive—then one confronts the fact that as much pleasure may be taken in single smells and tastes for their own sakes, without any reference beyond them, as may be taken in the most complex works of art. For that matter, pleasure in playing a game (one not played for money) is pleasure in doing something for its own sake, as is the pleasure of robbing a house if it is done not for money but for “kicks.” If something is found pleasurable, ordinarily the pleasure is what one wants from it, not something else beyond it.
Moreover, if it is said that a work of art should be a means toward pleasure, that is treading suspiciously near to the opposed view that art should not be a means to an end but an end in itself. If someone says, “Why do you go jogging every morning for three miles? Because you feel the exercise is good for you?” and another person answers, “No, not that at all, I just enjoy doing it,” this would ordinarily and quite sensibly be taken as saying that he did not do exercise as a means toward an end but as an end in itself. If something is done just because it is enjoyed, in common parlance this would be taken to be “doing it as an end in itself”; if one objected, “No, I’m not doing it as an end in itself, I’m doing it as a means toward the enjoyment I’ll get out of it,” his reply would be considered sophistical, for doing it for enjoyment’s sake is precisely what is ordinarily meant (or one thing that is ordinarily meant) by the statement that a thing is being done for its own sake.
In any case, the effect of great works of art upon a reader or viewer or listener can hardly be described as merely hedonistic. No one would presumably wish to deny that art can and should give us pleasure, but few would wish to assert that pleasure is all that it should give us. If one were to ask, “How did viewing Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ affect you?” and the reply was, “I found it pleasant,” we would conclude that his reaction to the painting was, to say the least, inadequate. Great art may please; it may also move, shock, challenge, or change the lives of those who experience it deeply. Pleasure is only one of many kinds of effects it produces.
Art as a means to truth or knowledge
One of the things that has been alleged to be the purpose of art is its cognitive function: art as a means to the acquisition of truth. Art has even been called the avenue to the highest knowledge available to humans and to a kind of knowledge impossible of attainment by any other means.
Knowledge in the most usual sense of that word takes the form of a proposition, knowing that so-and-so is the case. Thus, it can be learned from sense observation that the sun is setting, and this is knowledge. Is knowledge acquired in this same sense from acquaintance with works of art? There is no doubt that there are some propositions (statements) that can be made after acquaintance with works of art that could not be made before: for example, that this performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was 47 minutes long, that this painting predominates in green, that this piece of sculpture originated about 350 bce. The question is whether there is anything that can be called truth or knowledge (presumably knowledge is of truths, or true propositions) that can be found in works of art.
Literature is surely the most obvious candidate, for literature consists of words, and words are combined into sentences, and sentences (at least declarative sentences) are used to convey propositions—that is, to make assertions that are either true or false. And works of literature do certainly contain many true statements: a novel about the French Revolution conveys facts about the series of events; in a verse of the English scholar and poetA.E. Housman (1859–1936), it is said, “The tears of all that be / Help not the primal fault.” Since literature contains statements, it would be surprising indeed if at least some of them were not true.
But the relevance of this fact to literature as an art is extremely dubious. If an 18th-century novel gives a true picture of English country life of that time, this makes it useful to read as history, but does it also make it a better novel? Many, at any rate, would say that it does not: that a tenth-rate novel might give more facts about 18th-century life than a first-rate novel of the same century. For that matter, many of the propositions in a novel are, taken at face value, false; it is false, for example, that there was a foundling named Tom Jones who had an uncle named Squire Western. The thousands of pages of description in novels of fictional characters, ascribing to them thoughts and actions, are all false, since these characters never actually existed. (Some philosophers have preferred to say that propositions about fictional or nonexistent entities are neither true nor false.) Yet this fact in no way impugns their value as literature. Shakespeare, inThe Winter’s Tale, sets part of the action on the seacoast of Bohemia, but the fact that Bohemia has no seacoast does not damage The Winter’s Tale as literature, though it would as geography. The fact that Milton used the outdated Ptolemaic astronomy does not make Paradise Lost less valuable, nor does the nonexistence of the lands described in Gulliver’s Travels in any way diminish Swift’s work. There is no doubt, then, that works of literature can contain true statements and false ones. But it is tempting to ask, What does their truth or falsity matter? Literature is not astronomy or geography or history or any branch of knowledge, particular or general.
Many would hold that the above statements are indeed irrelevant, as are any that encroach upon the domain of science, but, they would add, there are other assertions that matter a great deal: for example, the statements in which a worldview is presented in a poem or drama or novel. The main burden of the ancient Latin poet Lucretius’ De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”) is a presentation of the materialism of the Greek philosopher Democritus, and an embodiment of the worldview of medieval Roman Catholicism is the very warp and woof of Dante’s Divine Comedy—and such considerations (it would be contended) are relevant to these works as literature.
In reply, however, it might be said that while it is true that these worldviews must be understood and taken into consideration in the reading of these poems and that they cannot be understood or appreciated without knowing them, the truth or falsity of these views still does matter aesthetically. If Lucretius’ view is true, then Dante’s must be false, and vice versa, since they are incompatible, but in order to appreciate the poem it is not necessary to know which (if either) is true. Appreciating art, unlike taking a stand for or against a cause in life, does not require a yes or no to statements. It requires only that the viewer look and appreciate, that he experience as richly and fully as possible the feeling and attitudes involved in the worldview that is presented. Philosophers and scientists are concerned with whether the Democritean materialism of Lucretius is true; appreciators of art are concerned only to capture the feeling appropriate to the worldview in question.
Many statements in works of literature are not explicitly made at all but are implicit: Hardy never tells in his novels what his worldview is, but it emerges rather clearly before the reader is halfway through any of them. Probably the most important points made in works of literature that contain a central thesis are implicit rather than explicit. How, in that case, can it be determined what thesis it is that is implied? In a court of law, if someone says, “He didn’t say it exactly, he just implied it,” the judge would be likely to rule that this was insufficient evidence of slander, since the person did not actually say it. Still, many statements in daily life are not stated but implied—in the sense that they are intended. The trouble lies in proving that the speaker intended them, since no one else is in a comparable position to say what his intentions were and, in the case of deceased authors, there is no evidence of their intentions other than what they said. One is doubtless on safer ground, therefore, saying that many statements are implied in the sense that they are suggested (whether the speaker intended to do so or not) by the tone of voice and the juxtaposition of the words used. Thus, “They had children and got married” suggests, though it does not state, that they had the children before they were married; any normal user of the English languagewould tend to construe it thus. And it is surely no overstatement to say that Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels suggests that the author was misanthropic or that the novels of the French author Marcel Proust (1871–1922) suggest a pessimistic view of love and other human relationships close to that of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). A serious reader of literature will become increasingly sensitive to what is suggested in the works he is reading.
But, once again, the importance of the suggested statements, even when they are true, in no way shows that they must be accepted as true by the reader if he is to value them as works of art. Is the sincere Roman Catholic who finds Dante’s worldview congenial and Lucretius’ repellent committed to saying that Dante’s is the better poem? If so, he may be accused of confusing his moral and theological judgments with his aesthetic ones. Still, it should be noted that there are some critics who believe that if two works of literature are both equal in excellence on all counts yet one presents a true view of reality and the other fails to, the one presenting a true view is better—better even as a work of art—than is the other one.
There is, however, another way of talking about truth in literature that is not or is not as obviously connected to propositions. A characterization in a novel or drama is spoken of as being true to human nature, true to the way people actually speak or behave or feel. No matter that Becky Sharp—in the English novelist William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair—is a fictional character, it would be said, as long as she is depicted as a person of a certain type would behave, she is being depicted truly; truth in fiction does not mean truth of the statements (for the statements in Thackeray’s novel describing her are false) but truth to human nature.
But what exactly does “truth to human nature” mean? The criterion is as old as Aristotle, who wrote that poetry is more true than history because it presents universal truths whereas history gives only particular truths and that poetry (dramatic fiction) shows how a person of this or that kind probably or necessarily would behave (or think, or feel). This criterion, however, is too vague as it stands: what is probable or plausible behaviour in one person is not in another, and what is probable in one set of circumstances is not so in another. The test of truth to human nature would be roughly as follows: Would a person such as has been described thus far (in the novel or drama) behave (or think or feel or be motivated) in the way that the author depicts this character as behaving in the circumstances described? It is often very difficult to decide this question, because knowledge of human beings is insufficient or because the dramatist himself has not provided enough clues. Still, once readers or critics are convinced that the character described would not have behaved as the novelist depicts him as behaving, they may criticize the characterization (at least with regard to this bit of behaviour or motivation) as implausible. If a character who has been described as spending years working toward a certain goal is represented by the novelist as abandoning it once he is within sight of it, the reader will have considerable reservations about this delineation unless the author has depicted the character as being unstable or masochistic or in some way as being the kind of person who might in these circumstances do this kind of thing. It is true that there are people in the world who abandon their goals within sight of them after years of labour, but the conviction must be implanted that the character already presented by the novelist belongs to this classification or the behaviour will seem reasonless and unmotivated.
Is truth to human nature aesthetically relevant? That is, when present does it make the work of literature better and when absent or flawed does it make the work worse as literature? Here again there would be some difference of opinion, but a very large number of critics and aestheticians, in the tradition of Aristotle, would say that it matters aesthetically a great deal. The novelist does not have to be true to geography or history or astronomy, but he must be, as the 19th-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne said of all literary artists, true to the human heart. A literary artist may tamper with all the other truths with impunity, but not this one: his characters must be convincing, and they will not be convincing if they are not depicted as having anger, love, jealousy, and other human emotions that real people have and in pretty much the contexts in which real people have them. If a novelist’s characters were not motivated in much the way that human beings are motivated, the reader would not even be able to understand them—they would be alien and unintelligible to him. Even when a writer (such as the Englishman Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows) depicts animals as central characters in novels, however much they may differ from human beings in external appearance, they must psychologically be presented as human beings—how else and in what other terms could their behaviour and their motivation be understood? Such, then, are the reasons for saying that whatever else a literary artist does, his depictions must be truthful to human nature.
Can works of art other than literature possess truth to human nature? It would seem that in a limited degree they can. Motion pictures and operas and other mixed arts clearly can, but they employ words, and literature is a principal ingredient in them. But what of arts that employ no words at all? Painting and sculpture, not being temporal arts, cannot depict action, and action is all-important in the representation of human character. These arts, as noted earlier, contain depictions of persons (real or imaginary) only on a knife-edge of time. Still, sometimes something may be inferred even from a knife-edge. The late self-portraits of the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt do seem to reveal an agonized yet sometimes serene inner spirit, suggesting that there are flashes of human insight to be found in depictions of human beings in visual art. As for musical art (music without the accompaniment of words), it contains nothing that could be called depiction, not even depiction on a knife-edge of time, and, if this is so, there can be no such thing here as true depiction or false depiction. Music may be expressive of human feelings, in the sense already described, but this is a far cry from saying that it contains depictions that are true to human nature.
Even if truth to human nature in the depiction of character is aesthetically relevant (which many would question), to say this is still far from saying that it is the only criterion for excellence in works of art, or even that this is the principal thing that art gives or its main excuse for being. To go so far would be to discount colour and form and expressiveness as criteria for excellence in art, and this virtually no one is willing to do. It would seem, then, that in no case is truth (even truth to human nature) necessary in works of art, seeing that entire genres of art, such as music, exist without it and that, even when it is present and when its presence increases the merit of a work of art (which again many would deny), it is only one virtue among many. Thus, the view that the purpose or function of art is to provide truth is quite surely mistaken; perhaps the person who wants truth and is indifferent to the presence of anything else had better turn to science or philosophy rather than to the arts.
Art as a means to moral improvement
To say that a work of art is aesthetically good or has aesthetic value is one thing; to say that it is morally good or has a capacity to influence people so as to make them morally better is another. Yet, though the two kinds of judgments differ from one another, they are not entirely unrelated. Three views on the relation of art to morality can be distinguished:
MORALISM
According to this view, the primary or exclusive function of art is as a handmaiden to morality—which means, usually, whatever system of morality is adhered to by the theorist in question. Art that does not promote moral influence of the desired kind is viewed by the moralist with suspicion and sometimes with grudging tolerance of its existence. For art implants in people unorthodox ideas; it breaks the molds of provincialism in which people have been brought up; it disturbs and disquiets, since it tends to emphasize individuality rather than conformity; and works of art are often created out of rebellion or disenchantment with the established order. Thus, art may undermine beliefs and attitudes on which, it is thought, the welfare of society rests and so may be viewed with suspicion by the guardians of custom. When art does not affect people morally one way or the other (for example, much nonrepresentational painting), it is considered a harmless pleasure that can be tolerated if it does not take up too much of the viewer’s time. But when it promotes questioning and defies established attitudes, it is viewed by the moralist as insidious and subversive. It is viewed with approval only if it promotes or reinforces the moral beliefs and attitudes adhered to by the moralist.
Plato is the first champion in the Western world of the moralistic view of art—at least in the Republic and the Laws. Plato admired the poets and was himself something of a poet, but, when he was founding (on paper) his ideal state, he was convinced that much art, even some passages in Homer, tended to have an evil influence upon the young and impressionable, and accordingly he decided that they must be banned. Passages that spoke ill or questioningly of the gods, passages containing excessive sexual passion (and all works that would today be described as pornographic), and even passages of music that were disturbing to the soul or the senses were all condemned to the same fate. Plato’s concern here was with the purity of soul of the persons who would become members of the council of rulers of the state; he was not concerned with censorship for the masses, but, since one could not predict which young people would pass the series of examinations required for membership in the council of rulers and since it was (and is) practically impossible to restrict access to works of art to a certain group, the censorship, he decided, would have to be universal. The objection might be raised, to be sure, that rulers to be should not be hothouse plants separated from the influences of the outside world and that they would be better off facing all of reality, including its evils. But Plato’s view was that these influences should be kept from them during their formative years—that during this critical time, when the whole tenor of their lives was being shaped, art could be an influence for evil and had to be sacrificed in the interests of morality. In other dialogues of Plato, such as the Ionand the Phaedrus, when he was not concerned with building a state, he extolled the virtues of art and even held the artist to be divine (although madly divine); but when it came to a conflict between art and morality, it was art that would have to go.
The most famous champion of the moralistic view of art in modern times is Tolstoy. Long after he had finished writing his novels, he fell under the influence of primitive (prechurch) Christianity, the principal tenet of which was the brotherhood of all humans. This one idea became such an obsession with him that everything else, including the pursuit of art to which he had devoted his life, became subordinate to it. Almost all the literature of his own time, including all his own novels, he condemned as inimical to human brotherhood by emphasizing class distinction and pitting one group of humankind against another. Even art that appealed primarily (in his opinion) to “upper class” tastes, such as the symphonies of Beethoven and the operas of Richard Wagner, were condemned as “false art.” The art that remained after these colossal excisions included such items as folk songs that peasants might sing in the fields as they worked and pictures and stories either illustrating the tenets of primitive Christianity or fostering the spirit of Christianity by promoting brotherhood.
The moralistic view of art is still, on the whole, the unarticulated view of art held by the masses, particularly when they are under the sway of a dominant religious or political doctrine. Historically, Christianity has been suspicious of all art except those works that depict some aspects of biblical history or that could be used to further the spread of Christian belief and practice (although this is no longer strictly true). And it would probably be fair to say that the view of art held by the government of the U.S.S.R. was a moralistic one: works of fiction and poems had to praise communism or further its doctrines, and works of music had to be melodic and singable (composers such as Dmitry Shostakovich were often condemned by the Soviet hierarchy as “too German” or “too materialistic”). Whenever a culture or nation is under the sway of a dominant view, whether moral or religious or political, the tendency of the rulers of that nation is to promote it at all costs, and one of the casualties in the process is art—at any rate that great body of art that is either indifferent or hostile to the reigning dogma.
AESTHETICISM
Diametrically opposed to the moralistic view is aestheticism, the view that, instead of art (and everything else) being the handmaiden of morality, morality (and everything else) should be the handmaiden of art. The proponents of this view hold that the experience of art is the most intense and pervasive experience available in human life and that nothing should be allowed to interfere with it. If it conflicts with morality, so much the worse for morality; and, if the masses fail to appreciate it or receive the experience it has to offer, so much the worse for the masses. The vital intensity of the aesthetic experience is the paramount goal in human life. If there are morally undesirable effects of art, they do not really matter in comparison to this all-important experience which art can give. When the son-in-law of the 20th-century Italian dictator Benito Mussolini waxed lyrical in his description of the beauty of a bomb exploding in the midst of a crowd of unarmed Ethiopians, he was carrying to its fullest extent the aestheticist’s view of art.
Few persons would wish to go so far. Even the most ardent lovers of art would stop short of saying that the value of art holds a monopoly over all other values. It may well be that the experience of works of art is the greatest experience available to human beings (though this, too, could be questioned), but at any rate it is not the only one available, and, this being the case, the others should be considered as well. There is a plurality of values; aesthetic values, although far greater, admittedly, than most persons realize, are still just a few among many. It is therefore necessary to consider the relation of the values derived from art to the values derived from other things, such as the conduct of life apart from art: no one can devote every waking hour to the pursuit of art, even if for no other reason than the need for survival, and thus the values of such mundane things as food and shelter have also to be considered.
MIXED POSITIONS
The moralistic and aesthetic positions are extremes, and the truth is likely to be found somewhere between them. Indeed, art and morality are intimately related, and neither functions wholly without the other. But to trace the precise relations between art and morality is far from easy; for want of a better term, “interactionism” could be used to label the view that aesthetic and moral values each have distinctive roles to play in the world but that neither operates independently of the other.
It would be admitted, first of all, that works of literature (which will be examined first, since of all the arts the relation of literature to morality is most obvious) can teach valuable moral lessons through explicit presentation: the genre that has this as its aim is didactic literature, as exemplified by Pilgrim’s Progress by the English Puritan John Bunyan and Back to Methuselah by the Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw. But most works of literature do not exist to teach a moral lesson: possibly, Shakespeare did not write Othello merely to attack racial prejudice or Macbeth to prove that crime does not pay. Literature does teach but in a far more important way than by explicit preachment: it teaches, as John Dewey said, by being, not by express intent.
How does literature achieve this moral effect? It presents characters and situations (usually situations of difficult moral decision) through which the reader can deepen his own moral perspectives by reflecting on other people’s problems and conflicts, which usually have a complexity that his own daily situations do not possess. He can learn from them without himself having to undergo in his personal life the same moral conflicts or make the same moral decisions. The reader can view such situations with a detachment that he can seldom achieve in daily life when he is immersed in the stream of action. By viewing these situations objectively and reflecting on them, he is enabled to make his own moral decisions more wisely when life calls on him in turn to make them. Literature can be a stimulus to moral reflection unequalled perhaps by any other, for it presents the moral choice in its total context with nothing of relevance omitted.
Perhaps the chief moral potency of literature lies in its unique power to stimulate and develop the faculty of the imagination. Through literature the reader is carried beyond the confines of the narrow world that most persons inhabit into a world of thought and feeling more profound and more varied than his own, a world in which he can share the experiences of human beings (real or fictitious) who are far removed from him in space and time and in attitude and way of life. Literature enables him to enter directly into the affective processes of other human beings, and, having done this, no perceptive reader can any longer condemn or dismiss en masse a large segment of humanity as “foreigners” or “wastrels,” for a successful work of literature brings them to life as individuals, animated by the same passions as he is, facing the same conflicts, and tried in the same crucible of bitter experience. Through such an exercise of the sympathetic imagination, literature tends to draw all people together instead of setting them apart from one another in groups or types with convenient labels for each. Far more than preaching or moralizing, more even than the descriptive and scientific discourses of psychology or sociology, literature tends to unite humankind and reveal the common human nature that exists in everyone behind the facade of divisive doctrines, political ideologies, and religious beliefs.
This is not to say, of course, that those who read great works of literature are necessarily tolerant or sympathetic human beings. Reading literature alone is not a cure for human ills, and people who are neurotically grasping or selfish in their private lives will hardly cease to be so as a result of reading works of literature. Still, wide and serious reading of literature has an observable effect: people who do this kind of reading, no matter what their other characteristics may be, do tend to be more understanding of other people’s conflicts, to have more sympathy with their problems, and to be able to empathize more with them as human beings than do people who have never broadened their horizons by reading literature at all. No one who has read great literature widely and for a considerable period, so as to make it an integral part of his life, can any longer share the same provincialism and be dominated by the same narrow prejudices that seem to characterize most people most of the time. Literature, perhaps more than anything else, exercises a leavening influence on the temper of a person’s moral life. It looses him from the bonds of his own position in space and time; it releases him from exclusive involvement with his own struggles from day to day; it enables him to see his own local problems and trials from the perspective of eternity—he can now view them as if from an enormous height.
To have moral effects, it is not necessary that a work of literature present a system of morality. Its moral potency is perhaps greatest when it presents not systems but human beings in action, so that through the exercise of the imagination the reader can see his own customs and philosophies as he sees theirs: as some among many of the countless adjustments and solutions to human problems that different circumstances and humans’ endlessly varied and resourceful nature have produced.
Works of literature, then, develop more than anything else the human faculty of the imagination, and the 19th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley said that the imagination is the greatest single instrument of moral good. Perhaps this sounds like an absurd overstatement, but consider what morality is like without the imagination. Consider the average morality of a small community, relatively isolated from centres of culture and unacquainted with any artistic tradition. Its morality is rigid and circumscribed; the details of each member’s personal life are hedged about with constant annoyances, and everyone’s life is open to the prying eyes of others who are unfailingly quick to judge, with or without evidence. Outsiders are looked upon askance; people of a different religion, race, or culture are viewed with suspicion and distrust; and anyone who does not subscribe to whatever moral code is dominant in the community is condemned or ostracized. No doubt these people are sincere—they are dreadfully sincere, deadly sincere. But sincerity without enlightenment can be as harmful to the achievement of good as intelligence without wisdom when that intelligence is possessed by political leaders playing with hydrogen bombs. Generally speaking, the people of a small community have not known the leavening influence of literature. Their morality is rigid, cramped, and arid. If these same people had been exposed from early youth to great masterpieces of literature and had learned through them to appreciate the tremendous diversity of human mores and beliefs held by other groups, with the same degree of sincerity that they themselves possess, they would be less likely to be as harsh, intolerant, and rigid as they are.
People are usually inclined to separate art and morality into two hermetically sealed compartments. They talk as if morality were already complete and self-sufficient without art, and that art, if it is to be tolerated at all, can grudgingly be permitted, provided that it conforms to the moral customs of the time and place of those judging it. But this view is surely to conceive the relation between art and morality in far too one-sided a manner. If art must take cognizance of morality, equally morality must take cognizance of art. Almost everything that is alive and imaginative about morality comes from the leavening influence of art.
To consider examples from ancient Greece alone, what would morality be today without the influence of the dramatists Aeschylusand Sophocles, without Socrates as described in Plato’s dialogues, even without the historians Herodotus and Thucydides with their quiet humour, gentle prodding skepticism, and tolerance for other customs and views? It is through great works of art that the most vivid conceptions of various ways of life are obtained. What is it about other times and places that people most remember? Is it their political squabbles, their wars, their economic upheavals? These events are known in general to intelligent laypersons and in detail to historians, but even then such events do not usually make much of a dent in peoples’ personal lives in the way that art does. What is alive today about ancient Greece is its sculpture, its poetry, its epic and drama. What is alive today about the Elizabethan period, even more than the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, is its poetic drama, with its vivid characterizations and boundless energy. Other civilizations and cultures may be sources of facts and theories that enlighten modern understanding, but what enables contemporary humans to share directly their feelings and attitudes toward life is not their politics nor even their religion but their art. Art alone is never out of date. Science is cumulative: even the science textbooks of ten years ago are now discarded as obsolete; the science of the ancient Greeks and the Elizabethans is studied today primarily for its historical value. But great art is never obsolete; it can still present to modern humans its full impact, undiminished by time. Shakespeare will not be out of date as long as human beings continue to feel love, jealousy, and conflict in a troubled world. A biblical statement might be paraphrased and applied to past cultures: “By their arts shall ye know them.” The artists whose works are now revered may have died unsung. Most of them, even those who were appreciated during their lifetimes, were considered far less important than the latest naval victories or the accession of the current king. Yet today these things have all passed into history, but art survives with undiminished vigour. The art of the past molds in countless ways the attitudes, responses, and dispositions of modern people’s daily lives. Most of what is perceptive and imaginative in morality owes its origin to art, and, when morality loses contact with the tradition of art, it becomes dead and sterile. Yet, in spite of this, some people tell us that art is merely the salve of morality, to soothe its stringency.
Already, in the preceding paragraph, mention has begun of arts other than literature. How, it could be asked, can they have any moral effects on those who view them or listen to them? Yet there are effects of these arts on the observer that, in a broad sense, are moral (as opposed to nonmoral) and that account for the attempts of many people to censor them.
Historically, the most famous supposition about the moral effect of art on its audience is Aristotle’s theory of catharsis; Aristotle applied the theory to tragedy only, but many since his day have applied it to art in general. According to this view, art acts as an emotional cathartic and achieves a “purgation of the emotions.” Certain emotions that humans would be better off without (Aristotle limited them to pity and fear, but they could easily be extended) are generated during the course of daily life. Art is the principal agency that should help to dispel these emotions. By observing works of art (witnessing a drama, listening to a powerful symphony, looking at certain works of sculpture or painting) the recipient can work off these emotions rather than let them fester inside him or take them out in unpleasant ways on others. Art siphons off these disturbing inner states rather than letting them grow rancid.
As it stands, this view is undoubtedly somewhat crude, especially in the light of modern psychology, and fault could be found in many respects with the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Yet the experience of reading, viewing, or listening to a work of art does give a peculiar release, a feeling of freedom from inner turbulence. The mere act of plunging, for a few hours, into an entirely different world when attending a play or a concert is often enough to transform, however temporarily, the tone of people’s daily lives. It is not merely that for a few hours they can forget their troubles—any form of entertainment, however worthless, might do this. It is not merely that art provides a break or interruption in the course of people’s lives at the end of which they are exactly what they were before. It is that through the aesthetic process itself, in the very act of concentrating energies on an art object of great unity and complexity and depth, a kind of inner clarification is achieved that was not present before.
It is not true, therefore, that reading novels of crime and detection leads people to indulge in a life of crime; on the whole, those who read such novels are law-abiding people, and, if anything, the reading of such novels is a substitute for aggressive activity (it is aggression vicariously experienced) rather than an incitement to it. Nor do works of art of a licentious nature usually incite people to rape or adultery; far from acting as incitements to action, they are safety valves against action by providing a kind of substitute gratification. It has been said, for example, that Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is an immoral work because it celebrates the passionate surrender to an illicit love and the victory of this love over practical, political, and moral concerns. But is there any evidence that people who read this play will behave like the lovers in question because they read the play? On the contrary: it could be argued that reading the play has an instrumental value in that it presents another example of a complex moral situation, the perusal of which provides many avenues for moral reflection, and that the play also possesses the intrinsic value of acute characterization, dramatic power, and poetry whose imagery and intensity are among the most splendid in the English language. Again, it was said in the mid-20th century that American youth had been demoralized by such writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, in that these writers set an example of bad behaviour. But to say that they are capable of demoralizing an entire generation is certainly to attribute to them too much moral power, especially over people who have never even heard of them. Even among those who do read serious literature, the effects are probably more beneficial than harmful: through books the horizons of such readers have been expanded to include other ways of life than they would have previously known.
Quite apart from the ultimate effect of a work of art on people’s emotions, it would appear that the very act of experiencing the work may itself have a moral effect. If they are really concentrating on the details of a work of art and not just passively letting it play upon their senses, this effect—the heightening of their sensibilities and the refining of their capacities for perceptual discrimination—will make them more receptive to the world around them, thus raising the tone of their daily lives and making their experience of the world richer than before.
Most of what passes for aesthetic appreciation does not begin to have this effect, but its failure is only because it is not aesthetic appreciation at all—it is a kind of tired reverie rather than an intense absorption in theaesthetic object. Most people, when they hear music, simply allow themselves to be inundated by the sheer flow of sound. Such people do not actively listen to the music and are not even aware of the most elementary kind of ebb and flow occurring within it; they only receive it passively, perhaps using it as a springboard for a private reverie or an emotional debauch of their own. Music has for them not an aesthetic effect but an anesthetic effect. It is not just hearing music that will have the required effect. The aesthetic experience, which involves nothing less than a total concentration on the perceptual details of the aesthetic object, is an experience that heightens consciousness, exercises people’s capacity for perceptual awareness and discrimination, and helps them come alive to the sight and texture of the world around them. After a viewer has seen an exhibition of landscapes by Cézanne, the entire world may seem to him to have changed its structure and complexion: it may, indeed, take on the look of Cézanne’s landscapes. And is not anything that increases awareness and subtlety of discernment and discrimination a potentially moral agent? Art provides the most intense, concentrated, and sharply focussed of the experiences available to human beings. Because of this, art can have an enormous influence on the tenor of a person’s life, more influential no doubt than any particular system of morality. In its ability to do this, it has an effect that, in an extended sense at least, can surely be called moral. Morality transcends particular systems of morality, and art, by being for many persons the dominant influence in their lives, thus transcends them also.