deutsch, on the concept of art

8/2/2019 Deutsch, On the Concept of Art

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ELIOT D E U T S C H

ON THE CONCEPT O F A R TArt must never forget its origins. Man s homofuber and homo poe t u together.

(JacquesMaritain)I

One way to understand what art is, which is to say, to formulate as far aspossible a right conception of art, is to look to the origins of art in religionand to isolate, as far as one can, the most prominent features of the develop-ment of art as it moves from its beginnings in, and dependence upon, religionto its achieving its own autonomous integrity. This s not to say that thereligious origins of art exhaust its genesis or ancestry (art, no doubt, also hasorigins in direct psychological needs for play, for expression, and the like),nor that any genetic account is more than a general schema whose value ismore logical than historical; it is to say only that one might find somethingof essential importance about the nature of art by looking to its kinshipwith, and early dependence upon, religion. This I believe, is not saying toomuch.

Gerardus van der Leeuw has pointed out convincingly how in primitivecultures or at the magical primitive stage in any culture, the expressiveforms of religious life - he drama, the hymn, the dance - are taken ascenters of holy power. There was a period, he writes, - nd for so-calledprimitive peoples t h i s period still exists - when art and religion stood so closeto each other that they could almost be equated. Song was prayer; dramawas divine performance; dance was cult. Art, in short, was ritual - nd wasmagical. The expressive forms generate and, at the same time, embody aspiritual energy that may radically transform whatever or whomever it touches.

Now what any form of magic seeks is essentially control over the mysteriousforces that are everywhere present in nature and life and that are potentiallyactive in the affairs of man. By bringing the participant into unity with theseforces, the rite, the consecrated act, allows the participant to take on directlysomething of this power so that it may express his own will. Consequently, theexpressive forms of religious life - he dance, the chant - re not intendedso much to be objects of disinterested contemplation (as supposedly worksof art are), as to be carriers and bearers of power. It is the hoZy power inherent

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3 (1976) 373 -391 . All Rights ReservedCopyright 0 91 6 by D. Reidel fibl ishin g C om pan y, Dordrecht-Holland


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374 ELIOT DEUTSCHin the work (which power requires the action of the participant for its verybeing) which gives a particular work its special value.

When the art-religion work is a center of power it thus expresses andcontains, for those who respond to it properly, the immanence of the divinespirit. Literally lifeless in itself the work may be, and frequently is, discardedwhen not in use (as with certain African masks); that is, when it is notfunctioning so as to bring forth the immanent power of spirit. It is when thework is a holy or consectuted action that it exists as a center of power.

Power is spiritual force - concentration of energy. Just as the asceticin all cultures is thought to be capable of generating and containing a specialsuperabundant energy (a kind of heat or t apas ) , one which, in traditionalHindu lore, may even, because of its intensity, threaten the gods, so the art-religion work, when performed or made correctly, is thought to manifest asacred power. The power, at this stage, is just ritualistic - which is to say, itexists just so long as the art-religion work is being performed correctly; andit is also cosmic; it is grounded in, it is thought to be an imitation of, reality.

A second stage or moment of kinship between art and religion is to befound at the traditional21evel of culture where, with the development of aconceptual theology, art-religion works are called upon to communicate ideas,concepts, visions. The art-religion work becomes a bearer of symbols, usuallyof a conventional sort,and is, at its best, itself taken to function symbolically,to point beyond itself to yet other states of being. While still retaining manyfeatures of the power-oriented primitive, the traditional stage emphasizes thetranscendent features of spirituality and sees in the now emerging art-worka means of communicating, of transmitting, a range of meanings associatedwith these features; e.g. divine love and goodness. The artist is here verymuch a maker, a craftsman. He doesnt so much express himself or his ownintuition as he projects a group or cult vision of reality.

in the traditional relationship between art and religion, then, with itsemphasis upon the work as symbol, we frequently find the subservience ofaesthetic values to religious needs, especially when, as so often happened inthe western medieval period, the work was to be instructional in character.The meaning dimension, largely confined to the level of conventionalsymbolization, dominates. At this stage the meaning of the emerging art-work, then, is essentially extend to the work. The message has alreadybeen formulated; it requires only representation or communication. Theaesthetic is valued here insofar as it facilitates religious teaching.


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O N THE CONCEPT OF A R T 375Now since th e time o f the Renaissance, with th e artist em erging as a

distinct, self-consciously creative being, in the West we have come to separatear t and religion in many ways.3 We loo k to the art-work as it may be a directembodiment of spirituality. It is not power or meaning, as these functionedin th e primitive and traditional phases, but qualify that now c ounts andenables us to accept art as an autono mo us spiritual activity. Largely derived,although we might hesitate t o acknowledge it, fro m R omanticisms claimtha t ar t is the infinite m ade visible in fin ite, sensuous form, we look to a rtfor the articulation in image, in form, of an intuition into self and world; welook to structured meanings and to formal relationships, to beauty (if the useof the term may be permitted) as tha t which gives a spiritual character t o art.

The emergence of art from religion is thus a process which con tinuouslytakes-up, retains and at th e same time refashions the basic features in th eearly phases of their relationship. When ar t achieves auton om y, w hich is tosay, when quality becomes the primary category of art, pow er. meaning an dbeauty, as defined suigeneris for art, become the inherent structure or aimof an art-work.

The power of an art-wo rk, which we might call its aesthetic force, is tha telusive sense of life which, like m agical power, is discerned t o be in the wo rk,but which, unlike magical power, is there as a perduring property: the forceof an art-work is not dependen t upo n th e works being used in rite and ritual.Aesthetic force, nevertheless, is mysterious insofar as it is inexplicable byreference to any set of quantifiable elements. The inner life of an art-workis not measurable: ae sthetic force cann ot be recorded on a scale; but it canbe apprehen ded, and indeed is apprehended whenever an art-work is experiencedrightly as an art-work.

Aesthetic force is the concentrated energy of the ar t-wo rk; its iukti ( toborrow an apt Sanskrit term), w hich shines forth and com pels, as it were, alike-minded assimilation of it. Aesthetic force is the vibran cy, the drive, thevitality of the art-work, whether there subtly or blatantly, bu t always thereas a m anifest presence. It is magical power become the imm anent spirituallife and rhythm of the w ork.

Similarity with meaning. When art achieves auton om y its mean ing is nolonger to be found in just a conventional set of sym bols or in an indepen dentlyformulated series of concepts; rather its m eaning is inherent in the work. Themeaning of an art-work, in short, is its aesthetic content. The meaning is just


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376 ELIOT DEUTSCHwhat the indiv idual work itself is in its presentational efficacy. The workmay have a recognizable subject-matter (although this is seldom the casewith music or architecture), and the subject-matter (familiar images, represen-tations, graphic symbols of whatever sort) may con tribute to the worksmeaning, but the meaning is not reducible to t he associations that gatherabout th e symbols or about the referential elements themselves. Indeedart-works m ay be meaningful which dispense entirely w ith any explicitsymbolic presentation.

When qualiry becomes the primary category of art meaning in artbecom es, then, a realization of the possibilities of the art-work itself. A workof art is meaningF1 to the degree to which it realizes the possibilities whichit itself gives rise to .meaning of an art-work is to be found i n ou r general theoretical dependenceupon the notion that meaning = referentiality (in some sense or other); thatreferential meaning has primacy (if no t exclusiv ity) for meaning in general.Leonard Meyer, for example, accepts a definition of m eaning as anythingacquires m eaning if it is connected with, or indicates, or refers to som ethingbeyond itself, so that its full natu re p oints to a nd is revealed in that connection;and concludes that

The chief difficulty that one has in articulating th e special inherent

Meaning is thus not a property of things. It cannot be ocated in the stimulus alone. Thestimulus may have different meanings. To a geologist a large rock may indicate that atone time a glacier began o recede at a given spot; to a farmer the same rock may pointto the necessity of having the field cleared for plowing; and to the sculptor the rock mayindicate the possibilityof artistic creation. A rock, a word, or motion in and of itself,merely asa stimulus, is meaningless

But a work of art is not a rock, or just a neutral stimulus. Works of art areprecisely unlike natural ob jects in having their own meaning, in realizing theirown possibilities independent of an y particular m ode o f selective perception.A work of ar t m ay, of course, be perceived extra-aestheticdly - y an artdealer as an object of potential profit, by a mover as something to be cratedcarefully and handled gently, and so on. Aesthetically, however, the workof art has (and is) an ntrinsic meaning - ts realization of the possibilitieswhich it itself gives rise to .

Meaning in art is thus related more to axiological than to epistemic uses/senses of t he term. It is closer to th e sense of meaning in the question, w hichis so ofte n asked, What is the meaning of life? than in What is the meaning


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ON T H E C ONC E P T OF A R T 377of God exists? When one asks abou t the mean ing of life one is askingabout a purpose, for something tha t, in the process of fulfilling, will prov ideone with a feeling of value or worth; one is no t asking for the conceptualsense, or lack of it, of a proposition or pseudo-proposition. In the questionof the meaning of life one assumes tha t m eaning is a prope rty (of life) andnot a relationship (between a symbol and a referent). And so with art. Themeaning of an art-work is a property o f it; it is the art-work itself as a processan d a comp letion. But it is not a meaning in a void anymore than the meaningof ones life, if it has one, is utterly self-contained or wrapped entirelywithin on eself. The m eaning of ones life, as well as with a work of ar t, bringsone in to new relationships with the world; the realization of possibilities isalways a disclosure as well as an inherence,I would argue, means the bringing of the work to an appropriate conclusionand exhibiting the process by which that conclusion is achieved.

Works of art are purposive forms, which is to say that once initiated th eystrive to fulfd ends appropriate to them. Octavio Paz writes:The poem flows,marches. And that flowing is what gives it unity. Now, to flow not onlymeans to move but to move toward something; the tension that inhabits words and hurtlesthem forward is a going to the encounter of something. Words seek a word that willgive meaning to their march, stability to their mobility.

And Susanne K. Langer notes, with respect to d rama, thatBefore a play has progressed by many lines, one is aware not only of vague conditions oflife in general, bu t of a special situation. Like the distribution of fxures on a cheeseboard,the combination of characters makes a strategic pattern.. . Where in the real world wewould witness some extraordinary act and gradually understand the circumstances thatlie behind it, in the theatre we perceive an ominous situation and see that some far-reaching action must grow out of it. This creates the peculiar tension between the givenpresent and its yet unrealized consequent, form in suspense, the essential dramaticillusion.6

But what does it mean to realize possibilities? For a work of art realization,

The poem, the play, as hde ed the painting and musical composition -whethe r the art be primarily one of time or space - reates its own conditionsof expectation, prediction, anticipation which call for resolution and fulfil-ment. The progress toward fulfilment - he process which is exhibited - sno t, of course, mechanical; it is not a m atter of the artist settingdow n initialwords, colors, lines, spaces and th en having everything else inevitably followfrom this setting down, as conclusions might from premises in a deductive


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37 8 E L I O T D E U T S C Hargum ent, for the appropriateness of a conclusion or consumm ation of thework depends aswell on elements of novelty and surprise; or, to put itanother way, appropriateness in a conclusion calls for originality, for newdisclosures, related t o them atic dimensions (e.g., the me taphor in a p oemwhich reveals unexpected qualities of a thing or relationships between things)or to more purely formal considerations alone (the technical accomplishmentor skill which opens new potentialities or extends old limitations of themedium).

The own possibilities which an art-w ork realizes thus calls for integrityin the medium - integrity as a wholeness and as honest useof material.A work of a rt defmes itself not only in the sense of a selection of elements,with initial selections influencing, but no t determining, what co nsequen tlyoccurs, but also in the full affective sense of its establishing its own specialand appropriate tone, its own unique an d right articulation of feeling - hefeeling which suffices the work and gives unity to it. To be true to themedium, to use the materials of a medium honestly, on the other hand,means to w ork with as well as to extend control over the inherent qualitiesof the material. The artist must be at once servant and master of his medium.With m otion pictures, for examp le, the art-form for millions today , therealization of possibilities with respect to the medium itself means that the filmmust be a film of (something or other), for that is its very character as ri m ,as photograp hic image, and yet at the same time - in order that a rnindjidaesthetic distance can be established between viewer and fdm (one of themost difficult tasks for film which tends peculiarly bu t quite naturally toabsorb the spec tator in ways which make for a certain mindlessness) thefilm must exhibit an ex ploitation of itself as a medium. The successfulfilm - s an art-form - s that film which isat once transparent, leading theviewer t o tha t wh ich is filmed (the action per se), and opaqu e, callingattention to itself as a self-contained structu re of forma l elements. Mostmovies are en tirely transparent, and hen ce are readily exhausted. They areentertainmen t precisely because of their failure, in terms of the dem andsof art, to use the medium wi t h full integrity. Th e film which is an art-work,and indeed there a re a surprisingly large number of them, is one w hich hasits own meaning in an d as a particular structured whole tha t is at oncetransparent and self-sufficient.

A work of art, we have said, is a process and a co mp letion. It is, whensuccessful, a realization of a conclusion that is appropriate for itself and an


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O N T H E C O N C E P T O F A R T 379exhibition o f the achieving of t ha t conclusion - which exhibition involvesworking with bo th given and self-created conditions. Ihe dance critic JohnJ. Martin writes:This s perhaps the cardinal consideration in the approach to dance composition, namely,that movement of whatever kind carries within itself the implications of mood, purpose,function, emotion.He also goes on to say thatBy the dancers prevailing awareness of the space in w hich and through which he m oves,he relates himself consciou sly and visibly to his en vironme nt, and not only to thephysical aspects of that environmen t but also to its emotional overtones.And, we would add , the dance also creates its own space. There is the naturalspace of the actua l, physical env ironm ent (a stage of a certain size) in whichand through w hich the dancer moves, and there is the space that the danceitself defines; the space intrinsic to the dance.

In short, there are given and self-presented cond itions in art , with th eart-work having the pow er (of course through the artist) to determine itselfwithin that m atrix. Self-determination for art w orks, as well as for persons,takes place w ithin a conte xt of existential conditions which call for fulfil-ment. The meaning of a work of a rt is thu s an expression of the freedom o far t to be itself. Freed om means precisely the pow er to realize the possibilitiesthat a thing (a person or object) sets for itself. The most meaningful thing,ontologically, would be th e freest thing, which at th e same time would be th emost creative/created thing - nd t ha t is clearly where the w ork of ar t has itsbeing.

Art becomes auton om ous, we have said, by virtue of its own quality an dstrives, when au tonom ous, t o be at once aesthetically forceful, inherentlysignifica nt and righ tly beautifu l. We have so far discussed aesthetic fo rce andinherent significance or m eaning. Let us turn briefly to [email protected] in art ,we have com e to believe, is not reducible to the attractive, the pretty or t owhat m ight answer t o any simple formulae for perfection; beauty h as to dowith rightness, with what is right for the individual, particular wo rk of a rtas a presence. The beauty of the work thus becomes inseparable from itsaesthetic force and meaningful con tent . It becomes th e art-work itself as aradiant form.with some recent mo dem movements (such as pop art or even abstract

Radiance, splendor of for m have a medieval-sounding air ab ou t the m ,


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380 ELIOT DEUTSCH

expressionism) seemingly denying th e notions enti rely; yet they r e m hindispensable for understand ing the intentionality of art as an autonomousform of life and being - because art, by its na ture, expresses a transcendentalstriving. What is form ally right for an art-w ork is not a given in nature; it is acreative achievement and thus always points beyond itself to a dep th ordimension of spiritual being. Art as art cannot he lp being rightly beautiful;the abstract (o r non-abstract) exp ressionist work , as well as a Cezanne, strivesfor a formal achievement that is right for it - nd succeeds as a work of artinsofar as it exhibits that achievement.with religion by way o f its cen tering in magical or holy power, and secondfrom its subservien t role in comm unicating an independently form ulatedmeaning. It becomes autonomous, the n, by virtue of its own quality andstrives, when autonom ous, to be at once aesthetically forcefirl, inherentlysignifwant an d rightly beautifid When art is autonomous it has its o w nintentionality.

In sum: art may be said t o emerge from religion, first from its identification

The question, What is art? can be addressed at several different levelsand kinds of generality. It may be dealt w ith as a problem in the philosophyof art, and accordingly answered in overarching metaphysical term s (Hegelian-like: Art is a spiritual activity of man w hich is delivered from a sensuousmedium and contains an end bound up with it); or it may be dealt withsomewh at more empirically, with ar t being characterized by those featureswhich supposedly set art-work s apa rt from othe r objects or which appropriatelyelicit a special aesthetic experience.

But, it has often been recognized, there are linguistic and logical difficultiesin the question itself which seem to rule o ut any fru itful answer to it. Firstof all it might be th e case tha t the art-w orld (everything that we accept asworks of art) is so extraordinarily rich and diverse, including as it doesexquisite Chinese vases and mamm oth Gothic cathedrals, simplesongsan dsymphonies, yric poems, abstract pai nt ing , statues of gods and portraits ofkings, that what is true about orholds for all objects in i t isvery little ind eed, andno t very interesting. Furth er, the question seems always to have been asked (andanswered) relative to the art o f a particular cultural time and place. The veryimport o f the question, in other w ords, is culture-bound - nd perhaps


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O N T H E C O N C E PT O F A R T 38 1inescapably so. Also the question appears to invite no t so much a descriptionor definition of what art is as a prescription of what art ought t o be. Under-lying the an swer t o What is art? is usually a callor program for what theanswerer believes art ought t o be (e.g., as in Tolstoys famous essay entitledWhat is Art?).

Following Wittgenstein, some aestheticians (notab ly Morris Weitz) havealso argued that it is impossible to fo rmulate a conce ption of art througharticulating necessary and sufficient properties o f art-w orks; it is logicallyimpossible, they say, to define art by any set of essential features thatdistinguish art-w orks from everything else.The problem of the nature of art is like that of the nature of games,at least in theserespects: If we actually look and see what it is that we call art, we will also find nocommon properties- only strands of similarities. Knowing what art is is not apprehending some manifest or latent essence but being able to recognize, describe, andexplain those things we call artin virtue of these similarities.

A rt, the argument goes,is an open concept: tha t is, its conditions ofapplication are emendable and corrigible.

Maurice Man delbaum in his article Family Resem blances and Generali-zation Conce rning the Arts, has nicely criticized this view by pointingout tha t t o claim family resemblance only (as defined by Wittgenstein)for w orks of art overlooks the fact that there is an attribute comm on to allwho do bea r a fam ily resemblance, although it is not n ecessarily one amongthose characteristics that are directly exhibited, viz. common ancestry.Art-works may have relational attributes of this sort - lbeit it mightindeed be extremely difficult to articulate them. Also the fact tha t theart-world is no t closed to new and different forms does not, as Weitz seemsto think, mean tha t art is necessarily an op en concept. Fu ture instancesto which the co ncept of art may apply can, of course, possess genuinelynovel properties, bu t the instances may nevertheless still come under aproperly formed definition or general concept of art.

found by turning away from the question but by looking deeper.art-works as we have seen, aim to be at once pow erful, meaningful andbeautiful. If this is what art-works themselves strive to achieve, then th eproblem of finding (or even looking for) essential and exhib ited, definingproperties of all art-works does not arise. A w ork of a rt is that concrete

The answer to What is art?, Mandelbaum rightly insists, is not to beWhen art, emerging from religion, achieves its own autonomy or integrity,


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382 ELIOT DEUTSCHform which aims to be at once aesthetically forceful, inherently significantand rightly beautiful. Aesthetic force, significance and beauty become thedeep structure, the fundamental intentionality of art. They become itsprimary categories or relational attributes.

Let us look further.

111art is imitationThe instinct of imitation is implantedin man rom childhood, one difference betweenhim and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures; and throughimitation he learnshis earliest lessom;and no lessuniversalis the pleasure felt in thingsimitated. (Poetics, IV. 2 )

The earliest philosophical theory in the West about art is that ar t is a kind ofimitation (mimesis).Plato interpretedmimesis as copying - he artist wasconcerned, Plato argued, to represent sense-objects by a replication of theirsensuous properties. Art did not imitate or copy the Ideas; it copied onlyphenomenal forms and was thus at an even further distance from the Trueand the Good than the phenomenal forms or objects themselves. Aristotle,on the other hand, who hought that imitation was an instinctive force inman, developed a somewhat more sophisticated use of mimesis and seemedto argue that art imitated primarily the typical or universal dimensions ofactions, characters or events, disclosing thereby their general significanceWhat art imitates, writes W.D. Ross, is characters and emotions andactions - ot the sensible world, but the world of mans mind. Of all thearts the least imitative, that which can least be charged with merely trying toduplicate something already existing, is music; but for Aristotle it is the mostimitati~e.~

It was left for Rotinus, however, the more ardent follower of Plato, toreject explicitly Platos restriction of imitation to the copying of sense-objects.Plotinus insisted that the soul can rise to the principle of Beauty and thatBeauty, as well as other Ideas, can be reflected in the mind of man as eternalmodels for his creativity. The arts,Rotnius writes, give no bare reproductionof the thing seen but go back to the Reason-Principles from which Natureitself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own;they are holders of beauty and add where nature is la~king.~


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O N T H E C O N C E P T O F A R T 383The neo-classicism of the seventeenth-century, however, which once again

called for art to imitate nature, neglected the Plotinian interpretation in favorof the notion that imitation meant a rule-bound following of the generalstructures of nature. Verisimilitudecame to mean an imitation of ideal types.As applied to the human scene:. for a painter or poet, not actual men and actions with their baffling mixture of goodand bad, but types of character and pu ri fi d logicized fables leading in a way analogousto the syllogism to a content of the mind, and to virtuous deeds, composed the truemodel in nature.

After having been largely set aside under the impact of Romanticism,imitation in recent times has again been seen as a central concern of art.Leo Steinberg, for instance, has argued that art through he ages showsunmistakably that most of it is dedicated precisely to the imitation of nature,to likeness-catching, to the portrayal of objects and situations - n short, torepresentation. Steinberg sets aside efforts to explain away this historicalfact by those who interpret representation as an adventitious element inart - concession made to populace or church or by those who insist thatmodern art, by eschewing the outgoing reference, constitutes somethingradically different and new in favor of holding that modern art has not,after all, abandoned the imitation of nature, and that, in its most powerfulexpressions, representation is still an essential condition, not an expendablefreight.6

Susanne K. Langer, however, has observed thatIt is natural enough, perhaps, for naive reflection to center first of all round the relation-ship between an image and its object; and equally natural to treat a picture, statue or agraphic description as an imitation of reality. The surprising thing is that long after arttheory has passed the naive stage, and every serious thinker realized that imitation wasneither the aim nor the measure of artistic creation, the traffic of the image with itsmodel kept its central place among philosophical problems of art. It has fgured as thequestion of form and content, of interpretation, of idealization, of belief and make-believe, and of impression and expression. Yet the idea of copying nature is not evenapplicable to all the arts. What does a building copy? On what given object does onemodel a melody?

But some works of art do primarily copy, or attempt to copy externalobjects of sense; others to represent the essential character of a particularthing, person, or event; still others to present the universal or typicalfeatures of a class of things; and yet others perhaps to imitate in none ofthese ways. What sense of imitation, then, is applicable to all art-works?


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384 ELIOT DEUTSCHHow does imitation relate to, and help further to explicate, the intentionalityof art to be aesthetically forceful, inherently significant and rightfullybeautiful?In early Greece, Wladyslaw Taterkiewicz observes, mimesis signifiedimitation, but in the sense n which the term is applied to acting and not tocopying.18 Imitation in art means properly an acting-out- a drawing fromthe very root of spiritual beingso that the art-work can present or performwith power its own aesthetic content or meaning. To mitate in art meansproperly to have the expressive content of the work grounded in reality.That work of art is most truly imitative which is a concentration of the powerof spiritual being. To imitate in art thus means to be determined by realityat the most essential level of spirituality. It means to have ones creativedrive be in accord with - be derived from - he spiritual rhythm and powerof being.

To be grounded in, to be rooted, means to be tied to, which meansrightly to be influenced by: in the fullest sense of influence, it means topartake of the essential character of that which is the source of influence.Imitation is thus a property, not a relation; which is to say, it is a qualitybecomes inherent in the art-work, rather than something that obtains betweenthe art-work and some object or process external to it.

Imitation, in this sense, thus helps us to understand the assertion that awork of art is its ow n meaning; that art is autonomous. The assertion doesnot properly argue (as Clive Bell has done) that art need not draw anythingfrom life and that to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothingbut a sense of form and color and a knowledge of three-dimensionaispace;lgnor does it argue that a work of art should (or should not) have a recognizablesubject-matter, that it should (or should not) represent something or other;it argues that the aesthetic content of the work, if it is to be meaningful,must, at its deepest level, bear the strength and confidence of its beinginfluenced by one or more aspects or dimensions of reality. But how is thatpossible?

Schopenhauer thought that art-works (and genres) were graded object s-cations of the Will and embodiments of the Platonic Ideas; that they werecopies of the Ideas in varying degrees of lucidity and power. What Schopenhauerdid see clearly, though, was that imagination, or the creative insight of genius,was the most objective form of consciousness. In contrast to phantasy-makings,which satisfy only the wish-fulfdling needs of the ego, imaginative construction,


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O N T HE CONCEPT OF A R T 385he argued, when properly unde rstood , is always imitative insofar as it disclosesthe essential character of reality, not as a symbol pointing to it, but as a directpresentation of it.20Imagination can be defrned as the bringing inward of a world perceived inthe present through the creation of re lationships between objects (or events) asstructured by m emory.actuality; it is precisely an intensification and e xplora tion of relationalexperience, of ones involvement with an other - with some one or m oreaspects or dimensions of reality. Imagination takes one outs ide of ones littleego-based world by bringing the w orld in to onese lf. Imagination is anopening of the mind to reality; it is an act of appropriating experience and,through the appropriation, of overcoming ones estrangement from it.

As noted by &hiller and others, imagination is a kind of play: it is a freecreative activity. The creativity of nature , it is believed, is utterly boun d t ogoverning laws and principles (gravity) or t o fortu itou s happenings (randomselection). Human creativity, on the o the r hand , is not necessary. Theprocess has causes and reasons and it has limits (and indeed the artist oftenfeels a certain necessity in tha t special need which creative expression alonecan satisfy), but , when genuine, the creativity is self-determining and th ereb yfree. When I create a poem , a piece of music, a garden, I am playing: I amengaged in an act for its own sake. Although nature sets limits to my ac t(I cannot co mpose m usic in a range outside of human aural perception), I amacting spontaneously, w ith discipline, fro m the center of my being. I amtherefore, acting freely.

Imagination means a freedom from the seeing of things in terms ofhabituated responses and a freedom to create an ordered work. T hroughimagination (which is always informed b y intellect) one struc tures experien ce,one articulates new relationships between things, one gives order and valueto what might otherwise be commonplace - ut, and this is the cruc ial point,the imaginative act, by its very objective character, is boun d t o reality.Whenever imagination is free it enjoys an obedience to reality, a beinginfluenced by it, a partaking of its essential character.

And, at the same time, it has its own subjective nature which is alsoreality-oriented, for without memory there is no imagination. This doesntmean that if on e were t o suffer amnesia one would be unable t o engage inartistic creativity; it means that an ntensification of ones past experience

Contrary to popular opinion, imagination is not an act of withdrawal from


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386 ELIOT DEUTSCHmade evident to consciousness is necessary for creativity in art. Imaginationworks on he (outer) present through the (inward) past. It demands that on ebring forth past intensities of experien ce, especially those which are ratheruseless for simply adapting t o or working in the present, and that one unitethem with a vividly perceived conten t. Imagination is thus always allied withinsight or intuition and h ence differs from mere imagining, with w hich it isoften confounded, just in thisway -with daydream ing or a m ere play ofmemories there is only the past or a wish-fulfilling future ; with imaginationthere is the structuring of the present through the intensities of the past. Withday-dreaming and the like, one is absorbed in oneself; with imagination oneis ou t of oneself through th e appro priation of the present and the bringingforth of some thing tha t is new. With day dreaming one invo luntarily roamsthe gamut of ones desires; with imagina tion one concentrates consciousnessonly on hose relations that are t o be structured.21Imagination or a rtistic intuition, however, unlike the more pure spiritualintuition associated say with philosophical mysticism does not demand a completetranscenden ce of the self. It is more an absorption o f the self, a self-forget-fulness, in the in tensity of a concen trated act tha n it is an utte r self-surrenderor self-denial. Its content is always at once phenomenal and noumenal, asit were, involving as it does a sensuous media and a silent spirituality -power or rhythm of being (chiyun or spirit resonance, as the traditionalChinese called it). Imagination and crea tive insigh t in ar t do es no t take placeindependently of its expression,its embodiment in form. One does not havean artistic intuition in to spirit resonance and then search around for a meansof expressing it; rather the seeing and the expressing are, and appear, asnecessary to each o ther.medium. It is extraordinary how this is occasionally forgotten.) Imagination,creative insight,is carried ou t in and through the materials of the a rt form ,and thus always involves intelligent or critical udgm ent. Recent analyses ofcreativity in art do take this into account, b ut then in their eagerness to ridthemselves of an y rom antic vestiges, the y err, i t seems, in the other direction;they un derstand creativity to be just the exercise of this critical control, andthey lack thereby any sense of the struggle, of the triumph , of the terrible orthe joyful in creativity.*? These analyses also err in neglecting the profoun dsense that the master artist has that he is more a locus than a source of thepower of his work, tha t he is the place where creative powers meet; in short,

Creativity in art, in other words, has to do with working with a particular


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O N T H E CONCEPT O F A R T 38 7to use the old formulation, that he is an instrument of nature and not just acontroller of a medium, that nature is working through him - hat hiscreativity is a kind of imitat i~n. ~Imitation in art is thus like the primitive magic of the art-religion work inits effort to embody a spiritual force, but it is unlike it in insisting that theforce, the power, is for itself as it informs its own aesthetic content and notfor control over - or otherwise establishing a relationship with - omethingexternal to it. Imitation is a drawing-from and thus is a presentation (not acopying of, a representing, a being a symbol of, a reflection of) the powerand rhythm of spiritual being. Imitation enables an art-work to be its ow nmeaning and indeed to achieve the appropriate radiance and splendor ofform which we see as the distinctive quality of that work of art which isbeautiful.ar t is expression

Oil is expressed from the olive; juice from the grape. Traditionalexpression theories of ar t claim that an artist lets out his feelings and emotionsin such a way that they are no longer just turbulent, blind and chaotic;expression being a kind of ordering and self-clarification; and that, asclarified, the emotions are then embodied in the work of art and cause orelicit an appropriate response or recognition in the experiencer of the work.To express, according to the theory, is thus different from merely to arouseor to exhibit raw emotion, mainly by virtue of the lucidity or intelligibilitythat is said to be achieved by both the artist and the contemplative participant.Speaking of the actors art, R. G. Collingwood, for example, writes:. f his businessis not amusement but art, the object at which he is aiming is not toproduce a preconceived emotional effect on his audience but by means of a system ofexpressions, of language, composed partly of gesture, to explore his own emotions: todiscover emotions in himself of which he w a s unaware, nd, by permitting the audienceto witness the discovery, enable them to make a similar discovery about themselves. Inthat case it is not her ability to weep real tears that would mark her out a good actress;it is her ability to make it clear to herself and her audience what her tears are about.

This applies to every kind of art. The artist never rants.. A person who writes orpaints or the like in order to blow off steam, using the traditional materials of art asmeans of exhibiting the symptoms of emotion, may deserve praise as an exhibitionist,but loses for the moment all claim to the title of artist.

Most expressionist theory of art, as John Hospers has pointed out, sconfined to analyzing the expression of emotions or feelings; little is said


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388 ELIOT DEUTSCHabout th e artists expression of ideas and concep ts (albeit Tolstoy tends t ocombine the two when ta king about the artist expressing the Christian ideaof brotherhood). It is also based primarily on a causalmodel of the relationsthat o btain between artist, art-work, and the experiencer of it. The modelassumes tha t the art-work which resu lts from the artists expression ofemotion is itself essentially a means (cause o f ) a particular effe ct, viz., theexperience of one who co ntemp lates it.a sourcethan a cause; it is where aesthetic value is discerned. The feelingimpo rt of an art-work is in, or simply is, the art-work as much as any of itsf o r d qualities. The art-w ork, we would argue, doesnt so much cause orevoke, or make for a simple recognition of , an emotion (of sadness, gaiety,or whatever); when properly respon ded to , it is recognized as having its ownexpressive power, meaning and quality.

An art-work is the expression of power insofar as it p resents a forcefulaesthetic con tent, which conten t .manifests the artists successful transmu tationof raw creative power into a con trolled feeling which suffices the work.Imitation refers to the going to th e ro ot of aesthetic force in spiritual power,the grounding of creativity in reality; expression refers to the actualpresentation of tha t force by the created work of art.

The artist an d th e a rt-work, in this dimension, are thus as one. Criticismsof expression theo ry w hich want to leave the artist and his creativitycom pletely ou t of the picture when judging a work of a rt (e.g. Hospers: w henwe make a judgment o f aesthetic value upon a wo rk of ar t, we are in no wayjudging the pro cess.. .%) go to an other extreme to avoid the naivite of thetraditional theo ry, w ith its emphasis on the subjective or personal emotionsof the artist. The creative process is one thing, the critics say, the wo rk of artis something entirely differen t.

But it is surely the case that a work o f art is what it is by virtue of aparticular creative process; that the being of an art-w ork is it s own becoming,if these terms may be allowed. The art-work, in short, is the process of itsbeing: the brushwork is the painting or drawing as assuredly as is its finalcolor disposition. The aesthetic force o f the painting, we might then say, isthe pow er of its coming-into-being; a pow er which is controlled anddisciplined and is to b e fo und , as it w ere, everywhere in the work. L ackingthat pow er, art-works may be p retty and decora tive, but they would fail tofulfd the intentionality of art itself, which aims t o be pow erful, meaningfuland beautiful.

But an art-work is an object of concentrated meaning and value. It is more


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O N THE CONCEPT O F AR T 389When a discrepancy is evident between an isolable content in art (a con-

ventional sym bolic meaning, literal reference or message) and a sensuousform which ado rns the message or meaning to ease its comm unication, wehave either propaganda (disguised sociology, politics, and the like) or bad art.In a genuine or successful art-work exp ression constitutes the aesthetic andirreducible meaning of the work; it doesnt convey a separate m eaning - rsymbol of emotion.

Following Susanne K. Langer, we can , I think, properly say then an art-work is an expressive fo rm - but only as it is creative of the meaning that isexpressed. Langer is surely correct, howev er, in noting tha t an art-workis a symbol in a somewhat specialsense,because it performs some symbolic functions,but not all; especially it does not stand for something else., nor refer to anything thatexists apart from it. According to the usual definition of symbol, a work o f art shouldnot be classed as a symbol at all. But that usual definition (of something standing forsomething else) overlooks the greatest intellectual value and, I think, the prime officeof symbols - their power of formulating experience, and presenting it objectively forcontemplation, logical intuition, recognition, understanding.

But what then is the im port of th at w hich essentially creates and is itsown meaning? Im itation. we have suggested, has primarily t o d o with theinfluence of reality on the art-work, the manner in which, through theobjectivity of creative consciousness, the aesthetic con ten t is informed byreality. Expression, we n ow suggest has to do with the manifest presence offormal relationships that constitute the work, relationships which, imbuedwith feeling, derive their significance from their own inherent rightness.This is, in a way, c ircular; but a circularity that is inevitable and itselfrevealing of the uniqueness of meaning (a m eaning tha t does not ju st standfor som ething else, or is merely associative, i.e. gathered abou t a particularsubject-matter) that is present in any successful work of art. It is theparticular way in which an individual work of art pre sents itself as sufficedwith feeling in and th rough its own aesthetic content which makes it countas an expressive form .expression, which is defined as that which has the capacity to cause, underassigned conditions, an aesthetically expressive effect in a contem plativeperceiver of it,* was that it enables us to see that Not all Objectivelyexpressive objec ts are products of artistic expression. We may , he says,adopt the attitude of aesthetic contemplation toward natural objects, such

Vincent Tomas believed that one of the virtues of the concept of objective


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390 E L I O T D E U T S C Has sunsets, real landscapes, and driftwood; and, when we do, we find ourexperiences of them have their feeling import. Yet no one embodied hisfeelings in them.29

But adopting an attitude toward something is not the same thing asapprehending the qualities of that thing. Expression as related to beauty,we would argue, has precisely the virtue of enabling us to distinguish sharplybetween works of art and sunsets and pieces of driftwood - xciting andinteresting as the latter might be.

An art-work, unlike a sunset or piece of driftwood, expresses beauty justas the expressive form that it is, which is to say, once again, that its processand its presence are inseparable. It is when we radically sunder artist fromart-work and art-work from a contemplative participant who has adopted acertain aesthetic attitude of detachment, that we fail to recognize the specialintentionality of art to be powerful, meaningful and beautiful, whichintentionality, when fulfded, is integral in the art-work. The aesthetic qualityof an art-work, in short, is not an isolablef o n d arrangement anymore thanits meaning is an isolable symbolic content. The quality, the beauty, that isachieved and presented by the art-work is its formal rightness and, inseparably,its aesthetic force and significance. The sunset, the driftwood, may offer aninteresting, aesthetically complex arrangement of formal qualities, of lines,colors, textures, and an aesthetically appreciative attitude toward theseobjects is no doubt desirable, but the discernment of these qualities is notthe same thing as the experience of quality in art. The latter requires morethan an attitude of detached attentiveness to abstracted formal qualities (oneis impressed by a sunset, with something of the literal meaning of the term,as being passively affected by it); to experience the quality of an art-workas it is an expressive form requires the full play of ones intellectual andintuitive as well as sensuous powers of discernment.

IVWe have argued that to formulate a right conception of art we must not

radically sunder the artist from the art-work and the art-work from thecontemplative participant of it. An art-work is what it is by virtue of acreative process, which process (of intellect, feeling, intuition) enables anart-work to be at once imitative and expressive and to fulfd its intentionalityto be aesthetically forceful, inherently significant and rightly beautiful. At the


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O N T H E C O N C E P T OF A R T 391same time the art-work has its being, as it were, in a world of consciousness(it is as an art-work rather than just as a physical thing only for consciousness)and, hence, as such it cannot be conceived as completely independent of theexperience of it.

Aesthetic experience has often been reduced to, or has been analyzedexclusively in terms of, either an aesthetic attitude (of disinterestedness,detachment) or an aesthetic emotion ( of intense pleasure). Since Kant atleast it has become commonplace to oppose an aesthetic attitude to apractical one. An aesthetic attitude, it is said, is one which is for its own sake;the object of perception is not, as is the case with a practical attitude, takenas a means to some further end, but is approached as it is an end in itself,worthy of our close attention. In aesthetic experience we must disengage anypersonal or utilitarian interests we might otherwise have in the object infavor of attending exclusively to its intrinsic qualities. We must, it is said, bedetached, so that we may be open to what is presented by the art-work. Anappropriate distance must be interposed between ourselves and the art-workin order that we may experience the art-work

Now, however the aesthetic attitude is to be defined, it is evident thatthis attitude (basically of our openness to the work) is not itself the essentialcharacter of aesthetic experience; rather it is a condition for that experience .Before one can relate to an art-work (or to a natural object) as an aestheticobject one must suspend ones practical and other inhibiting interests in it.This suspension is necessary for the apprehension of the aesthetic qualitiesof the object, but it is surely not sufficient for our experiencing the workrightly in the fulness of its being. A proper aesthetic attitude, in short,might enable us to experience an art-work properly, but the attitude assuredlyis not the basic nature of the experience itself.

Clive Bell has argued that AU sensitive people agree that there is a peculiaremotion provoked by works of art and that We have no other means ofrecognizing a work of art than our feeling for it.31 Now whether thisaesthetic emotion is ours as such or is objectified as pleasure in the art-work(Santayana) it is clear that this emotion is also not the essential characterof our experience with art-works, for it does not take into account the specialcognitive and spiritual dimensions of the experience; the aesthetic emotionis at best only a frequent accompaniment t o the experience. When theexperience of the art-work is under the control of the work the full inten-tionality of the work must be disclosed.


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392 ELIOT DEUTSCHThe experience of an art-work (which is aesthetically forceful, inherently

significant and rightly beautifu l) involvesassimilation, recognition anddiscernment and calls for a special appropriation which yields an integratedwholeness. Let me explain.

In actual life when we meet a situation of power, of force (especially ofviolence) we react to it , we protect ourselves from it, we might even actforcefully in turn; w ith works of art,on th e other h and, we assimilate theaesthetic force ; we take it o n, as it were, as a condition of own being; weincorporate it in to our emotional texture an d freely accept it. Assimilationis a kind of em pathetic embrace, but it is not an attributing of a psycho-physiological process t o a pa rticular shape o r configuration (V ernon Leesmountain rising); it is rather an awkening of o ur feeling to what is presentedby the art-work . It is our being influenced by the work, as the work, throughthe artist, was itself influenced by a pow er and rhy thm of being.

The aesthetic force of an art-work, in short, is not - when the work isright - ne that just overwhelms the experiencer of it , rather, albeit it mightappear initially as alien t o him, it is presented as an opportunity for hisrelationship with it.

We assimilateaesthetic force. We recognize meaning. In aestheticexperience the inherent significance of the art-work presents itself to us assomething t o be recognized rather than as something to be known con-ceptually. R ecognition is, of co urse, a kind of knowing; it has ts own noeticcharacter, b ut i t differs from conceptual knowledge, discursive understand ingand abstract, rational thought by virtue of its immediacy and qualitativediscrimination. To ecognize means to apprehend: it means t o see m entallythat a wo rk has realized possibilities tha t it itself has given rise to, that thework has been brought to an appropriate conclusion and is exhibiting theprocess by which tha t conclusion was achieved.

Recognition of this ype presupposes, therefore, a keen sensitivity andknowledgeable backgro und. One is calIed upon to recognize novelty andoriginality and a t the same time to take in them atic and othe r purelysymbolic achievements,as well as affective tones; on e is called upon, in sho rt,to apprehend the full range of m eaning that constitutes the work.

Meaning is the locus for the cognitive in art. In our exp erience of art-workswe must be know ing participants. We are not called upon t o k now whatthe w ork means, bu t t o apprehend that meaning as i t is the work.


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O N T H E C O N C E P T O F A R T 393

We assimilate aesthetic force, we recognize inherent significance, wediscern that the work of art is rightly beautiful. Aesthetic experience, o n itsformal side, or in its fo rmal dim ension, is no t just a noticing of qualities anda passing over the qualities to other aspects that interest one, as is the casegenerally with ordinary perception; it is precisely a close attentiveness t o th eplay of colors, lines, shapes, so&&, spaces, rhythms as they a t once havetheir own integrity and contribute to the work as a formal gestalt. Discernmentmeans discrimination and judgm ent; it is an activity of the experiencer; it isan active engagement between a work and the contemplative participant of it.

Now assimilation, recognition, discernment are not, in a ctuality, separatemoments or features of experience, rather they interfuse, intermingle andtogether are the process of our relating to w orks of art. The process doesrequire the full play of ones intellectual and intu itive as well as sensuouspowers and, under the control of the art-work , does bring about an ntegrationand wholeness to the experiencer of the work. And just as the creativeprocess which brings the a rt-work in to being is at the sam e time a self-articulationand self-formation of the artist, so this play of t he experiencers powers is akind of self-appropriation - he realization of the selfs own spirituality.Spirit meets spirit in art - nd an integrated w holeness, however temporaryor enduring , is achieved.

What religion earlier sought through art is now attained by art in its ownspiritual world.

. *

VIn sum: Art emerges from religion, frrst from its identification with

religion by way of its cen tering in magical or holy power, and seco nd from itssubservient role in co mm unicating an independently formulated meaning.It then becomes autonomous by virtue of its own quality and strives, whenautonomous, to be at once aesthetically forceful, meaningful, and beautiful.

to be aesthetically forceful, inheren tly significant and rightly beautiful.an immanent spiritual power, which power or rhythm of being is everywherepresent in the w ork and is discerned as its unique vitality.A work of art is inherently significant, is meaningful, t o the degree t owhich it realizes the p ossibilities that it itself gives rise to ; realization being

A work of art thus has its own intention ality, w hich is precisely its aimingA work of art is aesthetically forceful to the degree to which it manifests


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394 ELIOT DEUTSCHa bringing of the work to a right conclusion and the exhibiting the processby which the right conclusion is reached.

A work of art is rightly beautiful to the degree to which it presents as itsown presence a formal achievement that is appropriate to it.A work of art is imitative insofar as artistic creativity partakes of the

essential character of reality, with the work thus becoming a presentation of(not a copying of, a representing, a being a symbol of, a reflection of) thepower of spiritual being.expressive of the vision of the artist, as that vision becomes the art-worksown aesthetic content.

A work of art is an object for consciousness and is experienced byassimilation (of its aesthetic force), recognition (of its inherent significance)and discernment (of its right beauty); the three together forming a singleprocess of experience which culminates in a self-appropriationor realizationof the selfs own spirituality.

A work of art is thus that created object which, when realizing its ownintentionality, is at once imitative and expressive and performs, for con-sciousness, its own aesthetic content.

A work of art is expressive insofar as it exhibits its creative process: it is

UniversityofHawiiNOTES

Geradus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: TheHoly in Art, transl. byDavid E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 11.Cf. also Wladsylaw Tatarkiewicz,Hisro?y of Aesfhetics,edited by J. Harrell (The Hague:Mouton and Warszawa: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970). I, pp. 16 ff. By a traditional culture or stage of a culture I mean that mode of social-intellectual-spiritual life wherein, through a heightened self-consciousness and ability to communicatevalues a shared literature (oral or written) of myth, poem and dogma isestablished.

Part of the basis for the sepamtion is undoubtedly to be found in the belief of organizedreligion that it can, with the advance of its own ymbolic means of expression in theform of concepts, Ciispensewith art and indeed even oppose it as something which maystand in the way of religious consciousness. Herbert Reed describes the process nicelyin this way: Ritual impliesart - t needs art for the creation of its ritualistic objects.Religious emotion, too, must be generated by ritualisticobjects. So far art and religionare interdependent. At the stage of the formulation of belief, art may or may not benecessary; it w i l l prove at any rate useful for the formulation of symbols, the shorthandof beliefs, and for instructional purposes - s a pictorial language for the illiterate. Butat the rationalizing stage of religion, when religion becomes more than anything else an


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O N THE CONCEPT OF ART 395affair of philosophical concepts and of individual meditation, then there is bound togrow up a feeling that religion can dispense with such sensuous representations as worksof art - ndeed, such objects will come to be regarded as definitely antagonistic to thelife of the spiri t (Art and Religion, ?he Listener, 5 August, 1936.) eonard B. Meyer. Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 19561, p. 34.University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 142. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1953), p. 311. See Siegfried Krocauer, meory of Film: The Redemption of phvsical Reality (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1960).

John J. Martin, An Introduction to the Dance (New York: W. W.Norton & Co., Inc.,1939), p. 62 . bid., p. 63.l o Moms Weitz, The Role of Theory in Aesthetics, The Journal ofAesthetics and ArtCriticism,VoL XV , no. 1 (September 1956), 27-35. I ?Re American PIrilosophical Quarterly, Vol. 11, no. 3 (July 1965) 219-28.Cf. Republic, Bk. XW.D. Ross,Aristotle (New York: Meridian Books, nc., 1959). p. 269.

Harvey D. Goldstein, in an interesting article Mimesis and Catharsis Reexamined(The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. X X N , no. 4 (Summer 1966), 567-77),points out, however. that Aristotle did atso use mimesis to convey the idea of copying,but that mimesis had for Aristotle primarily to do with an imitation of the method orprocess of nature and not with a representation of sense-objects.Enneads, V, 8 ,1 , trans. by Stephen Mackenna.I s Katherine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History ofEsthencs (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1953). p. 220.l6 Leo Steinberg. The Eye Isa Part of the Mind, in Reflections on Art, edited by SusanneK. Ianger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 245.But Steinberg goes on to set up a straw man as an opponent t o this view by arguingthat the only alternative to art is imitation, which he then explains is largely a symbolicprocess (Representation in art is the fashioning of graphic symbols to act as analoguesfor certain areas of visual experience). is some peculiar notion that art operates in acomplete void and is thus creativeex nihilo.Susanne K. Ianger, Feeling and Form, p. 46 .

In his Art and Scholasticism,Jacques Maritain also notes: The truth is, it isdifficult to determine in what precisely this imitation-copy consists, the concept ofwhich seems so clear to minds which have their being among the simplified schemata ofthe popular imagination.

Is it the imitation or the copy of what th e thing in itself is and its intelligible type?But that is an object of conception, not of sensation.. .which art, consequently, cannotdirectly reproduce. Is it the imitation or the copy of the sensations produced in us bythe thing? But the sensations attain the consciousness of each one of us only as refractedby an inner atmosphere of memories and emotions, and are moreover, eternally changingin a flux in which al l things become distorted and are continuously intermingled; so thatfrom the point of view of pure sensation it must be admitted with the Futurists hat agalloping horse has not four hoofs but twenty . . .

OctavioPaz, IheBow and the Lyre, trans. by Ruth L C. Simms (Austin and London:

The reproduction or exact copy of nature thus appears as the object of an impossible


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396 ELIOT DEUTSCHpursuit - concept which vanishes when an attempt is made to define it."18Tatarkiewicz,op. cir.. p. 17.''Clive Bell, Arf (London: Chatto 8 Windus, Ltd., 19281, p. 16 .'o"Only through the pure contemplation.. .which ends entirely in the object, can deasbe comprehended, and the nature of genius consists in preeminent capacity for suchcontemplation. Now, as this requires that a man should entirely forget himself and therelations in which he stands, genius is simply the completest objectivity, i.e.. theobjective tendency of the mind, asopposed to the subjective. which is directed to one'sown self.. . "111. 36.

This account is, of course, exactly contra to Freud's treatment of creativity in art,insofar as Freud assumes that all creativity is reducible to a kind of compensatorysatisfaction-seeking,a fulfdment of desires that are denied the artist in the real world.Art becomes then a manifestation of w ish - fu l f i i desires and is responded to preciselyin those terms. Cf.his 'The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming'. It is interesting tonote that everything that Freud says about art is true - or bad art or for merelypopular phantasy-stuff like so-called soap-operas."Cf. Vincent T o m , Creativity in Art', 7he philosophical Review, Vol. LXVII, no. 1(Jan. 1958), and Monroe C. Beardsley, On the Creation of Art', 77zeJournal ofAesthetics and Arf Cziticism,Vol. XXUI. no. 3 (1965)."And hence the sense n the assertion often made that artistic creativity is an articulationor self-formation of the artist as much as it is the making of an art-work. Creativity inart forms the artist; it is a kindof self-discovqand self-making,not a mere self-expressionThe creativity of an artist is thus often as much a surprise to him as it may be a wonderto others.R G. Collingwood. T%e Rinciples ofArt (Oxford: The Qarendon Press, 1938), p. 120.The expression theory of art has undergone an interesting and rather curious historicaldevelopment. Spawned by Romanticism's emphasis on the artist as a self-consciouslycreative being, with art often looked upon as a means for his selfixpression, the theory,in its initial formulations (by Eugkne Vbmon, Croce, Collingwood, Ducasse) wasconcerned primarily with the creative process, willing as it was at times (e.g. Croce) torelegate the actual physical work of art to a secondary position. The making of an art-work, in the initial formulation, was a kind of therapy. It enabled the artist, and theexperience1 of his art, to attain a knowledge of, and by implication a freedom from,an otherwise turbulent, inchaoate emotional force.

'Ihinkers like Susanne K. Langer, however, recognized that as a psychology of thecreative process the traditional expression theory is severely limited to at best a particulartype of creativity and insisted. in a more sophisticated way, that the art-work may be asymbol of h u m eeling. The art-work then becomes an expressive form - an articulationof feeling for contemplative understanding.

It wasn't long before analytically oriented philosophers (Monroe Beardsley,0. .Bouswma,John Hospers) discovered a lack of clarity in the whole notion of expression,that the terms 'express', 'expressive', ' exprekon' were used in a wide variety of ways.The critics shifted the whole direction of the theory away from the artist and towardthe expressive values of the art-work itself by asking how we can intelligibly ascribeanthropomorphic qualities to a work of art ('sad music' as the saw or paradigm). And theyconcluded that the expression theory was utterly dispensable.An expression-languageused to talk about art-works canbe translated without lossof meaning into non-expreuion-language (about formal qualities and subject-matter).


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ON THE CONCEPT O F A RT 397In very recent times, however, other analytically oriented writers (AlanTormay,m e C on ce pt of Expression; Guy Sircello, Mind and Art: An Essay on the Varietiesof

Expression) have tried to rescue the theory by appealing to various ways in whichanthropomorphic predicates can be applied t o works of art in a manner unlike theirapplication to natural objects, and thus t o show how expression, expressive o f ,expressing are necessary for aesthetic analysis The emphasis, however, still remainson how it can be said that a work of art is expressive of certain human emotions. Thetheory is perhaps ready now for a more basic reconstruction - at the roots.John Hospers, The Concept of Artistic Expression, reprinted with some changes bythe author in R o b le m s o f A es the t i c s, edited by Morns Weitz (New York: The MacmillanCompany, 1970). I b i d , p. 227.Susanne K. Langer, Problems ofA r t , in A Modern Book of Esthetics, edited byMelvin Rader, 4th edit ion (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1973) . p. 296.Vincent Tomas, from Science, Language and Human Rights, in Philosophy Looks a tthe Arts, edited by Joseph Margolis (New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1962) , p. 31 .Ib id . , p. 43.330 In a famous essay Psychical Distance as a factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,Edward Bullough argued that aesthetic experience demands the insertion of a certaindistance between our own self and its affections or between our self and such objectsas are the sources or vehicles of such affections. This distance is obtained Bulloughsays, by separating the object and its appeal from ones self, by putting it out ofgear with practical needs and ends. He goes on to say that Distance does not imply animpersonal, purely intellectually interested relation of such a kind. On he contrary, itdescribes a personal relation, often highly emotionally colored, but of a peculiar character.Its peculiarity lies in that the personal character of the relation has been, so to speak,filtered. It has been cleared of the practical, concrete nature of its appeal, without,however, thereby losing its original constitution. He concludes by postulating anantinomy of Distance, namely that What is therefore, both in appreciation andproduction, most desirable is the utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance.This allows the participant to be deeply involved with the art-work yet able to relatewith it precisely as it is a work of art. Now although there are many ambiguities anddifficulties in this notion of a psychical distance, it - or something like it - has becomewidely accepted as describing the atti tude appropriate to our experience of art-works.3 1 Bell, o p . c i t . , p. 4.

deutsch, on the concept of art

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