Art As Communicable Knowledge

Art as Communicable Knowledge
Author(s): Henry P. Raleigh

Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 115-127
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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Art as Communicable
Knowledge
HENRY P. RALEIGH
The
following
remarks are addressed to the notion that fine art is a
special
mode of
thought
and
knowledge.
This
speciality
is most interest-
ing,
for we
suppose
the value of that
knowledge
shares in the value
we
place
on
knowledge
in
general, and, additionally,
in the
special
value
we
place
on art for both aesthetic and nonaesthetic reasons. The
impli-
cations this holds for a
theory
of art education are obvious. Insofar as
aesthetic
speculation may regard
the
experience
of fine arts as
essentially
an
exchange
of
knowledge,
this would
certainly
be considered as con-
tributing
to a
theory
of fine arts as communicable
knowledge.
As a kind
of
knowledge,
even
special
or
unique,
it must be
supposed
as well that it
can be learned and
promoted by
educational means.
Art as
knowledge
in the above sense is
especially, perhaps peculiarly,
a modem innovation. In the traditional
view,
from the Latin ars and
the Greek
techne,
art was
any knowledge
that served as a skill in trans-
forming
material. Art was
craftsmanship
and learned as such. That the
experience
of art was a form of divine or
inspirational
madness was never
entirely
absent from classical aesthetics.
Inspired
madness was more a
disease of
poets
than artists and was not believed
by
the ancients to be
a
functioning,
valuable
knowledge.
The fine arts stood in sometimes
subservient,
sometimes
purely mystical
relation to
philosophy,
the
para-
gon
of true
knowledge.
St. Thomas did
speak
of art as
intellectual,
its
apprehension
the
response
of the "maxime
cognoscitivi"
-
sight
and
hearing.
But art was still
essentially "making,"
a
job,
in the classic
sense,
HENRY P. RALEIGH is Chairman
of
the Division
of
Art at the State
University
College
at New
Paltz,
New York. He has contributed to several
scholarly journals
including
the
Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His article "The Problem
of 'Expression'
in Art and Art Education" was
published
in the
April
1968 issue
of
this
Journal.
He is also a
Journal
consultant.
116 HENRY RALEIGH
to be well done and one
only loosely
identified with the absolute source
of
knowledge
-
Beauty.
There is little
change
in the
predominant
Greek
attitude until
very
much later
when,
in aesthetic
thought,
the fine arts
begin
to assume the
position
of a different kind of mental
operation,
vague
to be
sure,
but somehow
representing
a
mysterious,
universal
truth.
Baumgarten, following Leibnitz,
had
attempted
to frame a
logic
of the
imagination
and
separated
the mind into two levels. One of
these,
a
region
of confused
imagery,
was the seat of artistic
knowledge. Kant,
in
summarizing
and
structuring
these newer
views,
was
among
the first
to see art as autonomous and not
necessarily
reduced to an alien
prin-
ciple
or
jurisdiction.
He made of art a kind of
judgment,
a union
between the
imagination
and the
understanding.
Art is not
merely
ex-
periential
but the
bridge joining
theoretical and
practical knowledge.
This
judgment,
for
Kant,
was formal and
subjective,
not mediated
by
cognition
of an end or
any
reflective idea. In
itself,
the
experience
of art
may
serve in
judgment, yet
it was not
knowledge.
To
Kant,
as to those
who had
preceded him,
art was
really
the matter of a
metaphysical
idea,
and the
artist, unknowingly,
exercised a distinct and
largely
detached
quality
of mind called
Imagination.
With
Schopenhauer
the real
oppo-
nents,
at least in modem
terms,
are
given
their
first,
characteristic form:
art versus science.
Schopenhauer
divorced the
objects
of
cognition
from
the
blind,
irrational
apprehension
of an
underlying reality.
The route
to this felt
knowledge
was aesthetic vision. Art alone tore the
objects
of
the mind out of the
fleeting, momentary qualities
of
rational, pragmatic
scientific
thought. Unhappily,
art was more an
escape
from
knowledge
than a form of
knowledge
in itself and
Schopenhauer,
as
Plato,
Vico,
and
Baumgarten,
concluded that art was but an
opiate
and the
genius
ultimately
a madman. This
conclusion,
Romantic and traditional as it
is,
has not satisfied modern rationalists who have come to
prefer
the thesis
that art and science seek the same truths but in different
ways.
That
art and science are the same but different is
important
to the
theory
that the fine arts
represent
communicable
knowledge. During
the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries the artist had
enjoyed
a brief
peership
with the scientist and in some instances he was the
only experimental,
methodological
worker
deserving
of the term. The reasons for this were
partly
due to a
quest
for technical solutions to difficult and advanced
pictorial
and three-dimensional
problems
and
partly
a desire to elevate
the social status of the artist.
Frequently
the artist of that time was a
geometer, engineer,
and alchemist as well as a
superb
craftsman. But
science and mathematics soon
outstripped
the
comparatively
humble
ART AS COMMUNICABLE KNOWLEDGE 117
level of
technology
that
occupied
the
artist,
and the artist as scientist
died
ignobly.
The alternative is to
hypothesize
artistic
activity
as
another,
equivalently valid,
hopefully
verifiable
way
of
truth-seeking
and thus
avoid the
unequal comparison
between the
technological
funds of knowl-
edge
of artist and scientist. This has
apparently
found favor in the
present
time.
Out of Romantic aesthetic
conjecture
has
grown
a belief that art is an
activity
that reveals the
unity
and
harmony
of the universal structure.
Art is the assembler of
wholes;
science is the
disassembler,
the
analyzer
of
parts.
From a
meager
and rather
negative
Platonic view that art
informs,
that
is,
communicates
knowledge by imitation, through
Schiller
and
Schelling
and the
regard
for art as an
objective philosophy,
there
has
developed
a consistent theme of art as
knowledge.
The usual modes
of
thought
and
perception arrange
and
classify objects
as
parts
of enti-
ties, selecting
and
reordering
these as
parts
of
greater
entities--all
against
some ultimate
purpose.
Art suffers no restrictions of
utility
of
ends;
it deals with whole
appearances.
Science is concerned with the
coherent relations between
things,
art with the
thing
in itself. The
ques-
tions must
obviously
be
asked,
"What is the exact nature of this
special
knowledge?" and,
"What is it
knowledge
of?" An examination of but a
few of the moder
speculative
ventures into this
problem
of aesthetic
knowledge
will indicate the
general
directions to which such
questions
have led.
One of the first of these
examinations,
much influenced
by
the
psy-
chologism
of the
period,
was Conrad Fiedler's.
Writing
in the late
1800s,
Fiedler inherited Goethe's and Herder's interest in
visual,
Gestalt
"wholes." A work of art cannot be known or
judged
in the same
way
as a
product
of nature. In the Kantian
tradition,
artistic
judgment
is not
rational nor is it
conceptual knowing. Conceptual
abilities start with
appearance forming concepts
of what is
given:
"In abstract
cognition
we
possess
the means of
submitting appearances
to certain demands of
our
thinking faculties,
and thus
appropriating
them for ourselves
by
transforming
them into
conceptual
Gestalt-formation."'
There is another form of
cognition,
and for Fiedler the true and final
level is that of artistic
perception.
Scientific abstraction rushes
through
and
beyond
the world of
appearances.
Art reveals what is there: "It
should be understood that man can attain the mental
mastery
of the
Conrad
Fiedler,
On
Judging
Works
of
Visual
Art,
trans.
Henry
Schaefer-
Simmern and Fulmer Mood
(Berkeley: University
of California
Press, 1957),
p.
31.
118 HENRY RALEIGH
world not
only by
the creation of
concepts
but also
by
the creation of
visual
conceptions."2
Unlike the Romantic theorists before and the
Expressionists
after
him,
Fiedler's artist is neither an emotional
escapist
nor an
objectifier
of his
feelings.
As does
abstraction, feeling (sensation)
obstructs and inhibits
the artist's
perceptions:
".. . we must be able to
forget every
sensation
in order to further our
perceptual grasp
of the
object
for its own sake."3
His artist is a
strange
creature of science who neither thinks nor
feels,
only perceives dispassionately.
Detachment and disinterest have been
borrowed from the Kantian aesthetic
contemplation
and made a virtue
of the
personality. Just
how visual
conceptions
will
help give
a "mental
mastery"
is not
explained.
That is to
say,
Fiedler does not tell us what
or how artistic
perception cognizes. However,
we are told
something
of
what it is
supposed
to be.
Very
similar in his
regard
for the
perceptual
function and the con-
comitant distinctions of mental
processes
is
Hugo Miinsterberg:
science
is
connection,
art is isolation: "To isolate the
object
for the mind means
to make it
beautiful,
for it fills the mind without an idea of
anything
else."4
The value of art is to
separate
the
single experience
from a network of
multiple experiences. Drawing
from the
argument,
advanced
by
William
James
for
one,
that all mental
processes
result in an isolation of
singulars,
Miinsterberg
continues the
opposition
to scientific
thought by noting
that other
perceptual
activities lead to some action or to further visual
relationships.
The art
object
holds us in arrestment.
Why
should we be
held in this
suspension? Disappointingly,
it is not to
gain something
from
contemplation
freed of all
practicality
and
purpose
but
only
to
effect a
physiological
release of tensions and strains. The
"synaesthesis"
of
Ogden
and Richards is of the same
order, although purportedly being
an advance over earlier theories of the
reciprocal
relation of aesthetic
pleasure
and
physiological
functions.
Synaesthesis, according
to
Ogden
and
Richards,
is mental
harmony, impersonal
and disinterested.5
From semantic and
psychoanalytic
studies has come a distinct
attempt
to
explain
art as an
interpersonal knowledge.
These
arguments
require
the
casting
of art in a
special
role as the
symbolic
reconstructor of
the human
psyche.
As a
theory
of aesthetic
knowledge
such
interpreta-
2Ibid., p.
40.
3
Ibid., p.
29.
4Hugo Miinsterberg,
The
Principles of
Art Education
(New
York:
Prang,
1905), p.
20.
5
Cf.,
C. K.
Ogden,
I. A.
Richards, J. Wood,
The Foundation
of
Aesthetics
(London:
Allen and
Unwin, 1925).
tions have
interesting implications
as well as serious deficiencies. It
may
be
probably agreed
that
any activity
which resulted in information about
one's
self,
if more than intuitional
"guessing,"
could be considered
knowledge, especially
if this information could be acted
upon
in the
performing
of a
descriptive
service. A
theory
of
knowledge
is
expected
to
hold,
directly
or
indirectly,
that
knowledge qua knowledge
must be
useful in some
way, usually
in some
operable
sense.
Any psychoanalytic
assumption
about the human constitution
supposes
some
pathology
of
that constitution that
may
be treated
educationally.
In the
simplest
sense, unconscious and
unorganized knowledge
is
reorganized
in the con-
scious to
improve
the
efficiency
of the
organism,
to restore
proper
emotional functions.
Significantly, psychoanalytic
treatment of emotional
pathologies
is educational and not medical or
surgical.
Could
art,
there-
fore,
be considered educational and
involving
useful
knowledge?
This
is
unlikely
in current
psychoanalytic interpretations
of art.
Anton
Ehrenzweig
divides form or form
language
into articulate
perceptions.6
These have obvious
correspondence
to the assumed
psychic
structure of the conscious and the unconscious. The
production
of art
entails the articulation of inarticulate form
language,
the latter essen-
tially pangenital,
driven into the unconscious because of the
prohibitions
of civilized conventions. Aesthetic
articulation,
the form
quality
which
structurally
determines that a form is an art
form,
is like
any
convention,
the
acceptable
facade behind which
inarticulate,
secret form
language
lurks
(in
Ehrenzweig's words, "Gestalt-free").
While in a
pure therapy
transaction the raw material of the unconscious
may
be revealed as
operable information,
the
stylistic
articulations that characterize art for-
ever
prevent
the Gestalt-free
imagery
from
being
acted
upon
and thus
resolved. The
tug-of-war
between articulation of the inarticulate
always
wins in favor of
conventionalized, safe,
articulate structure and the artist
is
eternally
driven to
go
on to
yet
another
creation,
and his audience
to
yet
more "secret" communications without ever
knowing why.
Art
cannot hold out the relief of
knowledge
but
only
the frustration of
"almost"
knowledge.
Art is
self-perpetuating,
blind, hardly satisfactory
knowledge.
Other
psychoanalytic
references,
such as H. Westman's
return to a near
Neo-Platonism, deny
that "aesthetic
experience"
can be
regarded
as a
superior knowledge.7
After
Jung,
Westman views art as
the
symbolic
carrier of
archetypical
forms whose
meaning
is
beyond
objective grasp
and sensed
only existentially.
The
ontological implica-
6
Cf.,
The
Psycho-Analysis of
Artistic Vision and
Hearing (London: Routledge
and
Kegan Paul, 1953).
7
Cf.,
The
Springs of Creativity (New
York:
Atheneum, 1961).
120 HENRY RALEIGH
tions
very
often
approached
in
psychoanalytic
aesthetic
speculations
are
invariably
cut short
by
the
overbearing tendency
to consider the artist
and his audience as unconscious and
ignorant
victims of their
psychic
drives. Since such
psychic
drives are
fundamentally
the
same, analytic
"knowledge,"
whether
pangenital
or
mythical,
is
repetitively
the same.
Inversely,
if men were more
knowledgeable, they
would have no need
of art either to
produce
it or to see it.
Symbolic investigations
of art have
come, perhaps,
the
closest,
method-
ologically,
to a
theory
of art as
knowledge. They
have done
so,
un-
doubtedly
because it was
just
such an aesthetic
theory
that
symbolic
investigators sought
to
find, basing
their research on the fact that
other,
more familiar modes of
knowledge may
be understood as
systems
of
signs
and referents.8 More
interesting
as a
synthesis
of the
stronger
features of
both
semantically
derived and
psychoanalytic
theories of art have been
Sir Herbert Read's studies.
Read,
like other
theorists,
believes there is a
special, investigatory
distinction in artistic
processes
that is akin to sci-
ence
although
not similar in method. In The Forms
of Things
Unknown,
Read
adopts
from Charles Morris the term
"appraisive-valuative"
to
indicate the
type
of discourse which is
represented by
art. This is distin-
guished
from scientific discourse which is
"designative-informative."
To
demonstrate that art
obeys internal,
structural
relationships
similar
to
linguistic, grammatical structures,
even to note
functional,
material
limitations which
correspond
to the
orthogonal
restrictions of
language,
is to
prepare
the
ground
for the claim that art is
engaged
in the trans-
mission of some kind of information. The nature of that transmission
is,
of
course,
"appraisive-valuative."
But what is
appraised
and valuated
by
the fine arts? Not the
objects
of
reality,
for a
painted representation
is
only
a
designative sign
for the
thing
it
represents.
The
alternative, pur-
suing
the
theory
of art as
knowledge,
is to arrive at the
impasse
of the
symbolists:
the art
object appraises
and valuates
itself;
or
passes
on to a
metaphysical impasse
of unknowable
knowledge
that lies
beyond
the
mind and
beyond
the level of
"descriptive-informative" knowledge.
For
Read,
the
cognitive quality
of art is found in its treatment of
singularity:
"The
apprehension
of
singulars,
in
any complete sense,
is the artistic
process
itself."9
The notion of art as involved with this
special
attribute of the world
8
For a criticism of such semantic based theories see Max Reiser's "The Se-
mantic
Theory
of Art in
America," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art
Criticism,
Vol.
15,
No. 1
(September 1956).
9
Herbert
Read,
The Forms
of Things
Unknown
(New
York: Horizon
Press,
1960), p.
44.
seems to be a
consequence
of the
phenomenal, singular quality
of art
objects
themselves as well as the desire to
distinguish
a mode of
appre-
hension
by
contrast to
apparently pluralistic
and relational
apprehension.
It is not
plausible
to conceive of the art
object
as relational in sensate
experience.
The
assumption
here is
always
that art
knowledge
is like
scientific
knowledge
in that it
informs, interpretively,
of a cause and
effect world but in its own
way
of
expressing
the
singular.
The mis-
leading
and
probably self-defeating
result of this
assumption
is that scien-
tific discourse
does, by
the
very
nature of the
symbolic
devices
employed,
impart
an
equivalent
structural
sequence
in the events or series it chooses
to describe. The
process
of artistic
activity may
well be similar but the
product,
since a
physical object,
is not
symbolic
of a serial
activity.
It is
always
a
singular
and cannot be viewed
any
other
way.10
The
singular
symbol
of a
propositional
formulation is
arbitrary
and like a
painted
representation, or,
more
abstractly,
a
painted geometric shape, may
or
may
not refer to
something
in
reality
but does not evaluate or
appraise,
or in
any
manner
provide
information about its referent. The
significance
of the
singular symbol,
the fact of its
being apprehended
as
knowledge
about
something,
is relative to the
possibility
of verification of the
pro-
position
in
reality.
The art
object,
as a
singular symbol,
cannot at all be
verified in
reality
in order to
gain
reifiable
knowledge.
This is no more
possible
than to do the same for the
symbol
"one" or "x." The
way
out
of the dilemma for the
symbolic theorist,
if he wishes to avoid an ate-
ological absolute,
is to internalize
knowledge, referring
it back to some-
thing
within the
participant
in the aesthetic
experience.
The referral
activates or reconstructs some
knowledge already present.
Read
accepts
the
Jungian theory
of
psychologically
continuous
mythic
materials. In
this
respect
artistic
knowledge
is
merely
an endless
reminiscing
of the
primordial past
in
psychic symbols
which alter their forms but never
their content.
Read, however,
would have the best of two
possibilities.
He finds a vital difference between the
repetitive psychic symbol
and the
pure
aesthetic
symbol
which is concerned
only
with the sensations
pro-
duced
by
the art
object.
"It
(the
aesthetic
object)
is a
perceptual
mode
that excludes all details of accident and environment not intrinsic to the
thing
itself.""'
As
knowledge,
the aesthetic
symbol
is
caught again
in its own
trap
of
informing
the observer that it is there and no more
-
a
symbol
of
10
The
cinema,
on the other
hand,
suffers no such
disadvantage
and the nature
of its
communicability
is much closer to that of literature.
1 Read, op. cit., p.
80.
122 HENRY RALEIGH
itself. Both Cassirer and Whitehead have
argued
for art
symbols
as a
type
of intuitive
knowledge, claiming
that such
special
information is
one of the
ways
of
achieving
an
objective
view of
reality.
Cassirer wished
to
give
an
autonomy
to art
by separating
the
symbolic
functions of
art,
language,
and science. He considered art as a
language
of forms of
feelings,
not of
concepts.
"Science
gives
us order in
thoughts; morality
gives
us order in
actions;
art
gives
us order in the
apprehensions
of
visible,
tangible,
and audible
appearances.1'l2
We would assume that such
apprehension
is
special
insofar as it
reveals
something
of
objective reality,
but in Cassirer's view this is not
exactly
so: ". .. art
gives
us a new kind of truth- a truth not of em-
pirical things
but of
pure
forms."13 We are led back to classical theories
which
sought
the sources of
knowledge
in
categories
of absolute
beauty
or absolute forms that
lay behind,
as
logical necessity,
and
beyond
the
knowledge
of
objective reality.
The
presence
of a visual art
object
as
totally given
to immediate
apprehension
of the senses is troublesome to account for in
any specu-
lation
concerning
the
knowledge, truth,
or
meaning
of the arts. The
forms of literature
may very well,
as
John Hospers
has
remarked,
con-
tain statements about the world
which,
as
information, may
or
may
not
be relevant to it as art. From a
novel,
for
example, Hospers
believes we
may
learn truths about human nature not as
directly presented
but in-
directly, simply by
virtue of its
being
true to human
experience: "Appre-
ciation of art
gives
us new
'ways
of
seeing'
but no
knowledge,
no
facts,
no
propositions;
so also with music and much
literature, especially
poetry."14
Not all would exclude
poetry
from the realm of
cognitive meaning.
Bertram
Jessup15 requires
as a test of
cognitive meaning only repeat-
ability
of the described
experience,
whether of a scientific
report
or of a
poetic
statement. This cannot be claimed for the visual
object,
for there
is
nothing
to which it
may
be
compared
and thus tested for
repeatability
unless it be a matter of further visual
cognitions. Obviously
a
painting
does not teach us to "see in new
ways."
We
may
see
something
else or
something
different. There is no evidence that art teaches us to see
differently, although
Heinrich Wolfflin had
suggested
an evolution in
12
Ernst
Cassirer,
An
Essay
on Man
(New
Haven: Yale
University Press,
1944), p.
168.
"
Ibid., p.
164.
14John Hospers, Meaning
and Truth in the Arts
(Chapel
Hill:
University
of
North Carolina
Press, 1946), p.
206.
15 Bertram
Jessup,
"On Fictional
Expressions
of
Cognitive Meaning," Journal
of
Aesthetics and Art
Criticism,
Vol.
23,
No. 4
(Summer 1965).
visual
perception.
We
suppose,
both
practically
and for
purposes
of
critical
operations,
that all viewers of the art
object
see it in
exactly
the
same
way.
If art could
promote changes
in the
perception
of
reality
this
would indeed be considered a contribution to
knowledge. Still,
we know
that an
Impressionist painting
of a bowl of flowers is different from an
Expressionist
treatment of the same
subject
and both in turn are
quite
different from the real bowl of flowers that
may
have served as
inspira-
tion for the
paintings.
We
know,
as
well,
that the
painters
saw the
original
bowl of flowers
just
as we did -
only
their
presented
forms are
different. It is the
stability
of
perception
that
handily
allows us to dis-
tinguish
the
paintings
from one another and from the
object
of
reality.
There is
yet
another
approach
to the view that visual art communi-
cates
knowledge.
This view
requires
a
very rudimentary
definition of
knowledge: knowledge
is
literally any
resultant of the action "to know"
and is often
equivalently
identified to it. Such theories of art as com-
municable
knowledge
sustain themselves on tenuous
grounds
since
they
would tend to include all
effectory
situations or stand as almost
purely
tautological.
These views
might
be subsumed under
general expressionist
theories of art but are different in the
respect
that
they attempt
to frame
expression
or
feeling
as a
type
of
knowledge
or some form of com-
municable
meaning. John Hospers,
for
example, accepts
a most inclusive
definition of
"meaning"
in art: ".. . a work of art means to us whatever
effects
(not necessarily emotions)
it evokes in
us;
a work which has no
effect on us means
nothing
to
us,
and whatever effect it does evoke con-
stitutes its
meaning
for us."'6
This would not be
helpful
as a
suggestion
of an aesthetic
theory
of
knowledge
for we must ask if no effect is not as
significant
a
meaning
as a
positive
effect. It would be
true, too,
that to
recognize
an
object
as an
object
intended to
produce
an
effect, although
no further addi-
tional effect
may
be
reported, is, nevertheless,
an effect deducible as
meaning. However, Hospers
is not concerned with
formulating
a
theory
of aesthetic
knowledge
for he notes that even the statements made of the
world
by
literature are irrelevant as information. The alternative to this
is to claim for
art,
not informational
communication,
but a
special
and
exclusive function of emotional communication. Under certain assumed
conditions
"objectified-feelings" might
be construed as
knowledge,
em-
ploying
a definition of
knowledge
in common
usage:
information of a
kind that can lead to
further, unspecified action;
that is
susceptible
to
methodological treatment;
that is communicable as
understanding.
"6
Hospers, op.
cit., p.
95.
124 HENRY RALEIGH
Arguments
of this nature draw in
part
from Kant's
theory
of
knowledge,
assigning
to the mind some active
principle
which exercises a
power
held to be a
necessary
condition for the
knowledge
of
objects
or the self.
In Art and
Scientific
Thought,
Martin
Johnson compares
both art and
science relative to their roles of
communicating agreed
to
patterns
or
structures: "... each
attempting
to communicate mental
images through
patterns
and structures and
forms,
in the
qualitative
domain of mea-
surement
respectively."17
In the face of a
persistent
belief that art
objects
are
independent
and
unique
entities it is difficult to
speak
of
"agreed
to
patterns
and struc-
tures" in the same
way
that one
may speak
of them in science. While
it cannot be denied that art
objects
do have
patterns
and structures as
do all
entities,
their existence as art
objects depends
not on
any
relational
dependence
on other structural
systems (other objects),
but on a total
distinction from all other structures and
patterns.
The criterion of
reasonable
agreement
for scientific entities is well known and this alone
is sufficient to diminish the value of such a
comparison
to the arts.
Straddling
the
positions
of art as a different mode of
perceptual
reality
and as
objectified
emotion is the recent
suggestion
advanced
by
Harry
S.
Broudy. Underscoring
the
importance
of the
problem
of art
as
knowledge
and
recognizing
the inherent difficulties in this
stance,
Broudy
does not
entirely
abandon the belief that art must serve some
sort of
cognitive
function: ". . . it is
exceedingly
hard to construe works
of art as statements of
meaning.
But as
objects
of
perception they
can
and often do
express
a
meaning by making
an
image
of some
feeling
or
ideas or some combination of them."'8
Broudy argues
that while such
expressed meanings
are not
assertions,
they
are "clues" from which assertive inferences
may
be made. The
difficulty
here is
only delayed.
A search for inferred assertions is no more
clear or accessible than a search for assertions of
meaning immediately
given.
Yet more difficult is the
possibility,
since inferences are
by clues,
of
gross misinterpretation
and an inference of
"no-meaning"
is as defen-
sible as of
"some-feeling"
or "some-idea."
Most
thorough
in its search for
adequate grounds
on which to base
an aesthetic
theory
of
objectified feeling
is the thesis of Milton C. Nahm.
Nahm recasts the Kantian
theory
in moder behavioral terms: "The
17
Martin
Johnson,
Art and
Scientific Thought (New
York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1949), p.
24.
18 "The Structure of
Knowledge
in the
Arts,"
in R. A. Smith
(ed.),
Aesthetics
and Criticism in Art Education
(Chicago:
Rand
McNally, 1966).
behavior called
'feeling'
is
knowledge
of the nature of the stimulus."'9
Space permits only
an outline of certain salient features of Nahm's
theory.
The artist
reproduces
his
feelings
in the
object, although
he need
not refer
directly
to the
specific
stimulus and he is most
likely
uncon-
scious of the referent. The
generic
source of these
feeling-symbols
is the
artist's
biological
and cultural
past.
In its
biological, primitive origins
the human mind held a structural
potential,
an emotional
predisposition
to react to its environment in a
way
most
probably
suited to insure its
survival. This assumed nervous mechanism is not learned nor is it con-
trolled
by
the individual. Before a
stimulus,
it serves to
produce,
rather
to
reproduce,
the best
biologically appropriate feeling response
out of all
other
possibilities
of
response. Imagination
is thus "the
organism's
effec-
tive
presentation
to itself of a stimulus."20
Moreover,
all man-made
symbols
are
recognitive
and "In all
men,
'reproductive
imagination'
operates
to
permit recognition
of the
presented
stimuli for
feeling."21
Such
symbols
are the
perceptual recognition
of an earlier
knowledge
of
morality, science,
ethics
-
all of the differentiated
feeling responses,
externalized as concrete
expressions
of man:
By
means of
art,
the maker actualizes the
symbols
in sensuous media. Those
who
experience
the art actualize in their own
experience
the
predisposition
to action
which,
in its
primitive form,
is the mechanical reaction of
organisms
behaving
with some
appropriateness
to
particular
features of their en-
vironment.22
This
position
removes the difficulties encountered in other
symbolist
theories;
the art
object appraises
itself. For
Nahm,
the art
object
reappraises
and revaluates man himself and leads him to
unspecified
ends of action. Nahm's
psychoanalytic implications
are evident and
therein lies a familiar weakness. The aesthetic
experience
is less a form
of
self-knowledge
than
quite literally
a neurotic
response. Despite
Nahm's claim that aesthetic
experience
is characterized
by
a sense of
exaltation and
courage
that furthers
action,
his
description
of the
sensation bears the
qualities
of a
pure neurosis,
uncontrolled and
trig-
gered by
stimulus cues of
varying strengths.
The
argument
would not
lose in
plausibility by considering
the aesthetic effect as a neurotic
reaction to situations
designed
for such an end.
However,
neurotic be-
havior cannot be ranked as a kind of
knowledge,
that
is,
as rational
19
Milton C.
Nahm,
Aesthetic
Experience
and Its
Presuppositions (New
York:
Harper, 1946), p.
355.
20
Ibid., p.
357.
21
Ibid., p.
366.
2
Ibid., p.
368.
126 HENRY RALEIGH
behavioral. While a
neurosis,
as a survival
device, may
be
advantageous
to the
organism,
the
disadvantage
is the
very inability
to know and con-
trol the
response.
The
failure,
in all
events,
to
identify
the function and
purpose
of
further, unspecified
and nonaesthetic actions restricts Nahm's
behavioral
assumption
from
leading
to a
theory
of aesthetic
knowledge.
Still,
Nahm's thesis is not
dependent
on this. We must examine the
pos-
sibility
of the art
object recalling knowledge,
not
necessarily leading
to
further
action,
even
unspecified action,
as increments of information.
Through
a reinstatement of
precedent images along subsequent ones,
"feeling
reinstates the
past
of the race or of the culture."23 The artist
is
really
a re-creator of the "reinstated
image."
The
images
take the
material form of a
symbol
of emotional recall. It is inconceivable to
suppose
that an
object,
as a
painting,
could
embody
as
complex
a ner-
vous reaction as emotions without the introduction of
culturally agreed
to
symbols.
But these
symbols
have
changed notoriously
over the
past
and
even
culturally approved
manifestations of neurotic reactions
vary
rad-
ically
from culture to culture and time to time. It is true as well that
symbolically
reinstated
knowledge
of
feeling-stimulus
cannot account
for
why
we
distinguish,
as a matter of
course,
a
range
of
inferiority
and
superiority among
art
objects.
We
perform
such
judgments among
objects presenting exactly
the same
symbolic
referent. Nor can it be
argued
that the
judgment
involves various levels of
craftsmanship,
for a
conditioned
response,
most
particularly
a neurotic
one, requires only
the
symbolic
cue. The material
qualities
of
representation
are of little
or no
consequence.
Extreme neurotic
response
and certain other condi-
tioned reflex actions
operate
in the
presence
of the most
impoverished
stimulus.
Undeniably,
the fine arts are
productive
of
emotions, although they
are not
exclusively
a vehicle for
producing
emotions. There is no evi-
dence that
emotions,
no matter how
defined, may
be considered knowl-
edge
of or about
something.
The
organism's expression
of emotion in the
face of an event or situation or
object
can
say
no more than
reporting
the sensations of
having feelings.
The
feelings may, through
the
appli-
cation of some
non-feeling knowledge
or
methodology, psychological,
biological, philosophical,
be examined as
if they
were a
knowledge
unknown to the one
experiencing
the
feelings. Still,
it cannot be stated
that
knowledge
is a resultant of aesthetic
experience.
At
best,
it
may
be
said that the one
undergoing
aesthetic
experience
has a
"feeling"
of
knowledge
but no
knowledge
either of itself or the outside world or
any
23
Ibid., p.
365.
conditions of the outside world. All such
attempts
lead
ultimately
to the
conclusion that references which the usual
symbols
of
knowledge
must
have are unknown. It
may
therefore be
conjectured
if the
question
of the
nature of the
knowledge represented by
the fine arts
may
be
meaning-
fully
asked.
Further,
it seems reasonable to
query
the
relationship
of the
development
of theories of aesthetic
knowledge
to the
stylistic develop-
ment of the fine arts. It
is, perhaps,
not accidental that theories of
aesthetic
knowledge
become more
pointed
in their
premise
that art is
a kind of communicable
knowledge
as the
styles
of the fine arts reach
higher
levels of abstraction
away
from
reality.
That
is,
abstract and non-
objective
forms take on more the
appearance
of all
symbol systems
whose
forms are
arbitrarily assigned.
In the latter case the
meaning,
that
is,
the referents of the
symbols,
are
agreed
to. In fine
art,
such forms are
called
"creatively-unique"
and there is no
agreement
as to their referents.

Art As Communicable Knowledge

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Art As Communicable Knowledge

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Art as Communicable Knowledge

Author(s): Henry P. Raleigh

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