Robert E. Wood - Nature, Artforms, and The World Around Us - An Introduction To The Regions of Aesthetic Experience-Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

N AT U R E ,
ARTFORMS,
AND THE
WORLD
AROUND US
An Introduction to
the Regions of
Aesthetic Experience
ROBERT E. WOOD
Nature, Artforms, and the World Around Us
Robert E. Wood
Nature, Artforms, and

the World Around Us
An Introduction to the Regions of Aesthetic
Experience
Robert E. Wood
Institute of Philosophic Studies
University of Dallas
Irving, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-57089-1 ISBN 978-3-319-57090-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7
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To all my students,
past, present, and to come.
Preface
The philosopher has his eyes fixed on the whole…and the whole character
of each within the Whole.
Plato, Theaetetus
The True is the Whole.

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
This work is a sequel to Placing Aesthetics,1 which “placed” aesthet-

ics, or reflection on the phenomena of Art and Nature which we have
come to call “aesthetic,” in a threefold manner. It placed it within the
structures of the field of experience by locating it in relation to “the
heart” producing and responding to “charged presences.” It placed it in
the history of selected high points of philosophic reflection from Plato
to Heidegger. Finally, it placed it within the overall conceptual scheme
of each thinker. It began with a sketch of the phenomenological field for
the arts.2
The current work develops in the direction indicated in that sketch. It
aims at a sense of aesthetic regionality, the entire aesthetic region with the
affinities and differences the region of each art form shows. Each of the
1Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1999) (henceforth PA).

2See the chart in the Introduction to the current work.
vii
viii Preface
art forms appears in the niches of human life determined by three

parameters—sensory base, spatio-temporal relations, and language—: as
spatial arts appearing to seeing, temporal arts appearing to hearing, spa-
tio-temporal arts to seeing and hearing, with linguistic arts operating in
differing media.3
This text was developed in a course based on Placing Aesthetics which
provided the context for reading classic philosophical texts on matters
aesthetic.4 The current text had its origin in the treatment of a particular
art form at the end of each course. This eventually enabled me to bring
them together into the current text which now plays counterpart to my
treatment of the differing philosophers from Plato to Heidegger. It is
intended for upper-level courses on art and aesthetics. But the style of
writing I have used should appeal also to educated individuals interested
in matters aesthetic.
Following Plato’s claim that the philosopher always has his eyes fixed on
the Whole and the whole nature of each kind within the Whole, and fol-
lowing the direction Hegel gave to the system of the arts, the current work
applies a descriptive method to delimit the spaces—the “regional ontolo-
gies,” to employ Husserl’s term—within which each of the several major
art forms make their appearance. In a sense I have tried to do too much.
But in the contemporary climate of opinion, the attempt is necessary to get
and keep in mind the entire regionality of the aesthetic, however sketch-
ily. Philosophical discussions tend either to go into the ethereal or descend
to complex particulars without first securing a comprehensive view of the
eidetic features of each region within which discussion—and in this case,
discussion of the arts—takes place. In the current situation, the tendency is
to focus on particular aspects of a given art form or to deconstruct whatever
holistic claims have been made. The result is the atrophy of any sense of the
Whole. This work is directed at the first steps in regaining such a sense.
One has to go back to the unglamorous task of a careful preliminary
description of the humble features of each art form to make sure one has
identified all the relevant features of the space within which it appears.5
3We will discuss this further in our Introduction.

4Philosophies of Art and Beauty, edited by A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhn (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976) provides a large segment of text from each thinker.
5In “Phenomenology of the Mailbox,” I carry out that unglamorous task in showing
the intelligible strands present in the field of our “operative intentionality.” See Philosophy
Today, Summer, 2003.
Preface ix
The reader is asked to attend carefully to these features to make sure

the entire round has been covered and, in the process, practice getting a
sense of the whole region in each case within the encompassing regional-
ity of the aesthetic. I have also given a historical perspective on each art
form by assimilating remarks of leading artists as well as writers on art,
philosophical and art-historical, in the history of the West. This text gives
experiential grounding that should lead back to the thinkers introduced
in Placing Aesthetics to establish an ongoing dialogue.
The current book is also connected with Placing Aesthetics insofar as
the thinkers involved in the latter hover over the text as dialogical part-
ners. Plato’s Beauty Itself and its erotic correlate, Hegel’s system of the
arts, Dewey’s rootedness in nature, Heidegger’s lived relation to the
Whole playing in tandem with rootedness in the Earth,6 and Buber’s dia-
logic existence are the central figures.7
In each of the art forms we can see how different thinkers come at
the same phenomena and are able to enrich our approaches to them. As
Nietzsche advised, it is necessary to have 1000 eyes to do justice to what
is the case. The present work is consequently not a treatise but a dia-
logue. However, dialogue presupposes an ontological structure on the
part of each partner and on the part of the regions one will be dealing
with in the art forms to be investigated. Hence, as starting points, we
will lay out the eidetic structures involved: the fundamental character of
the human being and the regional ontologies of the various art forms.
Originally we followed Hegel’s scheme of the classic art forms. But,
taking up the recent turn back to an aesthetics of Nature, we have
inserted a chapter on Nature and on Landscaping before the treatment
of the classic art forms.8 Film is also added to the list as the contem-
porary Gesamtkunst. Further, following the more recent turn to the
6For a comparison of Dewey and Heidegger that yields remarkable overlap on several
crucial themes, see my “Aesthetics: The Complementarity of, and Difference between
Dewey and Heidegger,” John Dewey, D. Anderson and J. McDermott eds, Special Issue of
the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 2. Spring, 2013.
7I did not include Martin Buber in Placing Aesthetics, but I did produce my first book
on his thought and he has remained in the background of my thought: Martin Buber’s
Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969).
8See for example the collected essays in Allen Carlson and Arnold Berneat eds, The
Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004) (henceforth ANE)

and Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott eds, Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From
Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) (henceforth NAE).
x Preface
aesthetics of everyday life, a final chapter pays attention also to that

turn.9 We add as an Appendix Kierkegaard’s presentation of the aesthetic
life to situate the aesthetic project within the larger framework of human
life.
Three of these discussions have already appeared in print and we
wish to acknowledge the sources. The architecture chapter appeared
as “Architecture: The Confluence of Art, Technology, Politics, and
Nature,” in On Technology, Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association, 1995/1996. The chapter on film appeared
in a less developed form as “Toward an Ontology of Film,” in Film-
Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 24 (August, 2001). The chapter on landscap-
ing appeared as “Martin Heidegger and Environmental Aesthetics:
Towards a Philosophy of Domestic Landscaping” in Current Studies in
Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, vol 1, no. 1 (Winter, 2001) (online
journal).
Irving, USA Robert E. Wood

Spring 2017
References
Carlson, Allen and Arnold Berneat eds. 2004. The Aesthetics of Natural
Environments. Toronto: Broadview Press.
Carlson, Allen and Sheila Lintott, eds. 2008. Nature, Aesthetics, and
Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Hofstadter, Albert, and Richard Kuhn. 1976. Philosophies of Art and Beauty.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Light, Andrew and Jonathan Smith eds. 2005. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Wood, Robert E. 2013. Aesthetics: The Complementarity of, and Difference
Between Dewey and Heidegger. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87
(2): 245–66.
———. Martin Buber’s Ontology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1969.
9See Andrew Light and Jonathan Smith eds, The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005) (henceforth AEL).

Preface xi
———. Phenomenology of the Mailbox. Philosophy Today, Summer, 147–59,

2003.
———. 1999 Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition. Athens:
Ohio University Press.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Aesthetics of Nature 11
3 Domestic Landscaping 35
4 Architecture: The Confluence of Art, Technology,

Politic, and Nature 53
5 On Sculpture 75
6 On Painting 95
7 On Music 129
8 On Literature 163
9 On Film 201
10 The Aesthetics of Everyday Life 229
xiii
xiv Contents
Epilogue: Kierkegaard on the Aesthetic Life 247
Bibliography 267
Author Index 269
Subject Index 275

List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 David Wood, Swirling waters 12

Fig. 2.2 Andy Goldsworthy, Rowan leaves with hole. Japanese maple
leaves stitched together to make a floating chain the next day
it became a hole supported underneath by a woven briar ring
Ouchiyama-Mura, Japan, 21–22 November 1987 31
Fig. 3.1 Zen Garden, Ryoan-Ji, Kyoto 43
Fig. 3.2 Mark Wood, Fishing by moss boulders and double waterfall 44
Fig. 3.3 Mark Wood, Pathways 46
Fig. 4.1 Chartres Cathedral 55
Fig. 4.2 Joseph Korom‚ First Star Bank, Milwaukee 58
Fig. 5.1 Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, Internal and External Forms 76
Fig. 5.2 Robert L. Wood, Crossing 85
Fig. 5.3 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker 89
Fig. 5.4 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker over The Gates of Hell 90
Fig. 5.5 Torso of Apollo 92
Fig. 6.1 Ma Yuan (1160–1225), Facing the Moon 96
Fig. 6.2 Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Richard Sheridan 112
Fig. 6.3 Vincent van Gogh, Poplars at St. Rémy 115
Fig. 6.4 Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry 117
Fig. 6.5 Paul Klee, Sunset 118
Fig. 6.6 Piet Mondrian, Farm at Duivendrecht 120
Fig. 6.7 Piet Mondrian, Apple Tree 1909 121
Fig. 6.8 Piet Mondrian, Composition 1916 122
Fig. 6.9 Piet Mondrian,Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue 1940 123
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig.  7.1 Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead 159

Fig.  8.1 Diane Stephens, To a Butterfly 193
Fig.  9.1 Babette’s Feast 202
Fig. 10.1 James Carrière, Japanese Tea Ceremony Utensils 230
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The basic claim of my previous work is that there is a “human nature,”

the enduring structure of which compels the creation of culture which
is essentially plural and thus historical. The grounds for this lie in the
magnetically bipolar character of that nature.1 We are most obviously
organisms which are public objects of observation, but we also each
experience ourselves privately “from within” in terms of our own “lived
bodies” and our pre-reflectively conscious self-relation. Our organ-
isms as organ-systems not only process and organ-ize materials drawn
from the environment, they also create and sustain organs for sensory
experience. Such experience occurs out of a single center of awareness
underpinned by a psycho-neural system which spontaneously retains
and synthesizes what is presented through the various sense organs.
Such synthesis awakens appetite and the perceiving subject is thereby
magnetized by objects appearing “outside,” furnishing opportunities
and threats to the well-being of organic existence, the whole point of
sensory experience for an animal nature. In fact, our original access to
things is through the apprehension of functioning wholes in relation to
our needs, on account of which perception is, from the very beginning,
value-laden.
1 For a more detailed exposition, see the Introduction to my Placing Aesthetics (Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 1999).
© The Author(s) 2017 1

R.E. Wood, Nature, Artforms, and the World Around Us,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_1
2 R.E. Wood
The organic center of “information processing” is the brain. But it is

crucial to underscore that the display of the objects does not take place
in the brain—in spite of the claims of scientists and their popularizers to
the contrary—but rather between the awareness arising out of the organ-
ism-directing brain and the objects “outside” the observing-desiring
organism in the environment. Awareness is focused precisely outside
as a primal datum that grounds both everyday awareness and scientific
inquiry.2 The perceptual synthesis itself functions in terms of the desires
that the attractive or repelling objects evoke. Thus the initial sensory
“showing” of objects in the environment is not theoretical but practical
and not biologically affect neutral but affect laden.3 This sensory level
furnishes but one pole—and that the most obvious—of the bipolar struc-
ture of humanness. It is the field wherein the arts arise.
The other pole—not at all obvious—is empty reference to the total-
ity. Beyond the visual horizon, there is the mental horizon within which
the sensory object appears. It involves a peculiar relation to absolutely
everything. As empty, this relation provokes the most fundamental ques-
tion, the question that follows from the basic structure of humanness:
what is the place of humans in the whole scheme of things? And, what
is the whole scheme of things? Growing up, each of us at first encoun-
ters such questions only indirectly in terms of the answers already given
to it by the religious or philosophic tradition in which we have been
raised. Religious proclamation provides a putative answer to the ques-
tions; philosophy in its speculative form attempts to ground its answers
in evidence.
The ultimate basis for the question lies in the notion of Being. Being
is a notion that includes everything in its scope: it covers the totality of
what is. What anything we encounter is is not only what the immedi-
ate evidence displays of it, but everything that further investigation will
uncover, and even, possibly, what empirical investigation will never be
able to uncover. Yet whatever we have evidence of is linked through the
notion of Being to whatever we do not yet or cannot have evidence of.
2 See my “What Is Seeing? A Phenomenological Approach to Neuro-Psychology,”
Science, Reason, and Religion, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical

Association, vol. 85 (2011), 121–34.
3 Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Value, M. Frings trans.
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 139.

1 INTRODUCTION 3
Even the question of a possible Infinite Being is included within the

scope of the notion of Being. To begin with, we have evidence of what
our senses reveal, along with our awareness itself; together with that,
everything else is contained within the notion of Being as an encompass-
ing darkness within the “island of light” that is the sense world. That
light is filtered off from the fullness of things encountered, initially in
view of the service of the sensory field to biological need. Our refer-
ence to the totality beyond the sensory field is initially empty. But the
notion of Being places us at a certain “interior distance” from our sen-
sory experience, grounding two necessities of our nature: understanding
and choice.4
As to the first, directed toward the Whole, we are condemned to
attempt an understanding of our experience in terms of the absolute
totality of things. Understanding consists in relating a given individual
to like individuals, and in relating that likeness to other related like-
nesses. At the most rudimentary level, we understand the color of the
letters on this page as black. What we see are individual letters present to
our capacity to see linked together under the general heading of “black.”
The latter, in turn, is linked to white, red, and so on, under the more
generic heading of “color,” which, unlike the concepts or white and red,
etc., has no sensory correlate. Color, in turn, is understood in terms of
its relation to other features gathered together in the notion of “sensory
features” which, along with peculiarities of behavior and the like, is an
attribute, a dependent aspect of bodies. All of this falls within the over-
arching notion of Being as its articulation: this is black, etc.
But such focal objects are correlated with the mental acts that attend
to them. The sensory features are correlated with sensory acts which
themselves are not sensory objects and which are the flip side of sensory
desires. We do not see seeing or sensory desires: both the seeing and the
desiring are directed towards individual sensory objects which are the
focus of attention, although we are immediately, unreflectively aware that
we see and desire those things. Self-presence is ingredient in awareness
of what is other—in fact, self-presence is the basis for the manifestation
4 See Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation,” The Knowledge of Man, M. Friedman ed.
and trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 59–71.

4 R.E. Wood
of what is other than that self-presence. Such self-presence is a matter of

feeling which is modulated in terms of desire, pleasure, and pain.
The general notions in terms of which we understand the sen-
sory are correlated with acts that we have come to call “intellectual.”
Understanding involves seeing the individual as an instance of a universal
type which can be unpacked in terms of a set of interrelated types, as in
the descriptive hierarchy involved in the recognition of color presented
above. Sensory acts reveal actual individual aspects of actual individual
things; intellectual acts reveal universal aspects that are potentially appli-
cable to an indefinite number of particular instances. Intellectual acts,
focused through sensory experience, fill in the initially empty space of
meaning between the full actuality of the sensory field and the initially
empty totality. As we advance in understanding the correlation between
our capacities and the things revealed through these capacities, we widen
our opportunities for choice. Choice, in turn, has the same grounding as
intellection.
Placed at an absolute distance from our sensory experience by refer-
ence to the Whole, we are condemned to choose among the possibili-
ties revealed through our understanding because we are always referred
beyond them and thus given over to ourselves. There are several limita-
tions here: the narrowness or even falsity of our understanding, the limi-
tation of our individual capacities to act out what we choose, and our
limited understanding of the motivational structure which leads us to
choose one way rather than another. The latter can be progressively puri-
fied by giving ourselves over unrestrictedly to the twin desires to know
what is the case and to respond to the obligatory, that is, to commit our-
selves to the True and the Good.
Not only does each of us settle into regular ways of understanding
and choosing, we also pass on to others these regularities that coalesce
into a tradition, as we ourselves have been shaped by the regularities of
others. Human nature, by reason of its peculiar bipolar structure, is cul-
ture-creating and culture-sustaining. We are animals shaped by tradition
and we, in turn, shape tradition; but in any case, we are inseparable from
it. We are by nature what Aristotle called zoion politikon, the being that
lives in the polis, that is, that lives out of the sedimented result of the
choices and understandings of those long dead in the institutional forms
within which we carry on our lives.
This tradition-bound character is most evident at the level of that
most fundamental of institutions, language. We do not give ourselves
1 INTRODUCTION 5
language but enter into the language provided by others. Language

sets us into a space of common meanings; it brings us out of the pri-
vacy of our desires and experiences; it shapes our desires and experiences
communally. Language is the privileged locus of the interplay between
private and public. It articulates our common practices within the over-
arching view of the Whole traditionally provided by religion. It trans-
forms the sensory into a sign of the universal. Thought thus requires a
double imbedding: in a sensory linguistic vehicle and in an antecedent
tradition.
So, by nature we are a genetically stamped reference to totality. By
that reference we are granted what we have come to call “intellect” and
“will.” The possibilities afforded by our bipolar structure are focused
in terms of the further stamping provided by culture, both in terms of
upbringing and in terms of the continuing impact of the cultural sur-
round. But with the awakening of reflective intelligence, each of us
has come to make our own choices and establish our own routines as
variations on the genetic and cultural themes. So we have a three-fold
sedimentation—genetic, cultural, and personal-historical—which con-
stitutes for each one of us our current “Me.” This Me provides the
set of concrete possibilities arising out of our past from which “I” at
any given moment have to choose. “I” as reference to totality am by
nature—insofar as I am capable of reflective assessment—always prised
loose and set at a reflective distance, not only from what is presented
outside me, but also from Me. But I am ever spontaneously inclined
to choose along the lines that have settled into the center of Me, into
what a long tradition has called the heart.5 It sets up a kind of magnetic
field of attractions and repulsions peculiar to each individual. It pro-
vides the default mode for our spontaneous lines of action. Correlate
to the heart are “significant presences,” providing spontaneous solicita-
tions by persons, situations, and practices “dear to my heart” that step
out of the indifference of a merely theoretical presentation and take
hold of me.
I have spoken of human structure as bipolar. I am quite aware of the
ordinary understanding of the term “bipolar”: it describes a dysfunctional
5 See my Introduction and the work of Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology of Feeling: An
Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart, R. Wood, trans. Foreword to this translation is by
Paul Ricoeur (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1977).
6 R.E. Wood
mental condition of alternating swings between exaltation and depression.

It is this meaning that I want to preserve as a kind of subtext. Our nature
is constructed around a biological pole and an ontological pole, and it is
precisely the tensive character of this structure that grounds the under-
lying Angst brought to the fore by Heidegger and by Augustine in his
notion of “the restless heart.” Orientation toward the Whole of what
is, based upon the all-encompassing but initially empty notion of Being,
blows the lid off of the security of the animal directed by its appetites.
We are condemned to choose how to relate to our appetitive solicitations
and how to create a meaningful whole out of potential appetitive chaos
while coming to terms with how we stand in relation to our background
orientation to the Whole. As Nietzsche would have it, there is the basic
imperative: “Condemn the chaos that is within to take on form.”6
My basic contention concerning aesthetics is that the heart is the
locus of aesthetic experience. It is always colored by the way I under-
stand the character of the Totality insofar as that understanding has
percolated down into my heart. Works of art articulate the desires of
the heart, address the heart by establishing charged presences appear-
ing within the sensory field, but setting them within the meaningful-
ness of the Whole. Works and experiences are “deep” insofar as they
make explicit our belonging to the Whole, relatively superficial insofar
as they ignore that and appeal to the lower aspects of human experi-
ence, as in kitsch and, at the bottom, in pornography. In some cases
the art form may issue a demand, as Rilke claimed: “You must change
your life.”7 Besides aesthetic satisfaction, works of art may occasion
transformation.
Though I have dealt with contemporary artists like Andy
Goldsworthy and Christo, I have not dealt at all with the formless junk
that has made its way into our museums.8 There are theories advanced
6 Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967),
§915/483 (henceforth WTP).

7 Rainer Marie Rilke, “On an Ancient Torso of Apollo.” See Appendix to the chapter on
sculpture.
8 At the Nasher sculpture museum in Dallas, I saw a bent-up old car bumper and also
ten or so very large wooden boxes propped up on one end, sitting on rumpled canvas
with paint and various colors splashed randomly about the exhibit. At the art museum in
Stuttgardt, I saw a piece consisting of small heaps of plaster on a large wrinkled canvas with
two long planks crossing at the top.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
for including such items, but I appeal to a developed sense of form

requiring a high level of mastery of technique as the entry ticket into the
spaces that deserve our attention.
Hegel speaks of our everyday relations to things as constituting a
“hard shell” of appearance that cloaks the real nature of things.9 One
recognizes ordinary objects realistically portrayed and responds to them
in terms of the associations they evoke in everyday life. But “every-
day life” presents us with a kind of “dashboard knowledge” of what to
push, turn, and pull on the sensory surface in order to get the output
we desire. This is true at the level of the sensory field as such, the ini-
tial and enduring function of which, we said, is to manifest opportunities
and threats to our organic well-being. It is true also at the level of social
co-existence into which we are introduced through language and all the
stereotypical ways of identifying and responding that constitutes the web
of belief and practice peculiar to one’s own ethnic community. That cul-
tural web determines the selective focus we give to the initial and endur-
ing sensory given by determining our modes of evaluation. We learn to
glance, categorize, and respond in set ways, without attending carefully
to how things are actually articulated in detail, much less to what might
underlie their surface presentation.
In my first sculpture course, the first assignment was to produce a
mask of a human face. My first attempt showed bulging eyes. When I
began to look carefully at faces, I was astonished to find how deep-set
the eyes typically are and how I had completely overlooked this feature.
And as I studied the human face, I began to realize how stereotypical
our ordinary attention is. As Heidegger underscored, we are thrown into
a pre-articulated cultural world not of our own choosing and are dispo-
sitionally tuned to respond in terms of “average everydayness.”10 This
provides a culturally mediated “dashboard knowledge” that takes up the
biologically natural dashboard. The task of the arts is to use sensory sur-
face to refocus attention and/or to communicate what lies beyond the
surface.
9 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T. Knox, trans. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press), I, 9 (henceforth LFA).
10 Being and Time, J. Stambaugh trans. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996), 338–40/German 370–2.

8 R.E. Wood
Consider the following chart which lays out the field for the basic art
forms.11
There are three basic parameters of the field of experience: the sensory
base, the spatio-temporal frame, and linguistic mediation. John Dewey
warned against isolating art forms in these conceptual bins; his warning
is well taken.12 Each art form has its origin in the relation of the living
creature to its environment as a holistically rhythmic being in relation to
a rhythmic environment. Holistic functioning involves a fund of retained
experiences integrated around focal objects.13 Visual, tactual, auditory,
olfactory, gustatory, appetitive, and kinesthetic components enter inte-
grally into such experience. So, although each sense might take the lead
in a given art form, all the other aspects underpin and direct experience
within that medium. The common substance of all the arts lies in this
11 Thisfirst appeared in my Placing Aesthetics, and is reprinted here with permission.

12 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 125–6, 175
(henceforth AE).
13 See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, D. Landes trans.
(London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 241–2.

1 INTRODUCTION 9
experiential substratum. Hence every art form can be called “poetic,

architectural, dramatic, sculptural, pictorial, literary.”14 Dewey’s thought
provides an extended basis for Aristotle’s calling attention to our natural
delight in rhythm and harmony without exploring that as far as Dewey
does.15 Dewey’s thought also adds descriptive richness to complement
Heidegger’s notion of Earth.16
Keeping this in mind, our division provides the basis for distinguish-
ing and relating art forms in terms of how each of their eidetic features,
the universal characteristics limning each art form, are related to those
parameters. This yielded the spatial art forms of architecture, sculp-
ture, and painting which appeal to seeing; the spatio-temporal art forms
of theater, opera, and film that appeal to seeing and hearing, as well as
mime and mobile sculpture which appeal to seeing alone in terms of the
temporal presentation of spatially extended things; and the temporal art
forms of dance, music, song, poetry, and story-telling which appeal pri-
marily to hearing, but, in the case of dance, also to seeing. Written prose
involves what is involved in attention to any art form: the constructive
response of the imagination building the world of the text by following
the words on the page or divining the meaning carried by a painting,
a musical piece or a sculpted object. Written prose, along with story-
telling, poetry, song, theater, opera, and film are also linguistic arts.
As I said, in this work I will focus attention upon seven basic art
forms: landscaping, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature,
and film. This focus follows the classic division developed by Hegel, with
the notable exceptions of film, the most recent major art form, and land-
scaping. The treatment of landscaping follows the first chapter on nature
aesthetics, for landscaping brings nature into culture, placing it in prox-
imity to architecture. Such division will allow us to include comparative
discussion of the art forms not included on Hegel’s list.
However, as I said, I have not begun the main body of this work with
art forms but with the framework, part external, part internal, within
which they all appear and from which they derive many of their forms:
14 AE, 229.
15 Poetics,1448b7.
16 “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” (henceforth BDT) Poetry, Language, and Thought,
trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 148–51 (henceforth PLT).

10 R.E. Wood
that of the presentation of Nature. As we have also said, the aesthetics

of the natural environment has recently undergone a substantial revival,
upon which we will draw in the first chapter. There has also been a more
recent move in the direction of exploring the aesthetics of the every-
day world or the built environment. Our last chapter will deal with that
aspect of aesthetics. So the treatment of art forms will be flanked by the
treatment of nature on the one hand and the everyday world on the
other as enduring matrices for the art forms.
Finally, we have added an epilogue on Kierkegaard’s presentation
of the aesthetic life, that is, a life whose fundamental principle is self-
enjoyment, crude or refined. Kierkegaard argues that such a life should
be bounded by ethical and religious commitment. He keeps alive that
relation to the Whole we have been and will be underscoring throughout.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Poetics. 1973. W. H. Fyfe ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Buber, Martin. 1965. “Distance and Relation.” The Knowledge of Man, M.
Friedman ed. and trans. New York: Harper and Row, 59–71.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 1975. T. Knox, trans. 2
vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Poetry, Language,
and Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper, 148–51.
———. 1996. Being and Time. J. Stambaugh trans. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception, D. Landes trans.
London and New York: Routledge.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.
Hollingdale. New York: Vintage.
Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Value, M.
Frings trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Strasser, Stephan. 1977. Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of
the Heart, R. Wood, trans. Foreword to this translation is by Paul Ricoeur.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Wood, Robert E. 1999. Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic
Tradition. Athens: Ohio University Press.
———. 2011. “What Is Seeing? A Phenomenological Approach to Neuro-
Psychology,” Science, Reason, and Religion, Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association, vol. 85, 121–34.
CHAPTER 2
The Aesthetics of Nature
We can approach Nature in several different ways, beginning with natural

science. In recent times, alongside the scientists there have been the
great naturalists: in nineteenth-century America Ralph Waldo Emerson1
and Henry David Thoreau2 appreciatively lived in, thought, and wrote
about the natural world. In the twentieth century, there was John Muir
who spent most of his time in the wild, plodding through forests and
scaling mountains, and writing about it in such a way as to persuade
Theodore Roosevelt to set aside various natural parks to protect them
from exploitation by businesses and by homesteaders.3 Later there was
Aldo Leopold, author of Sand County Almanac. Leopold, an exemplary
fusion of naturalist and scientist each informing the other,4 is a perfect
example of the importance for biologists of becoming naturalists. Since
biologists, and thus also medical students, deal mostly with parts of dead
animals or human cadavers or live creatures under unnatural conditions
within the discipline of bio-logy, a discipline given to the understanding
1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin,
1982).
2 Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (New York: Doubleday, n.d.).
3 See James Mitchell Clark, The Life and Adventures of John Muir (San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1980).

4 Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1949).

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_2
12 R.E. Wood
Fig. 2.1 David Wood, Swirling waters
of life, they should learn to attend to natural things as they live and
behave in their native habitats (Fig. 2.1).5
Those who write on aesthetics have most recently expanded the scope
of their considerations from art forms to the natural environment. The
movement had its origin in Ronald Hepburn’s 1966 “Contemporary
Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,”6 and in this volume we
shall consider works that have appeared since then. But I want to begin
with reflections upon our place as human beings in Nature.
5 SeeLeon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science (New York: Free Press, 1988).
6 Ronald Hepburn (1966), “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural
Beauty,” eds. Allen Carlson, and Arnold Berneat, The Aesthetics of Natural Environments.
(Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004), 43–62. (henceforth ANE.) The work within which
it now appears contains a significant bibliography in the notes to the introductory essay,
27–42.
2 THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE 13
Before there were human beings, there was Nature. Then human
beings came on the scene, having, just like other animals, the kind of
organs that allow the manifestation of the environment within the lim-
ited thresholds set up by the perceptual organs and in the service of bio-
logical need. This appearance, however, is only a relatively superficial
show, hiding the vast complexity and hidden powers that lie beneath the
sensory surface; getting to know more and more of these can lead to the
expansion of our aesthetic sensibility.
Animals are monopolar in their awareness, whereas humans are, like
a magnet, bipolar. As we have already noted, in the human case, sensory
experience occurs in a field of consciousness that is oriented towards the
Whole of what is. Such orientation pries each of us loose from immer-
sion in the environment and gives each of us over to ourselves to under-
stand ourselves and the world in which we live and take responsibility for
our actions. This situation produces a constant tension between the two
poles. Within that tension culture is constituted and human beings live
their peculiar lives. There is thus a dialectic, a reciprocal conditioning,
not only between Nature and culture, but also between culture and the
freely self-disposing individuals living within it. The latter are inevitably
the carriers of the culture, but can also contribute creatively to it or lead
to its degeneration. One form of degeneration is the lack of reverence for
the Nature from which we have emerged and in which we remain rooted
that leads us to consider it only as material for our projects.7
Early humans not only strove to maintain themselves in relation to
the manifest environment, they also learned to transform that environ-
ment by abstracting the notions of things from their individual instances
and re-arranging things to suit human purposes. But this was only an
extension of the coping intelligence of high-order primates. Distinctive
humanness involves some conception of the hidden Whole behind the
sensory surface. This adds depth to the essential and literal “superfici-
ality,” that is, surface character, of animal awareness. Human aesthetic
7 See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt, trans.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1977). For an approach to his “aesthetics” within the larger
framework of his work in general, see the chapter on Heidegger in my Placing Aesthetics:
Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). So also for
the other major thinkers cited.
14 R.E. Wood
appreciation brings more than sensory awareness to what is presented

sensorily.8
This does not preclude acute sensitivity on the part of the animal to
the nuances of what appears in the environment relevant to animal sur-
vival. But all of that takes place within the display of a kind of dashboard,
a surface that animals, driven by biological need, learn to manipulate in
order to get the desired output, while being completely unaware that
there is anything beyond that surface or “under the hood.”9 We might
express their situation metaphorically: they live wholly within the lumi-
nous bubble blown by the nervous system.
Emptily aware of the wholeness beyond the sensory dashboard and of
the encompassing Whole that is the cosmos, humans produced mythic
cosmologies centered upon notions of the gods who were linked with
the origins of things. And in addition, they learned to step back from
coping in order to appreciate the display of things with which they felt as
one. They further learned to transform the surface and to play with har-
monious forms, decorating their bodies and their implements, and trans-
forming the sounds they made through the discovery and production
of diachronic and eventually also synchronic harmonies. The emergence
of music from the cacophony of sounds generated in the environment
involved the “lived” discovery of the harmonic series which, in the West,
was eventually thematized and used as the basis for the development of
the harpsichord, the organ, and the piano.
Music may have had its rhythmic origin in a mother rocking her child
and humming softly to it; or it may have been associated with the regu-
larity involved in chipping stone, paddling a canoe, or working together
to haul heavy objects. Melody may have arisen in the attempt to imi-
tate birdsong. Early drawings of the prey or the totem of a tribe may
have had magical implications. Early art forms included tattooing, uten-
sil design, ornamentation (headdresses, necklaces, bracelets and the like),
decorative clothing and rugs, and visually rhythmic elaboration of weap-
ons and vehicles of conveyance. Much of the art centered upon the deco-
ration of temples and the huts of chieftains in order to underscore the
8 For the ways in which metaphysical sensibility transcends sensory presence in
and through sensory presence, see Ronald Hepburn’s “Landscape and Metaphysical
Imagination,” ANE, 127–40.
9 The felicitous metaphor of “dashboard knowledge” comes from Owen Barfield, Saving
the Appearances: An Essay in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, n.d.), 55–6.
importance of what took place within them. In any case, art arose out
of an interchange between the organically situated human being and the
environment upon which it depends. Art functioned within the overall
life of a people, rooted in the earth, in closeness to Nature.10
As we noted in the Introduction, Aristotle pointed to the twin origins
of art: imitation and delight in rhythms and harmonies.11 Our bodies
are rhythmic: inhaling and exhaling, walking and running, waking and
sleeping, being hungry and finding satiety, experiencing the beat of the
heart accelerating and slowing down. Our environment is also rhythmic:
the lapping of the waves, the alternation of day and night, the seasons,
with living forms becoming dormant, awakening, and putting forth new
shoots, dropping their seed, and slipping back into dormancy or death.
And we live in the interplay of those rhythms by reason of the harmonic
functioning of our own organisms in tune with what is given in the envi-
ronment.
Eighteenth-century aesthetics focused upon gardens and scenic views
of Nature as well as upon works of art.12 The latter became separated
from their original public sites and were relocated to museums and pri-
vate collections.13 Hegel, in his massive Lectures on Fine Art, deflected
attention away from Nature and concentrated upon what he called “The
System of the Arts”: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry.
At the highest level of artistic functioning, architecture formed the tem-
ple; sculpture presented the god; painting, music, and poetry celebrated
the divine.14 Hegel gave special attention to what he called “the high-
est vocation of art”: to display the Absolute in sensuous form, that is,
10 This is one of the central themes of John Dewey, developed in the very first chapter
of Art as Experience, “The Live Creature,” 3–19. For an approach to Dewey’s aesthetics
within the general conceptual framework of his thought, see the chapter on Dewey in my
Placing Aesthetics.
11 Poetics, 1448b7.
12 Eugene Hargrove, “The Historical Foundations of American Environmental
Attitudes,” Allen, Carlson and Sheila Lintott, eds. Nature, Aesthetics, and
Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008),
29–48 (Henceforth NAE.).
13 Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 8–10 (Henceforth AE.).
14 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975) vol. 1, 83–7. (Henceforth LFA.) For an approach to Hegel’s aesthetics within
the overall framework of his System, see the chapter on Hegel in my Placing Aesthetics
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).
16 R.E. Wood
to be the expression of religious sensibility.15 Following upon Christianity

and its proclamation of the identity of God and Man announced in Jesus
Christ, everything in which humans take an interest was included in the
function of art. This led to a secularization of aesthetics where the rela-
tion between people established through production and experience of
art becomes a new “holy of holies.”16 Philosophical treatments of aes-
thetics followed Hegel’s focus upon the arts. But Hegel also pointed out
that art is nourished by attention to Nature, and to Nature it periodi-
cally returns for refreshment when it has grown stale.17 As we said in the
Introduction, in very recent times there has been a movement within
philosophical aesthetics to refocus attention upon Nature. And that is
paralleled in art by the development of earthworks of various types.
Of course, one significant question is: just what is Nature? Observable
exteriority? But observation itself is part of Nature, and there is more to
Nature than its observability and our observing. Is Nature that which is
simply there for our transformation of it, an Other in relation to delib-
erate action? Is Nature a reality independent of human action? Or is
human action also part of Nature? Do we intervene in Nature arbitrarily
or is it our nature to intervene and the nature of what we transform to
be so transformable? Do not all organisms “intervene” in what is other
than themselves? Do they not all violate what they assimilate? Prior to
the complex gymnastics Heidegger exercises about the single sentence
extant from Anaximander that all things have to pay restitution by their
death for violating other things in order to live, does it not give us a
reason why all living things have to die?18 Natures can be and are regu-
larly violated so that other natures may flourish. Nature, Nietzsche said,
is the exhibition of the Will to Power, each organism subsuming other
forms to gather its own power to transcend itself in growth and repro-
duction.19 Death is a giving back of what we took from Nature, return-
ing our bodies to the earth in a kind of cosmic justice.
15 LFA, I, 9–11, 94.

16 LFA, I, 60–1.
17 LFA, I, 45.
18 The Presocratics, G. Kirk and J. Raven, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1966), §112, 117. See Martin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” Early Greek
Thinking, D. Krell and F. Capuzzi trans. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984). 13–58.
19 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale.
New York: Vintage.

Nature in one sense is the enduring matrix for everything distinctively

human, including Nature in us. It is our nature to step back and venture
out into what is other than our knowing-choosing center which Hegel
terms “Spirit.” Spirit in us, that is, our conscious knowing-controlling
center, emerges out of Nature and faces it both in us and outside us.20
Nature in this sense is what goes its own way without the intervention
of human consciousness, even in human beings, as in the case of our
metabolism and the functioning of our sensory systems.
What is the relation between Nature as a whole and the natures within
it? Since Newton, Nature has been regarded as a single matrix within
which the ultimate particles are embedded. All superficial appearances
are to be explained in terms of the laws of combination and separation of
the particles. Even though plants and animals and human beings appear
as single wholes which define themselves against the background of their
environments, seeking to develop, sustain, and reproduce themselves, yet
for science in the wake of Newton, this is just like froth thrown up by the
waves. The real causes lie in the underlying matrix of atomic, and then
subatomic, particles, and what we observe is a superficial show. Things
cannot succeed or fail: as a temporary conjunction of the elements, re-
arrangement is the work of Nature. And so we, as parts of Nature, can-
not violate Nature. The real things, the elements, are only re-arranged,
still according to invariant laws—and we with our peculiar awareness are
part of the surface froth.
This certainly has the effect of turning us away from attention to
holistically functioning forms in order to focus upon the units of which
they are composed. That is why we said that biology, in its study of the
various organs, cells, and chemical cycles, needs to remain in contact
with field biology, the study of animal behavior in its natural setting, in
order not to lose touch with Nature as it presents itself prior to our ana-
lytical dissection.
And since we can only obtain the kind of knowledge physics is able
to get us by constructing ever more elaborate mechanisms that allow
us to take things apart and are able to use the technological skill this
entails to annex Nature or natures to our purposes by refashioning it/
20 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, W. Wallace, trans. (Oxford University Press, 1977). See also
my Hegel’s Introduction to the System as a way of situating and mining the Encyclopaedia
Philosophy of Spirit/Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
18 R.E. Wood
them, natures are forgotten and regularly violated in a way that goes way
beyond those violations necessary for our own sustenance. Those who
still appreciate natures are “tree-huggers” who stand in the way of “pro-
gress.”
But there is another way of viewing nature. With relativity and quan-
tum physics, there is a single space–time–energy matrix within which
particles are peculiar nodal enfoldings. Taking a Hegelian theme, for
physics: “The truth is the Whole.” But for ecology, the relevant wholes
are ecosystems. One basic question is whether the ultimate explanation
lies in physics or whether each evolutionary level above the subject-mat-
ter of physics—life, sensory awareness, and reflective awareness as levels
of holistic functioning—each has its own type or types of explanation.
Physics is the ground floor whose integral functioning is presupposed in
its being subsumed by the emergent levels, and so on for each higher
level. One of the functions of the highest level, reflective awareness, is to
learn the proper modes of theoretical integration of the Whole.
There are different ways of attending to Nature. In one dominant
strain of contemporary life, Nature is simply what provides resources
for our projects. In another dominant strain, Nature is a set of problems
for theoretical mastery. In still another, as recovery from the first two,
Nature provides a refuge into which we enter in order to recover, from
our dominant activities which involve a detachment from Nature, a cer-
tain appreciation of, and union with Nature. Environmentalists still argue
for “pristine Nature” in forest preserves which are currently off-base for
businesses eager to find raw materials for their clients’ projects and their
own profit.
Aesthetic appreciation of Nature can occur in significantly different
ways. One typical way is to attend to scenic views. Nature is full of scenes
for our enjoyment: when we approach it aesthetically—it is picturesque.21
The latter term is odd: Nature is “pretty as a picture.” One would have
thought the opposite. But it suggests that we learn to appreciate Nature
from the artists who have taught us ways of seeing.22
21 Uvidale Price, A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the
Beautiful: In Answer to the Objection of Mr. Knight (London: Hereford, 1801).
22 In one of the oddities of the history of aesthetic awareness, people used to turn their
backs to natural scenery in order to view it through the frame provided by a “Claude
glass,” named after the scenic paintings of Claude Lorrain. See J. Baird Callicott, in
“Leopold’s Land Aesthetic,” NAE, 108.
Now, scenic appreciation of Nature has a history. Prior to the rise

of Romanticism, mountains, for example—those paradigms of sce-
nic beauty—were viewed as God’s slag heap, the leftovers from crea-
tion, ugly, irregular, or just “in the way” when you want to cross the
Alps to conquer Gaul. The Romans spoke of taeditas alpium, the bor-
ing character of the Alps. Wincklemann, who turned classicists’ attention
from the Romans back to the Greeks through studying their art (or at
least, Roman copies of their art), en route from his German home to
view the treasures of the Vatican, pulled down the shades on his car-
riage when crossing the Alps so he did not have to look at their ugliness.
Astonishing!23 Among the New England Puritans, the forests, though
beautiful, were wild, dark, and threatening.24 Now the mountains and
the forests with their streams and rivers are the places where we go to
recover from city life. It was the poets who taught us to look apprecia-
tively and to expand our notion of beauty from the ordered and regular
to the irregular, something especially cultivated in the Oriental garden.
But in the scenic approach, we are apart from what we observe in the
remotest sense: we merely view it from afar.25
As children we were no doubt taken by butterflies during the day and
fireflies at night. Birds and squirrels and rabbits, fish and frogs also drew
our attention. As adults we may take to feeding the pigeons, the ducks,
or the fish in the ponds, just to enjoy their presence. We might stop to
admire the changing beauty of a sunset, or the way the features of the
landscape stand out in the late afternoon when the shadows begin to
lengthen. We might stop to look out over the sea to the unlimited hori-
zon. At night I might gaze up at the stars and exclaim, “I stood there
amazed and asked as I gazed if their glory exceeds that of ours.”
We might also consider the character of weather: a bright day in
spring with the fresh green of new growth; the splashes of spring color,
especially cherry blossoms; the strong contrasts between shade and full
sun; late afternoon with the setting sun creating long shadows which
makes that upon which it shines stand out all the more; morning fog
23 See Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Seattle:
Washington University Press, 1959).

24 See, e.g., Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories (New
York: Dover, 1992).

25 J. Baird Callicott, calls scenic viewing “superficial and narcissistic,” NAE, 109a. In his
lectures he provocatively refers to it as “eco-porn.”

20 R.E. Wood
across a pond that allows only the tops of some of the trees to show
through on the other side; fresh winter snow inches deep that blankets
all and allows the fir trees especially to stand out; the power of a spring
storm, with dark clouds, some particularly threatening, showing an omi-
nous green, gathering and swirling on the horizon, periodically split by
a jagged bolt of lightning, followed by the thunder that makes the win-
dows rattle. Japanese poetry in particular is full of appreciation for differ-
ing types of weather.26
But paying specific attention to features of Nature is not the only
mode of appreciation. There is also an appreciation gained through
engagement in and with Nature,27 such as that gained by the farmer
whom Henry David Thoreau describes as catching sight of Nature out of
the corner of his eye, as it were, while he works in his fields.28 But more
explicitly, the farmer might deliberately leave wild spaces to support ani-
mal life, for example, uncultivated woods or hedgerows for small animals
and birds. His wife might typically plant flowers and a small vegetable
garden near the farmhouse. They live in Nature, cultivated and wild.
A former colleague of mine, raised with fourteen siblings on a tobacco
farm, could never understand why someone, even someone poor, gave
up the beauty of rural existence for the urban slum or the suburban
sprawl.29
Back-packing is another such engaged mode. In this case, all of the
senses are involved, not simply seeing, as in the appreciation of scenic
beauty. We see the various life forms and their differing, changing shapes,
colors, and textures. We hear the moaning of the mourning dove, the
howling of the wolf, the trickling of a brook, the roar of the ocean, the
wind singing through the trees, the leaves crunching beneath one’s feet,
the sound of deer running through the brush. While we are moving
through the terrain, we smell the scent of flowers, pine trees, molder-
ing leaves, the pungent odor of a skunk, or the freshness of an ocean
breeze. We feel the hardness of the rock beneath our feet, the sponginess
26 See Yuriko Saito, “The Aesthetics of Weather,” AEL, 156–76.

27 See Arnold Berleant, Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997).
28 Walden, 136–7.
29 In his several works, Wendell Barry has underscored the significance of rural com-
munity. See, for example, Life is a Miracle (Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 2000)
which culminates in the family farm.
of the forest floor that gives way under our steps, or the sliding of the
sand through which we plod. When we pitch camp there is the smell
of the campfire, of coffee brewing and fish frying. If one lives off the
land, there is the taste of berries and roots, of fish and game. One picks
up and handles pine cones, oddly shaped rocks, animal skeletons, or sea
shells and smooth stones on the beach. But such a relation to Nature
typically occurs as a vacation from city life and not as the constant pres-
ence enjoyed in its own way by the farm family prior to the rise of agri-
business.
Being out in Nature, participating in it with all our senses, can ter-
minate in a feeling of oneness with it.30 Even when working with it, we
may be brought up short by the startled deer who dashes away into the
brush, or by the hawk circling above, or by the peculiar way the rays of
the sun come through a clearing in a dense forest. One might be struck
by the profusion of life as one observes its absence above the timberline
on a high mountain. A friend of mine—the one raised on the tobacco
farm—told me of one of his most powerful aesthetic experiences: that of
the sun shining upon a spider’s web against the background of a metal
shed.
One might also bring to the encounter with Nature some understand-
ing of the natural processes involved in the things we encounter, be it
the terrain, the flora or the fauna in a region, or the geological layers
that lie under the observed surface.31 How was the terrain shaped over
millennia by the forces of Nature—earthquakes, winds, glaciers, and riv-
ers? The raw force of Nature can be seen in earthquakes, the tsunamis
that follow, the floods, the hurricanes and tornados, the forest fires. Such
extraordinary interruptions in the way humans cling to the earth force us
to confront the balances in the four traditional elements—fire, air, earth,
and water—requisite for our ordinary routines. One can come to realize
how the earth’s crust floats on a lava core which pushes up through the
great cracks in the ocean floor to move the tectonic plates upon which
30 Arnold Berneat, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature,” ANE, 82–3.

31 AllanCarlson has been in the forefront of such an approach to nature. His approach
tends to derogate other approaches, especially the scenic one. He claims that scientific
understanding of nature is to things in nature as art history is to particular works. In both
cases, he finds aesthetic appreciation without such knowledge to be superficial. See his
“Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” ANE, 63–75. Many of the papers selected in
ANE are rejoinders to this approach.
22 R.E. Wood
we too float. The pressure exerted along the cracks in turn pushes the
plates against one another with such force that they not only create the
mountain ranges, but occasionally slip along fault lines producing earth-
quakes which send out ripples of the earth’s crust parallel to the way in
which the shock waves of a tsunami move across the water surface at the
speed of a jet plane. One might appreciate the magnetic field generated
by the earth’s core and the ozone layer which shields us from much of
the harmful rays generated by the sun. One might also come to appre-
ciate the precise distance from the sun required for life as we know it
to survive: too close and the earth would be too hot for life to appear
and flourish, too far and it would be too cold. One could meditate on
the fact that someday the sun will reach a red giant phase, expanding to
encompass the solar system and destroy our planet along with the others
in our system. All of this can evoke a sense of contingency in all our eve-
ryday security.
When it comes to particular creatures, what is the typical life cycle and
behavior of the bear we spot in the forest? We might experience even
greater amazement if we are aware of the developmental cycles of the
specimen we are observing. Understanding such things might serve to
mediate and deepen the immediate sensory relationship. We might know
that the bristle-cone pine tree we are observing on a California moun-
tainside had its origin about the time of Moses—that is, over 3000 years
ago. It stood by as the history of humankind unfolded and generation
upon generation rose and fell, like waves on a beach, back into the earth.
Here it is not only a matter of a beautiful surface presentation: the sense
of temporal and sub-surface depth one brings to bear upon it deepens
one’s appreciation.
But, on the other hand, objective knowledge is not the same as aes-
thetic appreciation. For the former to effect the latter we must return
from reflection to immediacy, learning to mediate our immediate rela-
tion to the sensory surface by bringing to bear upon it what we know
from other sources. Directly parallel to this is the certain knowledge of
our own mortality which might sit in our minds alongside other objec-
tive facts, but which can also transform our immediate encounter into
a “vision” in which we “realize” or make real—or are made to realize
what we otherwise only know in a purely objective mode. It is medita-
tion, “emotion recollected in tranquility,” that furnishes the basis for
our being present to what we know only in an objective mode. It is the
invoking of such presence that is the special task of poetic awareness. It
helps to make what is simply other to “draw near,” to “touch” us, to

“grab hold” of us, to address our hearts, and possibly transform us.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist, in the Foreword to
his best-known work, The Phenomenon of Man, a Foreword simply
named “On Seeing,” called for an expanded sensibility developed in
and through scientific knowledge: a sense of the vastness of space and
time provided by astronomy, of cellular and chemical complexity as well
as of evolutionary history and ecological interrelatedness in biology, of
the most minute level of particles in physics. Our knowledge of time,
space, complexity, and interrelation has been breathtakingly expanded
by patient scientific work. But scientific knowing abstracts from our
participative relation to what we know. It creates a split in conscious-
ness between what we know objectively and our “sense of Being.”32
De Chardin argues that all this should be contemplatively exploited
to expand human sensibility.33 Indeed, he claims that we need to gain
a sense of the “within” of Nature as well as of the “without” gained
by observation.34 Along similar lines, Whitehead asked in effect what
Newton missed when he looked at Nature. It was what Wordsworth saw:
Nature is akin to feeling. In fact, for Whitehead, Clerk Maxwell’s vector
equations describe from the outside what Wordsworth divined: that the
elementary particles are more feelings than particles. And here he is mov-
ing in the direction of Leibniz for whom the elementary units or monads
are characterized by analogues to our own perception and appetition.35
32 Heidegger speaks of things in the world of scientific technology as having “lost their
being” to become mere data on hand for our manipulation. Introduction to Metaphysics,
G. Fried and R. Polt, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 66. Gabriel Marcel
speaks of restoring to things their “ontological weight.” Existential Background of Human
Dignity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 63, 74, 79.
33 The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1959), 31–6.
34 Ibid., 53–66.
35 Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 75–94. Whitehead was
following in the direction indicated by Leibniz that things considered “from within” are
unconscious perceptions and appetitions. Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings.
Robert Latta, Introduction and trans. (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), §§14–
21, 224–31. For a presentation of the basic conceptual scheme of these two thinkers,
see the chapters dedicated to Leibniz and to Whitehead in my A Path into Metaphysics:
Phenomenological, Hermeneutic, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1991).
24 R.E. Wood
De Chardin, Whitehead, and Leibniz conceptualize what for some

is a live experience: a sense of participation in Nature as a whole which
led Emerson to speak of an “Oversoul,” hearkening back to what
Neoplatonists called the “world soul.” The naming of the “object”
which is not an object, since it is experienced as encompassing us, is giv-
ing a verbal tag and developing a concept of what is essentially a mat-
ter of individual experience. This path might lead one to identify Nature
speculatively with the divine as Spinoza did. We then have a speculatively
grounded stand-in for the experience of an encompassing Nature.
One might also gain a sense of the world as theophany, as the mani-
festation of divine indwelling, as an encompassing and transcending
Source. One might speak here, not of Pantheism but of Panentheism: all
revealed in, not as God. Martin Buber centered his thought upon the
extraordinary way in which a particular aspect of Nature seems to address
us. This, he claims, is the origin of what he calls “moment gods”: the
god of the brook, the grove, the mountain. Hebrew revelation speaks
from an experience of all these addresses as spoken by a single Voice
Who, in the beginning, said “Let there be…and so it was.”36 Converted
from his early mystical life, Buber came to see that “What is greater for
us than all enigmatic webs at the margins of being is the central actuality
of an everyday hour on earth, with a streak of sunshine on a maple leaf
and an intimation of the Eternal Thou.”37
The appreciation of Nature may involve a focus upon one particular
aspect. Paul Weiss said that sculptors typically appreciate trees in winter
when their foliage does not hide their shape.38 As an amateur sculptor, I
can appreciate that. In the life process of the tree, life itself stretches out
in ways that give us a sense of the whole process. The trunk and branches
are like the iron filings which make visible on paper the otherwise invis-
ible lines of force of the magnet below. The overall structure is exposed
when the leafy cover falls away.39
36 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, R. Smith trans. (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 15.
37 I and Thou, W. Kaufmann trans. (New York: Scribners, 1970), 136–7.
38 Personal communication. Weiss wrote three books on the arts: Nine Basic Arts
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961); The World of Art (Carbondale:
Southern Ilinois University Press, 1961); Cinematics (Carbondale: University of Southern
Illinois Press, 1975).
39 For those interested, my own sculptural work is presented and discussed in an appen-
dix to my Placing Aesthetics.

One might have a particular fondness for flowers, which one can
observe not only in their natural surroundings, but also in an arboretum
or in one’s own garden. One learns to arrange them as cut flowers to
enhance a room. The Japanese are especially adept at floral arrangement.
One might have a particular fondness for birds that leads one to search
them out in their various habitats, following their migratory patterns,
watching their development from eggs to egg-laying adults, and observ-
ing them foraging, preening, mating, and caring for their young.
The naturalist studies the behavior of various animals, eager to under-
stand how they do the things they do and zealous in protecting their
habitat. They learn to track the movements of animals by radio transmit-
ters, both in order to understand them better, and to learn how to pre-
serve them in their habitat.
The fisherman loves to be on the water. As Ishmael noted in Moby-
Dick, “Water and meditation are inextricably wed.”40 And as Thoreau
elaborated, a lake “is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder
measures the depth of his own nature.”41 The lake or the pond or the
ocean is a symbol of human life: it has a surface and a hidden depth. It
has the mystery of what might be the largest fish within it.
My sons and I used to fish a gravel pit at different times of day and
under different conditions. The water surface changed frequently,
through the lapping of its waves in the breezes and the frothing up of its
waves in higher winds, through its glassy reflection of the environment
on a calm day, but also its changing moods in different states of darkness
and light, or when shrouded in mist that allowed glimpses of the trees on
the other shores. My youngest son and I used to play a catch-and-release
game to see who could catch the most bluegills in a local pond. Many
fishermen catch and release even some of their larger catches, since they
learn to appreciate the fish apart from the fish fry.
The hunter also goes into Nature. But whereas in earlier times hunt-
ing was the source of daily fare and winter provisions, now it exists for
the sake of entertainment, or trophies, or just delight in wanton slaugh-
ter. But a hunter may also occupy a kind of in-between position, not kill-
ing beyond the legal limit, but also learning to appreciate the stateliness
40 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (New York: Modern Library, 2000).
41 Walden, 160.
26 R.E. Wood
of the stag and the quality of the woods within which he hunts, like the
deer hunter played by Robert de Niro in the movie of that name.42
However, Holmes Rolston III said:
Those who go out and kill for fun may have failed to grow up morally;
sometimes those who object to any killing in nature and in human encoun-
ter with nature have not grown up either biologically or morally…. The
hunter feels not ‘perfect evil’ (Krutch), but ‘perfect identification’ with the
tragic drama of creation….Hunting, a seeming sport, has sacramental value
because it unfolds the contradictions of the universe.43
I am more inclined to say that, if a hunter really learned to appreciate

the stateliness of the stag, he would learn to hunt with the camera and
let the proud creatures be.
As Henry David Thoreau noted:
Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most
original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until
at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper
objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole
behind.44
When I was a young man we used to run rabbits in the snow and
chase them down with clubs. We would clean them and cook them; but
that was not a reason, only a rationalization. When we captured one, we
would twist its head off to let the blood drain out. We were told that was
better for the meat. But one time when I took my nephews with me and
we caught and killed a rabbit, I asked myself why I wanted to destroy
such a beautiful little creature. That was the last time I hunted. Two of
my sons have learned to hunt with the camera.
The appreciation of Nature might also occur through gardening: get-
ting to work in the soil, entrusting the seeds to the darkness of the earth,
watching the amazing development of plants and trees from small begin-
nings, observing the cycles whereby each living thing articulates itself,
42 The Deer Hunter (1978).

43 Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 91–3. For the
view of hunting as sacramental, see José Ortega y Gasett, Meditations on Hunting (New
York: Scribners, 1972), 110–11.
44 Walden, 181.
blossoms, and bears its seed, only to give way to the next generation.
Care for one’s lawn, for shrubs, for trees, and for gardens with vegetables
and flowers, might bring one into a participative relation with natural
processes and might lead one to consider the human life cycle. Observing
Nature over longer periods of time gives us an image of our own lifetime:
growing, flourishing, reproducing, dying, and living on in our offspring.
This sets up a kind of reciprocity, each analogue enhancing the other.
Considering Nature as an analogue to our life cycle is a metaphoric
approach that enriches the experience. I remember being on the shore of
the Pacific Ocean, seeing the rhythmic swells of the waves rising, hitting
the shore, and slipping back into the sea, and was reminded of the breath-
ing of some great monster that could awaken and turn violent. That
experience could have been the basis for a piece of lyric poetry, if I had
the ability to develop one. Notice that one is not distracted by turning
to something else—the sleeping monster—but is in fact tuned in more
carefully to the sea by the metaphoric parallel. This mode of metaphorical
“seeing as” deepens one’s appreciation of the object that evokes it.45
Such experience with living processes might make one exasperated, as
I am, at imitation plants and flowers. People want the surface look, but
not the appreciation of the observable processes and underlying func-
tions, hidden in darkness, and not the work it takes to care for the plants.
The gardener, like Hegel’s slave, advances well beyond the capacity for
power and pleasure that belong to the master in order to better appreci-
ate our insertion into Nature by working with it.46
Photography can be a tremendous aid in learning to focus appreci-
atively upon the world around us, natural as well as man-made. From
the indeterminate possibilities afforded by a given subject, it selects an
angle and a framing that maximize an ordered appearance. Eric Fromm
used to complain that taking a camera along when sight-seeing tends
to alienate you from being immersed in what you see, and that you
tend to think in terms of how you might show others the trophies you
accumulate.47 Though there is a point to this caveat, bringing real pho-
tographic competence to a trip can enhance attentiveness and yield a
45 See Emily Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” ANE,
162–3.
46 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, A. Miller, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), §§194–6, 117–9.

47 Eric Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart, 1955).
28 R.E. Wood
hypomneme, “an external memory,” a term which Plato applied to writ-

ing.48 This allows you to re-visit what you originally saw and continue
your appreciation into the indefinite future, in a direct parallel to the way
photographs of family and friends allow us to gain a deeper appreciation
of them and of the time of human existence.
The camera also allows for creative framing of color and pattern that
one can select, especially up close, the equivalent of abstract painting.
Though writers like Carlson or Callicott might find this superficial, they
miss an essential aspect that the original abstractionists, Kandinsky and
Mondrian, were after: a sense of the Encompassing shining through that
surface.49 Following Plato, Plotinus noted that a beautiful object not only
has harmonious properties, but indicates Beauty Itself in which it partici-
pates shining through.50 As we have frequently pointed out, here and in
previous works, the human being is bipolar, such that the sensory is always
related to Totality via the notion of Being. Though one might rest content
with the appreciation of aesthetic surface (and the detached appreciation
of that surface is a privilege of the human being), one might also learn to
be sensitized to the Beyond shining through the surface that conventional
associations might smother. And the awakening of that awareness through
art might spill over and suffuse one’s attention to any existent—person,
thing, or artifact—as participating in the Ground of Being.
Time-lapse photography provides a look at otherwise inaccessible nat-
ural processes. We have to remember what a plant was like when it first
poked through the earth, spread out, sent up a central shoot, then leaves,
a bud, a flower and fruit, only eventually to die back in late fall. Time-
lapse photography presents the whole process in a couple of minutes.
Our sense of living process is enhanced by such a compressed experience.
In the city, relation to Nature comes in the provision of green
spaces. Good city planning insists upon parks, trees along public roads,
the development of rivers and town lakes, arboreta, major landscaping
around public buildings, flower beds in strategic places. New York’s
48 Phaedrus, 275A. H. Fowler trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).

49 Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, M. Sadler, trans. (New York: Dover,
1977); Piet Mondrian, “Natural Reality and Abstract Reality I1919-20,” The New Art—
The New Life: Collective Writings of Piet Mondrian, H. Holtzman and M. James ed. and
trans. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 82–123.
50 Enneads, I, 6, 1. For an approach to Plotinus see my PA, “Plotinus and the Latin
Middle Ages,” and the appendix to the Plato chapter in my A Path into Metaphysics.
Central Park, occupying land of an astronomical value in real-estate

terms, was preserved for the city dwellers by the genius of Fredrick Law
Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in 1853, inspired by the poet William Cullen
Bryant. It comprises 843 acres with a walking path around it of six miles.
While it looks like a nature preserve, it is all actually the result of a mas-
ter plan. The Nature preserved, like the English countryside, is one that
has been planted by human beings.51 Without such a park, New York
City, with its population concentrated in high-rise buildings and its traf-
fic jams, would be oppressive.
Finally, good domestic architecture plans in relation to the environ-
ment and attends to the relation between the interior and exterior, in
both of which there are spaces for plantings. We will consider this further
in the chapters dealing with landscaping and architecture.
One contemporary artist intent upon re-introducing us to Nature is
Andy Goldsworthy who works in Nature with the materials at hand at
the spot where he works. In one particularly notable case, having gath-
ered driftwood along the ocean shore while the tide was out, he built a
kind of beaver’s lodge with a hole on top, one of his characteristic forms.
When the tide came in, the lodge floated, then rotated and began slowly
to disintegrate, giving back to the ocean the wood he harvested from its
shores. Captured on film, this is a direct exhibition of the way the built
environment is related to nature: it comes from nature and eventually
returns back to it.
Goldsworthy has emphasized the theme of the hole in many works,
some of them with stones, some with brush, some with sticks, some with
branches, some with slate or brick or sandstone, also with earth and with
leaves of various colors. In one piece, he pressed pieces of moss around
an opening at the base of a tree between two roots that made it look like
a vaginal opening—suggesting that the hole has to do with the mystery
of human origins.52
51 Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” a paper read
before the American Social Science Association at the Lowell Institute, Boston, February
25, 1870, The Public Papers of Frederick Law Olmstead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 171–205.
52 The DVD Rivers and Tides gives a good sample of Goldsworthy’s work. There are sev-
eral books dealing with his work, one of the best being Andy Goldsworthy, Hand to Earth:
Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture, 1976–1990 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993).
30 R.E. Wood
Another dominant Goldsworthy motif is the serpentine line that

underscores the flow in nature. In one piece, he stitched together a long
string of leaves by using spines from a bush, coiled it at the center of
a pool in the forest, and then filmed it gradually uncoiling and, fully
stretched out, snaking its way down the brook that flowed out of the
pool. The serpentine line was the motif for an impressive dry-stack stone
wall and also for a most impressive clay surface on a large wall from
which the serpentine line emerged as the clay dried.
Goldsworthy sees the flow in the birth and death of generations of
living beings and even in the stones that have undergone millennia of
development. For several of his works, he crushes red rock into a powder
and places it in small, still pools inside rocks that jut out from a cascading
stream, or he pours the powder directly into one of the rapids flowing
through the rock area, or he throws it into the air and lets the flow of the
air send it back to the flow of the river—again, captured on film.
His work in general emphasizes transience. In one very simple work,
he lay down on dry ground just as the rain began. After a while he got
up and left the dry silhouette of his body which soon disappeared under
the raindrops; a simple work, but, again, underscoring the transience of
human existence.
No other artist has been so ingenious at transforming Nature in such a
way as to give back the results of his work to it and thereby provide us with
a view of its processes. If we are sufficiently reflective, it brings to mind
the way in which every form that we introduce into Nature eventually suc-
cumbs to its processes as do we who emerged out of it. Goldsworthy’s
work makes a powerful case for the metaphoric use of Nature.
Emergent from Nature, we belong in Nature, and yet, because we
are projected toward the cosmic Whole, we are gifted with the ability
to transform Nature in the light of our ability to detachedly understand
the types and patterns of behavior of the world around us and, indeed,
of our own selves as members of the human species. Our refashion-
ing should take place in such a way as to let pre-human Nature show
itself within our transformations as we preserve the places where it can
show on its own in pristine wilderness. Cities of steel, brick, concrete,
and glass all too often throw out Nature; but in so doing they alienate
human existence from the place of its own birth and continuing rootage.
The built environment should set itself appreciatively upon the earth,
under the sky, open to the Mystery that surrounds us and to which we
Fig. 2.2 Andy Goldsworthy, Rowan leaves with hole. Japanese maple leaves
stitched together to make a floating chain the next day it became a hole supported
underneath by a woven briar ring Ouchiyama-Mura, Japan, 21–22 November 1987
are peculiarly directed, preparing for the next generation to follow our
inevitable demise (Fig. 2.2).53
53 See Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling and Thinking,” Poetry, Language, and
Thought, A. Hofstadter, trans. (New York: Harper, 1971), 49–51; cf. also, in the same col-
lection, “The Thing,” 172–82. We will look at the built environment, other than architec-
ture, in Chap. 10.
32 R.E. Wood
Japanese maple
leaves stitched together to make a floating chain
the next day it became a hole
supported underneath by a woven briar ring
OUCHIYAMA-MURA, JAPAN
21–22 November 1987
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CHAPTER 3
Domestic Landscaping
Coming away from our consideration of nature-aesthetics, in this

chapter I want to focus attention upon an art form that underscores our
belonging to Nature: domestic landscaping. And I want first to call to
mind the context within which I have been consistently taking my point
of departure: that of the Whole to which we humans are distinctively
directed. I want to do so by resting upon the work of Martin Heidegger
who stressed centrally both our dwelling in the Whole and our
inhabiting the Earth.
As our constant focus, the emptily intended Whole is the surrounding
mystery out of which things rise up in sensation and recede as into
their own darkness. This situation requires us to attempt to fill the
space between sensory fullness and empty reference to the Whole
with experience, inference, and construction to create a specific way
of envisioning our place within the absent totality, partially revealed
and even more deeply concealed by the way we are present to things
sensorily. However, filling that space involves something more than
intellectual activity. It is a matter of how we are present to things given
in sensation, how we focus upon them, how we dwell and act in relation
to them. It is actually what we call intellectual activity that tends to
preclude attention to such presence and such dwelling. But it is precisely

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_3
36 R.E. Wood
here, in how we dwell fully in the present, that the notion of Being
functions in its deepest way.1
The lifework of Martin Heidegger is rooted in what he calls “the key
experience of the forgottenness of Being” in Western metaphysics.2 What
the notion of Being involves, in line with the whole speculative tradi-
tion, is an articulation of our sense of what the whole of things, what the
world, the cosmos is. Der Sinn des Seins, “the sense of Being,” indicates
the conjunction of meaning and sensibility that Heidegger finds espe-
cially in art.3 According to Heidegger, great thinkers, like great poets,
operate from a fundamental philosophic-poetic experience of Being
which creates so much “world space” that in it even the ordinary appears
extraordinary.4 The sense of the world space thus created nourishes, in
hidden fashion, the linguistic constructions, conceptual or imagistic, that
are rooted in it as their ground. The hidden ground is the dwelling space
for a community that stimulates the articulation of the peculiar way in
which that community comes to stand in relation to the cosmic whole.
Essential to dwelling is a notion Heidegger borrowed from the poet
Hölderlin: the notion of “the Play of the Fourfold” of Earth and Sky,
Mortals and Immortals. The Fourfold is a development of Heidegger’s
earlier description of the struggle between Earth and World that sets
meaning upon the earth in the work of art.5 The collective world of
meaning we inhabit, the world of a tradition or an epoch, is expressed in
the articulation of that Fourfold. Each of the four factors refers to some
1 For a development of these notions, see my “Being and Manifestness,” International
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. XXXV, no. 4, Issue no. 140, (Dec., 1995), and for further
historical and conceptual grounding see the first part of my A Path into Metaphysics (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1991), and, later, Placing Aesthetics: Reflections
on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).
2 See “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ The Way Back into the Ground of
Metaphysics,” W. Kaufmann, trans., Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, W. McNeill ed.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 277–90.
3 “Origin of the Work of Art,” (henceforth OWA), Poetry, Language, and Thought,
A. Hofstadter, trans. (New York: Harper, 1971) (henceforth PLT).

4 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, G. Fried and R. Polt, trans. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 26.

5 The earlier treatment is in Heidegger’s 1935 essay, OWA, in PLT, 63. For the notion of
the Play of the Fourfold, see “The Thing,” also in PLT, 172ff.
3 DOMESTIC LANDSCAPING 37
way in which we are encompassed and of which only we humans are

aware. Each of the factors plays in relation to the others.
Earth is the hidden womb of all life which rises up in sensuous-
ness and falls back into the ultimately supportive darkness of what we
have come to call “matter.” Authentic dwelling draws near to things
by entrusting them to the Earth as the ground of their own mysterious
emergence. Earth is opened up to manifestness as the environment of,
and constituent in, all animal life by its relation to the Sky, the unreach-
able source of light and fundamental measure for all living form in its
alternation of day and night and in its seasonal changes. But for us mor-
tals, the humani, made of humus and condemned to return to the Earth,
it is a peculiar mode of manifestness; it opens up for us in relation to a
world of meaning, as distinct from, but intimately related to, the immedi-
ately manifest sensory environment of all animal existence. As we medita-
tively run ahead to our own term, the question of the meaning of our life
as a whole emerges, contained within the question of the meaning of the
all-encompassing Whole to which the notion of Being points us. Subject
to the measures of all life, we mortals, aware of our inevitable mortality,
seek the measures of our distinctive humanness by our relation to the
Immortals. Heidegger identifies the Immortals as the sources of inspira-
tion, presenting what counts as what is Most High that encompasses and
grounds the whole of what we experience, construct, and infer. Made of
Earth, we mortals are contrasted with the Immortals symbolized by the
distant measures furnished by the Sky. The Immortals are “the messen-
gers of the Most High,” angels or muses as sources of inspiration for
the ultimate meaning of what counts as high and low, victory and defeat,
success and failure. The mortals are themselves measured in terms of
how we dwell within the Fourfold and how we conduct our fellow mor-
tals into that essential interplay. In the togetherness of this Fourfold the
shaping of a world of dwelling occurs.
In peculiarly Heideggerian jargon, the “world worlds” in that
Fourfold, that is, a world of meaning as a cultural world holds us in its
grip, and in doing so allows things to be manifest in such a way that
what is truly a thing “things.” In both expressions, the worlding of the
world and the thinging of things, Heidegger stresses the way in which
we are apprehended. Things lay hold of us and we have to learn to let
them be, meditatively, thankfully. From appreciative thinking, the right
word, the poetic word, emerges. The word gathers the Fourfold to let
each thing meaningfully appear. Language clears and articulates the space
38 R.E. Wood
within which the arts occur, rising up in sensuousness, gathering the

sense of the Whole, stimulating a mode of presencing, of nearness, of
significant presence. Art forms in general take some mode of sensuous-
ness into a world of dwelling and in so doing bring that sensuous mode
to its fullest appearance. As a primordial articulation of dwelling, build-
ing occurs in this space of meaning. In the work of art the look of the
natural materials enters into a mode of focal presence from their purely
subsidiary role in ordinary wakefulness.
But dwelling entails a mode of thinking distinctively different
from what we have come to call thinking, for the latter involves
re-presenting and ordering, conceptualizing and arranging things into
a systematic whole, most often with a view towards re-ordering materi-
als to reach our projected goals. Heidegger distinguishes between that
mode of thinking, which he calls das rechnendes Denken, translated as
“representative-calculative thinking,” and das besinnliche Nachdenken,
translated as “meditative thinking.”6 Actually both the noun and the
adjective in the latter phrase suggest meditation; so a literal translation
would be “meditative meditation;” the noun literally means “thinking
after.” I suggest it involves what Gabriel Marcel called second or recu-
perative reflection, recovering concreteness from which first reflection
had abstracted. Be-sinn-liche involves gaining the “sense” (Sinn) of for-
gotten Being. In several languages, “sense” refers both to meaning and
to sensation. Gaining a “sense of Being” by meaningfully inhabiting a
world involves setting it upon the earth of sensory presence. Thinking in
terms of such a “sense” is essentially thankful, appreciative. It embodies
the ancient notion of pietas or a sense of unpayable indebtedness. Pietas
occurs in three different relations: in relation to one’s parents for exist-
ence and nurturing, to one’s culture for one’s concrete possibilities, and
to God or the gods for the totality of existence.7 If the former mode of
thinking is located in what we have come to call “intellect,” the latter is
located in what a long tradition has called “the heart.” Such meditative
thinking requires the spirit of silence, holistic listening and consequent
6 “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking, J. Anderson and H. Freund. trans. (New

York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 47.
7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, (Green Bay, WI; Aquinas Institute 2012), II-II,
q. 101, a. 1, citing Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Hippocrates G. Apostle trans. (Grinell,

Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1984), IX, 12, 1162a 4ff. Cicero, De Inventione (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1949), 2.
attunement to the total context of existence. If the former is essentially

conquestive, mastering, whether theoretically or practically, the latter
is essentially open to being mastered, being taken by what requires
our full attention and commitment. Thus for Heidegger, thinking, as
meditative appreciativeness, belongs essentially together with dwelling
and building—the triad that furnishes the theme for his essay “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking” that is most relevant to our consideration here.8
The togetherness of this triad within the Play of the Fourfold articulates
what Being means and what it means for humans to dwell in relation to
the whole.
However, calculative thinking, increasingly fashionable today, has
turned the environment and humans themselves into standing reserve
(Bestand), at hand for our projects; and we are in a wholesale flight from
thinking of the meditative, appreciative sort, which alone can establish
our dwelling on the earth.9 Hence the overwhelming sense of alienation
that attends our March towards technological mastery. The way back,
the Schritt zurück, to thinking as dwelling is through the arts, but only
insofar as the arts are rooted in and bring us to meditative dwelling.
Thus far Heidegger. In our second section, this background will be
used to sketch the beginnings of a comprehensive approach to the art of
domestic landscaping. The Fourfold furnish the framework for our expo-
sition—even though Heidegger might not approve of minute attention
to the actual operation of landscape design.
We are all familiar with the clichéd distinction between a house and
a home. The former is a structure, the latter a mode of dwelling that
presupposes the former as an element. Dwelling has to do, among
other things, with the way in which mutual care among family mem-
bers and hospitality to guests occurs—in Heidegger’s terms, how we
conduct other mortals into the Play of the Fourfold. But the concern
extends to how the interior is arranged, for convenience, for beauty, and
for remembrance, and how the exterior and its relation to the environ-
ment is cultivated. Heidegger calls attention to the traditional peasants’
hut which on the outside nestles into the earth and is adjusted to the
elements, while within, in addition to areas for gathering, sleeping, and
8 PLT,145ff.
9 SeeThe Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt, trans. (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977), 17.
40 R.E. Wood
cooking, it establishes a place for prayer (der Herrgottswinkel or “The

Lord God’s Corner”) and a place for the dead (der Totenbaum or “The
Tree of the Dead”), a place for remembrance of our relation to the Most
High, and a place for the reminders of our mortality.10 Life lived in
such a home tends to have a more or less constant religiously mediated
background of attention to the whole of our human lives and the total
context, governed by the divine, the ultimate Encompassing in which
we exist. This is brought to focal awareness at special times and places
in the house: at the time of private or family prayer, re-fixing attention
upon the meaning of the Whole, and at the time of the death of a fam-
ily member, the presence of whose remains in the home makes us even
more aware of our own eventual term and keeps alive the question of
the meaning of our lives. Dwelling can thus occur even in the simplest
of houses, but domestic architecture can itself serve to enhance dwell-
ing by how it uses space both for communal gathering and for individual
privacy, both as establishing interior spatial relations and as opening out
onto the exterior.
Landscaping plays a role in relation to the latter. It underscores
the belonging to the earth of the house and those who dwell in it. It
is a long way from Heidegger’s peasant hut, nestled into a hillside or
under a forest canopy growing over the generations, to contemporary
urban dwelling established within a more comprehensively planned
environment. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s notion of the Play of the
Fourfold can guide us in thinking through the togetherness of the
aspects involved in domestic landscaping. Focusing upon the elements
and their interrelation is a matter of phenomenological attention to the
essential structures of a given field. Nothing, not even the most trivial
types involved, should be omitted, so that we have a view of the entire
environment at hand. The reader should pay attention to whether we
have properly included all the elements.
The elements employed by landscaping are both living and non-
living forms. The living forms are trees and shrubs, flowering plants
and vegetables, lawn and ground cover. The non-living elements are
soil, mulch, stone, wood, water, and light, all employed in developing
10 “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?,” T. Sheehan, trans. Listening, vol. 12 (1977), 123;
“Hebel—Friend of the House,” B. Foltz and M. Heim (trans.), Contemporary German

Philosophy, vol. 3, 93.
and enhancing the bed, the walkway, the patio, the wall, the fence,
waterworks, and the gazebo.
The living forms draw upon earth and sky: the soil below and the
water from above and below, oxygen from the air, the light and heat
of the sun—the ancient four elements of earth, water, air, and fire still
verifiably there in ordinary macro-experience along with the advanced
micro-articulation given by scientific exploration. Our collective lives
depend upon their stable regularity. When, as forest and prairie fires, tor-
nados and hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods, they depart from their
regularity, human life and works are threatened. So the ancient Greeks
were not so naïve with their doctrine of the four “elements” which were
not atomic components but those regions whose stability underpins
civilization.
In Heidegger’s terms, plant forms, like us, belong to the earth: both
our and their forms are made from the elements, and for us one analo-
gizes the other. All living things take their places in the ecosystem, draw-
ing from and giving back to the elements. Living, they are proto-selves:
self-formative, self-sustaining, self-repairing, and self-reproducing. They
each carry on the life of their kind, reproduce, and fall back into the ele-
ments of which they are made to furnish the organic materials for sub-
sequent living forms that carry the torch of life after it is extinguished
in those who pass it on both by reproducing and by yielding up their
elements in death. As Anaximander would have it, each living thing has
to “pay the debt of cosmic justice” for having to violate the integrity of
those things that the organism destroyed by consuming it in sustaining
its own ongoing life.
Turning to specific living forms, trees frame the house and furnish
shade. Hardwoods especially continue to grow into stately, towering
umbrellas that last through generations. My mother’s great-grandchil-
dren sit in the shade of a stately tree I planted on my original home-
stead some seventy years ago. Given modern mobility, over the years the
homestead is more frequently occupied by successive and unrelated own-
ers and the sense of the continuity over generations afforded by the trees
planted by one of one’s own ancestral line is lost. Though less so than
the stately sequoias that began their lives thousands of years ago, yet in
their endurance, the trees planted by one’s ancestors remind us that life
endures through the passing of human generations.
As another living element, shrubs accentuate the house and provide
hedges to underscore or separate features of the organized landscape.
42 R.E. Wood
Divided by walkways, patios, and beds, the lawn forms the background
for all the other elements. The beds in turn constitute significant focal
points in the landscape, featuring varieties of living forms, especially
flowing plants, vegetables, shrubs, and ground cover. It is in this con-
text that the consideration of the value of native flora against imported
varieties arises—a topic that would extend our discussion beyond the
confines of this chapter. Suffice it to say here that the choice of native
plantings underscores the continuity between the natural and the built
environment.
Turning to the non-living forms: organically composed soil mixed
with moisture-retaining sands, like lava and green sand, provide the rich-
est base for what will grow in them. A mulch cover helps retain moisture
and allows for differing coloration of beds.
Natural stone for walls, paths, and patios permits greater variation
of form, color, and texture than manufactured stone which is, by
contrast, boringly uniform. Natural stone calls for greater artistry in the
distribution of sizes, textures, and colors. Natural stone also reminds
us of the earth from which, by contrast, the manufactured removes us.
Moss rocks of various sizes, placed judiciously, add a natural sculptural
dimension. In deep shade, the mosses and lichens that develop on the
surface present an interesting random interplay of colors and textures.
Together they remind us of our belonging to the earth of living and
non-living forms.
River rocks of various sizes might be used to line a ditch, edge a bed,
or snake through larger beds. Some mix of river rock and moss rocks can
be used to create setting and constitute the bottom of artificial ponds.
Moss rocks set among a grove of developed trees and surrounded by pea
gravel produce a real sense of serenity in the interplay between the living
and the non-living. The Zen garden, shown in the image that introduces
this chapter (Fig. 3.1), provides cosmic symbolism in raked sand sur-
rounding protruding boulders; it establishes, in all the features of such
a garden, a sense of serenity contributing to meditation and union with
Nature.11
In further articulating the non-living forms, the walkway directs
us from one area to another without our encroaching upon lawns or
11 See Wybe Kuitert, Scenes and Taste in the History of Japanese Garden Art (Amsterdam:
J. C. Gieben, 1988).
Fig. 3.1 Zen Garden, Ryoan-Ji, Kyoto. Credit Alamy Stock Photos
gardens that would be worn by regular traffic. One of the terms of the
walkway is the patio that creates a space for outdoor gathering. The
gazebo performs a similar function, shielding the occupants from the
elements while providing a commanding vista. It also creates a place
for silent meditation. The fence screens off areas of privacy or prevents
animal intrusion into cultivated spaces. It might totally occlude visual
access to an area; but it might also afford glimpses through it at the
space within or without, as it also affords support for vines. The hedge
or the wall has functions similar to those of the fence. A wall might
also serve to hold back the pressures of the earth on a hillside or, as an
element in a terrace, to enable the negotiation of sloping land. One of
the focal points of landscaping is the bed whose function is to contain
shrubs or trees and/or both perennial and seasonal flowers or vegetables.
Waterworks would include fountains, waterfalls, ponds, and, in
larger landscapes, streams. Of course, in some settings lake or ocean
shore affords a border to which building and landscaping provide
counterpoint. More often than not waterworks are present as swimming
44 R.E. Wood
Fig. 3.2 Mark Wood, Fishing by moss boulders and double waterfall
pools, whose design can provide a significant focal point for organizing
the landscape.
A small pond fed by one or more waterfalls allows the integration of
many elements to reproduce a natural setting. Canopied by trees that let
in filtered light, surmounted perhaps by a stone patio atop a retaining
wall facing a small waterfall that splashes over larger jutting rocks and
spills over wide, flat rocks and through a mix of varying sizes of river
rock and gravel, the pond fed by the waterfall might contain water-lilies
and fish. Surrounded by differing types of rocks, a large variety of plants
and shrubs would be tucked into the crevices. Such a setting attracts
birds, butterflies, and frogs (Fig. 3.2).
When not being used functionally as a swimming pool, the presence
of water, whether placid and silent or flowing and gurgling, creates a
soothing environment, and in so doing promotes meditative awareness.
On the earth, under the sky, water mirrors its surroundings as it also
changes its own mood by the action of the wind. Water reflects, and in
its reflection mirrors and stimulates our own reflective activity. As we

mentioned earlier, in Moby-Dick, Herman Melville has Ishmael observe:
“Water and meditation are inextricably wed.”12
As a final element we have light. Natural light falls differently at
different times of the day, in different seasons, and on different days in
different meteorological conditions. That determines what kinds of
plantings can flourish under varying shade and light conditions. Trees
shade the areas beneath in various degrees of density from the light-
dappled to the heavy shade where only certain types of plants flourish.
Artificial lighting creates a totally different visual ambiance, lining a
pathway, circling a patio, focusing on garden sculpture or highlighting
trees and shrubs, rocks and buildings. It creates dramatic nocturnal
focus.
Turning now to more specifically aesthetic elements, let us consider
briefly the formal properties of texture, color, and shape. From an
aesthetic point of view, plantings provide different textures and colors.
As well as the rich variety of colors furnished by flowering trees, shrubs,
and plants, different shades of green in the plant, shrub, and tree forms
provide contrasts of a more subtle nature. Judicious use of evergreens
can keep such contrasts going through the winter. Seasonal color is
provided both by the leaves changing in the fall and by plants and trees
flowering at different times of the year. Shrubs and grasses provide
different textures. Aside from the use of grasses in lawns, some grasses
grow several feet high and send forth spikes of differing degrees of
delicacy, pampas grasses exhibiting foot-long white plumes terminating
in spikes several feet tall. Others send forth tassels that reflect the sun
and sway in the wind. Mondo grasses come in various sizes and can be
used effectively in borders or in solid plantings. One might layer grasses,
with the typical burmuda, St. Augustine, bluegrass, fescue, zoyzia,
buffalo grass and the like found in the South covering the sweeping areas
and requiring regular mowing, fringed by types that would appear at
different times and would require less frequent mowing, being fringed
in their turn by the higher growing types that require no mowing
(Fig. 3.3).
The basic elements of shape are the curve and the straight line. The
straight line suggests rigidity and allows the eye to command the vista.
12 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
46 R.E. Wood
Fig. 3.3 Mark Wood, Pathways

Playing counterpoint to the straight line, the curve breaks up the rigidity
and forces the eye to a continual change of direction. As the direction of
a path, it continually affords a new perspective to someone walking along
it. Flanked by significantly high shrubbery, fences or walls, the curving
path solicits the walker to whatever hidden aspects may lie beyond the
field of immediately commanding vision. The curved path thus suggests
mystery rather than the immediate manifestness of the vista commanded
by the straight line.
In contrast to the conventional narrow straight-line bed running parallel
to the foundations of the house, the large curved bed sets off the dominant
orthogonal lines of the house and occupies more of the area otherwise cov-
ered by what is often the boring sameness of the lawn. Sweeping around
the corners of the house, the large curved bed carries the eye beyond the
edge of the conventional bed that terminates at the corner; it invites one to
move around the house. Variations on separate rectangular, circular, oval,
or kidney-shaped beds carve out areas of the lawn to further break up the
monotony of large green spaces or to soften the sharpness of the corners
where walkway meets walkway or driveway. Such curved beds can interface
nicely with a concave retaining wall to carve out space in a hillside.
And of course all of this takes place within the contours of the land,
typically flattened for efficient purposes in our cities. But sloping land,
like curved beds and walkways, breaks the monotony of flat planes and
straight edges. Sloping land elicits more clearly our belonging to the
earth and invites the building of houses that nestle into the hills and of
terracing that supplements the natural beauty of the slope. Berms, judi-
ciously placed, break up a typically flat terrain.
But all these elements remain only a jumbled pot-pourri without the art-
istry of the landscape architect. That artistry gathers these elements together
into a whole that establishes alternations between the vista and intimate
spaces, between the manifest and the hidden, and between the interior and
the exterior, setting the elements into relations that involve the possibility
of a continuing change of perspective both at any given time and through
changes in the seasons. Such space is not only visual but functional: set up
for work, play, visiting, and relaxation as well as for meditation, although
the latter, to our great loss, plays but a small role in the dominant culture.
Besides aquatic flora, the pond often contains fish and attracts birds,
butterflies, and frogs. This adds a relation to various types of fauna and
animal forms, both vertebrate and non-vertebrate. Insect life is involved
in pollination and in the decay of other living forms. Care must be taken
48 R.E. Wood
to eliminate encroachments of unwanted vegetative forms on gravel

driveways or pathways or within beds and patios and in fertilizing lawns
in such a way that the action of bacteria and small organisms upon the
soil is not eliminated as well. Flowers and flowering shrubs and trees
attract butterflies and bees. Undesirable insect numbers can be reduced
by attracting bats and various types of birds. Martin houses and bat
houses will keep the fly and mosquito population down, for each of them
daily eats more than its weight in insects. Thickets of bushes or trees
provide cover for bird-nesting and for rabbits, who have, nonetheless, to
be kept away from the gardens. If the land is big enough, pockets of
wildness can do the job. They also provide counterpoint to the cultivated
areas. An island of wildness jutting out of a neatly mown lawn or a
hedgerow left wild can provide cover for rabbits below and mockingbirds
above. A nut tree will attract squirrels; various berry bushes attract
assorted birds.
Like domestic architecture, domestic landscaping can be little more
than surface prettification, mere background for a sinking into “bour-
geois privatization.” We are often willing to dedicate a considerable
amount of money to secure surface decoration as background for other
things. The deeper dimensions begin to open up in our care for living
forms.
There is a sense in which the gardener can dwell more authentically
than the owner.13 He remains close to living processes, the mystery of
emergence out of essential hiddenness—a process that supports our own
conscious field. Dwelling on the earth, caring for the living, bringing it
to fuller unfolding by tending individual life forms and bringing them
into significant relation with one another, the gardener experiences
the meaning of living on the earth. Beneath the surface soil lies the
geological substratum furnishing two components that gain expression
in the use of natural stone and in the cultivation of the richness of the
soil, residue of the decay of previous life forms. Attending to the rhythms
of life, its emergence, blossoming, reproduction and decay, and its over-
all contribution to the humus that will support the next generation
of plant life, the gardener obtains a rich and vivid image of our own
emergence, blossoming, reproduction and decay, and our individual
13 Cf. Hegel’s master–slave relation in Phenomenology of Spirit, A. Miller, trans. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977), §§178–96, 111–8.

being-toward-death, not as a purely private episode, but as related to

our own contribution to the rising generation. But such metaphoric
sensibility is made possible only as we learn the meditative modality
of dwelling that gathers the Whole and deepens our sense of presence
and our attentiveness to what draws near in the present. Through the
arrangement of the aesthetically sensitive and meditative landscape artist,
we are invited to become sensitive to the environment as a whole and
the ever varying details of the many things within it as we ourselves arise
from the earth, dwell thereon, and return to it.
With reflective sensitivity to the Whole as background, the rising and
setting of the sun, the alternation of the seasons, the feel of wind and
rain, the look of light and dark, the clash, splash, and complementarity of
ever-changing colors, all enter into a meditative aesthetics that does not
merely remain on the surface but appreciates precisely the beauty of that
surface as indicative of the depths of life and being that the sensory sur-
face both reveals and conceals to us mortals. And it can do so because we
are referred to the Whole, and thus can be sensitive to surface as indica-
tive of depth and mystery. Care for the living and appreciation of natural
materials make those who truly dwell sensitive to the mystery and beauty
of life as expressed in the alternation of the seasons, and to the formative
power of both living and non-living forms. To be welcomed into such an
environment is to be introduced to a world of authentic human dwell-
ing. But this can be opened up only insofar as we leave a place in our
lives for comprehensive meditation.
Thus far we have attempted to assimilate Heidegger’s notions of
Earth, Sky, and mortals into our reflections upon domestic landscape.
These are three of the elements whose interrelation comprises the Play of
the Fourfold. There is a fourth: relation to the Immortals as “messengers
of the Most High.”
How to establish a relation to “the Immortals”? The presupposi-
tion has to be a form of meditative awareness that thinks in terms of
the Whole, of the cosmos and its ground. Given that, perhaps relation
to the Immortals can be evoked by some form of statuary: a statue of
St. Francis who celebrated nature as theophany, a Celtic cross or some
more abstract sculptural form that speaks of the surrounding mystery of
being, a statue of the Virgin conceived of as vehicle for the Incarnation
of God, a statue of the Buddha, or the Star of David.
I myself have designed a trinitarian earth-cross, a six-directional
form: up and down, right and left, front and back, corresponding
50 R.E. Wood
to the basic directions of the human body. It is composed of seven

14”-square blocks, and while it has a vertical dimension (up and down),
the horizontal dominates: it embraces the earth (right and left), and
gathers the past while anticipating the future (back and front). It under-
scores incarnation, our belonging to the world of space and time, while
it points vertically to that which is above. Such sculptural forms are ways
of bringing the enduring, all-encompassing dimension of depth into the
Now of bodily encounter to those who are meditatively attuned.
But because we can each inhabit our private space only by
simultaneously occupying the space of meaning belonging to the
wider community, the purely private focus all this involves has to be
complemented by a more encompassing approach, joining with others
in laying out new neighborhoods and recovering the old as well as in
developing an even more encompassing urban plan. And that involves,
beyond the domestic landscape contractor, a relationship between
private developers and public officials. Full dwelling, however, rooted
in the domestic, can branch out into the encompassing community to
transform our way of life.
The artist Christo has followed that route, working through city
councils and private property owners, and employing large numbers of
workers to transform our collective relationship to the environment.
In his wrappings, both of major buildings and of cliffs and islands, he
attempts to make us aware of the gifts provided to the community by
both nature and culture.
The private retreat afforded by intelligent and sensitive domestic
landscaping is a resource for bringing about meditatively that
appreciation of the relation between the man-made and the naturally
given that can feed wider cooperative efforts to gain appreciation of
the gift of both natural and man-made environments as they come to
relate to one another to constitute a single harmonious environment.
Dwelling on the Earth, under the Sky, facing our mortality together
with all living beings, and gathering the Whole together meditatively
in relation to the Immortal dimension, we can assimilate the results
of technological transformation achieved through calculative thinking
into a context fashioned and sustained by meditative dwelling. To
this mode of dwelling domestic landscaping can make a significant
contribution.
Bibliography
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Aristotle. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. 1984. Hippocrates G. Apostle trans.
Grinell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press.
Cicero, De Inventione Rhetorica. 1949. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1966. “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking,
J. Anderson and H. Freund trans. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1971a. “Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, and Thought.
A. Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper.
———. 1971b. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, and Thought.
———. 1977a. “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” T. Sheehan, trans. Listening,
vol. 12 (1977), 123.
———. 1977b. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. W. Lovitt,
trans. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1993. “Hebel—Friend of the House,” B. Foltz and M. Heim trans.
Contemporary German Philosophy, vol. 3.
———. 1998. “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ The Way Back into the
Ground of Metaphysics.” W. Kaufmann, trans. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks,
W. McNeill ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 277–90.
———. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics. G. Fried and R. Polt, trans. New
Kuitert, Wybe. 1988. Scenes and Taste in the History of Japanese Garden Art.
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Melville, Herman. 2000. Moby-Dick or The Whale. New York: Modern Library.
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CHAPTER 4
Architecture: The Confluence of Art,

Technology, Politic, and Nature
Since building is common to men, birds, and some insects, human

beings are not distinguished from other animals by the fact that they
build, but by the fact that they build, beyond simple function, crea-
tively and meaningfully. By “creatively” I mean that architects construct
different building types and in vastly differing styles, not being tied to
precedent, not having the urge to produce a specific form “imprinted
onto” their physiology as a species habit. By “meaningfully” I refer to
the way a building fits into a world of inhabitance.1 As we indicated in
the Introduction, such a world is founded upon the bipowlar structure
of the field of human experience constituted, on the one hand, by the
limited manifestness of a highly selective sensory field serving biological
need and, on the other, by an empty reference, via the notion of Being,
to the encompassing Totality. The latter makes possible and necessary
universal description, world interpretation, and choices leading over gen-
erations to the construction of a human life-world, a traditum, delivered
from out of the understandings and choices of those long dead. Such a
life-world opens up ways of thinking, feeling, and acting for those born
into it. It is precisely because we are referred to the Whole that we are
1 Cf. Christian Norberg-Schultz, The Concept of Dwelling (New York: Rizzoli, 1985);
cf. also his Meanings in Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1983) (henceforth MA);
Architecture, Meaning and Place (New York: Electra/Rizzoli, 1988) (henceforth AMP);
Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1980)
(henceforth GL).

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_4
54 R.E. Wood
able, in artistic work, to bring into being the new, and that the senso-
rily encountered can become an icon of the Whole, so that it is not only
positivistically “there” or even functionally interpreted; it is also symbolic.
Furthermore, because, by reason of our reference to the Whole, we can
back off from the purely functional outside us as well as from the organi-
cally desirous within us and can learn to appreciate the togetherness of
the sensory display for its own sake; we can appreciate beautiful forms
in nature and art and can produce them in art.2 Even the appreciation
of sensory configuration itself reverberates with our sense of dwelling on
the earth, in a world of meaning (Fig. 4.1).
Art is present in various places in a given life-world. But the most per-
vasive art form of all is architecture. With the exception of contemporary
installations of various sorts and in various places, all the other art forms
are found within or in relation to buildings. From time immemorial,
wherever humans dwell together we find architecture as expression of the
art of building. In our everyday life it is inescapable: we live in buildings,
work in or between buildings, are educated and entertained in buildings,
worship in buildings, make our public decisions, attend conventions, and
perhaps also listen to lectures on architecture in buildings. Architecture
is indeed the most pervasive art form, though today music is a strong
second.
Architecture as a fine art not only sets the context for the arts in
general; it also requires of the architect the aesthetic sensitivities of the
other plastic artists. It requires the eye of the painter to provide an aes-
thetic arrangement within a given perspective. As Ruskin would have
it, “a wall surface is to an architect simply what a white canvas is to a
painter….”3 Further, in relation to the wall surface, the architect is a
relief sculptor, sensitive to the effect of shadow in giving form to the
2 On the founding structures of the field of experience, cf. Chaps. 2 and 3 of my A Path
into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutic, and Dialogical Studies. (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1991). For a general approach to the aesthetic region,
see my presidential address, “Recovery of Form,” Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association, 1995, 1ff. For a comprehensive treatment of the overall concep-
tual system and the place of aesthetics in it for each of the major thinkers treated here,
see my Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1999).
3 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Dover, 1889), p. 83 (hence-
forth SLA).
4 ARCHITECTURE: THE CONFLUENCE OF ART, TECHNOLOGY, POLITIC … 55
Fig. 4.1 Chartres Cathedral. Credit Alamy Stock Photos
surface. Architecture likewise requires an eye for sculpture in the round

to give plastic depth and thus coherence to the indeterminate number
of perspectives from which one can view the building. But in addition
to these features that the architect shares with the painter and the sculp-
tor, the peculiar province of the architect is the handling of enclosed
space as it plays in relation to single and multiple perspectives inside and
56 R.E. Wood
out.4 In the twentieth century, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and
Siegfried Giedion share that view with Antoine Pevsner.5 Louis Kahn
sees the province of architecture as light, which is that which makes the
space appear in its play with the sculptural and painterly aspects of the
enclosure.6
But the aesthetic dimension here is closely linked to other features.
Most basically, architecture has to fit the ends for which the building is
constructed so that architects have to understand the concrete opera-
tion of things human: they have to be students of human nature. And in
order to fit those ends, architecture requires the know-how to construct
something that will stand over time: the architect must be an engineer.
It is commonplace to distinguish architecture from building insofar as
the latter is satisfied in producing an enclosure that provides protection
from the elements.7 Because it is tied to function and because, by rea-
son of the functions it deals with, it is concerned with the construction
of larger-than-human objects, architecture as an art form has the great-
est number of natural restrictions and thus of technical know-how. It
requires geological, meteorological, and engineering knowledge: knowl-
edge of geological substructure and of general weather conditions in a
given territory, knowledge of the properties of materials, of load-bear-
ing capacities, of stresses and strains, of conductivity and insulation, of
acoustical properties and the like. To that extent, as Frank Lloyd Wright
and Le Corbusier observed, the architectural engineer puts us in touch
with the principles of the physical cosmos.8 Although we must add that
there is a difference between using physical principles and showing or
expressing them. Engineering knowledge is a necessary, not a sufficient
4 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (New York: Penguin, 1983),
15–16. The latter point handles Roger Scruton’s objection to the peculiarity of interior
space as the special province of architecture in his The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979), 43ff (henceforth AA).
5 Walter Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture, New York: Harper, 1955, 32 (hence-
forth STA); Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture, New York: Mentor, 1963, 245
(henceforth FA); Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1980, 30ff.
6 Louis Kahn in John Lobell (ed.), Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of
Louis Kahn (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979), 50, 47, 34.

7 Ruskin, SLA, 8–9.
8 Wright, FA, 43; Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, F. Etchells, trans. (New
York: Praeger, 1960), 8 and 23 (henceforth TNA).

condition for architecture that brings building into the arena of the fine
arts.
Expressivity might be seen in the Doric pillar; the vertical emphasis
of the fluting, the entasis or swelling in the middle of the pillar, and the
cushion on the Doric capital give expression (as Schopenhauer would
have it) to the tension between gravity and rigidity, displaying the
impression of elasticity and strength resisting the weight of the entab-
lature and roof. Of course it is only an impression, since the pillar is not
bulging under the weight nor is its capital cushioning. But it is one way
of understanding, at the engineering level, the adage “form follows func-
tion.” The form expresses the function of weight-bearing, but here only
in the mode of “as if”9 (Fig. 4.2).
One could also create an even more external display of engineering
function by means of a set of conventional signs. Consider, for exam-
ple, the forty-story First Star Bank Building in Milwaukee, the tallest
building in Wisconsin, designed by architects from Skidmore, Owings,
and Merrill.10 It is one step beyond the International Style, a modern
gleaming white steel and clear glass construction comprised of a repeti-
tive grid pattern. The severe verticality of its tower is cut across by three
horizontal rows, one at the top, another some three-fifths of the way
down and the third at the bottom. The insertion of these rows com-
posed of diagonals alternating direction creates an ambiguous Gestalt
of arrows pointing upwards and downwards, so that the direction of the
eye is constantly altered upwards and downwards as one naturally runs
along the overpowering verticality of the building. This establishes a set
of signs indicating from the outside and conventionally the downward
and upward thrusts indicated more naturally by the imitation of natural
forms in the case of the Doric pillar.
Bridging the divide between the fine and the useful arts, architecture
is able, within the limits of structural stability, to elaborate aesthetic form
in tandem with suitability to the ends it serves. Thus three fundamen-
tal architectural principles were enunciated by Vitruvius, the basic source
of our knowledge of classical architectural theory: firmitas or stability,
9 Cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, E. Payne trans (New
York: Dover, 1966), 411–8.
10 I have chosen this building, not because it is one of the wonders of modern architec-
ture, but because I saw it every day when I was writing this chapter and found it intriguing.
58 R.E. Wood
Fig. 4.2 Joseph Korom, First Star Bank, Milwaukee
convenientia or utility and venustas or decorousness.11 Surprisingly, for

the pragmatic Romans the first consideration is venustas. The Vitruvian
triangle abstractly expresses features whose factual functioning rests upon
an historical context that defines social-political and also private functions
11 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, M.H. Morgan, trans. (New York: Dover, 1960),
I, IV, 2, p. 17 (henceforth TBA).

and upon a tradition of accumulated engineering skills and architectural

styles. Further, these abstract features appear within the givenness of the
life-world. (We will return to the latter in the last section.) Architectural
historian Peter Collins claims12 that none of these three features can be
rejected entirely, though deconstructive architecture has taken up the
challenge and produced deliberately dysfunctional, unintegrated, and
even—at least visually—unstable forms.13 And, of course, there is the
ever present warehouse or tool-shed which can scarcely claim decorous-
ness. The history of architecture in modern times is in part determined
by emphasis upon how venustas relates to stabilitas and convenientia.
In the sections which follow, we will first lay out certain components
of architecture by looking to a kind of ideal genesis of building. We will
then offer some preliminary considerations of the development of build-
ing types in terms of the articulation of social-political functions, in terms
of the symbolic character of building linked to those functions, and
in terms of the role played by beauty of structure and ornamentation.
This will involve consideration of how the often invoked adage “form
follows function” plays out in relation to the Vitruvian triangle. We will
conclude with some suggestions for assimilating certain Heideggerian
themes regarding the inhabitance of a life-world involved in architecture
which sets the larger context for the Vitruvian features.
In a sense, architecture as building begins with an imitation of nature
serving our animal needs, reproducing the naturally protective charac-
ter of the cave through the assembly of durable materials. In the earli-
est phase of its development it seems to have taken three basic forms:
the cone and its cognates represented by the Indian teepee on the one
hand and the pyramid on the other (though the pyramid was more
monumental sculpture than architecture); the half-sphere and its varia-
tions represented by the Indian lodge; and the quadrangle in post and
lintel construction. The pillar developed from the tree trunk used to
support a roof. The cylindrical form this exhibits was later used for tow-
ers. Thus in the middle of the eighteenth century, searching for new
architectural forms that would suit the modern world, Laugier went
back to the primitive hut to recover the basic elements and Fournay
12 Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture: 1790–1950 (Kingston and
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 22 (henceforth CIMA).

13 Mark Johnson, Disfigurings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 230–67.
60 R.E. Wood
sought a regeneration through geometry and its elementary forms.14 Le

Corbusier, paralleling Cézanne’s observations in painting, claimed that
the elements of architecture, abstractly considered, are the sphere, cube,
and cylinder as shapes and the horizontal, vertical, and oblique as direc-
tions.15 The building, formed out of variations on these geometrical
forms, is related to the earth upon which, within which, or over which
it is set and out of which it is made. It is related to the sky as the spatial
surround into which it reaches. (We will return to earth and sky more
specifically in the final section.)
The act of erecting a building not only protects what happens inside
the building from the outside; but also, from the indeterminate surround
of space, it carves out an interior, and from the indifference of empty
space it gathers, it charges. In carving out interior space, it allows things
to take place—an expression suggesting both a spatial and a temporal
feature.16
Allowing things to take place by establishing an enclosure for protec-
tion, a building requires entrance and exit. The primary entrance/exit
provides further spatial orientation, so that we have up–down, back–
front, and—linked up to human bodily orientation—right–left as pri-
mary directions in otherwise indeterminate space. The entrance/exit
establishes a face for the building and much of architectural art has been
devoted to the articulation of that face, rendering it both expressive and
beautiful.
The relation between inner and outer may be more or less open. Less
open, a building requires inner, artificial illumination; more open, it has
its walls penetrated by fenestration of a smaller or larger character to
allow less or more natural light to enter. There may also be an interior
relation to the natural exterior when the interior surrounds a space open
to the sky, establishing a courtyard, an interior within the interior which
is also an exterior. The courtyard is open upwards but not outwards
14 Norberg-Schulz, MIWA, 166.

15 TNA, 20 and 31. For Cezanne, cf. Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, Modern Art:
Painting/Sculpture/ Architecture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985???), 30a.
Plato in his Philebus found beauty of form more properly in “straight lines and circles,
and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them…(as) eternally and absolutely
beautiful” (51C). R. H. Wilenski [The Meaning of Modern Sculpture, Boston: Beacon,
1964, pp. 87ff)] (henceforth MMS) made a similar claim about modern sculpture.
16 For a summary of the approach we are taking here see Norberg-Schulz, MA, 224ff.
except by way of an entrance connecting it immediately with the exterior

space surrounding the building.
In its external relation to the natural surround, a building requires a
path or paths and thus becomes a center establishing direction. In actual-
ity, cities originate more by clustering buildings along paths formed by
those traveling toward some navigational center—frequently a center
formed by the confluence of river and sea. The paths wind along riv-
ers and streams flowing between hills and mountains and pass through
the lowest gap in high elevations. Buildings are oriented with respect to
those paths and that general surround which constitutes the genius loci,
to which ancient architects were especially sensitive.17
In relation to other buildings, the erection of a new building estab-
lishes a certain charged inter-space and allows public things to take place.
The public equivalent of the courtyard would be the square or piazza
created by the arrangement of buildings that define the open space. In
this case the space is also penetrated by streets or walkways which pro-
vide entrance and exit.
Relation to the surround has a different character depending upon the
character of the natural environment—be it flat or hilly or mountainous,
be it rich or poor in flora. The quality of light in a region combined with
technological development suggest different types of fenestration. The
character of the seasons also makes a difference. The latter, for exam-
ple, makes the flat roof functional in drier and warmer climates and the
pitched roof functional in wetter and colder climates—the colder the cli-
mate the more pitched the roofs to let the weight of accumulated snow
run off diagonally rather than bearing down directly upon the roof.
As cities develop, the relation to the natural surround diminishes
when houses rise immediately at the edge of streets and walkways. But
then nature tends to return privately in the form of courtyards with
flora and publicly in the form of parks and boulevards. The rich develop
walled gardens or country estates with grass, trees, shrubs, and flow-
ers along with waterworks. In modern America especially, the suburban
house stands back from the street, separated by grass and surrounded
by shrubs, trees, and flowers, with a place to grow vegetables as well.
Natural and man-made form a synthesis to establish location.
17 Norberg-Schulz, GL.
62 R.E. Wood
What we have considered thus far sets the most general natural con-
text for the building function and the relation of the building to its sur-
round. It says nothing of the different social-political functions which
develop over time and of the different building forms corresponding to
them. It says nothing of the symbolic character of building nor of beauty,
whether structural or ornamental, in which architecture as a fine art cul-
minates. Let us fold in these considerations and establish thereby the role
of technological development in effecting architectural style.
The articulation of different common functions over time, working in
tandem with the development of technology, required the introduction
of different building types. We might consider here two of those devel-
opments.
One of the major focuses of architectural art throughout the ages
has been religious architecture. In the High Middle Ages, the develop-
ment of the rib vault combined with the flying buttress made possible
the virtual elimination of load-bearing walls in the upper portions of the
medieval cathedral. This invention together with the development of the
leaded anchoring of stained glass segments enabled the development of
larger masses of glass—virtual glass walls—through which an abundance
of light could stream. This, in turn, opened up expressive possibilities
that were tied to a certain understanding of the place of human beings in
the cosmos.
The cathedral allowed large numbers of people to gather for wor-
ship. As the bible of the illiterate, through statuary and frescoes as well
as through its general form and decorative motifs, it taught people their
place in the scheme of things and set the dispositional tone for respond-
ing to that instruction. Contrary to the Greek temple whose open porti-
cos allowed a viewer to see from the outside the statue of the god within,
and whose dominant horizontality emphasized belonging to the earth,
the medieval cathedral, through the recession and decoration of its door-
ways, invited the worshippers in and closed off the interior from the
exterior. Through the rib vaults, the eye was directed upward to the soar-
ing heights which culminated prayerfully in the pointed arches. Through
the clerestory windows light, shown from above, was transformed by the
stained glass, especially the stunning blue of the windows at Chartres
Cathedral. The cruciform shape of the ground plan whose dominant axis
was underscored by the interior walkways drew the worshippers towards
the altar as the termination of a journey. The altar sat at the intersection
of two axes: the dominant axis from entrance to altar and a secondary
axis left and right of the altar to give a cruciform shape to the interior.
Gathering the whole together in a rhythmic and proportionate man-
ner brought engineering skill, religious function, and artistic expression
together into a symbolically powerful whole.
A whole world separates the cathedral from the modern skyscraper—

our second example of the impact of technology upon building struc-
ture and function. Louis Sullivan, one of the fathers of the modern
skyscraper, approached its construction with the adage we have already
noted and that has since become the watchword of the International
Style: “form follows function.”18 As Sullivan viewed it, the form a build-
ing takes should be determined by the social function it is meant to
serve. In the case of the modern skyscraper, congestion and high real-
estate values provided the socio-economic context for the high-rise
18 Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Dover, 1979), 42–9, 170, 208
(henceforth KC).
64 R.E. Wood
building. The social functions dictated the form it would take. But tech-
nology would set the limits within which everything could occur.
The late nineteenth century saw several technological developments:
the development of steel construction, ferro-concrete and plate glass,
electric lighting, central heating (and eventually also air-conditioning),
along with the invention of the elevator, all converging by reason of
the need for handling the concentration of large numbers of people in
relatively confined land masses. Without steel construction and within
confined land conditions, the thickness of foundations being in direct
proportion to height, there was a certain natural limit to the height of
buildings in cramped circumstances. Until the use of steel, the high-
rise building, under the limiting lot conditions of a modern city, could
only rise to some ten stories, with the walls at the base twelve feet thick.
But since in earlier times they did not have to arise within the cramped
confines of the modern city, the dome and pillar construction allowed
St. Peter’s in Rome to rise to a height of over 450 feet (held together
inside the double dome with an iron chain), which could easily include
a 30-story skyscraper, and any of the Gothic steeples. With steel-girder
construction, greater heights could be achieved within relatively nar-
row boundaries without unduly encroaching upon the space available
at street level. At the same time, elevators made possible rapid access to
the upper floors. Steel and glass construction established new open rela-
tions between inside and outside. The ability of steel I-beams or steel
reinforced concrete beams to span larger areas led to the development
of interior and exterior non-load-bearing walls. This provided flexibly
adaptable interior space through the removal or addition of dividing
walls, so that the form allowed an infinite variety of possible functions.
It also involved a relation of openness between inside and outside that
had hitherto been virtually impossible and thus changed the relation of a
building to space. The convergence of these technological developments
with social need brought into being the modern skyscraper.19
Specific functions dictated the overall form these buildings would
take. A basement contained boilers and the like; the first and second
floors would service customers walking in from the street; the floors
above would contain offices, the top floor re-routings for the heating
(and later air-conditioning) system, the elevator and the like. A major
19 Cf. Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” in KC, 202–13.
entrance gave the building a face and orientation. The first two floors
were often “set upon the earth” by the convention of rusticated stone.
The first floor would present a light and airy welcome with higher ceil-
ings and large plate-glass windows, while the second floor would be
readily accessible to customers by stairs, elevators, and escalators. The
floors above, since they all served the same office function, would show
an identical exterior. The top floor would present a different form and
cap off in an elegant way the building’s relation to the sky.
Next came the question of the proportions of each element in rela-
tion to the whole and on top of that the question of decoration. From
Vitruvius through Alberti to Le Corbusier, proportions were established
by selecting a module as a basic unit of measure derived from the meas-
urements of the human body, and putting it through various manipu-
lations of halving, quartering, doubling, and so on. Taking the human
body as the basis for the module established a feature of the overall form
that followed the general function of serving the human being.20
After the question of proportion there is the question of ornamen-
tation. Anyone who expects Sullivan’s architecture to provide samples
of the way the International Style understood his “form follows func-
tion” will be startled at the way ornament covers Sullivan’s buildings.21
His own ornamentation was based upon a loving study of vegetative
forms, so that those who viewed his architecture would be reminded that
human functions take place within living nature. In this he hearkens back
to the medieval cathedral with stylized vegetative motifs constrained to
follow the lines of the building and the ordering rhythms imposed by the
architect.22
Nonetheless the fanatical rejection of ornamentation, proposed by
Adolf Loos in his Ornament and Crime23 and turned into dogma by the
20 Cf. Vitruvius, TBA, III, I, 3, 73; Le Corbusier, TNA, 219.

21 Still standing are, for example, the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, the Guaranty
Trust Building in Buffalo, and Roosevelt University’s Auditorium Building in Chicago. See
Nancy Freazier, Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School (New York: Crescent Books, 1991),
40–5, 50–1, 56–61. Sullivan’s work has been considered the consummation of Ruskinism
which viewed architecture as focused upon ornamentation (Collins, CIMA, 115–6).
22 Sullivan, “Ornament in Architecture, KC, 187–90.
23 Cf. Mark Johnson, Disfigurings, 125–8 and Karsten Harries, “The Death of
Ornament” in The Bavarian Rococo Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983),
247ff (henceforth BRC).
66 R.E. Wood
International Style, was born when Sullivan publicly bemoaned the sty-
listic eclecticism exhibited by his contemporaries. The architects of the
time employed ornamental forms taken from copybooks of historical
precedents in such a way as to obscure rather than enhance overall struc-
ture and to pervert completely the symbolic meanings that adhered to
such forms in the past. Sullivan himself had bemoaned especially banks
and libraries made to look like Greek temples. He suggested refraining
from ornament entirely for a period of years so architects could concen-
trate upon well-formed buildings, as it were, in the nude. They would
thus re-learn the values as well as the limitations of mass and propor-
tion. Only then could they re-introduce ornament in a way that would
complement and enhance rather than efface the dominant structure,
like harmony added to melody as in the movement from plainchant to
polyphony. But for Sullivan as a poetic architect, ornament should never
be super-added. Both structural proportions and ornamentation should
spring from the same emotional tonality. Ornament would thus be an
organic part of the original conception, like a flower amidst the leaves
and branches formed by a kind of logic of growth.24
The International Style fathered by Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier
was based on Sullivan’s “form follows function” formula and paral-
leled by the contemporaneous De Stijl movement.25 It repudiated all
ornamentation and any elaboration of aesthetic form that did not flow
directly out of the engineering functions serving the social-political func-
tions of the building.26 This was also linked to the deliberate repudiation
of the practice of borrowing from past form—known as “quotation”—
because of the perceived need to develop distinctively modern forms—a
perception that goes back at least to the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury. In the past, ornamentation was tied to the articulation of social
function, underscoring aspects of deeper meaningfulness, as in religious
and political architecture, or of hierarchical rank, as in the construction
24 “Ornament,” KC, 189. This integral togetherness of all the elements is what Wright
meant by “organic architecture,” which includes relation to the native environment and to
the character of materials (FA, 15–27). This is basically Aristotle’s notion of a well-made
tragedy which can be carried over to all the arts. Poetics, 8, 1451a, 30ff; 23, 1459a, 20. See
my RF, 3.
25 On de Styl, see Johnson, Disfigurings, 114–9.
26 The claim goes back to J. N. L. Durand at the end of the eighteenth century. Cf.
Collins, CIMA, 25.

of palaces and mansions.27 Too narrow an understanding of the notion

of form following function in much of Modern architecture left out that
whole dimension of meaningfulness.
But Modernism in architecture, enjoying its heyday immediately
before and after World War II when it became the International Style,
was eventually judged to be sterile, inhuman—indeed, boring. Enter
architectural Postmodernism.28 It rejects Modernism’s rejection of his-
torical styles and reintroduces “quotation.” However, we end up once
more with a stylistic jumble of elements derived from previous archi-
tectural periods against which Modernism had revolted. In Mark
Jarzombek’s felicitous phrase, we are confronted with “one liner histori-
cism,” quoting without understanding anything of the historical context
that made the quotation meaningful.29 Borrowing a contrast from liter-
ary critic Murray Abram’s The Mirror and the Lamp,30 we could say that
the Postmodernists view architecture as mirroring the jumble of incoher-
ent elements constituting contemporary society rather than giving it illu-
minating direction. In another direction, Michael Graves, grounded in
a particular and well-articulated architectural theory, ended up design-
ing Disneyworld hotels as a way of making people comfortable with their
existence.31
There is a further dimension to Postmodernism in architecture: the
deconstructive attempt. Following the mirroring rather than illuminat-
ing view of general architectural function, the Vitruvian theoretical tri-
angle of firmitas, convenientia, and venustas is subverted on each of its
three corners by the Postmodernist architecture of Derridian inspiration.
Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman even aim at dysfunctionality and
at making the inhabitants of the homes they design homes uncomfort-
able! Eisenman’s Wexler Center for the Arts at Ohio State University is
27 Cf. Harries, BRC, especially 245–6. The entire concluding discussion, “The Death of
Ornament,” deserves careful attention.

28 Postmodernism is said to begin with Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art Press, 1966).

29 Mark Jarzombek, “Post-Modern Historicism: The Historian’s Dilemma,” in M.
Dioni and C. Ingraham, Restructuring Architectural Theory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press, 1989), 89a (henceforth RAT).
30 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

31 Disfigurings, 222.
68 R.E. Wood
a model of dysfunctionality. And Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette project in

Paris is meant to be constantly subjected to transformation.32 Tschumi
introduced Eisenman to Derrida and commissioned them to design
one of the buildings for this project. Derrida describes the beginnings
of his cooperative planning with Eisenman as a matter of free associa-
tion of words connected in an odd way with the term chora—place or
space as the receptacle and nurse of becoming—about which Derrida
was at that time reading in Plato’s Timaeus.33 They added the letter “L”
to chora and off they went playing with L-shapes and meaning-associa-
tions. Part of the associative significance of the L was the Hebrew word
El as in El-Shadai or in Gabri-El or Rapha-El where it referred to God.
Place and creation come together in the manufactured word “choral.”
Characteristically, their cooperative plan was deferred indefinitely.34
Not all Postmodern architecture is deconstructive. Frank Gehry in
particular has produced many admirable works which foreswear rectan-
gular and cubic forms, as in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain
and the Disney Symphony Hall in Los Angeles.
I want at this point to place the Vitruvian framework that exposes
correct, verifiable aspects of architectural work within the more encom-
passing framework of the life-world within which unconcealment of
the Whole happens.35 Stabilitas, convenientia, and venustas are actu-
ally features set within that larger framework exposed by Heidegger.
“Function” is broadened to include relation to the entire environment
as a relation of inhabitance—a sense of orientation, a feeling for space.
These sensibilities transcend a simple formal aesthetic and are related
to an appreciative awareness of a full way of life.36 Life-world involves a
mode of appearance in which the correlativity of the human being and
32 Ibid., 242ff.
33 Plato, Timaeus, 49b ff.
34 Jacques Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” RAT, 99–105. As
in every other region of human experience, this approach by itself leads us into a dead-
end. I emphasize “by itself,” since deconstruction can be helpful in pulling out submerged
strands of meaning; but it fails to help us—indeed, positively hinders us—in attempting
to grasp and thus learn how to produce integral wholes, for all the limitations factually
involved in that attempt.
35 On the distinction between the correct and the unconcealed, see Heidegger, “On the
Essence of Truth,” Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, D. Krell, ed. (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977) 11ff.
36 In fact, for Heidegger art perishes in the aesthetic. Cf. OWA, 79.
what appears is constitutive. The mode of appearance is determined, not

by objects separate from each other and from the subject, but by the
encompassing of subject and object in comprehensive manifestness. In
“The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger presented the Greek temple
together with Van Gogh’s painting and C.F. Meyer’s poem as appearing
in the tension between Earth and World.37 As we explained in conjunc-
tion with our treatment of landscaping, here “World” is world of inhabit-
ance and “Earth” is correlative to it as native soil. Heidegger’s “native
soil” is not simply the object of chemical analysis; it is the correlate of
inhabitance and plays in relation to a world of lived meaning. A temple
functions in the world of the Greeks as grounding their felt understand-
ing of how humans fit within the Whole by expressing the human rela-
tion to the gods or, as Heidegger later put it, mortals’ relation to the
Immortals. The temple establishes a felt relation to the gods, allowing us
to draw near to them, and that precisely as it configurates sensuousness.
The temple opens up the world of meaning as set upon the earth.
Earth is only derivatively a correctly verifiable scientific object as a
peculiar location in the solar system and as a chemical mass. In order to
so appear it has to emerge within a human life-world. In its life-world
function, the notion of earth has several components, all of them a func-
tion of their manifestness and thus their correlativity to humanness as
the locus of that manifestness. In a general sense, buildings are made of
earthy materials whose Verlässlichkeit or reliability furnishes the stability
that permits their functionality.38 Reliability concerns what Heidegger
calls the “sheltering” feature of earth—correlative to a sense of being
cradled and thus belonging. The sense of belonging is captured in the
expression “native soil.”39 Another of Earth’s properties is sensuousness,
its rising up to manifestness as its own fullness is sheltered in darkness.40
This rising up occurs in perceivers who are themselves made of earth,
the humanum from “humus” that enters into the determination of our
essential mortality. This provides the sensuous features of materials: light,
color, shadow, texture and the qualitative relations between them as well
37 OWA, Van Gogh’s painting, 32–6; Meyer’s poem, 37, the Greek temple, 41ff.
38 OWA, 34; cf. also “The Thing,” PLT, 167.
39 OWA, 42.
40 OWA, 47.
70 R.E. Wood
as the perspectival appearance of quantitative relations in proportions

and in scale.
Belonging to the earth has been articulated in the architectural tradi-
tion in various ways. Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture stressed
belonging to a given natural environment by selecting materials found in
that environment for his country homes and forming them in such a way
that they appeared to grow out of the environment.41 The use of native
materials as a convenience—e.g., red tiles made out of the local clays in
Italy or local limestone as mandated building material in Jerusalem—
gives a certain aesthetic unity to villages and cities and underscores their
belonging to the earth as this peculiar locale—which is linked to what
Heidegger means by Earth as “native soil.”
Other ways to emphasize a building’s belonging to the earth have
appeared. There is the rustication of lower stories in Renaissance
works.42 More recently, transparency achieved through the steel and
glass construction of homes in a wooded setting was intended to let the
house melt into the natural setting from without and display panoram-
ically the natural setting from within.43 Most recently, in the Portland
Civic Center, Michael Graves (the creator of Disneyland hotels) colored
the lower stories green to emphasize relation to vegetative forms. But
even the development of ornamentation composed of stylized organic
forms—for example, in the medieval cathedral, in Art Nouveau, in
Sullivan’s general approach to ornament, and in Lloyd Wright’s stained-
glass designs—was intended to emphasize our belonging to the earth.
We might add that the contemporary use of mirror glass on the exte-
rior of skyscrapers adds a new dimension of relation to the environ-
ment. During the day, they mirror, in a surrealist, distorted manner, the
buildings which surround them as well as the clouds and sky. At dawn
and dusk they glow with the color of the rising and setting sun.44 In
41 FA, 94ff.
42 Serlio considered rustication a “symbol of the original forces of earth,” reported in
Norberg-Schulz, GL, 54.
43 Cf. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New
Caanan, Connecticut in Paul Heyer, Architects on Architecture: New Directions in American

Architecture (New York: Walker and Company, 1966), 31–3 and 207ff.
44 Tom Wolfe sees them as boring reflections of other glass boxes in From Bauhaus to
Our House (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981), 6. Robert Romanyshyn, Psychological
Life, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982) sees them as narcissistic.
Heidegger’s later analyses, the notion of Earth plays in relation to that

of the Sky: things rise up into the field of awareness on the Earth and
under the Sky. “Under the Sky” does not simply refer to the Now of spa-
tial encompassment, but also to the alternations of night and day, cloud
and sun, spring and fall, winter and summer which furnish fundamen-
tal measures of human time and change the character of how buildings
appear.
What stands there is unmoved and exhibits proportionate relations
between the parts. This led Schlegel to claim that architecture is fro-
zen music, a symphony in stone.45 As in music, the relation between
the parts could be described in terms of mathematical ratios. Pursuing
the parallel further, Dewey said that buildings are to mountains what
music is to the sea.46 Nonetheless, the play of light and shadow from
dawn to dusk, from cloudy to clear and from season to season, but also
under conditions of artificial illumination—whether ancient candlelight
or modern electrical light—creates another kind of symphony, not the
frozen music of static space but the dynamic music of an ever chang-
ing exhibition of textures, colors, and forms. In the frozen music aspect
of architecture we can consider Schopenhauer’s claim that the aesthetic
theme of architecture is the struggle of gravity and rigidity.47 Dewey said
further that architecture best expresses finish, gravity, repose, balance,
peace.48 In the dynamic music aspects we have Kahn’s notion of the play
of light and shadow revealing texture, form, and rhythm.
In relation to exterior space, a building rises toward the sky and
sets itself upon the earth. It stands in the light streaming from above.
Because we are set upon the earth of sensuousness as oriented toward
the Whole, sensuous configurations become metaphors of our belong-
ing to the Whole, the dimension Heidegger refers to as that of “the
divinities, the beckoning messengers of the godhead.”49 Rising, ground-
ing, and being illuminated constitute the primary metaphors of human
45 This is attributed to Friedrich von Schlegel by Hegel, LFA, III, 65. Schopenhauer
attributed it to Goethe.
46 AE, 230.
47 Cf. supra, n. 9.
48 AE, 224.
49 “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” PLT, 150.
72 R.E. Wood
dwelling—metaphors made live in Plato’s image of the Cave50 and

picked up in the symbolism of the medieval cathedral. Human life
ascends or descends, measured by how it occupies its place in the cos-
mos. It has strong foundations or it shifts and collapses. It occupies its
place and is well founded insofar as it stands in the light of understand-
ing how we humans fit into the Whole and it can see further in the light
insofar as it ascends higher. But we dwell most fully insofar as we partici-
pate in the display of the beauty of the Whole, for which our beautiful
products are essentially icons.
The central notion that runs through all our considerations is func-
tion. In a sense it extends beyond everyday utility and includes symbol-
ism and the tuning of ethos through the perception of the beautiful. Both
the structural and aesthetic aspects of form subserve such a wider con-
ception of function. As is well known, neither Plato nor Aristotle—nor
for that matter the medievals who followed them—distinguished useful
and fine art. Perhaps it was because, imitating nature, they accepted aes-
thetic form as following human function and not as super-added. In fact,
they operated largely along the lines suggested by Sullivan.
Plato had earlier presented a view of the arts as providing an aesthetic
ambiance which ideally should be characterized as orderly, harmonic,
proportionate, and graceful. He focused primarily upon musically accom-
panied poetry, but in addition to painting and the design of clothing,
furniture, and utensils, he also mentioned architecture. The total ambi-
ance these art forms provided would stimulate psychic dispositions char-
acterized by the same properties as the objects, establishing a fit matrix
for the emergence of nous attuned to the recognition of such properties
in the encompassing cosmos.51 Hence art—whatever its theme—is not
morally neutral in its aesthetic properties. But neither is such morality
50 Republic, VI. In fact the first line, Kateben, “I went down,” presents the first part of
the structural metaphor that governs the whole work: going up and going down suggests
the basic question of the work: when are human beings going up and when are they going
down? The metaphoric pair light/darkness plays in tandem with that structural metaphor.
For an overall interpretation of the Republic based upon structural metaphors, see my
“Image, Structure and Content: A Remark on a Passage in Plato’s Republic,” The Review of
Metaphysics, vol. XL (March 1987), 495–514.
51 Ibid., III, 401a. See our ultimate chapter on the aesthetics of everyday life that takes as
its point of departure Plato’s observations on the built environment. For a comprehensive
treatment of Plato’s aesthetics see the chapter on Plato in PA.
acosmic; rather it lies precisely in the dispositional, interpretative, and

behavioral adjustment of the human to the overall context of existence.
In this Plato and Heidegger share common ground. It is our contention
that in that context architecture as the most pervasive of the art forms
takes the lead. Drawing upon our understanding of cosmic laws, it sets
us upon the earth under the sky. But the way it articulates its forms can
open us to a view of the deathless order in which we live and die.
Bibliography
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Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. 1984. Poetics. I. Bywater trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle. J.
Barnes ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Collins, Peter. 1984. Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture: 1790-1950.
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Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books.”
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Northwestern University Press.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books.
Dioni, Mark and Catherine Ingraham. 1989. Restructuring Architectural Theory.
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Freazier, Nancy. 1991. Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School. New York:
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Gropius, Walter. 1955. The Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Harper.
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———. 1971b. “Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, and Thought.
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Johnson, Mark. 1992. Disfigurings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 1983. Meanings in Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.
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Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1963. The Future of Architecture. New York: Mentor.
CHAPTER 5
On Sculpture
The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, secretary and friend of Auguste
Rodin, noted that the medieval cathedral was a sculpture magnet, built
to call for a vast amount of sculptural pieces in its niches. There is no
equivalent today. Like easel painting, sculpture in the modern world
largely stands on its own. But while painting requires at least walls and
a roof, sculpture has no such restrictions. Rilke said, “It was something
that could exist for its own sake alone, and it was well to give it abso-
lutely the character of an object round which one could pass and which
could be observed from all sides.”1 Niche sculpture, by contrast, can
only be viewed frontally. Hence photography can do it more justice than
it can to sculpture in the round (Fig. 5.1).
Sculpture, Rilke goes on to say, must be set off from other things,
“untouchable, sacrosanct, separated from the influence of accident or
time, in the midst of which it appears solitary and strange, like the face
of some visionary…, part of the calm permanence of space and its great
laws.” Its persistence is due to the typical material used for memorial-
izing: bronze or stone. We will meet this idea of the face of a sculptural
piece again when we discuss Rodin.
Following Aristotle, we have already noted that in all artwork “organi-
city” is the dominant formal motif, the belonging together of spatial
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2006), 6 (henceforth
AR).

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_5
76 R.E. Wood
Fig. 5.1 Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, Internal and External Forms. Credit
Henry Moore Foundation
and/or temporal configurations that ultimately harmonize, one with all

the others, to compose a single whole. Among the spatial arts, in sculp-
ture the problem is much more complex than in painting, for in paint-
ing one has to satisfy organistic conditions in only two dimensions. The
addition of the third dimension presents an indeterminate number of
perspectives, each of which has to be respected to produce an integral
piece. As Henry Moore remarked, this makes sculpture the most diffi-
cult of all arts.2 One has to learn how to perceive and anticipate in three
dimensions.
Today people are often at first more attracted to sculpture through
photographic reproduction that can obviously only give a two-
dimensional representation of one of its indeterminate number of possi-
ble perspectives.3 But to capture and express the vitality of the work, the
sculptor has to occupy the center of gravity of the piece that holds all the
perspectives together.4 In real things, most particularly in living things,
2 Henry Moore, “A View of Sculpture,” in Henry Moore (New York: George Wittenborn,
1968), xxxiii, b (henceforth HM). Plato made the same observation about the indetermi-
nate number of perspectives involved in sculpture in his Laws, II, 668D.
3 Moore, “Mesopotamian Art,” HM, xxxiii, a.
4 “Notes on Sculpture,” HM, xxxiv, a.
5 ON SCULPTURE 77
sensory surface is expressive of underlying powers. The sculptor has to

gain a sense of how the underlying powers gain expression in the shaped
surface.
One easy way to bring about harmony is bilateral symmetry. It is the
way used in paper cutouts, kaleidoscopes, Rorschach inkblots, and also in
Georgian architecture. The real aesthetic challenge, however, is the same
in both forms, symmetrical or not: to create harmony or organic unity
among the elements of either side so that a side could exist as a unity
all its own. A human profile is an example of this challenge. Symmetry
makes the elements correspond point by point to their symmetrical
opposite and so adds balance to the piece. In a good work, either kind of
form displays organic wholeness that involves framing and thus balance.
Producing works that are closer to relief is more like painting: the
problem of organicity here is basically two-dimensional. But in fully
three-dimensional pieces, working the material from one perspective
immediately modifies the others. This makes portrait busts particularly
difficult. One has to capture the subject from all angles simultaneously.
More freely creative work is easier because one does not have to attend
to exactitude of resemblance to a given subject and is freer to pursue
the aesthetic possibilities. Nonetheless, it is impossible to conceive of a
work from all angles simultaneously, so that one inevitably has to create
as one goes along. And each decision one makes limits the possibilities
for the next decision. Clay is easier in this respect, since one can always
go back upon a whole set of decisions—something that marble or wood
does not allow, until modern technology made possible filling with syn-
thetic materials and reshaping. Furthermore, marble or wood does a lot
more independent “talking back” by revealing the limits of the grain’s
ability to cooperate with the emerging form, for one should not simply
“impose” the form on the marble or the wood, but develop it in relation
to the grain of the material, else the grain and the form will not cor-
respond. Michelangelo immortalized this relation between the material
and the artist in the famous line, “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto
ch’ un marmo solo in se non circonscriva” (“The best artist has no concept
that a piece of marble alone does not circumscribe within itself.”) This
is a notion that has passed into the fundamental character of twentieth-
century sculpture in figures like Henry Moore.5
5 Cf. R. H. Wilenski, MMS, 95 and 101.

78 R.E. Wood
In a remark that applies to all fine art, Henry Moore claims that the
creative process can begin from either of two ends of human experience
which he calls order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious
and unconscious. One can have an expressed idea, after which one must
figure out how to render it in the appropriate medium; or one can sim-
ply begin vaguely and let the idea come to fruition in the process of
production.6
The sense of space is integral to sculpture, and not only the filling of
space by mass. As Boccioni noted, the different aspects of shapes inter-
play in such a way as to set up a dynamic relation between the parts that
extends into and charges the surrounding space.7 The lines that deter-
mine a given form and the negative spaces within it suggest prolonga-
tion into that environing space. They make visible a translation into the
sculptural medium of “those atmospheric planes that link and intersect
things,” giving “plastic form to the mysterious sympathies and affinities
that the reciprocal formal influences of the planes of objects create.”8
Sculptor Adolph von Hildebrand notes that we live in relation to
Nature with all of our senses interplaying, giving rise to a fundamental
feeling for space. The synaesthetic images we bring with us from past
experience have a kinaesthetic ground that produces “this most elemen-
tary effect of Nature, viz., a feeling of space.” The arousal of a feeling
for space is essential for work in visual art generally, and that involves the
unity of seeing and touch.9
Opening the forms provides a whole new dimension to a sculptural
piece: a sense of inwardness and a sense of containment. The hole opens
an inward dimension, as, for example, in the work of Henry Moore
and Barbara Hepworth (paralleled by the paintings by her husband,
Ben Nicholson, and the pelvic bone paintings of Georgia O’Keefe) as
well as in several of the earthworks of Andy Goldsworthy mentioned
in Chap. 2.10 For Moore, the hole immediately creates the sense of
6 “Notes,” HM, xxxv, b.

7 “Manifesto,” in Art and Its Significance, S. Ross ed. (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1984), 537 (henceforth AS).
8 Ibid.
9 The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, R. Meyer and R. Ogden , trans. (New
York: Stechert, 1907), 14, 32, 49 (henceforth PF).

10 Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture Architecture, S. Hunter and J. Jacobus (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 67a (henceforth MA), 240. See also Chap. 2.
5 ON SCULPTURE 79
the inner dimension, while simultaneously evoking the mystery of the

cave.11 Together, external and internal space add, as it were, another
dimension to traditional focus upon mass.12 Hollows and full forms of
similar shape call out to one another; dissimilar shapes establish a coun-
terpoint; and both play in relation to occupied space. In their interplay,
the parts take on a kind of rhythm and harmony suggesting, as in every
art form, a certain mood.13 One might note here that the focus upon
space as a kind of material all its own is a peculiarity of modern art forms.
The International Style in architecture was dedicated to the shaping of
space.14
The medium too has its own symbolic value. Bronze and stone, and
to a lesser extent wood or ceramic clay fired at extreme temperatures,
have a fixity, a solidity less subject to the decay of time than paint on
canvas or plaster (although fired clay can break). A sculpted piece sug-
gests an endurance, a hardness, a resistance, and is particularly fit for
memorializing—especially in stone and bronze. It renders its subject
“immortal.”
The medium also determines treatment: modeling—e.g., with clay
or wax, often linked with casting as a second step; carving—e.g., in
wood, stone, ivory and the like; and, in more recent times, construc-
tion or assemblage of various pre-given materials. Some dogmatic pur-
ists—and there are as many of them in the world of art as there are in
religion—insist that carving is the only true form. Wilenski, for example,
downplays modeling as more suited to Romanticism that focuses upon
individualism (why— because the medium is less resistant?) and loses the
more universal expressiveness involved in carving.15 Others who claim
“truth to materials” in too one-sided a way miss the sense of pleasant
surprise involved in shifting from one medium to another—for example,
in casting what is originally conceived in clay or wax, or even in a hard
11 “Notes,” HM, xxxiv, b.

12 Cf. Naum Gabo, “Sculpture: Carving and construction in space” (1937), Theories of
Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics, Hershel B. Chipp ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984), 332 (henceforth TMA).
13 Cf. Gabo, TMA, p. 336; Moore, “Notes,” HM, xxxv, b.
14 Cf. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a Tradition
(Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1980), xlvii–lvi.

15 Wilenski, MMS, 25 and 92–106. For a comparison of stone and clay as media, see also
von Hildebrand, 124–36.

80 R.E. Wood
and thus carved medium, or in ceramic firing where the resulting patina
is often controllable only within a certain range.16 Nonetheless, there
is something important in Wilenski’s observation that there is a formal
meaning in each substance with which the sculptor has to reckon.17
Henry Moore remarked that certain natural shapes are spontaneously
symbolic18—an observation Herbert Read exploited in his Jungian inter-
pretation of Moore’s work.19 Though Moore found the human figure
the object of deepest interest, nonetheless he found principles of form
and rhythm in the study of pebbles, rocks, bones, trees, shells, and
plants, thus linking the human to the natural order from which it has
arisen and in which it is embedded.20 The combined formal properties
of these natural objects give a sense of form and texture deeply relevant
to what guides the eye and hand in sculptural production. As Herbert
Read noted, “the eye of the artist feeds unconsciously on whatever for-
mal motes comes its way.”21
The smooth transitions and the overall unity of the bones as well as
the comprehensive structure and patterns of the seashells are linked to
their being functional parts of organic wholes and teach us to produce
organic wholes. Trees and plants, of course, are organic wholes. Stones,
on the other hand, are not. They have to be collected, by one with an
eye already sensitized to organic form, from the overwhelming number
of randomly generated forms produced by the millennia-long grinding
and washing process of the waves on the shores of the oceans and the
great lakes, rubbing stone against stone. Having a visual understand-
ing of the formal properties of such objects allows for the production of
visual objects that do not necessarily represent or replicate the appear-
ance of naturally produced objects appearing in the world of everyday
16 The Christus Africanus on the cover of my Placing Aesthetics appeared with sharper
detail in the negative than in the positive; so in the second printing, the publisher presented
the negative.
17 MMS, 100.
18 “A View of Sculpture,” (henceforth “A View”) (1930) in HM, xxx.
19 Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (New York: Praeger, 1964),
176ff (henceforth CHMS). Read has a more extended work devoted entirely to this inter-
pretation of Moore: Henry Moore (London: Zwemmer, 1934).
20 “A View,” HM, xxxi, a. Cf. Naum Gabo (“Sculpture,” TMA, p. 331) on the emo-
tional value of materials deriving from our own belonging to the material order.
21 CHMS, 167.
5 ON SCULPTURE 81
attention. Nonetheless, as John Dewey also observed, they still carry the
felt reverberations drawn from “real things,” each sense being an outpost
of a total organic relation to things appearing in the environment.22
Hence for Moore, Graeco-Roman idealistic representation is but one
conception. There is a broader conception, capable of doing justice to
the whole range of differing styles of sculpture that have emerged his-
torically, from the more primitive to the most modern. To see it, he
said, one must remove the Greek spectacles.23 Here he is less dogmatic
than Futurists like Boccioni who speak of “the Phidian period and its
decadence” and “Michaelangelesque sins.”24 Moore sees the great
sculpture of the world in Sumerian, Early Greek, Etruscan, Ancient
Mexican, Fourth- and Twelfth-Dynasty Egyptian, Romanesque, and
Early Gothic.25 What redeems Phidias for Moore is that he still main-
tained the fundamental sculptural principles of the Archaic Greeks that
are expressive of an intense vitality, as certain figures of the Renaissance
still remained close to primitive grandeur and simplicity. So-called “clas-
sical” periods arise on the basis of “primitive” art and then slowly fade
into technical tricks and intellectual conceits.26 Indeed, the realistic ideal
of physical beauty in art was “only a digression from the main world tra-
dition of sculpture, while … Romanesque and Early Gothic are in the
main line.”27 Here Moore shares common ground with Brancusi who
said, “What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things.
Starting with this truth it is impossible for anyone to express anything
essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.”28 Along the same lines,
Rodin makes a distinction between imitation of “form” and imitation
22 AE, 218.
23 “A View,” HM, xxx, a.
24 Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” AS, 537–8.
25 “Mesopotamian Art,” in HM, xxxii, a.
26 “Primitive Art,” (1941) in HM, xxxvi, a. In this observation Moore roughly follows
a tradition represented by Winckelmann for whom sculpture passes through several more
primitive phases until it enters upon a classical culmination followed by decline, although
he completely changes the evaluative perspective represented by Winckelmann who had lit-
tle sympathy for anything less than perfect idealized representation. Cf. Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, Introduction by Alex Potts, Harry Francis
Mallgrave, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006).
27 “Primitive Art,” in HM, xxxvii, b.
28 Cited in H & J, p. 77a–78b.
82 R.E. Wood
of “life.”29 In this view, what is important is not beauty but vitality and
power of expression.30
The inclusivist conception Moore advances is sensitive to the intrinsic
emotional significance of shapes and the importance of the materi-
als employed.31 Here Moore articulates a view along the lines of the
Platonic presentation (perhaps ironic) of art as surface imitation,32 along
with his discussion of painting in the purged city, where he focuses
upon Apollonian properties. Unfortunately, it is Plato’s overt view that
has determined most people’s expectation of the work of art.33 Moore
sees the historical mission of Brancusi’s work as lying in a process of
simplification that eliminated all surface distraction that has cluttered
shape since the end of the Gothic. Brancusi’s work thereby makes us
more shape conscious.34 In working toward that consciousness, Wright,
Brancusi, and Moore paid special attention to the nature of materials in
their work.35
Our focus has been upon free-standing sculpture. Mention of archi-
tecture calls attention to one of the dominant traditions where sculp-
ture is subservient to architecture. Recall Rilke’s observation that the
medieval cathedrals functioned as magnets that attracted statuary to
themselves, while today sculpture has no such magnet.36 It was the
medieval architectural tradition that almost wholly occupied the atten-
tion of John Ruskin who claimed that “Perfect sculpture must be a part
29 MA, 67a.
30 “The Sculptor’s Aims,” in HM, xxxi, b. Cf. Herbert Read, CHMS, 163. Cf. also R. H.
Wilenski, MMS, 162.
31 “A View,” in HM, xxx.
32 Enneads, IV, 3, 30. Plotinus holds that there are two faces of imagination, a repro-
ductive and a creative. In the latter case, surface form is modified to give expression to
understanding and ultimately to the Presence of Beauty Itself as the Face of the Beloved
appearing in sensorily given things.
33 In an easily overlooked passage in his Republic, Plato’s critique of painting as holding
up a mirror to the visual environment has to be compared with his claim that paintings
should have certain aesthetic properties involved in composition (400D).
34 “Notes,” in HM, xxxiv, a.
35 See Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993), for a detailed discussion of the significance of the use of various materials for sculp-
turing employed throughout history.
36 AR, 6.
5 ON SCULPTURE 83
of the severest architecture…”37 “[T]he first office of that sculpture is

not to represent the things it imitates but to gather out of them those
arrangements of form that shall be pleasing to the eye in their intended
places.”38 In the medieval cathedrals the statuary was designed to fit
into the niches provided by the architecture of the building, as we have
already noted, but sculpted decoration, often employing vegetative
motifs, developed its own stylized rhythm. This entailed a play between
representation and stylization that characterizes all good art, even the
most “imitative.”
In sculpture as well as in architecture, texture is particularly impor-
tant. It sets up a play between light and shadow on the surface of the
piece to help create the dominant mood of the work. An overly smooth
piece might take on a boring character compared with the surface of one
of Rodin’s nudes that ripples and flashes as one moves around it. On the
other hand, many of Brancusi’s pieces are highly polished, emphasizing
the ideality of the form presented.
Though the ancient Greeks painted the surface of many of their stat-
ues, time has worn it off, presenting us today with naked marble or
bronze. Schopenhauer, who should have known this, praised the Greeks
for their “infallible good taste” as opposed to painted sculpture, since
they are said to have known to leave work for the imagination of the
viewer.39 Taste has largely moved in the direction provided by the rav-
ages of time: color, beyond that provided by the medium itself, with
some addition of transparent patina, has usually not been associated with
high-level sculpture. Adolph von Hildebrand spoke of the painting of
statues as “a monstrous crudity.” More generally, he considered realism
and naturalism in art as the opposite of “true art.” His attack on realistic
painting in relation to sculptural pieces is based on a formal claim that a
piece of sculpture should have a uniform color so that it stands out from
its background.40
37 John Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Dover, 1989), 135.
38 Ibid.131–2.
39 Arthur Schopenhauer, WWR II, Supplement to Book 3, ch. XXXIV, 408. For a treat-
ment of his aesthetics within his overall conceptual scheme, see the Schopenhauer chapter
in my Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1999). Consult it also for a comprehensive treatment of the overall conceptual sys-
tem and the place of aesthetics in it for each of the major thinkers treated here.
40 PF, 79, 12, 58.
84 R.E. Wood
Of course, in contemporary times, no canons of taste are followed.

Three-dimensional painted pieces, fusing painting and sculptural con-
struction, are commonplace. And waxworks realism is found in many
contemporary exhibitions.41 One is reminded of the Zeuxis–Parrhasios
encounter concerning illusionist painting. So one can produce clever illu-
sions, what’s the point? Kant noted that the creation of illusion pleases
for only a short time and we are soon bored with it.42 Such illusionary
art turns us back to the artist to admire his or her dexterity. It is an art
of conspicuous display, much like the case of the rich throwing money
about to show their ability to accumulate. Von Hildebrand comments:
“The artificial and refined article of the present day … encourages lack of
culture in perception, just as wax figures do, by means of perverse sensa-
tions and a false feeling of reality.”43
Of course, artists can do what they want. But art functions at a more
profound level when it so transforms our ordinary “dashboard” relation-
ship to things as to give us a sense of meaningful presence and of the
underlying depths and encompassing wholeness that are nonetheless
anchored in the individual, sensorily present work. Von Hildebrand notes
that the special situations which art carves out of Nature’s totality give
expression to our universal relation to Nature. Each artwork therefore
“becomes effective far beyond the frame of its special meaning.”44 One
is reminded of Heidegger’s claim that, in the light of a great work of
art, everything takes on another significance, “so that even the ordinary
appears extraordinary.”45
Art haunts us and has the ability to bring us both to an enhanced
appreciation of sensory surface and, simultaneously, to a sense of lived
meaning. And it can do this because it arises within and appeals to the
field of human experience that is anchored in the sensuous here and
41 Von Hildebrand included waxworks realism as the execution of “artistic crudities.” PF,
113. A friend of mine, visiting Madame Tussauds, was speaking with a guard, until he real-
ized that the guard was waxen! In the Stuttgart Museum I almost said “Pardon me” to the
Cleaning Lady on the floor with her bucket, until I noticed she did not move!.
42 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. W. Pluhar, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),
§42, 166 (henceforth CJ). For a treatment of his aesthetics within his overall conceptual
scheme, see the chapter on Kant in my PA.
43 PF, 58.
44 PF, 75.
45 OWA, PLT, 58.
5 ON SCULPTURE 85
Fig. 5.2 Robert L.
Wood, Crossing
now and is referred to the encompassing Whole through the media-

tions of cultural tradition. It is that structure to which we have appealed
throughout this work (Fig. 5.2).
Crossing is part of a series of works examining the circle, its center, and the
nature of things as they try to find order within that structure. Exploring
the relationships and connections between content, material, form, and
aesthetics, the artist seeks to reveal the emotive power, mystery, and felt
86 R.E. Wood
experience that exists within these constructs. He particularly wants to call

attention to incompleteness.
At the end of each chapter, I give some attention to a significant work

or artist. Here I will consider Auguste Rodin who restored sculpture to
its ancient grandeur.46 Contrary to Boccioni’s dogmatic contempt for
the two major figures, Phidias and Michelangelo, Rodin viewed his own
work as an oscillation between them. For Rodin, Phidias’ work, which
expresses “contentment, calm, grace, balance, reason,” can never be sur-
passed—and indicates that there is no progress in art, only appearances
across the centuries of artistic greatness.47 By comparison with Phidias,
Michelangelo, “the culmination of the Gothics,” expressed violence and
contrast, “a restless energy, the will to action without the hope of suc-
cess, a great melancholy which regards life as a transitory thing to which
we must not cling.” Rodin’s work expresses an oscillation between these
two views, but without what he regarded as Michelangelo’s contempt for
life. Rodin’s aim was to express serenity, but together with a kind of anx-
iety before the mystery that bathes all great art in its light.48
This is an interesting juxtaposition of opposite attitudes, serenity and
anxiety, paralleling Kant’s juxtaposition of a sense of impotence in the
face of natural immensity of size or power with a sense of exaltation
in the experience of the sublime occasioned by natural immensity and
power. For Kant this follows from our dual nature as bodies and minds,
locating us here in the present and referring us to the Whole.49 Rodin’s
combination of serenity and anxiety more closely parallels Augustine’s
sense of the restless heart that has peace in the depths because of its fun-
damental orientation towards God.
Rodin was also impressed by Baudelaire. He produced the illustra-
tions for publisher Gaston Gallimard’s personal copy of The Flowers of
46 For a perceptive treatment of Rodin’s career as a sculptor, see William Tucker’s chapter
on Rodin in The Language of Sculpture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985) (hence-
forth LS).
47 Auguste Rodin (as related by Paul Gsell), On Art and Artists (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1957), 202, 225 (henceforth OAA). Heidegger made a similar claim about think-
ers and poets.
48 OAA, 207–12.
49 On the sublime, see Critique of Judgment, W. Pluhar trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishers, 1987), §§23–9.

5 ON SCULPTURE 87
Evil. Together, Dante and Baudelaire were the main literary sources of
Rodin’s inspiration as a sculptor. Rilke reports that eventually Baudelaire
fades and Plato especially is given his attention, with some excursions
into Rousseau.50
Merleau-Ponty describes the peculiarity of Rodin’s approach to
sculpture:
Movement is given, says Rodin, by an image in which the arms, the legs,
the trunk, and the head are each taken in a different instant, an image
which therefore portrays the body in an attitude which it never at any
instant really held and which imposes fictive linkages between the parts,
as if this mutual confrontation of incompossibles could, and could alone,
cause transition and duration to arise in bronze and on canvas… ‘It is the
artist that is truthful, the camera is mendacious.’51
With the invention of the camera in 1839, many artists, particularly

painters, reacted strongly, many in a negative way, like Rodin in his
claim about the mendacious character of the photograph. As Cézanne
objected, the photograph leaves out the involvement of the artist.
Through the artist things appear holistically based upon past experience
through all the senses and through the felt relations established with
things. As we have noted, John Dewey observed that each sense is an
outpost of a total relation of the perceiver to things perceived.52 Adolph
von Hildebrand spoke of a purely observational approach to nature pre-
sented in science, in photography, and in artistic realism as killing the
expressiveness of nature itself.53
Rodin further attempted to get around the confinement of the pho-
tograph to a single perspective, but also around sculpture’s own confine-
ment to a single frozen instant. By rearranging the relation between the
parts of the body, as Merleau-Ponty observed, he gave the impression
of movement.
50 AR, 62.
51 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Eye and the Mind,” (henceforth EM), trans. C. Dallery,
in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 185 (hence-
forth PrP).
52 Dewey, AE, 218.
53 For von Hildebrand, this parallels scientific observation, which abstracts from the
expressiveness of nature and thus kills the artistic spirit whose aim is “to saturate each
object with our bodily feelings.” PF, 106, 104.
88 R.E. Wood
Even more impressive is his concern for the life of the surface qua
surface. As realistic as Rodin’s sculptures appear, after his earlier more
camera-like productions like “The Age of Bronze” (modeled upon
Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave”), many of his later productions, like his
famous “Balzac,” exhibit a concern with overall surface that ripples as
one moves around the piece. Rilke claims that the subject matter of
Rodin’s art became the surface: “no spot remained empty, dumb or
indifferent”; from every point of view the surface is animated.54 Such
works are “tremendous creations composed of hundreds upon hundreds
of vital movements.”55
This shows Rodin’s mastery of light reflected from the articulated
surface; but he was also a master of space. Rilke describes his friend’s
works as if composed of great planes that could be extended to infinity.56
But surface for Rodin was also correlated with a sense of the underly-
ing depth gaining expression in that surface. His figures exhibit “this
turning-inward-upon-oneself, this tense listening to inward depths.”57
Finally, it is the eternal that is expressed in the likenesses he produced.58
His emphasis upon “nature,” as for later painters like Mondrian, led
to increasing abstraction.59 In his last phase, he worked with truncated
figures. His interest in fragmentary sculptures from antiquity led to his
own later work with fragmented bodies, without heads, without arms,
with truncated legs, even an isolated hand and forearm. Rilke remarked
that Rodin’s intent was to produce an aesthetically integral whole for
which the truncation was only an occasion. But, I claim, the truncated
form cannot but suggest the absent members and thus appear grotesque
rather than integral. Rilke’s own tribute to Rodin, “Antique Torso of
Apollo,” is a meditation on a truncated figure from antiquity.60
Perhaps Rodin’s most famous piece is The Thinker, of which dozens
of copies, mostly unauthorized, were made. The overall treatment of
the body with its sinews and muscles and huge frame emphasizes mas-
sive power and displays Rodin’s fundamental concern with the life of the
54 AE, 7, 12.
55 AR, 30.
56 AR, 50–1.
57 AR, 15.
58 AR, 28.
59 LS, 23.
60 See the Appendix to this chapter.
5 ON SCULPTURE 89
Fig. 5.3 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker. Credit Andrew Horne
surface. More remote from an exact copy, those copies that appear as
bookends leave out the most impressive aspects of the work. The copies
also remove it from its setting: Rodin was deeply impressed by Dante,
especially his Inferno which presents his vision of hell. It was this vision
that Rodin tried to reproduce with his two-decades-long work on The
Gates of Hell. The Thinker is positioned in the middle of the pediment
above the gates. The context shows what The Thinker is thinking about:
eternal damnation, a thought which draws upon the deep inwardness
that considers one’s life as a single whole in terms of its ultimate
meaning.
Exemplifying a hundredfold magnification of the old saying, “A pic-
ture is worth a thousand words,” Rodin said it would take a year to
explain in words what is going on in just one of his sculptural pieces. But
one can readily say that they represent, in varying ways, power and life
90 R.E. Wood
Fig. 5.4 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker over The Gates of Hell. Credit: Randy
Duchaine/Alamy stock Photo
with a sense of the mystery out of which they come and a sense of repose
in the acceptance of the mystery (Figs. 5.3 and 5.4).
In more recent times there has developed a form of sculpture that
transforms the environment in earthworks, fence lines, wrappings of
buildings and small islands. We considered Andy Goldsworthy at the
end of Chap. 2 because his work with found materials on site makes us
more aware of Nature at the site. In art classes, children are encouraged
to follow his example in working with on-site natural materials that are
set back within Nature. Goldsworthy has also produced a massive snake-
like earthworks reminiscent of the Indian burial grounds at Chilecothe,
Ohio.
One might mention Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt
Lake in Utah. And Christo has been inventive in his wrapping of great
buildings, such as the Reichstag in Berlin, which suggests that they are gifts
to their viewers and users. He wrapped the cliffs along the Pacific Ocean
and surrounded an island in New York harbor with floating pink material.
He also filled the hills near Los Angeles with large yellow umbrellas like
5 ON SCULPTURE 91
huge dandelions sprouting from the hills. Recently, in New York’s Central
Park, he framed the paths with portals from which billowed large sheets
of organ-colored cloth. Part of his work is to secure the cooperation of
local officials and owners and large crews to do the massive work. His work
builds a community, not simply of viewers, but of participants in forma-
tion. Photographing the stages of production is also part of the art form.
Sculpture as the aesthetic modification of three-dimensional materials
originally played a role within sacred architecture, became free-standing,
gathering space in selected areas, and was separated from its communal
space and taken up into museums in modern times. Contemporary artists
like Goldsworthy and Christo have invented new forms and placed them
within natural and social space, taking sculpture out of the museum and
thus out of the past to established charged spaces within the common
contemporary life-world.
Appendix
THE ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO
By Rainer Marie Rilke
We cannot know his astonishing and silent head,

its eyes ripened like fruit.
But its torso glows like a street lamp which,
its gaze turned down, maintains itself and glows.
Otherwise the curve of his breast could not dazzle you
and the soft twisting of the loins could not go smiling
to that center which bears procreation.
Otherwise the stone would be stunted,
cut short under the pellucid plunge of the shoulders
and not shimmer like a wild beast’s coat
nor break out of its boundaries like a star.
For there is no place which does not see you.
You must change your life.61
The last line contains enigmatic words indeed. Peter Sloterdijk named
his 2009 book You Must Change Your Life, after that last line and
devotes the first chapter to its discussion. He says (Fig. 5.5):
61 Translation mine.
92 R.E. Wood
Fig. 5.5 Torso of Apollo.

Credit Prisma Archivo/
Alamy Stock Photo
One does not have to be an enthusiast to understand why those closing

lines have developed a life of their own. In their dignified brevity and mys-
tical simplicity, they radiate an art-evangelical energy that can scarcely be
found in any other passage from recent language art.
Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and trans-
mit and more potent authority than God, the ruling idol of religions.
Only their verticality is beyond doubt.62
The last sentence of the poem seems to come from nowhere and
follows on from a startling claim that the torso itself not only sees the
observer, but sees from every spot. It repeats Hegel’s description of the
work of art as “a thousand-eyed Argus.”63 Sloterdijk continues: “In the
position where the object usually appears, I now ‘recognize’ a subject
with its ability to look and return gazes.” The sense that non-conscious
62 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, Wieland Hoban trans. (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2013), 21–8 presents his interpretation of the poem.

63 The original myth has a 100-eyed Argus; Hegel multiplies it by 10 for the work of art.
5 ON SCULPTURE 93
things seem to look out at the artist is reported by several artists. The
piece radiates brilliance from the inside, and from that inside it is said
to look out from every spot. The image of the turned-down street lamp
near the beginning qualifies the gaze that glows within the torso, fore-
casting the lines where it bursts forth like a star and looks out at you.
This at least parallels Martin Buber’s notion that in a great work of art
we are being addressed by the Eternal Thou, called to transform our
lives.
Sloterdijk, claiming that “Rilke had read his Nietzsche,” reads the
phrase “glistening as a wild beast’s fur” as a Dionysian moment in the
Apollonian whole. He links the emergence of athleticism at the turn of
the century with the cultivated body of the athlete that was the exemplar
of the god that the ancient sculptor chose. Even now, the body in perfect
shape is a call to those of us who are out of shape to change our lives.
But according to Sloterdijk, attributing the source of the experience to
the divine has thankfully been superseded by “anthropotechnics,” the
formation of one’s life as a whole, and not simply one’s body, by prac-
tice. Changing one’s life through cultivation is a life imperative, whatever
further interpretation the poem may allow.
Bibliography
Boccione, Umberto. 1984. “Manifesto,” in Art and Its Significance, S. Ross ed.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 537 (henceforth AS).
Chipp, Hershel B. ed. 193. Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and
Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gabo, Naum. 1937. “Sculpture: Carving and Construction in Space” in Chipp,
Theories of Modern Art.
Giedion, Sigfried. 1980. Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a
Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gsell, Paul. 1957. On Art and Artists. New York: Philosophical Library.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “Origin of the Work of Art,” In Poetry, Language,
and Thought. A. Hofstadter trans. New York: Harper.
Hunter, Sam and J. Jacobus. 1985. Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture,
Architecture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. W. Pluhar, trans. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “The Eye and the Mind.” C. Dallery trans. The
Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
94 R.E. Wood
Moore, Henry. 1968. Henry Moore. New York: George Wittenborn.

Penny, Nicholas. 1993. The Materials of Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Plato. Laws. 1926. A. H. Armstrong trans. Two Volumes. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
———. Republic. 1969. P. Shorey trans. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Plotinus. Enneads. 1989. A. H. Armstrong trans. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press).
Read, Herbert. 1934. Henry Moore. London: Zwemmer.
———. 1964. A Concise History of Modern Sculpture. New York: Praeger.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1989. “Ancient Torso of Apollo” in Select Poetry of Rainer
Marie Rilke. S. Mitchell trans. New York: Vintage.
———. 2006. Auguste Rodin. New York: Mineola.
Ruskin, John. 1989. Seven Lamps of Architecture. New York: Dover.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1966. The World as Will and Representation. Two
volumes. E. Payne, trans. New York: Dover.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. You Must Change Your Life. Wieland Hoban trans.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Tucker, William. 1985. The Language of Sculpture. New York: Thames and
Hudson.
Von Hildebrand, Alolph. 1907. The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture.
R. Meyer and R. Ogden, trans. New York: Stechert.
Wilenski, R. H. 1964. The Meaning of Modern Sculpture. Boston: Beacon.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. 2006. History of the Art of Antiquity. Harry
Francis Mallgrave, trans. Los Angeles: Getty Publications.
Wood, Robert. 1999. Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
CHAPTER 6
On Painting
One might, as the Greeks did, paint three-dimensional objects. As we

noted, Schopenhauer claimed that the pure marble of what remains of
their statues testifies to their infallible good taste, compared with some-
thing like Madame Tussaud’s waxworks realism. For Schopenhauer, real
art leaves something to the imagination.1 But, as we have noted, even
in his time, careful examination revealed that the “infallible good taste”
involved covering over the beautiful nude marble with paint, though
time had worn it off to expose the underlying marble grain! Chinese and
Indian statuary was often painted, as were statues in the medieval West.
In the eighteenth century, Sir Joshua Reynolds disdained the use of color
in sculpture, and that disdain was continued in the history of sculpture
until recent times (Fig. 6.1).2
Generally understood, however, painting is the art form that applies
paint to two-dimensional surface, whether that is fresco, canvas, wood,
paper, or some other background medium. A heavy impasto surface—
for example, a painting by van Gogh—gives the painting surface texture
and thus, in this respect, approaches low relief sculpture. Painting may
1 Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, R. Hollingdale, trans. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1986), 160. For a comprehensive treatment of the overall conceptual system and
the place of aesthetics in it for each of the major thinkers treated here, see my Placing
Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).
2 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses (London: Penguin, 1992), 234.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_6
96 R.E. Wood
Fig. 6.1 Ma Yuan (1160–1225), Facing the Moon

6 ON PAINTING 97
attend to that surface as such in abstract art or it may strive to create

the illusion of three-dimensional objects. In between we have the flat,
non-perspectival representation of natural forms, most focally the human
form. Early twentieth-century painters tried to flatten out the visual sur-
face completely, some perhaps just giving a new focus to painted surface.
Kandinsky noted that color relations themselves set up relations of depth
on flat surfaces.3 One might consider here the paintings of Franz Kline
which feature large swatches of black that cause the colors behind to
recede, so that it looks as if the black is covering something behind it,
like swatches of black paint on a store-front window. Kandinsky further
noted, repeating and developing an observation Kant had made, that
each color and each combination of colors has correlates in the human
moods associated with them: white as innocence and silence, green as
placidity, red as arousal, and so on.4 As a move away from materialism,
Kandinsky also moved away from representation to play with color and
pattern.5
By eidetic necessity color can only appear as inhering in extension and
as located in an environing, phenomenal space filled with light. Actual
space is chock full of air molecules, dust, pollen, and all the irradiations
across the electro-magnetic spectrum; but our visual apparatus screens all
that out to present merely phenomenal space, space as experienced, with
the life-serving illusion of emptiness. If we could see all, paradoxically we
could not see at all because air molecules would be in immediate visual
contact with the eyes. In the interests of organic survival and flourish-
ing, the sensory apparatus must show threats and opportunities in the
environment at some distance from the perceiver; hence the requirement
of phenomenal space carved out of real space. Artists coming to terms
with perceptual presentation modify their depiction to show something
of the non-apparent and underlying, an aim not only of early abstract
painters but also of painters that are representational. Merleau-Ponty saw
3 Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977), 36–41
(henceforth CSA). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. W. Pluhar, trans. (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1987) 302 (henceforth CJ).
4 Kandinsky himself had an elaborate relational scheme to which not everyone would
subscribe. See “The Language of Form and Color,”in CSA, 27–45.

5 CSA, 1–5.
98 R.E. Wood
the essence of Cézanne’s work as making the invisible somehow visible.6

It was also the expressed intent of the playful surfaces of Paul Klee.7
Painting, of course, is all about color. As the generic correlate to the
universal orientation of the power of seeing, “color” is a term under
which we have various species. The basic distinction is between so-called
chromatic colors and achromatic colors, only the latter of which the
color-blind can see. If we seek to produce different colors, we discover
that some can be formed by mixing with others. In the process we dis-
cover that there are three “primary” chromatic colors: red, yellow, and
blue. White and black can also be isolated, the former considered (from
mixing colored light-projections) to be the co-presence, the latter the
absence of all colors. These and their direct admixtures in grays are the
(oxymoronically expressed) achromatic colors. They are what color-blind
people see.
Through mixing the primary colors red, yellow, and blue, the comple-
mentary colors are produced. The complement of each of the colors is
the mix of the other two. Thus the complement of red is green which is
composed of yellow and blue; the complement of yellow is purple com-
posed of red and blue; and the complement of blue is orange as a mix-
ture of red and yellow. Adding proportions of black or white gives darker
or lighter shades or degrees of brilliance to the other colors. And varying
the proportions of the colors gives us various tints. In addition to tints
and shades, there is also a question of saturation as well as the intensity
of the colors.
Color laid on a two-dimensional surface—wall or canvas or wood—
establishes boundaries by each color occupying a definite stretch of space
within that surface. And a given color occupies that space in more or less
defined ways, the latter reaching a limit in “hard-edge” painting, the for-
mer in the blending of borders between colors. It has been said that how
an artist treats edges is the measure of his skill as an artist.8 The edges
6 The Visible and the Invisible. In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s late thought may be consid-
ered the working out of the philosophy implicit in Cézanne’s work. See my “Heidegger,
Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty,” forthcoming. For a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s link to Klee,
see John Sallis, Klee’s Mirror (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 129–
134b.
7 Klee’s Mirror, 118b.
8 Maurice Grosser, The Painter’s Eye (New York: New American Library, 1955) (hence-
forth PE). I would recommend this book as an illuminating treatment of features in the
history of painting since the Renaissance.
6 ON PAINTING 99
within parts of a painting are either clear or fuzzy, producing either a

definite or an indefinite shape. Art historian Heinrich Wölfflin based his
analysis of historical styles upon a distinction between “painterly” and
“linear” (open and closed) works that followed this not so eloquently
expressed distinction between fuzzy and clear.9 William Blake held that
only distinct boundaries could be admitted in the highest-quality paint-
ing.10 Michaelangelo’s clearly delineated painted figures carry over the
sculptor’s eye to the painted human figure.
Establishing a patch of color involves setting up visual relations with
the surrounding space within the limits of the framed surface. The space
becomes tensed. Adding other colors creates further tensions. The task
is to distribute the colors in such a way as to achieve a certain balance, a
proportional distribution of color values that convey a certain mood.
The external relations of colors have definite effects that must be
respected in any successful painting. Josef Albers, who taught paint-
ing at the Bauhaus, made a career out of surrounding a given color by
squares of differing colors, showing how the same color appears as a dif-
ferent color when in proximity to successively differing colors. Its “real”
color is supplanted by its “phenomenal” color by reason of its juxtaposi-
tion with different colors in different paintings. As Albers himself said,
“Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon—it is
the very heart of painting. Repeated experiments with adjacent colors
will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it
carries and therefore influences.”11
A major problem with color is the staying power of the paint. How
long can a picture last? It has been claimed that Leonardo’s Last Supper
disappeared in its original form some 300 years ago, “yielding to the flux
and decay to which all things outside the mind are subject.”12 What we
see today is the result of continual restorations.
The Old Masters lived in a tradition of mixing materials and tech-
niques of painting passed on through the ages by means of apprentice-
ships—a tradition that was never put down in writing and has largely
disappeared. The wonders of modern chemistry since the production
9 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in
the Later Art (New York: Dover, 1950).
10 Cited in Dewey, AE, 206.
11 Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).
12 PE, 107.
100 R.E. Wood
of mauve from coal tar in 1856 have created a set of brilliant colors
eagerly taken up by the Impressionists and those who succeeded them.
Van Gogh noted the instability of the color used by the Impressionists
and recommended the bold use of color that time would tone down.
However, the toning down went further than he anticipated. The green
of the billiard table in his Night Café has now turned brown and the
brownness that the Romantics appreciated in the Old Masters was likely
the result of a similar process as well as the layers of lacquer added to
protect the painted surface. But if one compares a seventeenth-century
Van Dyck with a late nineteenth-century piece by Renoir, the former
still retains a fresh and bright surface, whereas the latter is sad and faded.
The Old Masters relied upon the oral transmission of the staying power
of certain color mixes passed on through the centuries, whose formulae
have sadly been lost.13
The relations of contrast and complementarity in the togetherness
of color and shape establish a peculiar aesthetic form that is the visual
equivalent of musical form. As in music, the togetherness of visual val-
ues establishes a certain mood. That is why Plato saw a commonality
between audile and visual forms: Apollonian or Dionysian, well-defined,
orderly, graceful, proportionate or wild, chaotic, awkward, mal-propor-
tioned.14 Plato transfers them from music to painting and, indeed, to
the whole built environment. That is why Walter Pater claimed that all
art seeks the status of music, that is, the production of aesthetic form.15
Hegel also considered “a certain music” as central to all art.16 In some
Italian paintings, such as those of Correggio and Leonardo in their mas-
tery of chiaroscuro, Hegel notes: “the pure song of the soul, a penetrat-
ing melody, sings over the whole figure and all its forms.”17 And here
it would seem Hegel forecasts not only Pater’s view of art in general as
seeking the status of music, but also the movement of a purely abstract
art such as we find in Mondrian or Kandinsky or Klee. Kandinsky took
music as the model for painting in its capacity to produce “a spiritual
13 PE, 107–17.
14 Republic, III, 400E.
15 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Harold Bloom, ed.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 55–7.

16 Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975), vol. I, 159 (henceforth LFA).

17 LFA, II, 874; see also I, 159, 528.
6 ON PAINTING 101
atmosphere” that leads one to discern, like Cézanne, “the inner life of
everything” and, like Matisse, “to reproduce the divine.”18 Elkins noted
that “the buried spiritual content of modern and post-modern art may
be the great unexplored subject in contemporary art history.”19
Hegel observed that painting progresses historically in terms of both
content and aesthetic form. It begins with a stiff, flat, isolated treatment
of sacred figures, a mode closely allied with sculpture in its isolation of
forms. It proceeds to relate religious figures to one another and then to
their architectural, and more and more to their natural surroundings.
It further develops into a focus upon people in everyday life, and then
upon landscapes, animals, buildings, flowers, fruit, food, and the like.
The themes become secularized, gradually spreading out from an ear-
lier wholly religious focus. But, as we noted, for Hegel they become so
much under the impetus of Christian incarnational thinking: the human
being in its individuality was revealed in its supreme value through the
Incarnation and anything in the environment in which humans took
an interest became a suitable subject for painting. That vision had to
descend from an otherworldly focus to a this-worldly attention, reach-
ing for Hegel a certain highpoint in the Dutch masters who gave minute
attention to everyday objects.20
Reynolds saw the Dutch as provincial, at least in terms of how they
depicted classical or religious figures. Their focus upon the everyday was,
for Reynolds, a lower form of painting. Hogarth he saw as producing
excellent depiction, but of lower forms of human life. Reynolds him-
self argued for the superiority of “heroic” art, though he himself did
portraits. His subjects were always, of course, the rich. Romanticism
changed the focus. And when we reach van Gogh, his portraits, when
they are not of himself, are invariably of ordinary people.
The objects which occupy the painted space are more or less or not at
all like those which appear in everyday life: there are representational and
abstract forms, with some forms occupying the middle. Suzanne Langer
speaks of representational painting as creating the same sort of “virtual
reality” as does a mirror.21 In fact, Plato, the first to write philosophically
18 James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 1999), 17–9, 43–5 (henceforth
WPI).
19 WPI, 75.
20 LFA, I, 168–170, 597–600; II, 884–7.
21 Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953) (henceforth FF).
102 R.E. Wood
about painting, expressly spoke of it as “holding up a mirror to reality,”22

precisely the way a camera works. The obvious difference is that what is
mirrored is often in motion, although “motion pictures” have been able
to capture motion as well. It is the representational function of mirror-
ing that many people have come to expect of painting because it was the
expected mode in the tradition.
John Dewey claims, along with many others, that, whether represen-
tational or abstract, painting has the same aesthetic problems of compo-
sition: the artist has to select, intensify, and concentrate the energies and
rhythms found in natural and human occurrences. The literal copy con-
tains too much that is irrelevant to the fuller expressivity of painting.23
Sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand said that it was the task of the artist “to
realize a unity of form lacking in objects themselves as they appear in
Nature.”24 Vincent van Gogh advised that, when drawing from nature,
one must leave out much detail and focus on “great things” which he
described as “great lines and forms and simple, delicate outlines” and
as “the real and essential.”25 Even Joshua Reynolds, portraitist though
he was, downplayed the achievement of mere copying. Reynolds held
that exact copying requires only good hand-eye coordination, but real
art involves poetic expression. The painter has to construct an ideal out
of the scattered instances of beauty and expression found in real occur-
rences.26 Further, in celebrating heroic subjects, it would be inappropri-
ate to present Alexander the Great as the small figure that he was.27 In
Napoleon at St. Bernard’s Pass, David presented a dynamic Napoleon
seated upon a noble steed rearing up, taking expressive liberties with the
fact that Napoleon crossed the St. Bernard Pass on a sure-footed donkey!
So one must take liberties with representation that is faithful, not to real-
istic exactitude, but to the expressive power of the underlying essence of
the subject treated.
In the case of purely abstract painting, there is the problem of the
reduction of such painting to surface decoration which Kandinsky,
22 Republic, X, 596E.
23 AE, 84, 92, 183.
24 PF, 11.
25 Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, Irving Stone
ed. (New York: New American Library, 1969), 59 (henceforth DT).

26 Discourses, 163.
27 Discourses, 103 and 120.
6 ON PAINTING 103
abstractionist though he was, saw as a problem with the new mode of

abstraction at the beginning of the twentieth century: in its non-repre-
sentational character, it can be seen more superficially as merely decora-
tive and not intrinsically meaningful.28 The paintings of Mondrian’s late
period furnished the model for dress, jacket, sweater, and tie designs. It
is easy to miss his intent to produce an icon of our relation to the cosmos
characteristic of his work as a theosophist. But then Mondrian himself
gave no clue in his later titles that typically read: “Composition in Blue,
Red, and Yellow.”29
Now painting, like other art forms, can and does function in differ-
ent ways. It can tie us to surface and it can draw us into depth, both
by realistic depiction and by abstract presentation. It can be deliber-
ately cultivated to evoke erotic desire in pornographic art. But the very
same object—let’s say a female nude—can be presented in such a way
as to evoke a more detached appreciation of the form. As John Dewey
remarked, the difference between a pornographic and an artistic depic-
tion of the nude lies in the overall mood created by the aesthetic mode
of presentation.30 Kenneth Clark wrote a whole book on the distinction
between the naked and the nude.31 Titian painted Sacred and Profane
Love (1514) which juxtaposed a female nude with a fancily dressed
woman. The former was the Sacred.
Courbet was commissioned by a rich man to depict female genitalia
which he could unveil during his bachelor parties. The artist obliged
(and took the money), but named it The Creation of the World. The
title invites a reflective relation to the picture in the pornographic leer-
ers. One is invited to think of the genitalia as the origin of life and to
reflect more comprehensively on the origination of the whole context in
which living, painting, and, at the most superficial level, pornographic
leering takes place. But I’m sure the point was lost on the emotionally
28 CSA, 47. Jean Mitry did not see Kandinsky’s point and remarked, “abstract painting is
nothing more than a pretty but purposeless pattern of shape and color.” Mitry, The Aesthetics
and Psychology of the Cinema, C. King trans. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1996), 340b (henceforth APC). This is exactly how they were seen by those who adapted
Mondrian’s patterns to dresses and ties.
29 See below.
30 AE, 95, 178.
31 Kenneth Clarke, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1972).
104 R.E. Wood
adolescent adults who continued to leer. However, the depiction is

photographic and not stylistic in character and does thereby suggests
pornographic leering.
We typically receive clues to how we are to read a painting in its title.
Arthur Danto has reflected somewhat extensively on the difference nam-
ing makes to a painting. If, for example, we saw a painting of a man
plowing on a hillside next to a body of water in which another person
is splashing down into the water while the sun shines brightly overhead,
one would look at it differently if it were entitled “Work and Play on a
Sunny Day” than if it were titled The Fall of Icarus—which is the name
given it by Breugel, its creator.
Danto also dreamt up a hypothetical situation in which two artists
are commissioned to do murals for a science building, one to depict
Newton’s First Law and the other his Second Law. Unknown to each
other, they execute identical murals: a straight black line one-third of the
way up and all the way across the white wall. The one illustrating the
First Law (“A body in motion will stay in motion in the direction of the
motion unless acted on by an outside force”) presented the line as the
trail left by an inertially moving body. The other mural, illustrating the
Third Law (“For every action an equal and opposite reaction”) presented
the line as a divider between two bodies pressing against one another.
Danto suggests another title: “Sea and Sky at High Noon,” where the
line is the horizon dividing sea and sky. The examples illustrate how we
see in function of how we think and thus name. The sensory given is
fitted into a wider interpretive framework. Naming as well as mode of
depiction invite reflection upon, and bring us to a mode of presence to,
or participation in what is presented.32
Framing: The visual environment is grounded in the viewer’s body
which establishes the horizon as the limit of the field of vision. Within
that field, as one focuses upon a particular object, everything else
becomes marginal. In separating the painting from its visual envi-
ronment, we are invited to disregard other elements, to reduce to the
marginal what necessarily co-appears with any focal presence. We look
only at the painting and disregard the walls and the other objects in
the room or outside the window. Indeed, in attending to the painting
32 Arthur Danto, Transformation of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 115 ff.

6 ON PAINTING 105
itself, we disregard even the frame. The frequently elaborated character

of the frame only serves to set the painting off more sharply from its
environment: it announces that within its encasement there lies the pre-
cious world of the painting itself. The painting is its own world with
no essential immediate relation to what co-appears with it in the envi-
roning space. Interior decorators might advise the selection of a paint-
ing because it fits with the color relations in a room or select the color
scheme of the room to fit with the colors of a significant painting. But
that is purely exterior to the painting itself.
From what is extant of early history, the first painting was done on
cave walls where the background of the figure trailed off into aesthetic
indifference. With the development of smooth interior walls in houses
and temples, the painted figures as frescos were located in relation to the
limits of the surrounding space. At some point detachable and thus port-
able surfaces of wood or paper or canvas established a still more limited
frame. Whereas the fresco has a definite location and should be thought
of in relation to its architectural environment, the painting is detachable.
It exists within its own frame separable from the everyday visual environ-
ment. It becomes portable.
In his defense of early twentieth-century art, Jean Cocteau claimed
that a picture is not a window: it can have its own subject matter inde-
pendent of outside reference.33 Following tha, Jackson Pollock broke
with the convention of easel painting that lent support to the view of
painting as a window onto reality. He placed his canvases upon the
floor so that one would not be seduced into following the easel-paint-
ing temptation. This also allowed him to develop his drip-painting
technique.34
As in the case of the piece that begins this chapter, typical Chinese
paintings not only do not call for a frame, they positively exclude being
surrounded by one.35 They typically contain steep mountains, whose
extreme verticality parallels the vertical dominance of the viewing sur-
face. They typically contain pine trees surrounded by mist or clouds that
appear out of a background that recedes indeterminately. Human beings
or their houses are tiny figures dwarfed by the trees, the mountains,
33 PE, 163.
34 WPI, 89.
35 Study the Chinese painting that stands at the head of this chapter.
106 R.E. Wood
the clouds, and the indeterminate background. It is relation to the

background that invites thought to extend beyond the edges of the paint-
ing. Such paintings give an exquisite sense of the sublime, the tiny insig-
nificance of the human in the vastness of the cosmos. They correspond
perfectly to the bipolar character of the field of human experience that we
have stressed throughout. Here, imaginative creation gives filling to the
empty founding reference to the Totality and expands human sensibility.
The separable factor of a painting has brought to the fore even more
strongly than in the case of the fresco the aesthetic problem of composi-
tion and thus the notion of overall aesthetic form. Figures must stand
in definite spatial relationships with other figures and in relation to the
overall field limited by the edges of the painting in such a way as to pro-
duce a sense of definable, harmonic formal relations. That is true both
of the figures and of the colors. Painting, we said, is about color and
about form, both in the sense of shape and in the sense of the together-
ness of colors and shapes. Abstract paintings, as instances of Kant’s “free
beauty,” bring that to the fore, since the problem of composition is often
made the theme of the painting.36
In representational painting the objects represented determine the
boundaries within the painting. So one might begin a painting by sketch-
ing in the shapes with a charcoal pencil. There are two aspects to con-
sider: the exactitude of the representations and the distribution of shapes
within the frame. The problem is the same in photography. A camera is
the modern equivalent of Plato’s mirror. Of course what makes painting
different than mirroring is that, as we have noted, painting freezes what
in the mirror is always in flux. But what makes a photograph fine art is
not its exact mirroring; any camera provides that. As we have also noted,
what is required is the selection of the frame, i.e. the limits of the paint-
ing, and the proportionate distribution of the shapes and colors within
that frame. With the camera, one can frame any kind of object, even the
most pedestrian, and establish thereby a kind of abstract object. But that
requires an eye sensitized to formal properties. What is photogenic is a
well balanced set of forms and colors in which the play of light and dark
is also proportionately distributed.
As we noted previously, Plato’s mirror image has to be understood
in relation to his remark, earlier in the Republic, that paintings (along
36 Immanuel Kant, CJ, §4, 49.

6 ON PAINTING 107
with music, buildings, clothing, furniture, and utensils) should have the
Apollonian qualities of grace, order, harmony, and proportion. It is the
distribution of forms within the frame and the togetherness of color,
light, and shade playing in relation to that distribution that establish aes-
thetic form in a painting. In order to have a good painting, these condi-
tions have to be met, whether in representational or in abstract painting
or in photography.
Perspective: Representation may or may not involve reproducing,
before the invention of the camera, a perspectivally exact version of the
object. It was not until relatively late in history, in the Renaissance, that
painters took perspective seriously. What is present to the eye from a sin-
gle perspective are perspectival distortions. Seeing solid bodies in the
environment necessarily involves distortion of the object that appears to
shrink as it recedes from vision in the direction of the horizon.37
Consider a representation of a cube. In a two-dimensional flat sur-
face, what we perceive from a fixed point of view is a central square
with two rhombuses, one on the top and the other on one of the sides.
Interpreted three-dimensionally, a cube appears in such a way that its
sides are reduced as they recede from the perceiver. Prior to the fathers
of perspectival painting, Brunelleschi and Alberti in the Renaissance,
such perspectival distortion was not even attended to.38 It remained sub-
sidiary until the Renaissance artists made it focal.
In previous paintings, the figures were presented in abstraction from
the background they necessarily involve in the appearance of real solids.
In primitive paintings, the king and queen are significantly larger than
their subjects, both sets of which are typically flat figures. This kind of
painting makes visible invisible relations, here the greater significance
of the king and queen, so exact verisimilitude would distort rather than
support what is being said in the painting.
The figures on Grecian urns and Byzantine icons are completely flat
and without any realistically depicted environment. Icons depict Christ,
or the Virgin and Child, or a Saint surrounded by golden halos against
a flat background, often gilded or decorated with various geometric
37 One might reply that objects shrinking progressively as they stand at a distance from
the viewer is not a distortion at all. It is the way they must appear as what they are. Our
psycho-neural system discounts the immediate appearances and puts us in relation to the
realities involved. That is why perspective was not observed earlier.
38 See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
108 R.E. Wood
patterns. There is no sense of perspective or visual depth. In some of the

icons, the fingers of the Christos are extremely thin, even skeletal, and
the proportions of the figures are not naturalistic. In icons presenting
the Virgin and Child, the child often looks like a miniature ten-year-old
which gives the Virgin the look of a significantly larger-than-life figure.
Representation clearly dominates, but not visual verisimilitude. Such
icons both bring the spiritual figures closer to us and, at the same time,
set them apart, with various devices, as sacred figures.39 It is expression
rather than fidelity to realist appearance that counts. The icons are made
to appear as if the divine or the saintly looked out through the eyes. For
Hegel, not just icon painting but painting as such makes its productions
“thousand eyed Arguses” in which, as in the human eye, the subjectivity
of the artist looks out at the viewer.40 Icons center upon the look of the
sacred figure looking out at the worshipper. So perspective is not central
in the history of painting.
The reason perspective did not emerge earlier is that, in our ordi-
nary experience, out psycho-neural system has automatically registered
the shifts in perspective as we move in relation to things or move things
in relation to us, circumambulating or rotating the object so that our
system automatically discounts the distortions. John Dewey noted one
essential component involved in our perceptual relation to things: syn-
esthesia, the automatic synthesizing of past experience from differing
angles and differing senses.41 That is why we do not ordinarily attend to
the distortions. Plates set out for dinner on a long table appear from a
given perspective as ovals of increasingly lesser width and depth as they
are arranged in progressive distances from our viewing position. But we
rarely occupy a frozen perspective and always “see” the plates as round,
just as they appear straight on with their faces fully turned towards us.
This is known as “the Brunswick constant.”42 It is our prior experience,
retained and synthesized, that automatically discounts the distortion. We
experience them as round even though what actually appears from a given
39 See Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, G. Palmer and E.
Kadloubovsky, trans. (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999).
40 LFA, I, 153–4.
41 Dewey, AE, 125–6.
42 Mitry APC, 75b.
6 ON PAINTING 109
position does not so present them.43 A photograph, freezing the object

in a single instant, makes the perspectival distortion obvious. But then,
there was no photography before the early nineteenth century.
Photography: With the invention of the camera by Louis Daguerre in
1839, photographic realism, arrived at with such painstaking effort by
the painter, could be secured in an instant. In the words of printmaker
Jürgen Strunck, photo-duplication technology superseded “horse-bris-
tle technology.” But that did not do away with painting. According to
Matisse, photography freed painting to be painting.44 One began to
look at pre-Albertian painting as having its own integrity. Picasso insti-
tuted a new movement to recapture the power of “primitive” painting
over against Academicism’s nearly photographic realism.45 Cubism aimed
at capturing a multi-perspectival view in one straight-on viewing.46 Du
Champ’s Nude Descending a Staircase depicts a series of humanoid fig-
ures within a single frame representing the actual descent.
Positively impressed by the camera, the Impressionists saw the painter
as a detached spectator.47 The work of this movement was consequently
all surface, removed from exhibiting the total relation of the painter to
the theme and abstracting from exhibiting the hidden dimensions of
things depicted. However, Cézanne noted that the world of nature has
more dimensions than the camera can capture.48 Matisse further said that
“photography has greatly disturbed the imagination, because one has
seen things devoid of feeling.” And he also said that “the invention of
photography had released painting from the need to copy nature,” leav-
ing the painter free to “present emotion as directly as possible and by the
simplest means.”49 What the painter is able to do beyond mimicking the
camera is to indicate the tactile dimension and also bring to bear a sense
of the unseen and unseeable “interior” of the object depicted.50
43 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” (henceforth CD) Sense and Non-Sense,
H. and P. Dreyfus, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 14 (henceforth

SN). See also von Hildebrand, PF, 84–6.
44 Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master (London: Penguin, 2005), 26 (henceforth MM).
45 See Gertrude Stein, Picasso (New York: Dover, 1984).
46 Guilliame Apollinaire, Cubism (New York: Parkstone Press International, 2010).
47 PE, 89, 132.
48 PE, 129.
49 Matisse to critic E. Tériade, 1933, in MM, 26.
50 PE, 71.
110 R.E. Wood
One of the things that emerged with photography was what André
Malraux called “the museum without walls,” the availability of paintings
from all over the world within the confines of the covers of a book.51
Hitherto, if one wanted to speak about a given picture, one had to visit
the site where it was displayed or remember what you had once seen
on a site other than the place where you are writing or sketch it from
the original viewing. Today the entire history of art is at one’s finger-
tips. One drawback is that one cannot observe the paintings in their true
size; and, since size is one of the determinants of treatment, one cannot
understand fully the character of the treatment.52 One could get around
that a bit by having a person stand next to a given piece in a photograph;
but that is only an intellectual recognition. The full impact of a piece
depends upon perceiving its size directly and not through intellectual
mediation.
One might add that, even after photography, books aiming at bird
identification still require drawings that make clearer than photographs
the salient features of different species, picking them out from their
background and accenting visible peculiarities of shape and color for pur-
poses of field identification.
One problem with photo-reproductions of paintings is reproducing
the colors themselves. I have a print of van Gogh’s “Irises” in which the
colors are very vivid. When I saw the original in the Getty Museum out-
side Los Angeles, I was disappointed with how pale it seemed by com-
parison. The same is true of Breugel’s Peasants’ Dance, the original of
which I saw in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Again, when I was put-
ting together a slide show for my aesthetics course, I was surprised that
the color reproductions of the same painting from different sources var-
ied very widely in their color presentation.
Surface and Depth: Photographic realism was not simply the aim of
various painters since the Renaissance. Verisimilitude to the point of illu-
sory “real presence” was the aim of classical Greek artists as well. As we
have merely indicated before, Hegel tells of a meeting between the paint-
ers Zeuxis and Parrhasios in which one bragged that he painted grapes
so realistically that the birds tried to eat them, the other that his painting
51 André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, S. Gilbert trans. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
52 PE, 133.
6 ON PAINTING 111
of drapes even fooled the other painter who reached out to part them.
Hegel went on to remark on the utter insipidity of the attempt. Nature
already does a good job of presenting real objects. Why compete with
her in that respect? The invention of hammer and nails was more impor-
tant for the advancement of civilization.
So, the point of art is not surface imitation. Hegel as well as Reynolds
and a host of others see that as a mistake.53 Von Hildebrand, for exam-
ple, claims that “the value of a picture does not depend on the success
of a deception…, but on the unitary spatial suggestiveness concentrated
in it.”54 Realistic imitation is a matter of mere draftsmanship, a precon-
dition but not the most essential feature of good painting. One might
think that the lack of verisimilitude in more “primitive” painting was
linked to a lack of command of painting techniques. But that is not nec-
essarily the case.
Like Hegel, Schopenhauer saw a higher mission for art than verisi-
militude. The point of art is not to present things in a visually realistic
manner, but to present them in such a way as to evoke a reflective and
participatory relation to the depicted object as expression of ideal objec-
tivity.55 Verisimilitude can be a distraction from what is to be achieved by
fine art. Even Alberti recommended leaving more for the mind to dis-
cover than is actually apparent to the eye.56
In realism and abstractionism, in painter after painter from Reynolds
to van Gogh and on to Kandinsky and Mondrian, one hears the same
claim: that the aim of painting is to grasp and express the essential.
Indeed, one reads such comments from artists in different media. As we
noted previously, in his sculpture Brancusi was dedicated to such essen-
tial expressiveness. And as Goethe put it, “Art does not exactly imitate
that which can be seen by the eyes, but goes back to that element of
reason of which Nature consists and according to which Nature acts.”57
Hegel considered everyday appearance to be “a hard shell” that thought
had to penetrate and transform to show the ideal.58 For Hegel, what is
53 Discourses,103.
54 PF,56. Emphasis mine.
55 WWR, I, 2, §27, 145.
56 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (London: Penguin, 1972), 77.
57 Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, B. Sanders, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1906),
§490.
58 LFA, I, 9.
112 R.E. Wood
Fig. 6.2 Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Richard Sheridan
finally important in art is the transformation of surface in such a way as

to communicate a sense of the Eternal and Encompassing, “to unveil the
truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration,” a content whose
universality has been “absolutely individualized and sensuously particu-
larized.”59
Joshua Reynolds saw the function of painting as revealing ideal
beauty, drawing from the scattered motes of beauty immediately
59 LFA, I, 55 and 51.

6 ON PAINTING 113
available in Nature and bringing them into a coherent whole not present
in Nature directly. But even more, painting was to express greatness of
character and significant action. Dewey viewed it more broadly as gath-
ering the energies and rhythms found in our lives, intensifying and con-
centrating them.60 But also for Dewey, in its deepest forms art has the
ability to bring into focus that relation to the cosmos that hovers in the
background of all sane experience.
But, short of stimulating a sense of the Encompassing, one can “see”
various human attributes in the way a figure is treated: one can see purity
in Raphael’s Madonnas, vigor and power in David’s Napoleon, and
serenity in the treatment of the Buddha. Gainsborough’s Mrs. Richard
Sheridan depicts an absolutely calm face and relaxed left arm while her
hair, clothing, and the trees that surround her are ruffled by the wind,
with storm clouds invading the blue sky. The soft, flowing character and
the pink and white of her dress suggest a delicacy. Yet she displays the
strength of absolute serenity brought into relief by the depiction of the
threatening situation—a pictorial presentation of the Kantian sublime
(Fig. 6.2).
The point with regard to painting, and to the arts generally, is that
photographic realism tends to reinforce conventional associations. Non-
photographic depiction in the pre-Albertian modes of painting was able
to bring a sense of the Beyond, of the surrounding Mystery that cor-
responds to our founding empty reference to the Whole of Being and
beings. Many twentieth-century abstract forms of painting have been
inspired by the same intent. As we noted before and will shortly exam-
ine, Mondrian’s late studies in blue, yellow, and red were actually icons
of the cosmos.
But of course conventional religious paintings can themselves become
part of the dashboard of everyday adjustment and of the functional
world of contemporary Scribes and Pharisees. Given that proclivity,
it would seem that art requires perpetual refreshment where different
forms arise, not simply as the search for novelty, but as a break with the
ordinary dashboard associations in order to do two things that may or
may not coincide: to attend more carefully to what appears on the sur-
face and to evoke a sense of the surrounding Mystery awakening us to
our grounding reference to the Mystery of the encompassing wholeness
60 Art as Experience, (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 28 (henceforth AE).

114 R.E. Wood
of things and of ourselves within the Totality. Interestingly, Dewey saw

both functions as essential possibilities of art.61
In Martin Buber’s view, great artists, along with saints and philoso-
phers, have had the experience of being “addressed” by something from
beyond the phenomenal circle and were called upon to respond to that
address by bringing form into the inter-human world. They open the
possibility for others to relate to the Eternal and Encompassing. But
then form becomes “object.” Art history takes over, and the work is
reduced to expression of subjective biography and sociology and related
to the development of technique or the succession of styles. But a work
of art or a text from the Bible always has the potential to produce in
the perceiver the transformative awareness of transcendence.62 As Rilke
noted and we have cited several times, when contemplating the antique
torso of Apollo, one might discern the imperative: “You must change
your life!”63
What is crucial in painting is expression, the meaning found in the
work, in realism as well as in abstractionism. This is a constant theme
from Reynolds to van Gogh and on to Kandinsky and Mondrian,
Cézanne, Matisse, and Klee. We can show this a bit further in some early
twentieth-century painters: in van Gogh, Cézanne, in Klee, and, some-
what more extensively, in Mondrian.
For Vincent van Gogh, the artist’s duty was “to be absorbed in nature
and art,” to live for a long time in nature, to learn to love it, and to lis-
ten to “the language of nature.”64 Absorption in nature leads to a kind
of fusion whereby the artist sees her through his own temperament and
catches “the poetry in things.”65 The resultant work has “soul” in it, is
“fresh and true,” “more true than literal truth.”66 For Hegel, following
upon “the restoring of all things in Christ” through His Incarnation,
painting involves the display, through the mood evoked by the way the
object is treated, of the artist’s subjectivity whose infinite dignity and
freedom was manifest through Christ. Painting expresses, in the very way
61 AE, 192.
62 Iand Thou, 166–7.
63 See the Appendix to Chap. 5.
64 DT, 122, 130, 145, 437, 453.
65 DT, 288.
66 DT, 158, 315, 176, 301.
6 ON PAINTING 115
Fig. 6.3 Vincent van Gogh, Poplars at St. Rémy
objects are treated, the subjectivity of the artist in his or her feeling for,
and thus participation in the “life” of the objects (Fig. 6.3).67
Consider van Gogh’s Poplars at Saint Rémy. There is an interplay
between horizontal and vertical pressures. The poplars thrust upwards,
while the sky especially plays strong counterpart, not static, but dynamic,
racing horizontally across the sky which, through its ultimate dark upper
edge, nonetheless seems to press downwards. It is an ominous, threaten-
ing sky. The landscape flanking the poplars runs a similar flowing hori-
zontal course, but pressing upwards as if under pressure from below.
67 LFA, I, 86.
116 R.E. Wood
But near the bottom of the poplars and below, the ground seems to give
way through the piling up of slab-like patches. The poplars are not fully
upright, but lean to the viewer’s right, and the leaves have turned yellow,
indicating the end of a season. The whole presents itself as if the sky is
closed and the earth is opening up to swallow the upward thrust of life
that begins to totter. The whole is intensely dynamic and unstable, full
of tension and foreboding, with a sense of imminent collapse, while the
poplars still struggle mightily to hold their own in their powerful vertical
thrust.
Paul Cézanne began with the Impressionists’ interest in visual surface,
taking nature as a model, but parted company with them in his attempt
to present things, as it were, “subtly illuminated from within,” giving
an “impression of solidity and material substance.” As Merleau-Ponty
remarked: Cézanne “wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the
birth of order through spontaneous organization” and to “confront the
sciences with the nature ‘from which they came.’” Science looks away
from expression and focuses upon the “positivity” of the observed visual
surface; this is what bothered sculptor von Hildebrand. For Merleau-
Ponty, Cézanne displayed “a vision which penetrates right to the root
of things beneath the imposed order of humanity.” “The lived object…
presents itself to us from the start as the center from which these con-
tributions radiate. We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the
hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor.”68
Here we detect Cézanne’s sensitivity to the synaesthesia, the operative
togetherness in the sensory system in our dwelling with persons and
things and indwelling in our own bodies, playing in tandem with a desire
to gain a sense of the underlying.
Merleau-Ponty continues: “The voracious vision, reaching beyond the
‘visual givens,’ opens upon a texture of Being….” The “eye lives in this
texture as a man lives in his house.”69 The expression “texture of Being”
indicates something more than a feature of individual things. It indicates
the way in which each thing functions for us in terms of its and our rela-
tion to the Totality. “…[T]he proper essence of the visible is to have a
layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain
absence.”70 We are tempted by what I call “the optomorphic fallacy,” the
68 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SN, 11–16. See also EM in PP, 160–1.

69 PP, 166.
70 PP, 187.
6 ON PAINTING 117
Fig. 6.4 Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry
mistaken belief that everything that is can in principle be adequately cap-

tured by a camera-like viewing; all we need is more and more sensitive
instruments.71 Cézanne, along with others, worked to overcome that fal-
lacy (Fig. 6.4).
This is not usually part of the standard repertoire of Cézanne’s work,
though it is most impressive. It employs his usual palette for landscapes:
orange-tan with green and blue laid on in patches. It puts one in mind of
van Gogh’s Poplars of St. Rémy in the kind of instability it seems to por-
tray. The foreground of rock walls dominates, but the background walls,
71 Bernard Lonergan claimed that the philosophically disoriented assumption that dogs
the sciences and everyday awareness itself is that being is “the already out-there now real,”
in principle the object of visual inspection. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
(1957). See also my WIS.
118 R.E. Wood
Fig. 6.5 Paul Klee, Sunset. Credit Artists’ Rights Society
together with trees that rest upon them, are tilted, giving the impression
of a still photo of a scene in incipient collapse. But the brightness of the
foreground walls does not give the somber impression provided by van
Gogh’s work. In spite of the collapse, the foreground dominates in its
solidity. It has been suggested that Cézanne’s treatment here became an
inspiration for later Cubist painters.
Paul Klee was impressed by the striving for spiritual expression in
the work of Cézanne and Matisse. If Cézanne was closer to depiction,
Matisse subordinated depiction to an enlivened surface; but Klee moved
more deeply into the realm of fantasy. In his work generally, he sought to
express the essence of growth with “the new naturalness, the naturalness
of the work,” participating in the creation of the artwork as the image
of God’s work. The visual medium is only an isolated case where the
universe appears, a surface in relation to the depth where the formative
powers operate. “There are more truths unseen than seen.” The artist’s
task is to reach out into “new dimensions, far removed from conscious
association,” playing in the dark with ultimate things, “deep down in the
primordial underground.” He learns “to gather what rises from below”
6 ON PAINTING 119
and becomes the channel for its expression in the fixity of the painted
surface. The mystery encountered should “shake us to our foundations”
and come to expression in the work of art.72
To illustrate that, I want to give some attention to the analysis of Die
Sonnenuntergang (Sunset) (Fig. 6.5).
The piece is laid out with width dominating height as far as the
dimension of the canvas is concerned. However, what dominates the-
matically is the vertical—or rather diagonal—interplay of three circular
figures. The smallest and lowest is painted in red which makes it stand
out from all the rest. It is the primary focus of the piece. An arrow
below indicates (in a hokey way) that it is going down. The circular fig-
ure on the top to the viewer’s left plays counterpoint to the setting sun.
It stands out by reason of the dark red tear that drips from its single
eye, but also by its being circumscribed in black as well as its being, as
it were, pointed to by the thick black horizontal line that begins at the
border. Between the two circles, at the horizontal midpoint of the piece,
and near the bottom of the painting is the third circle, transparent and
formed by the same dots that appear in the figures to the left and right
of the humanoid circle. In tone it is more recessive than the sun and the
human head.
The teary-eyed circle is the human being regretting the setting of the
sun. That this is not simply a sunset is indicated by the joining, with a
coffin-like shape, of the teary figure to the circle at the center near the
bottom. The coffin is linked to two flanking shapes that can be consid-
ered distortions of the coffin shape. The shape below and to the viewer’s
right of the coffin, jutting into the center of the lower, middle sphere,
is linked to another similar distorted figure. The four shapes alternate
between a bluish white and a faded magenta. The bluish-white figures
encroach upon the human circle above and the central circle below. To
the right of the last figure is another thick black horizontal line from that
figure to the border, matching the similar black line by the humanoid
circle. It suggests a relation between the human head and the coffin.
Finally, the background is a light yellowish brown with bluish rubbings
suggesting a chaotic matrix for the whole surface presentation.
72 275 Paul Klee Notebooks, vol. I, The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961),
22, 67, 78–9, 88, 80, 93, 82, 17.

120 R.E. Wood
Fig. 6.6 Piet Mondrian, Farm at Duivendrecht
Reflecting the sun in the faint red color of the dots that fill it, a mush-
room-like figure runs across the whole of the top part of the canvas. Two
sweeping blue lines come off below the mushroom to the right and the
left to form two other figures. One dominant feature is the presence
of small dots, not only in regular formation within the mushroom, but
also in the two flanking shapes, the lower circle and the surround of the
humanoid circle. In the mushroom the dots are red; in the other three
shapes and its surround they are blue. All the shapes except the sun, the
dots, and the background are transparent.
“Deep down in the primordial underground,” which reverberates
through attending carefully and reflectively to this figure, we contem-
plate the mystery of our death, that, pondered in silence, can “shake us
to our foundations.” The sunset contemplated by the teary-eyed fig-
ure is the setting of its own life, as the coffin-like figures suggest. The
tear shed is a tear of blood, the symbol of life pouring out. Outside the
6 ON PAINTING 121
Fig. 6.7 Piet Mondrian, Apple Tree 1909. Credit Dallas Museum of Art
background, the figures not composed of dots are the human circle, the
sun, and the coffin-like figures. The latter is indicated where parts of the
coffin-figures appear without the dots outside the other figures. This
may suggest that everything is composed of atomic particles except the
human spirit and what becomes symbolic of its own immaterial character.
Though it regrets leaving this life, there is hope for it beyond.
There are questions which remain. One of them is: why are the sun,
the dots, and the background the only non-transparent elements? Maybe
they represent the opacity of matter… And what does the circle in the
middle of the lower portion of the canvas represent? It calls out both to
the humanoid circle and to the circle of the setting sun. Is it the Earth?
Finally, I want to illustrate the path from realism to abstraction by
focusing upon the career of Piet Mondrian. When the instructor in a
painting class showed his students a late Mondrian, one student asked:
“Why did he paint this way? Why didn’t he paint trees?” The instructor
responded that this is just what he set out to do.
122 R.E. Wood
Fig. 6.8 Piet Mondrian,

Composition 1916.
The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation/
Art Resource, NY
Mondrian began with a kind of impressionist realism from the 1890s

on into the first decade of the 1900s and continued for a while beyond
(see Figs. 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9). In Farm Near Duivendrecht the trees in
winter display a latticework of clearly separated units. Late in the first
decade and on into the second decade of the twentieth century, the
first levels of abstraction make their appearance (see The Apple Tree of
1909).73 The paintings appear as if constructed out of painted units, per-
haps following the path blazed by Cézanne. The trees begin quasi-real-
istically and then, following the networking of trees in winter, turn into
a net of more clearly separated elements with curves and perpendiculars.
73 Piet Mondrian, Apple Tree. Pointillist Version 1908–1909. Oil on composition board.
Overall 22 3/8 x 29 ½ (56.833 x 74.93 cm) In Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the
Arts Collection, gift of the James H. and Lillion Clark Foundation, 1982.26 FA.
6 ON PAINTING 123
Fig. 6.9 Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue 1940. Copyright
Tate, London 2016
In the next few years the curves progressively give way to perpendicu-
lars as he painted facades, cityscapes, and oceans, many within oval
frames, representing perhaps the horizon of vision. Pinks, gray-blues,
and a kind of mustard yellow come to dominate. In his “Composition
in 1916” out of a gray background emerge a kind of oval with mustard
yellow patches predominating on the edges, giving way to patches of
the three colors, intermingled with a multitude of perpendiculars. The
piece is organized in such a way that the center seems to bulge out a
bit and advance toward the viewer. From about 1917 ovals and curves
disappear and rectangles set up by perpendiculars take center stage. The
perpendiculars come to be formed by black lines that eventually and pri-
marily run the full length of the surface both horizontally and vertically
(see Composition in Blue, Red, and Yellow of 1942 for one of the most
striking of such paintings). From then until his death in 1944 we see
the complete abstraction of such black perpendiculars on a white field
124 R.E. Wood
punctuated by rectangles containing the primary colors: red, blue, and

yellow. Everything becomes a variation on these visual themes: primary
colors on a white field divided by black perpendiculars predominantly
running the length of the surface.
Mondrian understood his later work as fidelity to the reality of
nature!74 But by ‘nature’ he did not mean everyday surface. He meant
what he took to underlie that surface. He claimed that,
Natural appearance, form, natural color, natural rhythm, and even in

most cases natural relationships, all express the tragic…. We must not see
beyond nature; rather we must…see through nature. We must see deeper,
see abstractly and above all universally. Then we can see the external for
what it really is: a reflection of truth. For this we must first free ourselves
from attachment to the external; only then can we rise above the tragic and
consciously contemplate repose in all things.75
In the paintings of his late period, the colors on the surface were vari-
ous mixtures of the basic chromatic and achromatic colors. The primary
colors are abstract presentations of the way all things appear to us visu-
ally. They appear within a white field. White, containing all colors, sug-
gests a matrix within which everything exists. That would follow the
theosophist orientation of the artist. The curved and jagged lines of
ordinary objects are deviations from the basic opposition between the
horizontal and the vertical. Horizontality and verticality appear as the
intersection of the horizon established by gravity and the vertical thrust
against gravity. The latter is expressed in all the other forces, living and
non-living found in our experience, and produce mountains, raging seas,
trees, animals, humans, buildings, airplanes, dams. Running the black
lines across the white surface indicates the complete dominance of the
whole field by these opposites. Sculptor von Hildebrand noted that hori-
zontal and vertical directions appear everywhere in nature but, “like the
skeleton to an organism [they are] everywhere felt but nowhere seen.”76
Mondrian makes them both seen and felt.
74 The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, edited and
translated by H. Holtzman and M. James (New York: De Capo Press, 1993), (henceforth
NANL).
75 NANL, 88–9.
76 PF, 74–5.
6 ON PAINTING 125
Mondrian: From Realism to Abstraction

The relation between the colors sets the eye in motion, so that the
apparently static surfaces are actually depiction and visual production of
dynamic tension and motion. White as background corresponds to the
encompassing ground out of which everything comes. Kandinsky sees
white as mediating silence, and, as we have seen, Mondrian saw his work
as expressing repose as opposed to immediate everyday surface which
rather displays the tragic. As reflective subjectivity deepens, that is, as it
backs off from the immediacy of immersion in the dashboard surface, it
begins to grasp the basic underlying forces. Mondrian sees his task as a
painter to give expression to those forces and thus to provide his viewers
with the possibility of reflective deepening.
Over the centuries the reputations of certain paintings, like all clas-
sics, endure by making an appeal again and again to sensitive and reflec-
tive viewers. To those not so sensitive and reflective they are objects
at hand—like a profound philosophical text to the average reader.
However, unlike a philosophical text—or any ordinary text for that mat-
ter—the surface appearance of a painting is integral to its “message.”
The text at the most superficial level consists in rows of black figures on
a white ground; and at a higher but still superficial level, they are sen-
tences in a given language. At a still higher level, they present meanings
at differing levels of depth. To reach those levels, the sensory medium of
presentation is completely subsidiary. It is somewhat like glasses through
which we look out at things in the environment; they disappear in ful-
filling their function. But paintings with regard to colored surface, like
poetry with regard to sound, highlight the medium, bringing it into a
focus it does not have in ordinary life.
However, paintings present themselves, like any other object, as capa-
ble of being approached in different ways. A dog might not even pay
attention to a painting leaning against a wall and waiting to be hung—
unless as he typically attends to upright objects. Humans might simply
glance and categorize: “That’s a painting.” One might go further and
learn the artist and title—for example, in order to pass an academic
test or to appear “cultured.” One might take an interest in the chemi-
cal composition of the colors or the techniques of achieving certain
effects, as artists typically do. As a cultivated aesthete, one might appreci-
ate the quality of the total sensory Gestalt. Further, one might locate a
work within the history of an artist’s stylistic development, an example
126 R.E. Wood
of which we just presented above in the case of Mondrian. Again, one

might study the works of an artist such as Mondrian to get some under-
standing of his biography or, further, of the cultural milieu by which he
was shaped. But one might also learn to let the work do its work: to
transform our way of looking at things, to teach us to look more care-
fully, reflectively, and appreciatively at the things in our visual field, to
affect our dispositions, to help us to gain, in the case of the most pro-
found works, some sense of the encompassing Mystery in relation to
which distinctive human existence exists. A painting is a set of eyes look-
ing at us from out of the depth of the artist’s subjectivity. But at its core,
that subjectivity, as human, looks from out of the natural depths of rela-
tionship to the Whole. It is this that both Hegel and Buber, along with
Mondrian, underscore.
As an epigram to “In vino veritas,” in Stages on Life’s Way,
Kierkegaard cites Lichtenberg: “Such works are mirrors. When an ape
gawks in, no Apostle gazes out.”77 Works of art in general—and not
just painting—can fully do their work only in terms of what the viewer
brings, in terms of character, disposition, and knowledge, to the work.
Someone who brings only curiosity and a desire to be titillated will
never experience what a work can do. Remember Rainer Maria Rilke’s
statement that when confronting a great work of art one might expe-
rience the imperative: “You must change your life.”78 What the great
work of art can effect is not titillation or intellectual sophistication, but
transformation.
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the German is mine.

78 “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” See the Appendix to Chap. 5.
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Danto, Arthur. 1983. Transformation of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard

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CHAPTER 7
On Music
[T]here never has been, anywhere, a culture without its music; and that music
penetrates to our blood and bones hardly, I think. needs argument.
Peter Kivy, Introduction to the Philosophy of Music
Building is to mountains as music is to the sea.

John Dewey, Art as Experience
Like every developed form of human activity, music has a history.1 It

developed through a history of institutions formed by the perfection
of various techniques: the techniques of instrumental construction,
compositional technique, and the techniques of instrumental
performance. It is the interrelation of those techniques which allows
talents, otherwise only latent in the human gene pool, to be identified,
focused, and honed into excellent performance abilities. How many
potential classical pianists were there 5000 years ago or, currently, among
the Khoikhoi? Proximately none, but remotely—in terms of genetically
based possibilities—probably as many as there are now per unit
population in the developed world. It is the formation of institutions
generally that evoke competencies among those who have the suitable
1 I want to thank Robert Kubala and Hannah Venable for helpful comments on this
chapter.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_7
130 R.E. Wood
genetic endowments. Institutions, developed over very long periods of

time, bring the individuals inducted into them to a distinctively more
complex level of freedom to unlock otherwise fallow talents and to
perform at significantly higher levels. Here we have a notion of freedom
significantly more exalted than freedom of choice: freedom to perform
based upon extended self-discipline and submission to a tradition. Music
is a prime example of freedom through discipline.2
1.
The medium within which music occurs is sound, a peculiar phenomenon
that disappears in the process of occurring. It is, as it were, time made
sensible.3 Hegel points out, with regard to the medium, that music
involves “the obliteration, not of one dimension only [as in painting],
but of the whole of space, purely and simply, this complete withdrawal,
of both the inner life and its expression, into subjectivity…. Music…
takes the subjective as such for both form and content.”4 It can do this
because, as Walter Ong pointed out, sound is the only medium that regis-
ters the interior structure of what produces it and which appeals to one’s
conscious center because it envelops the recipient. Whereas vision isolates
its focal object, sound involves harmony, a temporal putting together.5
On the part of the perceiver, music requires what Husserl calls “reten-
tions” and “protensions,” with our psycho-neural system gathering the
past and anticipating the future which moves us from the flowing, punc-
tual Now as a term of abstract analysis to the living, extended Now of
experience.6 Hearing at all—and, indeed, all awareness—requires some
retention of the past in the present and some anticipation of the future.
To hear a melody or a sentence requires that the sounding of the first
tone entering into the first word or note both pass away “objectively” but
endure “subjectively” in awareness, entering into the wholeness that is the
2 See my “Aspects of Freedom,” Philosophy Today, vol. 35, no. 1 (Spring, 1991),
pp. 106–15.
3 Suzanne Langer, FF, 109, 125.
4 Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T. Knox, trans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975,
vol. II, 889 (henceforth LFA).

5 Orality and Literacy (Methuen, 1982), 72.
6 On the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1893–1917), J. Brough trans.
(Springer, 2008).
7 ON MUSIC 131
hearing of the melody or the sentence. It also entails an anticipation of

completeness such that the end occurs because of the beginning and vice
versa, and that the transition from beginning to end has significant rela-
tion to the constitution of the whole that is the sentence or the melody.7
One might hear the human voice or the sound of a bird or even a
concatenation of sounds in the jungle or on a busy noon-day street in
a major city. Random sounds are not music, nor are they spoken lan-
guage. Compared to random sounds or even the sounds animals make
in communicating with one another, human speech is patterned in an
exceedingly complex way as dictated by phonemic construction and
semantic referents, and mediated by syntactical rules. It is inhabited by
a spiritexpressed in tones and rhythms that are integral to poetry. Music
goes beyond that to focus the sound pattern in particularly complex ways
according to definite rules of harmonic and dissonant relations exhibited
by the harmonic series.
Originally creating music was most likely a matter of spontaneous
recognition that a certain tone “belongs with” other tones, giving a
sense of correspondence and the possibility of a sense of completion. The
Pythagoreans recognized the mathematical basis for what was explicitly
recognized as the harmonic series.8 Required was an ear capable of
detecting harmonic relations, culling them out of the cacophony of
natural sounds, like selecting aesthetically formed stones out of the
myriad produced by the washing of the waves of the sea, except that
music, while being deliberately produced, is constituted of relations,
while the stones are isolated individuals.9
Outside birdsong, neither melody nor sonorous harmony are found in
nature, although rhythm and harmony of functioning originate there.10
Aristotle traced the origin of the arts to a natural delight in rhythm and
7 Aristotle,Poetics, 1415b, 25.

8 Jeremy Montagu, in a private letter to Anthony Storr, noted that it is only a small pro-
portion of the earth’s population that produces music recognizably related to the har-
monic series. Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (New York: Ballentine Books, 1992), 62.
(Henceforth MM). Most of the world’s music is based upon the pentatonic scale contain-
ing only whole tones. Western music follows the diatonic scale that includes half-tones.
9 Eduard Hanslick, The Musically Beautiful, G. Payzant, trans. (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1986), 31. Henceforth MB.

10 MB, 69. The Romantic composer Amy Beach has a set of piano pieces (“A Hermit’s
Thrust at Eve/Morn”) that incorporate snatches of birdsong that she recorded.

132 R.E. Wood
harmony, which Dewey located in the relation of the organism, itself a

harmonic system, to the rhythms and harmonies of its ecosystem.11
Both Plato and Aristotle linked rhythmos and harmonia, the two basic
components of music, with logos, music in general. Harmonia would be
the belonging together of the sounds that makes the piece more than
noise; rhythmos involves pacing. For a long time, harmonia was restricted
to its diachronic appearance, its appearance over (dia) a period of time
(chronos) in melody, whereas now it applies to synchronic relations, co-
appearance in the present. The unit of the melody is the tone, that of
the rhythm is the beat. Here we reach the equivalent of vowels and
consonants.
2.
Plato proclaimed the priority of speech, claiming that music without
speech was meaningless.12 Aristotle situated poetry in relation to cognate
arts by beginning with spoken language. Prose takes up the referent,
dance isolates the tempo, and instrumental music the sonority together
with the rhythm, while poetry takes up all three.13 Leonard Bernstein
claimed that music is heightened speech.14
What is the relation of music to speech? In ordinary speech the sound
is subsidiary to the referent, to what one intends to say by means of
the sound. Unless a listener becomes bored and distracted from what
is being said, the sound remains subsidiary to the total phenomenon
of listening to what is being said. If the hearer is bored or distracted,
what he hears is the droning of the voice. But vocal dynamics can make
a significant difference: cadence (fast or slow), pitch (high or low), and
volume (loud or soft), used well, in addition to the timbre, the peculiar
sonority of the voice, are able to grip the audience and “bring the
hearers into” what is being communicated. They share in the speaker’s
participation in what is being said and do not merely receive informa-
tion. Poetry builds on that. Music embodies the same factors.
11 Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 14ff (henceforth AE).
12 Laws, II, 698B.
13 Poetics, 1447a, 20.
14 Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question, Harvard Lectures DVD, 1973, lecture
one.
7 ON MUSIC 133
Contrary to ordinary expectation, for Eduard Hanslick “the concept

‘music’ does not apply strictly to a piece of music composed to a verbal
text.” “[O]nly instrumental music is music purely and absolutely….”15
This means that opera, which grew out of the verbal recitative, “forces
music and text into continually overstepping and yielding [which] results
in opera’s being, like a constitutional government, based on the constant
tension between two legitimate rival parties.”16
Mozart and Gluck took two opposing positions on the relation of
words to music.17 Gluck claimed the priority of the word. Theologian
Karl Barth, who began each day listening to Mozart, remarks
that Mozart did not observe the well-established ecclesial principle that
the music must serve the word; rather, Mozart viewed the relation of the
word to the music in an entirely different way: the word must serve
the music.18 Barth goes on to ask, “But is that [music serving the word]
the only possible principle for church music?”19 In his view, “it is as
though in a small segment the whole universe bursts into song because
evidently the man Mozart has apprehended the cosmos and now,
functioning only as a medium, brings it forth into sound!”20
Felix Mendelssohn once said, “People usually complain that music
is so ambiguous, that it leaves them in such doubt as to what they are
supposed to think, whereas words can be understood by everyone. But
to me it seems exactly the opposite.”21 And regarding music, Batteaux
said, echoing Pascal, “The heart has its intelligence independent of
words, and when it is touched it has understood everything.”22
15 Hanslick, MB, 15.

16 MB, 23.
17 MB, 22–6.
18 Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 38.
19 Mozart’s letter to his father in 1781, cited in Barth, 52.
20 Barth, 35. See a similar remark by Pope Benedict XVI, shared by Lutheran bishop
Hanselmann at a Bach concert: “We realized…by the impact on our hearts, that it could
not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come through the power of
Truth…” “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” in The Essential Pope
Benedict, J. Thornton and S. Varenne (New York: Harper Collins: 2008), 50.
21 Cited in Storr, MM, 65.
22 Charles Batteaux, “Lex Beaux Arts reduits à un même principe,” (1743) cited in
Kathleen Higgins, The Music of Our Lives (New York: Lexington Books, 2011), 88.
134 R.E. Wood
Let us return to a consideration of sound and speech. When we hear

someone speak—especially at some length—we hear a constant flow
of sound, normally without appreciable breaks. If we hear someone
speaking in a foreign language that we do not know, it is impossible to
recognize where one sentence ends and another begins—or, for that
matter, when a word begins and ends. But by reason of reference, for
those who know the language, the flow of sound lends itself to being
broken up into units that we call sentences which describe or prescribe,
recommend or petition, and so on. This can only occur because there
are semantic units, units of meaning which the sentences express. If we
take only descriptive sentences, the unit involves the assignment of an
action or a property to a subject. But since there are a plurality of dif-
ferent actions or properties that can be found in different subjects, there
are also detachable units of meaning we call words that can enter into dif-
ferent combinations. This would seem to be the ultimate semantic unit;
but, since words often have many meanings, the meaning intended in a
given situation is only found as the word functions in a sentence. So we
should not speak of words here but of word-meanings, and we can still
look to the word-meaning as the basic unit in the sentence.23
But the word-meaning is not the ultimate unit of spoken sound, for the
words can be broken up into sound units called phonemes or syllables, and
the phonemes or syllables in turn can be analyzed into vowels and conso-
nants.24 These are based upon the sound possibilities of the human oral
cavity, vowels involving the open mouth, consonants—which “sound
with” (con-sonare) the vowels—Involving various modes of clipping the
vowels through placing the tongue against the teeth (thus dentals d, l,
n, t), passing air through the teeth (thus sibilants c, s, z), or shaping the
sound through special positions of the lips (thus labials b, f, m, p, v, w)
or throat (thus gutturals g, k, q, x). The choice of five vowels and nine-
teen consonants is a bit arbitrary, since there are various ways of pro-
nouncing each vowel in different words.
There is, further, a distinction between these units and their empirical
instantiation, since the same “a” can be spoken by voices with different
timbres and regional accents and can appear in multiple written forms or
23 See Paul Ricoeur, “Structure, Word, Event,” in The Conflict of Interpretations D. Ihde,
ed. (Evanston, IN: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 87.

24 Poetics, 1457a 1ff.
7 ON MUSIC 135
in Braille. What language works with are ideal sound units, abstracted
from the peculiarities of individual speakers and systematically related
to one another. It is the taking up into the intention to communicate
of sound phenomena generated through the mouth that makes the
sound combinations expressive of meaning. Thus there is a clear distinc-
tion between the sound itself and the meaning it conveys. De Saussure
employs the metaphor of the leaf which has two sides: in this case, there
is the sensory side and the intelligible flip side.25
There are parallels within music. Within the movements of complex
pieces and within less extended pieces like a song, we have motifs which,
being distinguishable units, are somewhat like words or sentences.
Wagner builds his works upon recurring Leitmotifs.26 Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony begins with what during World War II was called “the victory
motif,” so named because it reproduced the “… ___” of the Morse code
for “V” that was itself considered a sign for victory. The Fifth Symphony
was also linked to the style of music that exhibited vigor, striving, and
insistence.27 A musical motif is like a phrase in that it is repeated in dif-
ferent contexts, but also in that it sounds incomplete in itself. On the
other hand, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” presents motifs that are
more like sentences in that they display what sound like completed lines
of sound: the Peter motif, the Wolf motif, the Grandfather motif, and
so on. A melody would be a more complexly developed unit than the
sentence-like motif—more like a speech as a concatenation of sentences.
However, though music may be said to have syntactics or internal struc-
tural principles, its semantics, absent a text, are not so clear.
The tone units have to be constructed out of the continuum of
sounds. We can see this in the case of a stringed instrument where
the player can exert pressure at any point along the whole length of
the string. Sliding along the string with constant pressure while glid-
ing the bow across the string produces the continuum of sound called
glissando. What is sought in producing individual tones is the position
25 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, C. Bally et al. eds, R. Harris,
trans. (Chicago: Open Court, 1983), 110ff.

26 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, P. Burbidge and R. Sutton, trans. (London: Faber
and Faber, 1979), pp. 345–6.

27 The V was made famous by Winston Churchill with his two-fingered victory gesture
that, rather paradoxically, was turned into a “peace” sign during the 1960s.
136 R.E. Wood
that gives “perfect pitch.” Such perfect pitch occurs only as a function
of its relation to a system of tones with which it is said to be in har-
mony. The starting point of the harmonic series can change. In the case
of an orchestra, the first violin presents the first tone that other strings,
woodwinds, and brass have to match. In the case of a piano concerto,
the first violinist hits a key on the piano to tune the orchestra to the cen-
tral player, the pianist.
Fast and slow, loud and soft are what give a peculiar dynamics to
performance. Whereas the tones can be generated purely mechanically,
the dynamics can be mechanically generated only up to a point. What
distinguishes an accomplished pianist from an amateur is not only the
ability to hit the right notes in the right sequence for a set duration,
it is also the peculiar feeling for the whole of the piece that dictates the
relationship between the different dynamic features of the work. The
mode of indwelling in the whole is what is peculiar to different human
performances.
One of my grandsons as a child regularly entered a piano competition
in Austin, Texas, and regularly came in behind competitors who were
mechanically perfect. But at seventeen, when testosterone washed over his
brain, he played with feeling and finally won first place. True competence
consists in holding the whole of a given piece together for the duration of
the performance, animating the mechanical with one’s own spirit.
Although some may think music originated in imitating bird song,28
one could also think of it, along the lines of Aristotle’s linking it to lan-
guage, as having originated in the passionate speech of some tribal orator
with its rising and falling pitch and volume, its accelerating and slow-
ing cadences. Such sound develops into song which emphasizes both the
referent and the sound pattern, but brings the latter into greater promi-
nence than even in the best of oratorical prose. Verbal dynamics affects
the emotional response of the audience.
28 Charles Hartshorne has extensively studied bird-calls as the expression of a certain
joie de vivre. He notes that “every simple musical device, even transposition and simul-
taneous harmony, occurs in bird music.” Born to Sing (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1973), 56. Peter Kivy praises Hartshorne’s related work, Philosophy and Psychology
of Sensations (1934) as “his unjustly neglected book.” Among other things, the book
deals with expressive qualities and emotional tone in sound. Peter Kivy, Introduction to a
Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 266 (henceforth IAM).
7 ON MUSIC 137
3.
Let us next look, however sketchily, at what harmonia entails. (Here we
enter into very rudimentary considerations. But remember, the aim is to
limn the eidetic space of each art form, learning how to think compre-
hensively of each field, and, indeed, how it fits within the Whole. The
reader should ask whether I have secured all the basics.) As we said,
among the Greeks it was exhibited in the diachronic production of
the melody; in modern times it refers to the synchronic production of
harmonic relations in chords. It refers to a feature of music, standing, so
to speak, “vertically” in relation to the “horizontality” of melody. That
is, melody is diachronic; it develops through time, while harmony in the
contemporary sense is synchronic, that is, it occurs as the togetherness
(syn) of tones at a given time to produce chords. It may be difficult to
determine the components of a chord just from the sound, since what
is produced is a single effect. However, we can analyze the chord into
its constituents by reason of the different sources producing the sound:
different keys on a piano, different instruments in an orchestra.
There are four types of chords: major, minor, diminished, and aug-
mented. The major chord is the basis and the others involve variations.
The major is constructed out of a root together with notes a third and a
fifth space removed from the root. The minor involves one change: the
third is flattened. A diminished chord departs from the minor by low-
ering the fifth as well as the third. And the augmented departs from
the major by raising the fifth. Major chords are generally perceived as
cheerful, minor as melancholy, and diminished chords as anguished. The
diminished cannot be heard as a final chord; it must be resolved. The
augmented also calls for resolution.
Harmony requires scales or the generation of definite intervals
of sound related to each other in a way we recognize as in some way
“consonant” with each other. In our “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do,” we have
a combination of both whole tones and half tones. Where C is ‘do’ the
halves fall between mi and fa, ti and do and establish an octave or set of
eight harmonically related tones. The scale is repeatable up and down
the higher and lower registers. A piano has to be tuned so that the ten-
sion on its strings produces just these intervals. One indication that this
scale is basic is that a given note sets in vibration the parallel note on a
scale higher and lower on the register, so that middle C will cause all
138 R.E. Wood
the C notes on the piano to vibrate in consonance. But it also produces

sympathetic vibrations in other related notes (thirds and fifths).
Then we have different keys where the basic scale is modulated by
introducing sharps and flats, or the heightening or lowering of a tone
by a half tone on the scale.29 The introduction of sharps and flats gives
a different set of relations between the notes that comprise the melody
and effect the harmony. As we have said, such relations are aligned to
distinctively different moods. Thus one can have major or minor keys,
the latter of which might suggest sorrow or longing, while one would
not ordinarily produce marches, which suggest courage and confidence,
in any but a major key. However, part of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique”
symphony is a March, almost a defiant resistance to the overwhelming
sorrow communicated by the piece as a whole.
The notion of harmony applies also to spatial properties, so there are
certain analogies between music and architecture. As we noted previ-
ously, Dewey compared building to mountains and music to the sea as
static to dynamic.30 Harmony in building is static and thus synchronic; in
the dynamism of music there are diachronic as well as synchronic harmo-
nies. The two ideas come together in Goethe’s famous images: “music is
liquid architecture; architecture is ‘frozen music.’”31
Developed in terms of harmonic systems of melodies, chords, and
harmonic transitions, music also has a place for dissonance or sounds
that do not fit harmonically. Because of the harmonic systems, we have
been brought to expect “resolution,” “arriving home” after a journey.32
Dissonance leads us away from “home” in such a way as to increase our
expectation and herald our return home.
Music is not only about sound, it is also about silence. There are
silences in the rests, shorter or longer, built into the score. There are
silences between movements in longer pieces and silences between sung
29 Other cultures have developed scales that deal with intervals of quarter tones, e.g.
India.
30 John Dewey, AE, 230.
31 J.W. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, (New York: De Capo Press, 1998),
March 23, 1829.

32 Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986). 79ff. (hencefoth WM).

7 ON MUSIC 139
verses. There is, finally, a link between the inner silence of composer, per-
former, and listener and the “level” of the piece performed. We will look
at the latter toward the end of this chapter.
4.
Let us now consider the elements of music in terms of their origination.
Rhythm could have a different origin than speech. One might consider
repetitive action, like the regular striking of a stone to create an ax head
or the regular pounding with a hammer to forge a blade or communal
action like paddling a canoe or pulling a barge as giving one a sense of
regular cadence that would lend itself to vocal accompaniment. The
drum comes into being to support the beat that sets the feet tapping.
But even more basically, musical rhythm is correlated with the rhythms
of the heart, of our own breathing, and the cadences involved in walking
or running. Regular, these rhythms nonetheless vary in frequency and
intensity as we reach towards and fall away from various emotional
states. And eventually rhythm is developed to support voice and
reference.
But one might also think of music originating in the cradle song, in
a mother’s humming to her child as she gently rocks her/him to sleep.
The rocking provides the rhythm and the humming modulates the
beginning of melody. But what is astonishing is that the creation of mel-
ody involves the recognition of the distinction between harmonic and
dissonant relations between sounds. It would presumably be the har-
monic relations that soothe the child as they are rocked to sleep. That
would link harmony with a certain restfulness in the human biorhythmic
processes. The mother might also speak to her child in soothing words
that either stem from or themselves become song.
5.
Musical instruments have a long history. The oldest, dated very impre-
cisely back to between 43,400 and 65,000 years ago, is the Dibje Bebe
flute made out of a horn supplied with four holes. Dating from about
2400 BCE, the Royal Cemetery at Ur yielded a cache of flutes, lyres,
sistrums, cymbals, and a predecessor to the bagpipe. Bronze and silver
trumpets, dating back to 1500 BCE, were found in Tutankhamun’s
140 R.E. Wood
grave. Strings, woodwind, percussion, and brass are the basic sets of
musical instruments.33
But perhaps the first instrument, linked to the dance, was the drum.
Since it was made out of non-permanent materials, the earliest samples
of it do not date as far back as other instruments. There are remaining
examples of slit drums made out of tree trunks. Skin-covered drums are
even more subject to decay.
Perhaps following the linguistic independence of bird song, someone
discovers the simple pipe able to generate sound sequences like the voice,
but without necessary reference. The pipe probably developed from the
horn or conch that originally produced a single sound and was used in
signaling. With the complexity introduced by the flute and the lyre, one
begins to play with the possibilities of combinations of sound to produce
units of musical “meaning” that we call melody—perhaps again stem-
ming from the cradle song. Then one might consider the combination
of vibrating strings tuned to fit the generation of the melodies sung or
played on the pipe. It is through the measurement of vibrating strings
that the Pythagoreans were able to discover the mathematical propor-
tions that lay at the basis of musical sound. Later, with the development
of techniques for molding metals, we have the emergence of brass instru-
ments. Thus an imaginary genesis of the basic types of instruments for
the production of musical sound: voice, percussion, woodwind, strings,
and brass.
6.
Music has had different loci in the history of its development, whether
in the field or in the dance-hall accompanying the dance, in the theater
accompanying ancient drama, in church as a mode of prayer, in the home
or in the chamber of the aristocrat, or in jam sessions when musicians
get together in any venue. It was in the late seventeenth century that
the concert hall became a preferred locus.34 Through modern means of
communication, it appeared on the radio and on records that gave way
to CDs and DVDs which are able to capture the visual as well as the
33 See Jeremy Montagu, Origins and Development of Musical Instruments (New York:
The Scarecrow Press, 2007).

34 Storr, MM, 23.
7 ON MUSIC 141
audile acts of performance. Through the i-Pod, as earlier through the

Walkman, as well as through radio in the car, a standard feature, music
can be a constant accompaniment, wherever one might be. After archi-
tecture, music is today the most pervasive art form.
The native habitat of music lies in communal songs and dances of
prayer, of work, of celebration, and of love. Where music “grew up”
was in church. Although the fugue and prelude broke away from being
“about something,” they nonetheless derived from “reverie pieces” used
in the church service.35 Bach’s fugues and his choral preludes to reli-
gious lyrics foreshadow the development of music independent of the
church music from which they derived.36 In Germany, the churches also
furnished the space for Abendmusik that was not necessarily religious in
character. Such were Buxtehude’s (seventeenth- and eighteenth-century)
organ recitals in Marienkirchen in Lübeck.
In the development of classical music, and even within the
ecclesiastical component of that music, composers regularly drew upon
folk tunes. In his Messiah, Handel included themes from drinking
songs.37 Twenty years ago, Anthony Storr noted that, since the 1950s,
“the gap between classical and popular music has widened into a can-
yon which is nearly unbridgeable.”38 However, it is encouraging that
over the past several years, pianist Bruce Adolphe on “Piano Puzzler”
has been regularly transforming a popular tune into a classical piece in
the compositional mode of a classical composer. It is also the case that
some composers, like Billy Joel, are able to move back and forth between
popular and classical.
Leonard Bernstein sees a progression in twentieth-century American
music where the development of musical comedy reached a point that
anticipated a distinctively American form of classical music, especially
heading toward grand opera.39 The first representative of the operatic
style was George Gerschwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess. Bernstein goes on to
35 Bernstein, JM, 38–45.

36 JM, 254.
37 JM, 41, 109, 249.
38 Anthony Storr, MM, ix. It takes a while when entering a new city to find a classical
music station, so rare is it and separate from the riot of popular music of all sorts that fills
the airways.
142 R.E. Wood
note that: “The more a show gets away from pure diversion, the more
it tries to engage the interest and emotion of the audience, the closer it
slides toward opera.”40 According to Bernstein, it then aims at enriching
and ennobling the members of the audience by inducing lofty emotions
in them.41 His own contributions include West Side Story as more popu-
lar in style and Candide as operatic.
7.
Musical history can be divided into different periods, including in
modern times the baroque, classical, Romantic, and the twentieth cen-
tury. These involve different styles of composition and performance. In
the Middle Ages, plainchant was the dominant mode in religious music,
while song accompanied by more simple instruments like the lute, flute,
and drum characterized secular music. In plainchant the music was
strictly subordinated to the word, following both Scripture (“In the
beginning was the Word”) and Plato for whom, as we noted, instrumen-
tal music without words was difficult to understand with regard to mean-
ing—in fact, he considered it nonsensical. So seriously was this taken that
the Roman Catholic Council of Trent (1554–1563) insisted on limiting
complexity so that the meaning of the word took center stage.42 There
was one exception in plainchant, and that was in the case of the Alleluia.
Itself an interjection, like our “Yahoo!”,43 its musical elaboration went
to extraordinary lengths compared to the unelaborated character which
was the rule for such chant. The elaboration of the Alleluia exhibited
the sheer ethos of joyous celebration. That sense comes into opera in the
aria where the words are often merely the occasion for the elaboration of
voice. In the Renaissance, polyphony came into its own, as in the unsur-
passed scores of Palestrina.
As we noted above, Hanslick pointed to an ongoing tension in opera
between text and music. The origin of the opera lay in the sixteenth
40 JM, 165.
41 JM, 165. This is not necessarily the case: how lofty are the emotions stimulated by The
Barber of Seville?
42 IAM, Introduction, 161–3.
43 Martin Buber maintained that the Hebrew “Yahweh” had it origin in just such an
exclamation. Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (New York: Harper, 1946), 50.
7 ON MUSIC 143
century with the Florentine Camerata who turned the performance of

Greek drama into the recitative or declamatory form that follows the
cadence and tone patterns of ordinary speech.44 It took some time for
those beginnings to morph into grand opera. Bernstein claims that
what makes opera grand is the magnification of human emotions: “way
beyond life-size so you can’t miss them.”45
As fundamental characters in the structure of music, in addition
to melody as horizontal, harmony in the modern sense as vertical, and
rhythm, there is also counterpoint and orchestration.46 Counterpoint
grew out of the round, which involves overlapping repetitions of the
same melodic line, as in “Row, row, row your boat.” Counterpoint
involves the simultaneity of differing melodic lines. Bach links the hori-
zontality of the lines with the verticality of harmony.47
In the late eighteenth century the new forms that emerged bore no
direct relation to extra-musical reality. Wagner later coined the term
“absolute music” for such a form, not because it was the best, but
because it was “absolved” or abstracted from its typical accompaniments
in the life-world.48 It abstracted from voice and its relation to the word
and from the relation of rhythm to the dance. It was a purely formal
construction, parallel to mathematics and chess.49 From the choral prel-
ude and the opera prelude grew independent forms: the fugue appeared
as the classic locus of counterpoint; the sonata stepped forth from the
cantata; and from the sonata came the symphony. It is in these forms that
orchestration functioned as the interrelation of complex melodic lines
played on a large variety of instruments.
The Italian word sonata contrasts with cantata: sounding versus sung
music, or instrumental versus vocal music. The sonata, with its three
movements, gave the equivalent of a plotline to instrumental music. Like
Hegelian dialectic, exposition presents tonal ideas, development operates
44 Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions (Philadelphia: Temple
45 Bernstein, JM, 279.
46 JM, 24.
47 JM, 254.
48 Art of the Future (1849), cited in Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, R. Lustig,
trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 21–2 (henceforth IAM).

49 IAM, 262.
144 R.E. Wood
in terms of contrasting ideas, and recapitulation brings the two to

resolution. A sonata might also present an introduction as a prologue and
a coda as a kind of epilogue.
The symphony eventually developed as the most complex of musical
forms. In classical form, it has four movements. The sonata form is
assimilated into its first movement, which is fast in tempo, present-
ing the theme, the contrast to the theme in the exposition, its develop-
ment, and its recapitulation. The second movement is slow, followed by
a light third movement (such as a minuet—originally an accompaniment
to a dance—or a scherzo, a joke, and thus something playful). The sym-
phony concludes with a fast movement that often recapitulates the major
themes.
This highly complex form developed with a vast variety of
instruments. In the symphony orchestra there is the challenge of coor-
dinating strings (violin, viola, cello, bass, and harp), percussion (drums,
timpani, cymbals, and various sounding devices), brass (trumpet, French
horn, trombone, tuba), woodwind (clarinet, flute, bassoon, oboe, saxo-
phone), and the piano.
There is another form, the concerto. It had its origin in the baroque
concerto grosso in which a group of solo instruments play together against
the background of the orchestral whole. It evolved into the modern con-
certo which features a solo instrument playing against an orchestral back-
ground and partner.
But, as Bernstein notes, “of all the different instruments in this vast,
heterogeneous collection called an orchestra, there is none that can com-
pete in any way with the sublime expressivity of the human voice. It is the
greatest instrument there is.”50 The opera is built around the voice. Even
the words are subordinated to the voice in the aria. In opera the libretto
is a poetic skeleton that the music embellishes emotionally.51 One of the
features of opera is that, while one could not listen to four voices speak-
ing simultaneously, one can listen to four voices singing simultaneously.
One can have several melodic lines expressing opposite emotions at the
same time.52
50 Bernstein,JM, 283.
51 JM, 290, 294, 314.
52 JM, 304.
7 ON MUSIC 145
The complexity of modern pieces involves different instruments

moving at different levels and in different directions, but held together
in the unity of a whole. As in a play or a novel, each part has to fit into
the overall character of the piece, like an organism, as Aristotle put it.53
This requires in the composer a feeling for the complementarity, oppo-
sition, and resolution of different melodic lines, different rhythmic and
harmonic progressions, and different instrumental timbres.
8.
Over time musical notation developed and did for music what writing
does for speech. Translating the temporality of speech into visual form
fixes the fleeting character of sound in the stability of spatial relations. As
the Romans said, “Verba fluunt, scripta manent.” (“Words flow, writings
endure.”) The written score, like the written word, increases indefinitely
the scope of the audience. Without modern sound projection devices,
the spoken word can reach only an extremely limited audience; it cannot
be retained as a whole by that audience. Once it is over, all that remains
are the fragments and impressions in the memories of the individuals
who comprise the audience. But even the speaker cannot ordinarily give
a verbatim repetition of his or her own speech. That is why oral tradi-
tion develops mnemonic devices, rhythms and rimes, in order to be able
to retain exactly certain significant speeches. The development of writing
fixes the past more exactly—though it cannot capture the tonal dynam-
ics of the original delivery. Similarly with musical notation: it can fix the
tonal relations exactly but not the dynamics (neither the volume nor the
tempo) of a given piece that are indicated by quite flexible common-
sense terms (conventionally in Italian) like forte, piano, or lento.
Musical notation is like mathematical notation. Prior to the invention
of the latter, humans were restricted to certain limited feats of calcula-
tion. With the fixation made possible by written symbols, one could see
at a glance the representation of complex relations and go back immedi-
ately to early phases of such developments.54 So with musical notation:
it enables extremely complex forms to emerge, forms like the sonata, the
53 Poetics 1451a, 8.
54 Edmund Husserl, On the Origin of Geometry, commentary by Jacques Derrida.
146 R.E. Wood
symphony, and the opera. And with these more complex forms comes
attention to orchestration.
The written score gives, as it were, a kind of recipe for performance.
The score indicates with exactitude the key, the high and low of the
tones, the synchronic tonal relations and the tonal successions. But, as
we have already observed, what it cannot fix exactly are the dynamic fea-
tures: the loud and soft, the fast and slow, which are indicated, not by
exact notation, but only in a relatively vague way through ordinary lan-
guage. Hence there emerges the distinction, in Ingarden’s terminology,
between the musical work and the musical performance.55 Not only can
we have good, bad, or indifferent performances; we can have different
interpretations of the dynamic qualities of a given piece in their overall
interrelation. The latter depends upon a sense of the overall dynamic
unity of a given piece, a peculiar sort of “feel” or “indwelling” in the
piece as a whole.
One might say that the ambiguity in the score can now be overcome
by recording the composer playing or directing the original performance.
But that does not overcome the distinction between the work and the
performance, for the composer himself may play or direct a given piece
differently at different times, discovering, perhaps spontaneously, dif-
ferent dynamic interrelations. The invention of the melograph in the
1950s made it possible to measure the length of time of each note and
of silences between notes, translating the measurements into a visual
graph. One can then place the graphic record of one performance next
to another to see how different each performance is in dynamics.56
There is a certain parallel between the musical score and the text of
a novel. Language being what it is, it necessarily leaves zones of visual
and audile indeterminacy consonant with the overall plot and charac-
ter development.57 Words are stand-ins for universal notions: red, tall,
round, loud, seductive, brash, and the like. As such, they leave a gap
between their own universality and the concrete individuality described,
a gap which leaves a space for imaginative performance by the reader.
And even in understanding a given character, there may be richer or
55 Ingarden, WM, 16.

56 Dahlhaus, IAM, “The Act of Performance,” Introduction, 224–50.
57 Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. G. Grabowicz, (Evanston: Northwestern

7 ON MUSIC 147
poorer interpretations, depending, among other things, upon one’s

understanding of the possibilities of different characters in real life and
the way the characters are explicitly delineated by the author. The text
is a recipe for the imaginative performance of the reader. Some readers
can “perform” better than others. Or think of the more explicit perfor-
mance of a literary text—say, a Shakespeare play. One begins to see more
clearly the difference between the sameness of the written word and the
differences of imaginative interpretation, spelling out in quite different
ways the characters, the diction, the setting, the pacing of the action,
the dress, and possible musical accompaniment. Consider, as an extreme
example, the punk rock version of Romeo and Juliet. So it is with musical
performance. The zones of indeterminacy left open by the text or even
by the virtualities of “the musical work” allow for an infinite number of
possible interpretations.
There is another aspect of the musical score. It could be played on
other instruments rather than the ones indicated by the composer: for
example, a piece written for a string quartet could be played by brass or
woodwinds. In order to accompany the vocal practice of an opera com-
pany, the score is also transcribed from full orchestra to piano. But one
could also compose it to stand as a piece in its own right, for example
in the music of the opera Carmen scored for the piano or in the recent
presentation of a West Side Story Suite, featuring a complex classical elab-
oration of the original tunes with Joshua Bell as central performer.58
9.
When musical pieces became more complex, there emerged the need
for a conductor. In an orchestral piece, the conductor is like a pianist,
only the instruments of his performance are not black and white keys,
but live instrumentalists. As the pianist must learn to indwell in the
whole to gain a sense of the appropriate dynamics of their interpreta-
tion, so also the conductor must have a sense of the whole piece and
weave together the differing instrumental accompaniments, adjusting
the dynamics of the piece and the volume of each of the instruments
as they indwell in the musical piece as a whole. They must have a sense
58 IAM, 216.
148 R.E. Wood
of proportion and relationship between the parts of the score and the
various instruments.59 A great conductor like Toscanini, no matter how
many times he conducted a given piece, would always study the score
carefully before each performance to keep the plurality of parts and
the overall character of the piece firmly in mind.60 In an opera, the
orchestra functions chiefly as background and the conductor has to
mediate between the singers who take the lead and the orchestra that
accompanies.
There have been two major schools of conducting: one exhibiting the
elegant style championed by Mendelssohn and the other displaying the
passionate style exhibited by Wagner. Bernstein notes that both are nec-
essary to musical interpretation: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the
clear and restrained form and the wilder and more unrestrained form.61
10.
However, we are focusing exclusively on the work as determined by the
score and have failed to consider what was the original form of music,
namely, improvisation. Folk music is essentially improvisation, displaying
variations on traditional melodies. The repetitive character of traditional
Irish music not only engrains the melody in the audience, it also solicits
spontaneous variations for the different instruments. Jazz carries on that
tradition: one musician begins with a given melody or comes up with a
new one, elaborates on it spontaneously, and then is answered by other
instruments in sequence.62 Dixieland involves the simultaneous improvi-
sation of several different instruments.
Mozart fixed in notation his improvised variations in his twelve varia-
tions on the tune that children know as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”
or “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” One of the great delights of my late teen
years was to sit in the chapel of the Divine Word Seminary and listen
to Brother Roman on the great pipe organ improvising on a theme.
Though Mozart’s variations were fixed in a text, his original was not.
Texts or recordings stem out of original creativity. So we can have, for

60 JM, 160.
62 JM, 109–31.
7 ON MUSIC 149
the most part, musicians who are only reproducers, with various levels of
talent, of written scores, and musicians who, as performers, are creative
musicians in a significantly wider sense of the term than creative inter-
preters of fixed scores. Some scores for solo instruments even build in
opportunities for ad libitum variations—though only by way of excep-
tion. Bach’s figured bass left room for improvised variations in the lower
accompanying registers.63
11.
Let us turn now to the question of musical meaning. Leonard Bernstein
presents four levels: One is narrative-literary meaning that follows a
dramatic text, for example Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Richard
Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The second is atmospheric-pic-
torial meaning linked to a visual scene. Debussy’s La Mer, for example,
represents the sea under different conditions and is meant to stimulate a
set of mental pictures of the sea. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition
presents the tonality of a series of different pictures, concluding with
“The Great Gates of Kiev” and linked together by an ambulatory theme.
One wonders whether a person who didn’t know the titles would auto-
matically associate the music with the images involved.
Eduard Hanslick pointed out that the same music could be used to
accompany widely differing texts. And in fact, Handel and Bach drew
much of their religious music from secular tunes.64 We have noted
Mozart’s tune used for two very different nursery rhymes. But Hanslick
would have to admit that some forms of music would poorly fit certain
texts, like the St. Matthew Passion narrative accompanied by Lawrence
Welk’s champagne music (my example, not his).
The third form of musical meaning identified by Bernstein is affective-
reactive meaning linked to the dispositions evoked in the hearer. Some
works indicate such meaning by the title. Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique”
symphony comes to mind, or Beethoven’s Sonata in E flat major, opus
81, which has the title “Les audieux, l’absence, le retour.”65
63 IAM, 230–4.
64 Hanslick, MB, 16–9.
65 Hanslick, MB, 38 note.
150 R.E. Wood
As a mixture of pictorial and affective forms, Beethoven’s Piano

Sonata, opus 27, no. 2 developed as a pure musical form and subse-
quently attracted a referential title to itself. In a review, poet Ludwig
Rellstab called it the “Moonlight Sonata,” a title by which it has been
recognized ever since.66 It suggested to him the kind of disposition
evoked by the shining of the moon on a clear night.
Bernstein’s fourth form, purely musical meaning, would have no
direct relation to any of the other forms. We think immediately of one
of Bach’s fugues. For Bernstein, only this last form is worthy of musi-
cal analysis.67 This seems to contradict his claim that music is heightened
speech. But the latter claim refers to the origin of music, while the for-
mer refers to music that has come to stand on its own.
Peter Kivy describes a fifth form of musical meaning where the music
represents abstract concepts, as in Bach’s “tone painting.” Ten repeti-
tions represent the Ten Commandments; one represents following Christ
by doubling, one theme following another; melodic lines descending and
ascending represent Christ descending from heaven and re-ascending;
the elimination of all accompanying instrumentation represents the rich
being sent away empty.68 That mode of representation has had few imi-
tators, I would suspect because it is so external to the themes involved.
Of course, in Bach’s case one can envision the music itself carrying those
symbolic meanings.
On a parallel with Kant’s mention of arabesque drawings, examples
of “free beauty,” one way of considering abstract music was as “sonic
wallpaper.” Here Kant shifted the focus to the purely formal properties
of an aesthetic object as “free beauty” and as the entrance ticket into
the aesthetic. Though he redeemed the plastic art forms from trivial-
ity by folding in real-world referents in “dependent beauty” and “the
ideal of beauty,” he followed Sulzer’s view of music as pleasant diver-
sion, placing it at the bottom of the hierarchy of art forms, shading off
from the beautiful to the merely agreeable that provided background for
dinner parties.69
66 Cited in Storr, MM, 80.

68 Kivy, IPM, 191.
69 Kant, Critique of Judgement, W. Pluhar trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). §53,
196ff.
7 ON MUSIC 151
But after Kant there occurred what Dahlhaus has called “a paradigm
shift” in musical aesthetics.70 E.T.A. Hoffmann’s discussion of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was the charter of a new way of seeing
the purely instrumental, rescuing it from the charge of triviality and
placing it at the very highest level of aesthetic achievement, something
Schopenhauer would canonize in his philosophy. More recently Gabriel
Marcel—an existentialist philosopher and dramatist who was also a music
critic and composer—made a similar claim.71
For Hoffmann, pagan religious thought was expressed in sculpture,
and Christian religious thought in music, where music, freed from all ref-
erence to ordinary features of experience, exhibits the infinite yearning
of the human soul.72 In between the view of music as merely decorative
and the view of it as the highest penetration into the metaphysical, Hegel
considered music the expression of pure, abstract interiority, standing
above the exteriority of architecture, sculpture, and painting, but infe-
rior to the highest aesthetic form in poetry into which music was taken
up and given rational articulation.73 For Hegel, the word had the last
word—though not quite.
12.
Music might be thought of as a deliberate attempt to produce different
emotional states by its dynamic possibilities. Hegel suggested the origin
of music lies, not in its connection with language, but in the natural
cry of feeling: “the scream of horror, the sobbing of grief, the trium-
phal shout and thrills of exultant pleasure and joyfulness.” Further, “the
chief task of music consists in making resound…the manner in which the
inmost self is moved to the depths of its personality and conscious soul.”
However, the principal thing in music is “not the progress of the specific
feeling…but the inner life which dominates it, which develops and enjoys
its own self alike in grief and joy.” Such domination occurs through sub-
mission to the discipline of musical form developed through the work
70 Dahlhaus,
IAM, 7.
71 Musicand Philosophy, S. Maddux and R. Wood, trans., Introduction by Robert E.
Wood, (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005) (henceforth MP).
72 IAM, 22–5.
73 Hegel, LFA II, 950–60.
152 R.E. Wood
of musical imagination. There is thus “a battle between freedom and

necessity, a battle between imagination’s freedom to give itself up to its
soaring and the necessity of those harmonic relations which imagination
needs for its expression and in which its own significance lies.”74
In Hegel’s view, the word becomes “the servant of the music.”
Indeed, “if music is to be purely musical, then it must spurn this ele-
ment which is not its own and, now that it has won complete freedom,
it must be completely released from the determinate sphere of words.”
“Absolute music” becomes the pure form of music.75
Since the early Greeks, music has been associated with emotion. There
were seven scales, each associated with a different emotion. The Dorian
mode was one of vigor; the Lydian mode one of relaxation.76 Aristotle
said that music is the most imitative of the arts because, while a painted
portrait might give us a sign of the inner dispositions or ethos of the sub-
ject, music gives us the dispositions themselves.77 Parallel to what Henry
Moore observed regarding abstract sculpture and Aristotle regarding
music itself, the patterns of absolute music still have reverberations in
the emotional life of the listeners (and performers are also listeners)—
reverberations like those in extra-musical situations.78
We must distinguish between a performance producing a musical form,
exhibiting an emotion, and evoking an emotion. Correspondingly, on the
part of the hearer, we would have the experience of formal recognition, of
emotional recognition, and, as it were, of emotional infection. One could
recognize the musical form exhibited by Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique.”
One could see, clued into such recognition by the title but presented in
the music itself even without that title, that the music has a brooding sad-
ness about it—although, as I said earlier, there are contrasting passages of
affirmative vigor. Further, one could be, as one aesthetics professor regu-
larly was, plunged into a state of depression by the piece, such that he
would have to play something vigorous or joyous to change the character
of his own negative emotional tuning. But the latter need not occur.
74 LFA, II, 938, 891, 940, 932.

75 LFA II, 934, 952.
76 Dahlhaus, IAM, 14–5. Plato discusses the modes in terms of their psychic effect in
Republic III, 398Cff.

77 Politics, VIII, 5, 1340a, 1ff.
78 IAM, 262.
7 ON MUSIC 153
The distinction between emotional recognition and emotional

infection refines Aristotle’s claim that music produces ethos like that in
real life. Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess” does not give us the same
ethos as what we would experience if the dead princess were our own
daughter. Like the pity and fear aroused by tragic performance, the emo-
tions that might be brought about by a musical piece are experienced at
a distance provided by the implicit knowledge that the objects involved
are fictitious. But then one would have to say that there is a difference
between emotional recognition, being moved emotionally by the music,
and being carried away by the emotion. Listeners might take the latter
to be the height of musical experience, so that listening to music often
becomes the occasion for reverie induced by the musical mood. But in
that case one’s attention is deflected away from the music to one’s own
private associations.79 Nonetheless, Hanslick claims that joy and sorrow
and otherworldly stirrings can be awakened in us by music.80
Somewhere Mozart claimed that emotion gets in the way of music. It
does so in the case of the aesthetics professor just cited. It certainly does
in the case of composition. A composer must be in control, coolly aware
of the technical requirements of his craft; Poe made a similar observation
regarding his poetry.81 The same is true of the performer. A director who
disagreed might think that a ballerina would better express the sense of
loss associated with the death of the lover in the ballet if, just before her
performance, she was informed of the death of her own lover. She would
most likely be too emotionally distracted to attend to her performance.
Edward Bullough said: “Just as an artist, if he is to move his audience,
must never be moved himself—lest he lose, at that moment, his mastery
over the material—so the auditor who wants to get the full operative
effect must never regard it as real, if his artistic appreciation is not to be
degraded to mere human sympathy.”82 Hanslick, though stoutly main-
taining the primacy of musical form over emotion, went on to say that
the performer is able to “breathe into his performance the wild storms,
79 MB, 58.
80 MB, 7.
81 Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Selected Poetry and Prose of
Edgar Allen Poe, T. Mabbott ed. (New York: Modern Library 1951).
82 Bullough, “‘Psychic Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle” cited in
Higgins, 107–8.
154 R.E. Wood
the passionate fervor, the serene power and joy of his inwardness.”83 At
the same time he held that, “without spiritual ardour, nothing great or
beautiful has ever been accomplished in this life. In the composer, as in
every poet, feeling will be found to be highly developed, only it is not
the creative factor in the composer.”84 As Hegel also noted, feeling must
be cast in the forms of technical mastery of the medium.
Bernstein and Hanslick agree on the emotive power of music.
For Hanslick, “the other arts persuade, but music invades us.”85 For
Bernstein, this reaches its greatest power in grand opera where “primary
emotions are not merely presented to us, they are hurled at us.”86 Carroll
Pratt suggests that music represents or symbolizes the ebb and flow of
emotional life by being “isomorphic” with it.87
Along these lines, Hanslick speaks of musical dynamics, the motion
of feeling, abstracted from feeling, which parallels emotional life.
“Music can rush, surge, storm, but it cannot love and be angry.”88
Musical dynamics are exhibited in pitch (high and low notes), inten-
sity (increasing and diminishing), tempo (acceleration and deceleration)
and the rhythm of tones that, like colors, possess symbolic meanings.
So we could call music “charming, soft, impetuous, powerful, deli-
cate, sprightly.”89 Particular musical pieces exhibit different parallels:
Beethoven’s symphonies exhibit “turbulence, striving, unappeasable
longing, vigorous defiance.”90
From such passages we might think that the purpose of music is to
arouse feelings. However, Hanslick led the movement that focused atten-
tion upon the formal characteristics of music as the essential and upon
emotional reverberations as secondary.91 For Hanslick, musical form is
like architecture and dance: “beautiful relations without content.”92

84 MB, 46.
85 MB, 50.
86 JM, 289.
87 The Meaning of Music, 1931, cited in IAM, 28.
89 MB, 10–12, 20.
90 MB, 39.
91 MB, 6–7.
92 MB, 78.
7 ON MUSIC 155
Nobody would seriously consider the point of architecture as an art form

is to induce feeling. Also in dance, “the enhancement of the dramatic
principle … produces a corresponding violation of its plastic and rhyth-
mic beauty.” The more the dramatic enters dance, the more it tends
towards pantomime.93 He even says that “the more powerfully an effect
from a work of art overwhelms us physically (and hence is pathological),
the more negligible is its aesthetical component.”94
In a quite different approach to music, Susanne Langer claimed that,
just as prose on the one hand and mathematics on the other are symbolic
forms that express our understanding of objective things, so the different
arts develop symbolic forms to express our understanding of the inner
life of feeling.95 And in this regard, we have already noted several times
Walter Pater’s remark that all art aspires to the condition of music.96 I
would take that to mean that all art, through the creation of aesthetic
form, whether or not deliberately directed to a referent by association
with a verbal form, expresses an understanding of the corresponding life
of feeling. Hegel makes a similar, Nietzschean-sounding claim: “Even in
suffering, the sweet tone of lament must sound through the griefs and
alleviate them, so that it seems to us worthwhile so to suffer as to under-
stand this lament. This is the sweet melody, the song in all art.”97
A major question is obviously what “understand” means here. It
could mean that as a psychiatrist I, through a set of symptoms, under-
stand the patient to instantiate a peculiar pathological state. The psy-
chiatrist would also understand the meaning of what the patient says
when they discuss the bill. But these are two modes of what I would call
“objective” understanding. That is not what is involved in Langer’s or
Hegel’s use of the term in this connection. It is rather what is involved
in empathetic identification when one can say to another, “I understand
your pain.” One might call this, following Kierkegaard, “subjective”
understanding which requires “the whole person” rather than a detached
93 MB, 23.
94 MB, 57.
95 Music expresses the composer’s knowledge of feeling, not his feelings. Langer,
Philosophy in a New Key (New York: New American Library, 1959), 188.
96 Walter Pater, The Renaissance. Selected Writings of Walter Pater. Harold Bloom, ed.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 55–7.

97 LFA, vol. I, 159.
156 R.E. Wood
intellect. The whole person is centered upon the heart which sets up
magnetic zones of attraction, repulsion, and neutrality. Likewise, one
begins to understand a culture when one is immersed in its life-world
in such a way that it becomes “dear to my heart.” Here one realizes or
makes real what one otherwise only intellectually recognizes. In Martin
Buber’s way of putting it, in such understanding one moves from object
to presence.98
13.
There is a final metaphysical consideration. Schopenhauer moved
the focus of music to the emotions and viewed the musical object as
expressive of the final metaphysical depth of things, beyond all concep-
tual understanding. As animal structure expresses inner desire (mouth
expresses hunger, genitals sexual desire), the human face expresses the
state of mind of a person, and language their understanding of things.
And as each individual expresses the eternal “Platonic idea” of its species
(grasped and expressed in its generality by science, and in its ideality by
the plastic arts), so the whole exterior–interior–eternal relation expresses
the underlying and encompassing Will, beyond intellectual apprehension,
which is the final-depth dimension of the universe best expressed artisti-
cally in music. In the experience of a great symphonic performance, he
says, it is as if the inner secret of the cosmos has been revealed, but not in
any way that can be articulated adequately in verbal, conceptual form.99
Schopenhauer notes that “music does not express this or that particular
and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety,
merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, mer-
riment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their
essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives
for them.”100 Again, “Accordingly, we could just as well call the world
embodied music as embodied will; this is the reason why music makes
every picture, indeed every scene from real life and from the world, at
98 Iand Thou, W. Kaufmann trans. (New York: Scribners, 1970), 166–7.

99 The World as Will and Representation. E. Payne trans. Two volumes. (New York:
Dover, 1966) (Henceforth WWR). See my chapter on Schopenhauer and the role of
aesthetics in the overall conceptual themes of the major thinkers cited here, in Placing
Aesthetics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).
100 WWR I, Sect. 52; 261.
7 ON MUSIC 157
once appear in enhanced significance, and this is, of course, all the
greater, the more analogous its melody is to the inner spirit of the given
phenomenon.”101 This could be taken, before the fact, as a comment on
musical accompaniment in film.
In the line of Schopenhauer, Gabriel Marcel said that music gives
expression to a sense of cohesion and plenitude, articulating our par-
ticipation in the encompassing mystery of being.102 He said that “it is
music, and music almost exclusively, which has been for me an unshak-
able testimony of a deeper reality in which it seemed to me that eve-
rything fragmentary and unfulfilled on the sensory level would find
fulfillment.”103 “[I]t is music and music alone that has caused me to dis-
cover the saving light. It is music that has opened the road to Truth for
me, towards which I have not ceased striving, this Truth beyond all the
partial truths that science demonstrates and expounds, the Truth that
illumines the work of the greatest composers like Bach or Mozart.”104
Along the same lines, Max Picard, in his wonderful little book called
The World of Silence, speaks of the development of a spirit of silence, an
inner openness, a listening, that one can learn to carry within oneself as a
kind of cushioning distance that allows things to make their claim upon
the self. Such silence involves a sense of encompassing wholeness as the
mystery of Being that makes one attentive to the reverberations with the
Whole that everything produces. It is this, perhaps, to which Boethius
referred when he spoke of cosmic music, distinguishing it from vocal and
instrumental music.105 Picard cites Plutarch who said that men created
voice, but the gods created silence. Great sculpture is carved out of mar-
ble and silence; great cathedrals enclose silence; great music arises out of
silence and sets its hearers back into its silent origin.106 Such solitude and
such silence, far from separating us from others, are rather the bases for
101 WWR I, Sect. 52; 262–63.

102 Gabriel Marcel, MP, 46.
103 Marcel, EBHD, 21.
104 MP, 14.
105 Boethius, De institutione musica, I, 2, 187: 18–188: 26; from De institutione arith-
metica libri duo, De institutione musica libri quinque (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867).
106 Max Picard, The World of Silence (Chicago: Regnery, 1958). Recently at a classical
piano performance, I noticed the motionlessness and silence of the audience. At the inter-
mission, I called the attention to that of a student who sat next to me, contrasting the
response of the audience at a rock concert. She, apparently never having been exposed to a
158 R.E. Wood
deeper communion with them. Silence and speech as well as solitude and
community are not exclusive opposites so much as mutual requirements
of authentic human existence. Speech which does not carry with it a
sense of silence tends towards chatter; community which is not coun-
terbalanced by a love of solitude, and solitude which is not significantly
more than a running away from other people, are both flights from real-
ity. It would not seem amiss to read Marcel’s view of music in a similar
vein. A silence of this sort is a listening for some announcement of the
encompassing, the mystery that surrounds everyday focal awareness, the
mystery of our belonging explicitly to the Totality.107
One might object that such a sense is a matter of subjective
projection. I would respond that it certainly does depend upon what the
hearer allows to come into play in listening, and that certainly depends
upon the more or less permanent dispositions of the hearer. But there
is an invariant structure of humanness grounding all foreground phe-
nomena. As we have noted throughout, that structure is bipolar (in a
non-dysfunctional sense): the obvious organism with its ever-present
field of sensory presentations evoking desirous reverberations and the
non-obvious “reference to Being” as the encompassing whole. The latter
reference is by nature empty and arises in the form of a question, namely,
how do we fit into the whole scheme of things, and the implied ques-
tion, what is the whole scheme? This reference to the Whole grounds
all distinctively human experiences. It is explicitly attended to in religion
and in speculative philosophy. As the otherwise decidedly non-mysti-
cal atheist John Dewey noted, all human experience takes place within
a sense of the encompassing whole which appears as a kind of felt aura
within which (as Dewey changes the metaphor) all aspects of experience
swim. Art accentuates that background and elicits the sense of belong-
ing to the whole that is the universe.108 Schopenhauer, Picard, Marcel,
and Dewey underscore the ability of music to bring this background
into the foreground of attention and give it a decisive non-conceptual
Footnote 106 (continued)

rock concert herself, remarked that such a response was disrespectful of the performer, not
realizing that this was precisely what the performer expected.
107 In the movie The Deer Hunter, a drunken celebration is brought to a halt by the
bartender’s playing a classical piece on the piano. The celebrants stand by in silent awe.
108 AE, 192.
7 ON MUSIC 159
Fig. 7.1 Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead
articulation. Music is able to develop in us a sense of indwelling in the

encompassing whole.
14.
Let us conclude with a musical work which links us back to a painting.
Let us consider Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead together with Sergei
Rachmaninov’s musical meditation on it (Fig. 7.1).
First the painting. The colors are appropriately somber. The island
rises up out of the sea and stands out against a dark sky. It is composed
of masses of rock that press downwards as, in a small valley between
them, cypress trees press upwards, playing live counterpoint to the pon-
derous dead masses of rock. As represented abstractly in Mondrian’s late
work, life strives upwards, pushing up through the earth whose weight
thrusts downwards. Carved out of the rock are buildings and gleaming
white tombs. Like the cypresses, a single figure shrouded in white—pre-
sumably the priest who will conduct the interment ceremony—stands
160 R.E. Wood
upright in a boat, while an oarsman slowly propels the long, flat funeral
barge through the water. A white coffin sits across the axis of the boat to
form with it a kind of cross. The gleaming white of the tombs carved out
of the rock establish a visual cradle for the white of the standing figure
and the coffin. Light and dark, upwards and downwards, and intersect-
ing axes in the horizontal plane are the formal elements that translate
the struggle between life and death which frames human existence. We
humans alone can reflect upon these features and secure a deeper sense
of our being towards death and consequently of our being as a whole,
bound back to our common humanity.
Rachmaninov’s musical meditation re-creates the mood of the
painting. There is an underlying rhythmic accompaniment, beginning
almost imperceptibly and gradually increasing in volume. It seems to
mirror the regular lapping of the waves on the water which surrounds
the island, but also symbolizes the ongoing, insistent course of time
moving us to our inevitable end. And from that rhythmic background
a single horn sounds a variation on the haunting Dies Irae theme from
the liturgy for the dead, from the sequence entitled “Day of Wrath.”
The music plays out a kind of struggle, with the insistent underlying
rhythm propelling us ever onward, moving faster and louder as the
piece progresses. At one point the music accentuates six insistent steps
downward, two slow, four fast, as the sound of doom. Then there
follows the one truly lyrical passage, serene, soaring slowly upward. One
is reminded of Hegel’s Nietzschesque remark that we cited previously:
“Even in suffering, the sweet tone of lament must sound through the
griefs and alleviate them, so that it seems to us worthwhile so to suffer
as to understand this lament. This is the sweet melody, the song in all
art.”109 As the piece began with a faint then progressively louder rhythm
of the waves, so it closes with the ongoing rhythm of the waves slowly
fading.
As in a movie the soundtrack enhances the mode of presence for the
audience, so Rachmaninov’s piece plays out the emotional responses
to the inevitability of death. Both pieces together, Böcklin’s and
Rachmaninov’s, serve to make us aware of each of our lives as a whole
and raise the question of ultimate significance.
109 LFA, vol. I, 159.

7 ON MUSIC 161
Bibliography
Aristotle. 1932. Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———. 1995.Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Barth, Karl. 1986. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Benedict XVI, Pope. 2008. “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of
Beauty.” The Essential Pope Benedict, J. Thornton and S. Varenne eds. New
York: Harper Collins.
Bernstein, Leonard. 1973. The Unanswered Question. Harvard Lectures DVD.
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De institutione musica libri quinque. Teubner: Leipzig.
Buber, Martin. 1946. Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant. New York:
Harper.
Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music. R. Lustig, trans. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Eduard Hanslick, The Musically Beautiful. 1986. G. Payzant, trans. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1986.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1998. Conversations with Eckermann. New York:
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———. 2008. On the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1893–
1917). J. Brough trans. New York: Springer.
Ingarden, Roman. 1973. The Literary Work of Art. trans. G. Grabowicz.
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———. 1986. The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity. Berkeley:
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———. 1977. Feeling and Form. New York: Pearson.
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———. 2005. Music and Philosophy. S. Maddux and R. Wood, trans.

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(Spring), 106–15.
CHAPTER 8
On Literature
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol

and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory
and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth?
William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
[A] work of art is never finished until it becomes a collective representation

and…contains, by all that generations of readers has put into it, infinitely
more than at the moment of its conception.1
Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?
Literature is a late emergent in the history of humankind, since writing

in the literal sense goes back only about 5000 years, a small fraction of
the 1.75 million years or so that humans have inhabited this earth.2 As
speech precedes writing, so oral tradition precedes literature. We will
approach literature from an analysis of its oral antecedent. And because
both are expressions of fixation in language, we will include a description
of the major components of language itself.
1 Sartre, What Is Literature?, B. Frechtman, trans. (New York: Washington Square Press,
1966), 144. (Henceforth WL.)

2 I want to thanks several colleagues in Literature whose comments helped develop this
chapter: Brett Bourbon, Scott Crider, Wendy Faris, Eileen Gregory, Gregory Roper and
Bernadette Waterman-Ward.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_8
164 R.E. Wood
1.
Oral tradition is based upon a judgment of importance, of what deserves
to be rescued from the flux of events and the similar flux of everyday
speech. Speech itself depends upon a certain stilling of the flux by the
repeatability of words and sentences that stand in for the repeatability
of meanings like friend and foe, edible and inedible, permitted and
forbidden, the differentiation of animal and plant species based upon
their reproductive repetition, and the differentiation of kinship relations
among people. In the events that occur through the conjunction of
needs and the appearance in the environment of things and persons
that satisfy or thwart those needs, events of significance occur that bear
repetition. There emerges the re-telling of the excitement of the hunt
or the battle with the enemy or the voyage at sea or the trek through
the wilderness or the devastation of the great fire, flood, or earthquake.
Such events stand apart from the everyday routines that ground us in
our regular reactions to the environment and to each other according
to the patterns of understanding and reaction typical of the group. The
events have their peculiar inception, development, and completion and
are thus in principle excisable from the flow of routines in relation to
which they stand out. The story presents the heroes and the great events
in the history of a people to which the audience learns to look back in
appreciation. The more important the event, the more it calls for the
talents of the storyteller who can make it live on vividly in the memory
of his audience.
The consummate storyteller learns to abstract the items of import
from the complexity of accompanying items. Not every tree or blade
of grass or cloud in the environment of the actual event, and not every
movement, drop of sweat, spot of dirt or word uttered by the characters
enters into the re-telling. Furthermore, the storyteller learns to set
the outstanding events off against the world of everyday routines. To
highlight the events, he develops extraordinary narrative devices like the
use of metaphor or the employment of foreign or particularly elevated
terms. He learns to pace his narrative, to develop verbal dynamics—
louder and softer, faster and slower—to rise to the climax and round
off the re-telling as an organic whole. To aid his memory, he develops
meters and rhyme schemes, but in so doing he also attends to the overall
“music” of the narrative. He may learn to further enhance the musical
dimension by accompanying the verbal flow with the lyre. In doing all
8 ON LITERATURE 165
this, he brings his audience “into” the narrated events, as if they were
emotionally “there.” He conjures up a “real presence.”
We should not neglect to mention the emergence of the “tall tale,” a
fictional exaggeration, or just “spinning a yarn” to entertain one’s hear-
ers. In addition to the seriousness of recounting significant episodes in
the life of a community, there is also storytelling as entertainment or how
we are “held between” the working day and more serious aspects of life.
2.
The vehicle of storytelling is speech. Speech itself is a temporal flow.
One who does not understand a given language hears only the ongoing
succession of strange sounds flowing from the mouths of the speakers.
Sentences are generated in such a way that the sound of the beginning
of each has passed away before the sound of its end is produced. And
each sentence flows into the next. Indeed, we do not usually think in
terms of sentences but in terms of the objects about which we speak in
continuous discourse. By reason of their reference to differing things and
aspects, sentences are analytically isolatable from the flow of discourse.
We can carry the analysis further when we isolate the words that
compose the sentences: the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles,
prepositions, conjunctions. The nouns and verbs are basic: together they
form sentences. Some words are subjectable to inflections of various
sorts, such as declensions of gender, number, and case with nouns and
adjectives; with verbs there are conjugations relating to time (variations
on past, present, and future) and the intent of the speaker (declarative,
interrogative, optative, and imperative); there is also the abstract
infinitive.
Word meanings are nodes in a network of related meanings. We
define a given term by several other terms that, in turn, are defined by
still further terms in a network of increasing complexity. Each word
involves a hierarchy of greater and greater generic extension until we
reach the top in the overarching categories that Aristotle identified as
Substance (Thing—ousia) and Attributes (dependent features carried by
the Thing—symbebekota, or what is co-yoked with the Thing).3 As Sartre
3 Categories, J. Ackrill trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle, J. Barnes ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 2a14–4b19.

166 R.E. Wood
noted, “each sentence contains language in its entirety and refers back
to the whole universe.”4 It was perhaps for this reason that Levi-Strauss
contended, following von Humboldt, that language has to emerge as a
whole.
If we zero in on speech, we see that there are five basic components
to the situation of speaking: (1) an I (speaker) (2) saying (employing
the phonemic system) (3) something (a message, employing the meaning
system) (4) about something (referent) (5) to someone (hearer). We
should add: (6) in a concrete situation. Speaking is ultimately grounded
in an “I” addressing a “You” in a situation. Third-person references have
their ground in first-and second-person relations. Even the apparent
impersonality of a scientific treatise is anchored in the I who is the
writer and each You who is the eventual individual reader.5 Structuralist
linguistic analyses attempt to do away with the subject, but there has to
be the writer and the reader of such analyses.6
Speech has a double grounding: in the linguistic system comprising
the interrelation of phonemes and meanings passed on from time
immemorial, and in the concrete meeting of I and You in the Here-and-
Now.7 It is through that ultimate anchorage of language in speech and
of speech in the concrete interpersonal relation that language itself is
capable of transformation over time, though at any given time it typically
stands fixed in its universality as opposed to the individual instances of
its concrete occurrences. Individual communications might add to the
transformation of the language, but that happens with glacial slowness,
somewhat accelerated by works of geniuses like Dante or Shakespeare or
4 Sartre, WL, 15. He similarly says that “each painting, each book is a recovery of the
totality of Being.” WL, 37.

5 These basic features of speech are systematically disregarded in the scientific community
and its popularizers who think that causal relations in the brain are identical with meaning
relations in the field of awareness and that first- and second-person accounts can be
reduced to third-person accounts. They forget that they are free to choose to pursue the
truth in concert with others. See John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1992), 117.
6 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996
(henceforth LT).
7 See Merleau-Ponty and the distinction between langue and parole. Signs, R. McCleary
trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 194), 84–97.

8 ON LITERATURE 167
Goethe or a translator like Luther or in works developed in the contact

zones between cultures.8
Because I and You each have the bipolar structure to which we have
returned again and again in our exposition, we are always referred
emptily to the Whole through the notion of Being in relation to
sensorily manifest individuals in our bodily environment. The function
of this notion grounds the all-encompassing character of the linguistic
system. This also grounds our apprehension of the eidetic and our ability
to transform the sound possibilities of our own oral cavities by virtue
of a constructed eidetic phonemic system in order to refer through the
eidetic meaning to whatever we are speaking about. Linguistic sounds
arise by historical selection out of the sound-generating capacities of
the human organism that situates human awareness in the environment.
Such sounds are themselves the incarnation of distinctively human
awareness. We come to ourselves as thinkers as we incarnate our thought
in speech or writing, and doing so bears witness to the essentially public
character of awareness.9 Language situates us from the beginning outside
the privacy of awareness in a space of public meaning mediated sensorily.
Language bears witness simultaneously to the essential sociality and the
essential embodiment of human awareness.
As we said, speech flows constantly, disappearing into the past as
it is generated. If it persists at all, the spoken sentence, or usually the
meaning referred to by the sentence, persists in memory until it is
forgotten. Of course, much depends upon the quality of one’s memory.
It is memory—good or poor—that allows one to return to the same
singular historical event long after it has flowed down the stream of
time. It is storytelling that sustains through oral tradition the memorable
events of the past.
3.
With that as background, let us turn to a consideration proximate to our
real interest here, namely, literature; let us turn to writing.
Speech is embedded in sound that flows though time; writing embeds
the sound patterns in visual patterns that endure in spatial immediacy.
8 Wendy Faris called my attention to the function of contact zones.

9 See Chapter I.
168 R.E. Wood
Alphabetical writing, one of the first great feats of abstraction discovered

by genius, emerged together with the analysis of speech into ultimate
phonological units. When we carry out a phonological analysis, we find
that the unit proximate to words is the syllable, but the ultimate units
are vowels and consonants. The vowels are basic; the consonants “sound
with” (sonare con) the vowels by clipping them in various ways. Vowels
and consonants are based upon the sound possibilities of the human
oral cavity on the one hand and, on the other, an idealized selection
of certain ranges of sound that carry absolute identities. In the case
of “a,” for example, there are many concrete individual modulations
for individuals or groups when sounding out the same identical “a”
function. That involves the indefinite repeatability of the same sound
units at different times and places by voices that have different timbres,
dynamics, and accents. To determine how a given sound counts as “a”
one has to hear it in relation to the way in which the other vowels are
sounded by that individual or in that group. In other words, the vowels
and consonants form part of an eidetic system of humanly selected
ideal units in definite phonemic relations that transcend the individual
differences of their being sounded out in individual cases. The ideal units
are always embedded in but are not identical with their concrete audile
existence. One could say the same about their written equivalents: a/A,
a/A, and A/a are all empirically different instances of the same letter.
Spoken or written, they are subservient to communicating identical
meanings abstracted from and applied to things originally given in the
environment. Both the meanings and the words exhibit the capacity of
the human being to grasp and construct the universal as such, bringing
the language user out of the space of privacy and into a public space of
meaning—indeed, of identical meanings in spite of empirical differences.
Of course, when we talk of meanings, there is the problem of multiple
meanings of a given word—both literal and metaphorical—the particular
variation of which has to be understood from the context of the
discourse. Meaning in context requires at least a sentence to determine
which of the possible meanings is intended.10
The phonological or graphic units in their togetherness as words are
“the other side,” as it were, of the meanings to which the particular
10 See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, J. Costello, trans.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977) (henceforth RM).

8 ON LITERATURE 169
words correspond. They are the body for which the meanings are
the soul—indeed, the relation of meaning to sonorousness is itself
the expression of the general relation of soul to body in the human
being.11 And just as the phonemic units exist only in relation to the sys-
tem where they are contrasted with other phonemic units, so also the
meanings incarnated in the sound system exist only in relation to the
other meanings that unpack them. For example, “human being” means
(at least in one way of unpacking it) “rational animal,” while “animal”’
means “sentient organism” and “organism” means “living body” and
“body” means “material substance.” Only in this network of meanings
do we understand what we could mean by a single meaning-unit. And
the meanings, in turn, are derived from their original reference to the
objects, initially given in the environment, about which we have come to
speak.
Writing is an exterior supplement to the native, interior memory
that is inclined over time to forget what was said. The Romans noted:
“Verba fluunt, scripta manent” (“Spoken words flow, written words
remain”)—a warning by the pragmatists to be careful what you commit
to writing, but also a significant observation about the relation of speech
to writing. However, though writing rescues memory from its tendency
to weaken over time, Plato warned that by establishing through writing
an external memory (hypomneme), one ran the danger of weakening
the extraordinary memory power (mneme) of the rhapsode. One
learns to rely upon the written word rather than upon one’s memory.
Since writing abstracts from the animation involved in speaking, it also
produces “the dead letter.” Further, in contrast to speech, through its
fixed alienation from the speaker, writing cannot respond to whoever
might address it with an objection or ask it for further clarification.12
Plato to a certain extent circumvents his own observations by writing in
such a way that the text functions proleptically, giving hints and pointing
in a direction. Asking the right questions through attending to the
object of the dialogue leads in that direction.
11 See Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, R. Harris trans. (Chicago:

Open Court, 1972). 64–7.
12 Phaedrus, 1997. A. Nehemas and P. Woodruff trans. Plato: Complete Works. J. Cooper
ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 357D ff.

170 R.E. Wood
Writing changes the scope of the audience. Speech is restricted to

the immediate situation of the interlocutors (or eavesdroppers), to the
space within which the voices can be heard and the time within which
the conversation occurs. But writing opens up to all those capable of
reading the language, wherever they might be spatially located and
whenever they might read the text—at least for the duration of the time
when the material medium supports the text. The same words can be
read again and again. But the flux will inevitably overtake the material
medium. However, the identical words can be written again and again by
copyists and later reproduced by mechanical means. Of course, just as in
oral tradition, reproduction depends upon the judgment by the copyists
of the import of what will be thus retained for posterity.
Today the living voice itself can be transcribed electronically—thus
significantly disambiguating by tonal dynamics what, as written, could
remain ambiguous, but also opening out to any hearer, literate or not.
Television might be rapidly replacing literacy. Given the content of most
of what is presented on TV, this is surely not an advance over reading!
Writing removes us from the face-to-face situation of oral
communication. It allows coordination between people living at a
significant distance from the immediate situation. It allows orders to
be relayed and thus control systems to operate at a distance. It founds
nation and empire, beyond village and tribe. Those who learn to
write are in a position to command, whereas the illiterate tend to be
subordinate. In earlier days illiterate kings depended upon literate
scribes.
For us—writer and readers in our respective Nows—this current
written communication depends upon the antecedent development of
the English language. As we said, language places each of us from the
start in a peculiar “space of meaning” together with others, but it also
closes off those who have not entered this space. Those who taught us
language brought each of us out of his or her bodily point of view as
a needy sensing being and into a common set of eidetic structures.13
Language holds in place the eidetic recognitions and creations of those
long dead. It is the system within which all the other cultural systems
13 This is all that Plato’s notorious “Forms” mean: linguistically articulated meaning as
universals as against the particulars that instantiate them. In his Parmenides, Plato has the
Eleatic Stranger say: “No forms, no language.” M. Gill and P. Ryan trans. Plato: Complete
Works. J. Cooper ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 135C.
8 ON LITERATURE 171
function, providing the basic access to the Whole for a tradition. Each of
us lives in it in such a way that we are brought out of our own privacies
and into a public space. It is within this space that we carry on all the
operations we have been examining. It is within this space that we are
able to develop the sciences that have inter-subjective validity. It is within
this space that this book has been written and is now being read.14
4.
What distinguishes literature from other written forms? One wouldn’t
consider a shopping list or an outline on a chalkboard to be literature;
they are simply piles of bones. Placing the shopping items in the order
in which one might find them in their respective aisles provides one of
the features of literature: it must have an order, a skeleton. But even in
a more structured and fleshed-out form, one wouldn’t typically consider
a business letter under the heading of literature. How about a scientific
paper? A philosophical treatise? What about a personal letter? Historical
writing could be considered literature. History is a written form of
storytelling, but controlled by methods of source retrieval and source
criticism.15 To consider the writing of history as literature we must
consider not only the narrative dimension but also the style.16
What is style? It involves a distinction between what we might call the
What and the How of presentation. Here we have a continuum where
the business letter and the scientific or philosophic treatise occupy one
end with their total absorption in the What or the objective content of
the work. At the other end is the poem that accentuates the How, that is,
the participative relation of the reader to the object. Style accentuates the
expressive value of words and expressive value brings the objects closer
to the audience. On the continuum, the poem passes over into its own
antecedent, the song, where it is not the written form but the sound
patterning that takes center stage. And song in turn passes over into the
14 See Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,”
Social Research, vol. 38, no. 3 (Autumn, 1971), 529–62.

15 Eagleton follows the Wittgensteinian line, claiming that there is no single essence to
literature but that it has a function, a role in a particular context, LT 8.

16 See Hayden White on history as narrative. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History,
Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007, R. Duran ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2010).
172 R.E. Wood
pure patterning of sound in purely instrumental (later called “absolute”)

music. The written form itself, as a visual object, is accentuated in
illuminated manuscripts and also in the works of those poets who shape
their sentences into the forms they depict, such as a bird in George
Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” Typefaces are more neutral. Their differences
have a certain aesthetic value that is pervasive, but it stands in the
background as we focus through the word upon the meaning. Unlike
the sound in poetry, the aesthetic appearance of the typeface does not
enter focally into the poem proper.
Style comes to the fore in deviations from normal usage that make
what is written about stand out and come closer to us, or bring us into
a deeper relation to it. It takes hold of us; it speaks to our heart. In day-
to-day living we encounter things globally and functionally. We learn
to glance, categorize, and respond in stereotypical ways sufficient for
human co-existence and functional adjustment to the human and non-
human environment. Literature—and art in general—transforms the
stereotype so that even the ordinary appears extraordinary.17 The means
employed are unfamiliar words or words used in ways not so familiar.
The enemy here is the cliché. Aristotle noted that in tragedy, by reason
of the serious or heroic (spoudaios) character of its action, the language
employed is elevated above ordinary usage. In addition to metaphors,
tragedy contained a mixture of ordinary and extraordinary words, even
drawing in foreign terms.18 “Purple prose” embellishes the ordinary in
order to underscore the higher level of seriousness at which the narrative
operates. Wordsworth saw the task of the poet as giving strangeness to
the familiar. He is echoed in literary criticism by the Russian formalists
among others.19
One of the stylistic devices is the metaphor. The metaphor does not
lie in the single word but in the way a word functions in a sentence.
17 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, R. Mannheim trans. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959), 29. For a comprehensive treatment of the overall conceptual
system and the place of aesthetics in it for Heidegger and for each of the major think-
ers treated here, see my Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1999).
18 Poetics, I. Bywater trans. In Complete Works of Aristotle, J. Barnes ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 1458a, 32.

19 See Terry Eagleton, LT, who presents their position but restricts its application to
poetry.
8 ON LITERATURE 173
Words carry potentialities that can only be determined by the context

in which they are used. This holds not only for the metaphor but for
other expressions as well. For example, “Time flies like an arrow” might
be understood in three different ways, depending upon the context. It
might refer to a certain species of fly that is known to be attracted to
arrows. It might also be a command given to a researcher to get out his
stop-watch quickly and measure how long it takes for a fly to get out of
a maze. Or it might—most likely—refer by simile to the rapid passage of
time.20
As its etymology indicates, metaphor is a carry (phorein) over (meta)
of a meaning from a primary and literal instance to a secondary instance,
retaining something of the original meaning while suppressing aspects
that do not apply to the secondary instance. One of the reasons for the
transfer is the carry-over of associations belonging to the literal instance.
As Dewey noted, words carry “an almost infinite charge of overtones
and resonances.”21 Calling the lion “King of the Beasts” carries over
the notion of regal power to the animal, and calling Richard “The
Lionheart” carries over the notion of the courage and awesome power of
the beast to the warrior. Aristotle calls the ability to develop metaphors
a sign of genius (euphues or “good nature”): seeing resemblances where
others only see differences.22 The comparison involved in metaphor
permits certain qualities of what is metaphorized to stand out. A
scientific model is itself a kind of metaphor, but shorn of emotional
reverberations.
John Dewey calls attention to the importance of the distinction
between metaphor and simile. One might think the only difference
is the use of the term “as” or “like” in the latter. The “as” brings into
play the level of intellectual analysis that we have underscored. But
Dewey somewhere notes that the immediacy involved in the metaphor
draws one into immediate relation to the object of the metaphor and
draws upon its emotional tonality bypassed in the simile.23 Something
of the emotional aura that surrounds the metaphor is immediately
transferred to the metaphorized. Though the simile only ads “like”
20 Iowe this example to Hubert Dreyfus.

21 Art as Experience, (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 20 (henceforth AE).
22 Poetics, 1459a. When it comes to considering the eidetics of literature, it’s surprising
how many times Aristotle keeps popping up.

23 AE.
174 R.E. Wood
to the metaphor, it also forces us to make explicit the samenesses and

differences that we find in things experienced and draws us away from
the immediate tonality of the metaphor. What is there about the meta-
phor that parallels the metaphorized? Retain that. What is there about
the metaphorized that is different? Eliminate that. As simile immedi-
ately suggests explicitation, to that extent it is like the development of
a classificatory system. But unlike the case of the latter, differences are
greater than samenesses and are based upon external resemblances rather
than internal features.
Plato shows how “angler” belongs, through the higher-level genera
under which it falls, to the same network of meanings as does “sophist,”
thus allowing the first term to be carried over to the second. He also
indicates that what operates in such networks are the overarching notions
of sameness and difference. The further up the generic hierarchy you
locate the junction under which both original and transferred meaning
fall, the more differences are greater than samenesses and tend to be
based upon external resemblances rather than internal features.24
In addition to the content of the words there is also the patterning
of the word-sounds. The devices used to pattern sound include meter
and rhyme. But there is also attention to the sonorous qualities of words
both alone and in interrelation to produce differing tonal relations. In
alliteration the same sound is repeated several times in different words.
The relative strictness of traditional poetic meter is a formalization of
the rhythmic character of ordinary prose. Aristotle noted that certain
meters naturally go together with certain linguistic situations.25 Again,
words sounded out have certain qualities: beautiful, ugly, light, heavy,
funny, simple, ornate. A group ignorant of English was presented with
different English words and word combinations and asked to pick out
the most beautiful from the list. They chose “cellar door.” An English
speaker would not typically notice that, since the referent is ordinary and
somewhat lowly.
There is also the matter of tonal emphasis: the sharp tone of
command, the pleasant tone of invitation, dropping the voice at
the end of a declarative sentence, raising it at the end of a question.
24 Sophist, N. White trans. Plato: Complete Works, J. Cooper ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987), 218–21c.
25 Poetics, 1459b, 30.
8 ON LITERATURE 175
Phonic qualities together with their rhythmic accompaniments evoke

the dispositions appropriate to what is said. This becomes fully focal
in music where the combination of tone qualities and rhythms brings
about specific inner dispositions in the hearers. If style is essential
to the art form, we might understand Walter Pater’s claim that all art
seeks the status of music to mean that the peculiar value of art lies in its
emphasizing the How of our participation in what is presented, the kind
of disposition (Aristotle’s ethos) it produces in us.
There are various levels to a literary work. In dramatic literature, at
one level there are words and their interrelations; at another level there
are characters with their actions and diction; at another level still, there
are ideas and attitudes. They are drawn together by the emplotment
and cemented by the atmosphere generated by their “world.”26 Such an
atmosphere is inseparable from the order of the whole. No matter what
the literary devices employed, what makes a work literary is what makes
any artwork artistic, namely, the integration of complexity in order to
produce a participation in what is presented, in order to affect the heart
of the audience and establish a significant presence.
What Aristotle said of tragedy can be applied to all literature and,
indeed, to every work of art: that it should be like an organism—all the
parts operate together, with nothing left out that is requisite for its total
functioning and nothing left in that is superfluous to that function.27
“Organicity” points to a mean between aesthetic defect and aesthetic
excess. That artists in practice hit upon this overarching feature for their
work is linked, as John Dewey emphasizes, to the fact that art arises
from the relation between the live creature and its environment. Artist
and audience are organisms (but ones with minds open to the Whole),
functioning wholes composed of integrated biorhythms that play
counterpoint to the rhythms of the environment. Art recaptures at the
level of culture the rhythmic integration that is the healthy organism.28
We should also underscore what we observed in the case of oral
tradition: the meaningful, having beginning, middle, and end, not sim-
ply as chronological succession but more basically as unity of meaning.
26 Roman Ingarden. On the Literary Work of Art, G. Grabowicz trans. (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), 291.

27 Poetics, 1451a, 20ff; 1459a, 20.
28 AE, 150. This is a formal consideration and refers to the “music” of a work of art.
Obviously, in most forms of art there is a mimetic element.

176 R.E. Wood
The end furnishes not simply termination but a kind of completion, a

resolution that follows the plot line. The Aristotelian muthos is not the
bald plot summary but the emplotment of all the elements, woven into a
meaningful, organic whole like the soul weaving together the elements of
the body.29
5.
Perhaps story-telling was originally a matter of narrating what had
occurred; but eventually it also involved the creation of fiction, a made-
up world presented as if it were real. Why create make-believe? Some
consider it an escape from the tedium or sufferings ingredient in daily
living. Aristotle was more positive: he claimed that fiction is more
philosophic than history because it involves the understanding of the
universal. History tells about individual characters and events. In order
that it provide a plausible story, fiction involves the understanding of
the typical: typical consequences of typical actions by typical characters
in typical circumstances—where typicality, however, is not identical
with stereotyping.30 The best fictional characters are richly articulated
individuals. Because of the actual functioning of the typical, once the
premises are set up, the author is not free to change them. The author
is no absolute despot but a limited despot. Once his characters and
setting have been put in place, they function much like pieces in a chess
game: each one limits the kind of moves one can make within the overall
setting. Hence the characters guide the author: they “talk back” when
he or she forces them out of character. As Sartre put it, “if his characters
escape his control and impose their whims upon him, if the words
maintain a certain independence under his pen, then he does his best
work.”31
Within the development of fiction there is the emergence of fantasy.
By that I mean the construction of a world, many of whose elements
could not exist in reality: fantastic creatures like talking animals and
walking trees, fantastic circumstances and the like. What can make such
29 Poetics, 1450a, 37. See Paul Ricoeur on muthos as emplotment, Time and Narrative,
K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), vol.
1, 31–51.
30 Poetics, 1451b.
31 Sartre, WL, 144.
8 ON LITERATURE 177
constructions more than escape is the way they bring to an enhanced

presence certain pervasive qualities of human experience.
For a long time I resisted a student’s insistence that I read Tolkien’s
Hobbit stories. Dedicated to philosophic prose, I considered such fantasy
to be pure escapism. But when my ten-year-old son was temporarily
blinded, he asked me to read him The Hobbit. I got so intrigued that I
read him both the original story and the trilogy, now become popular
again through the film versions.32 What intrigued me about these
works was the way I became more vividly aware of the brooding and
encompassing presence of evil, the slide into near animality because
of greed, the nobility of quest and honesty, and the like. What I take
to be essential here is not only enhancing understanding, but also
“making more vividly present.” Perhaps we might better say that there
is a mode of understanding that is capable of entering into or getting
close to what one comes to understand. There is a difference between
“understanding” as subsuming the individual under some set of
explanatory universals and “understanding” as empathetic or sympathetic
identification. Literature achieves the latter by employing the former in a
concrete way.
Where we have underscored the participatory aspect of literature,
Aristotle introduces emotional catharsis as the end of tragedy. We
might understand Aristotle to mean by catharsis, not ridding oneself of
unwelcome emotions, but experiencing them in a fictional context that
gives us emotional distance while drawing us in emotionally to what is
happening. Catharsis means not only a purging but a clearing up, so that
the effect of the performance is poetic vision, a realization of what we
might otherwise know in a purely detached mode.33 Such realization
involves transformation.
If we move in the opposite direction from fantasy in the direction
of the prosaic “realism” of philosophy, what would make a philosophic
work literary? Aristotle ruled out the first candidate for that title:
Empedocles wrote in meter, but was a scientist and not a poet.34
Parmenides’ Peri phuseos is written in hexameters, a primary poetic device
32 J.R.R. Tolkien, 4-Book Boxed Set: The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two
Towers, The Return of the King (Del Ray: Mti, 2012).

33 See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 388–91.

34 Poetics 1447b 11.
178 R.E. Wood
derived from the oral tradition. But that is not sufficient for Aristotle,
though he does not say what is. Parmenides’ proem to the work is
narrative and fantastic, describing an ascent from darkness to light on a
chariot, guided by the daughters of light, into the presence of a goddess
who provides the basic insight to the aspirant. But after the proem,
the remainder of the piece is declarative, working out certain logical
consequences of the original insight expressed in hexameters. Whereas
one might call the proem “literary,” one would not give that appellation
to the rest of the work.
A Platonic dialogue follows in the direction provided by Parmenides.
It is narrative, but what it narrates is a dialogical exploration of a given
philosophic theme: justice, courage, friendship, piety, knowledge, eros,
the structure of the cosmos, and so on. Its narrative explores different
characters who act out of definite conceptions of what is central to
human existence. Such conceptions foster or inhibit philosophic
insight. Furthermore, the dialogue employs imagery as a model for the
intelligible relations it is after. And it does so not only piecemeal, but as
metaphors that structure an entire work.
Consider, for example, the Republic. Its first word is katebein, “I
went down,” in this case to the Pireius, the sea port of Athens where
Socrates and his partner are about to go back up to the city. Going
down and its correlative, going up, govern the entire work, which
is about finding what is truly “up” and truly “down” in human life.35
They play in tandem with the metaphoric pairs darkness and light.
The main argument advances upwards from a primitive city through a
luxurious city to a purged city (Books II to IV) and on to a philosophic
“city laid up in heaven” (end of Book IX). The metaphoric pairs appear
in the center of the work, at its height in the Line of Knowledge and
its correlative depth, the Allegory of the Cave. The absolute height and
center is occupied by the Good as the metaphoric sun of the intelligible
world and as principle of the Whole (Books VI and VII). The linkage
between the Good and the intelligible realm provides a measure for
examining regimes and character types that regressively fall down from
the philosophic height (Books VIII and IX). The dialogue concludes
35 J. Hillis Miller makes a similar claim about literature: “For me the opening sentences
of literary works… are the ‘Open Sesame’ unlocking the door to that particular work’s fic-
tive realm.” On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), 24.
8 ON LITERATURE 179
down in the Underworld with the Myth of Er on the judgment of the

dead in the afterlife (Book X).
In his Statesman Plato presents thought as a weaving of two strands:
the warp as the hard-twisted strand of apodeixis and the woof as the
soft-twisted strand of paradeigma. Both are modes of showing (-deixis
and -deigma). Apo-deixis is “showing from the top down” exhibited
in geometrical demonstration and in logical divisions later called
“Porphyrian trees.” Para-deigma is “showing alongside” as in metaphor,
diagram, allegory, and myth. Demonstrative rigor interwoven with
poetic insight constitutes the completed fabric of philosophic thought as
Plato viewed it. If that is a height, we have clearly fallen away from it.36
The philosophic discussion roots the ideas in the movement of the
characters and in the imagistic basis of human life. Here narrative and
imagery, allegory and myth are not window dressing or candy coating
on the bland or perhaps bitter pill of philosophic thought. Their
function is based upon the notion of the Good as principle of the Whole
that involves both the interrelation of the intelligible forms among
themselves and their linkage with their individual instances available to us
through sensory presentation. But the dimension of the Good, beyond
the correlate to intellect, is correlate to eros that magnetizes the whole
person.37
Parmenidean hexameters contain a dimension not accentuated in
a Platonic dialogue: the dimension of the articulation of sound, the
dimension of the musical. Poetry brings that dimension of human
speech to the fore and explicitly cultivates it. We have previously noted
the continuum between ordinary speech with its cadences and sound
patterns, the deliberately cultivated cadences and patterns of poetry,
the even more accentuated sound patterns of song, and the complete
detachment of sound patterning from language in purely instrumental
music, culminating in so-called “absolute music.”38
36 Jacob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman (University of
Chicago Press, 1977), 176.

37 See my “Image, Structure, and Content: On a Passage in Plato’s Republic,” The
Review of Metaphysics, vol. XL (March 1987), 495–514.

38 As Dewey noted, “The poetic (intension) and the prosaic (extension) are two poles of
a continuum.” AE, 241.

180 R.E. Wood
6.
Historically, literature has appeared in certain genres, basically divided into
prose and poetry. Mikhail Bakhtin claimed that Aristotle gave the defini-
tive description of the classic genres (though omitting, for unaccount-
able reasons, lyric). Aristotle divides poetry into serious and comic, and
the former into epic and tragedy.39 Epic and tragedy are differentiated in
several ways. Epic presents a series of incidents covering a long timespan,
whereas tragedy focuses upon one event, usually within a single day. Epic
is narrated, while tragedy is enacted or “imitated.” Epic is presented in a
single meter, tragedy in several. Aristotle considers comedy a species of the
inferior, indeed of the ugly, dealing with characters lower than the average
type, whereas epic and tragedy deal with the higher character–types.
Aristotle defines tragedy as “the imitation of an action that is serious
or heroic (spoudaios), complete, having magnitude, in dramatic not
narrative form, using language with pleasant accessories, to arouse pity
and fear with a view toward their catharsis.”40 Heroic action presents
great figures as distinguished from the lower figures of comedy. We
have already referred to Martha Nussbaum’s persuasive interpretation of
catharsis: it means “clearing up” as the basis for poetic vision.41
Aristotle goes on to identify the formal parts of drama: mythos, charac-
ter, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle.42 Of these, character is the
psychophysical agent with his or her felt dispositions to behave whose
deepest dimension is thought embodied particularly in diction, but also
in visible action. Melody and spectacle enhance the presentation, though
Aristotle (surprisingly) considers spectacle as unessential. But the soul of
tragedy is mythos as emplotment, that is, the concrete weaving of the vari-
ous parts together to form a coherently living whole, like an organism.
Going beyond Aristotle, we might note that lyric has a more limited
temporal and spatial focus and can include things of nature as well as
persons and even manufactured things like an urn. Where epic, tragedy,
and comedy underscore the moral-practical dimension, lyric has more
of a contemplative character and extends beyond the human to things
of nature (Hopkins’ “The Windhover”) or even human artifacts (Keats’
39 Poetics, 4, 1448b, 24.

40 Poetics, 6, 1449b, 24.
41 See note 30.
42 Poetics, 6, 1450a, 37.
8 ON LITERATURE 181
“Ode to a Grecian Urn”). It focuses upon an individual object and upon

the disposition evoked by it.
Mikhail Bakhtin claims that the novel is the only form open to
development.43 As we noted, in his view, Aristotle’s analysis of poetry
remains the stable basis for analysis of its forms. The epic is fixed on
the national heroic past and presents “the reverent point of view of a
descendent.” The other literary forms are similar. “At the heart of all
these already completed high genres lie the same evaluation of time, the
same role for tradition, and a similar hierarchical distance.”44
Bakhtin sees the origin of the novel in the Socratic dialogue insofar as
it is a device for the critique of the present. He traces anticipations of the
novel through Hellenistic and Roman times. But the emergence of the
novel in full form he finds in Cervantes.45 Don Quixote (1604) was the
work most influential for the subsequent novelistic tradition. Bakhtin finds
a connection between the simultaneous emergence of the novel and exper-
imental science: the emergence of science and the emergence of the novel
are characterized by “personal experience and free creative imagination.”46
The novelty of the novel consisted, first of all, in its focus upon
characters other than “the high and mighty” or the “low types” that
were the focus of comedy. It focuses upon a plurality of social levels and
developed in tandem with democracy, which equalized the great and the
small before the law. Contrary to the dominance of the past in the other
literary forms, the novel takes place in the present and is aimed at the
future. Bakhtin emphasizes what he calls “polyglossia” or “heteroglossia”
or the multiplicity of languages for which the novel is a dialogue. “[T]he
movement of the theme through different languages and speech types,
its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia,
its dialogization—this is the distinguishing feature of the stylistics of
the novel.”47 As a parallel to deconstructive analysis, the approach of
43 “Epic and Novel,” Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. The Dialogical Imagination,
M. Holquist ed., C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981), 3 (henceforth DI).
44 DI, 13, 18.
45 Bakhtin treats Cervantes throughout DI but especially in “Discourse in the Novel,”
310, 324, and 384. Kundera makes the same claim. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel,
L. Asher, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 4–8 (henceforth AN). He says further, “I
am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes,” 20.
46 Epic, DI, 25, 39.
47 “Discourse in the Novel,” DI, 262–3.
182 R.E. Wood
dialogizing heteroglossia emphasizes centrifugal tendencies involving a

struggle between socio-linguistic points of view. But they are not simply
dispersed: they enter into a distinctive dialogical relationship.48 Further,
they invite the reader to enter actively into the dialogue.
One aspect of this is that the novel introduces the way of speaking
and thinking characteristic of different classes in a society. Another is
that it contains several different literary forms. As Milan Kundera notes,
“whereas neither poetry nor philosophy can incorporate the novel,
the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing
thereby anything of its identity.”49 This multiplicity, both of literary
forms and different forms of language, is a central factor in the fact that
the novel is the only genre that continues to develop.
7.
Once an author has finished the work, it is released from its origin and
placed in the public space of language allowing for interpretation and
criticism. Interpretation arises, for one thing, in the gap between the
universality of the words used to describe a concrete situation and set of
characters and the particularity of the correlates. It arises also in relation
to how the whole is constructed and the way “ideas” are found in it.
John Dewey distinguished, as did Heidegger, between the art
product and the work of art.50 In the case of literature, the art product
is found in multiple copies as identically the same, even though
perhaps differentiated empirically by different typefaces or accompany-
ing illustrations. The work of art is what the work does. One sees here
a parallel between the musical score and the literary text, in contrast to
a piece of plastic art. The latter stands by itself, but calls out for view-
ers, whereas what the literary text or the musical score indicates does
48 Ibid.,
273.
49 AN, 64.
50 AE, 162. Heidegger makes a similar distinction in “the Origin of the Work of Art,”
Poetry, Language, and Thought, A. Hofstadter trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),
17–87.. See my “Aesthetics: The Complementarity of, and Differences Between Heidegger
and Dewey,” John Dewey, D. Christiansen and J. McDermott eds, Special Issue of the
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2013). vol. 87, no. 2. (Spring, 2013), 245–66.
8 ON LITERATURE 183
not exist without its “performers.” The musical score has a one-for-one
correspondence between the notes on the staff and the sounds produced,
though, as we said, it cannot capture fully the musical dynamics. The
combination of loud and soft, fast and slow linked together in the whole
is a matter of interpretation on the part of the performer.
Although a literary text has a one-for-one relation between the words
on a page and the meanings they represent, nonetheless, because of the
relation between words and instances—the universality of words and the
individuality of the instances—words call for an imaginative filling that
can differ substantially from reader to reader. This is made transpar-
ent in considering the acting out of a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.
Different directors, different actors, different set designers, and differ-
ent costumers produce different “interpretations” of the same text. We
have previously called attention to a glaring example: the punk rock film
presentation of Romeo and Juliet. What is rendered transparent in the
stage or movie production happens all the time in individual readings:
different performances, different interpretations.51 Film director Andrey
Tarkovsky says, in an exaggerated way, “A book read by a thousand dif-
ferent people is a thousand different books.”52 Nonetheless, the words
and their referents circumscribe the limits within which imaginative
construction can legitimately happen—though a given work may occa-
sion reverie and associative fantasy peculiar to a given reader, which is
Tarkovsky’s point.
At the same time as reading requires imaginative “performance” by
the reader, it also requires, in the case of great works, a tacking back
and forth between parts and the whole—something that cannot be
achieved in a single reading. Such works have to be studied as well as
read through. A first reading gives a general impression. “Voracious
readers” move from work to work, carrying such general impres-
sions. Reflective readers are eminently re-readers. The first impression
should give a global sense, a way of inhabiting the “aura” of a work,
together with the general plotline and the dispositions of the characters.
51 Eagleton claims that literary works “are ‘re-written,’ if only unconsciously, by the soci-
eties which read them.” LT, 11.

52 Sculpting in Time, K. Blair trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 177.
184 R.E. Wood
Re-readings attend to how that global sense is articulated in the various

parts. One might be led from there to raising and exploring the ethical
or “metaphysical” issues involved in a work. In the case of literature the
issues are necessarily embedded in the individual characters and events
presented imagistically. That makes the issues “real” rather than merely
conceptual. Aristotle saw the linkage between ethics and poetics, where
the latter renders concrete the principles of the former embedded in
characters in interaction.53 Philosophy examines the issues at the level
of the universal through the vehicle of the concept, although a great
thinker like Plato or Nietzsche works on both sides of the divide between
concept and image. But perhaps even more basically, both operate out
of what Dewey called an “aura,” a felt sense of encompassing, dwelt-in
significance that guides the selection of ideas and images applied by Poe
to “The Raven.”
Whereas one might think that poetry is a matter of inspiration, Poe
said it is even more a matter of mastering the technical aspects, what he
calls the levers, ropes, and pulleys behind the scene that are needed to
get all the scenic elements into their proper places. But what the poet
exhibits in the finished work is an understanding, more or less pro-
found, of the life of feeling. Poe began with a feeling of utter desola-
tion then searched for a word which carried that feeling. He arrived at
“nevermore.” The object of that feeling was then called “Leonore,” with
“nevermore” operating within and guiding the technical aspects involved
in the construction of the poem.
Literature together with the other art forms renders the aura or
world-atmosphere more explicit. There is a “fusion of horizons”
involved when the aura that generated the piece meets the aura within
which a reader dwells.54
But of course, not every reader is a student of the text. One might
not study a given work in the way indicated. One might simply seek
escape from the everyday in the realm of fantasy. One might re-read
a work because one is struck by the characters or the plot or is just
delighted again and again by the whole presentation. Or, in the case of
53 Poetics,
1449b, 25f.
54 I
owe the emphasis upon the aura of the reader and several other helpful remarks to
Wendy Faris.
8 ON LITERATURE 185
poetic diction, one might appreciate the expression itself:”What oft’ was
thought but n’er so well expressed,” as Alexander Pope put it.
There is another aspect of a literary work to which Sartre called
attention and that we cited as an epigraph to this chapter. Like Dewey,
he refers to the work of art as its effect. “…[A] work of art is never
finished until it becomes a collective representation and … contains, by
all that generations of readers has put into it, infinitely more than at the
moment of its conception.”55 I would qualify that: a significant work of
art is never finished but continues to generate new meaning as it is read
by new generations who inhabit a lifeworld that is substantially different
than that of its author
8.
Criticism emerges through comparison between interpretations of a
given work, judging the greater or lesser adequacy of one interpretation
over another. It also arises between different works, allowing us to judge
depiction of character and situation, organicity, style, metaphysical
depth, and the like. The works that furnish the basis for comparison
have traditionally been “canonical” works, works that have “stood the
test of time,” appealing again and again throughout the centuries to
reflective and sensitive readers in different eras. But the canon itself
undergoes fluctuation. In the Neo-classical age, Voltaire declared
Shakespeare a barbarian, in the Romantic age he was the paradigm of
genius. But perhaps the Neo-classical age is the problem in its attempt to
establish “eternal” criteria that would produce genre “purity,” without
sufficient self-criticism of the limited character of the criteria and how
they are applied.56 The canon itself has to be open to the emergence of
new classics since the works now considered canonical were novelties
when they first appeared. And new classics provide new criteria for
reconsidering the works of the past, allowing us to focus on aspects
hitherto only implicit in reflective reading.
55 Sartre,WL, 144.
56 For the transition from Classicism to Romanticism, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy
of the Enlightenment, F. Koelln and J. Pettegrove trans. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968), 275–360.
186 R.E. Wood
In an era of deconstruction and unbridled freedom, all authority is

suspect. That applies to the authority of a canon of great texts. Literary
theorist Terry Eagleton sees it as grossly presumptuous to think there
is a single tradition. He thinks that a canon is a matter of power: a
reading back by those who have the power of definition that dominate
the readers, “a construct fashioned by particular people for particular
reasons at a certain time.”57 However, there are unitary strains: many of
the texts work out of response to and assimilation of prior texts, as in
his exploration of the afterworld Virgil draws upon Plato, Dante upon
Virgil, Milton upon Dante. And the tradition is not a monolith, since
there are a significant plurality of lifeworlds explored in it.
More important, it is also the case that classics are self-authenticating
to those who measure up to them. One of our philosophy
undergraduates was working one summer for a Texas Utility lineman
who found out that his assistant was a philosophy major. The lineman
remarked, “Philosophy? I love Plato’s Republic!” When asked what other
texts in the history of philosophy he had read, the reply was “None, only
Plato’s Republic.” When asked if he had read anything else by Plato,
the reply was the same. “Whenever I finish reading the book, I start all
over again.” Untutored, the man had discovered a classic as a work that
bore continual re-reading because of the depth and richness it contains.
I always tell my students, “There is no such thing as philosophic reading;
only re-reading and re-reading and re-reading…”58 Yuri Lotman says the
same thing about poetry.59
Regarding the classics, Kierkegaard quotes Lichtenberg: “Such works
are mirrors: when an ape gawks in, no apostle gazes out.” One has to
come up to the level of the classics….
9.
What we have been describing might be called a naive approach to
literature, reading it in terms of how it illuminates the lifeworld.
Practicing a phenomenological method, it has affinities with Hans-Georg
57 Eagleton, LT, 10, 62–4.

58 Ialso tell them that there is no such thing as reading Hegel, only continual re-reading.
To aid the re-reading of Hegel, I have developed a text, Hegel’s Introduction to the System
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
59 Yuri Lotman, The Analysis of the Poetic Text, 1972, cited in Eagleton, LT, 89.
8 ON LITERATURE 187
Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Gadamer presents a hermeneutical theory

addressing the literary-philosophic-theological traditions. Following
his teacher, Heidegger, he sees the individual as embedded in a tradi-
tion that is the effect of the past history of a people. Applied to texts,
he draws upon meanings currently operative from history to bring them
to bear upon the sources of that history. He aims at an expansion of
self-awareness by seeking a “fusion of horizons,” an interplay between
the meanings one would automatically assign to words that come from
a different place and time, and the meaning that arises through careful
study of texts. One looks at the same things as presented differently in
the texts. In The Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser follows in Gadamer’s
tracks.60
Eagleton claims that this presupposes a liberal humanist ideology
insofar as one is open to being changed by the text.61 I would think
that if there were not this openness, one shouldn’t read any but books
approved by one’s reinforcement circle—as was the case with the former
Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books. It also is the case that
there are depths to religion itself that involve an openness to ongoing
transformation so that it is not only the liberal humanist who should be
so open.
In more recent times forms of literary theory have emerged that
attempt to “get beneath” the surface meaning to the deep structures
that are said to govern it. An early attempt was that of Freud for whom
the circle of everyday awareness, the ego, was the result of two force
vectors: the id and the super-ego, the sub-personal urgings—centrally
sexual—which arise into consciousness from the biological base or
from the unconscious, contesting the power of that which is perceived
as coming from above the ego-consciousness, the super-ego as locus of
the introjections of the norms stemming from the parents and from
the larger social whole within which they are embedded. What the
ego experiences as its choices are really the result of those two vectors
of power.62 But the aim of psychoanalysis is expressed in the adage,
“Where there is Id, let there be Ego,” “Where there is lack of control,
60 The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

61 LT, 69.
62 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, J. Reviere trans. (New York: Norton, 1960).
188 R.E. Wood
let there be control.” This seems to counter the overall determinism of

Freud’s system. Freudian-inspired literary theory works within those
parameters.63
Similarly, in linguistic and in anthropological studies, structur-
alism works to hive off the real object and to dissolve the subject and
the object in the underlying system.64 The underlying linguistic system
furnishes the program from which one makes a responsible choice.
The linguistic system is actualized in speech, in the Between of two
or more interlocutors. As Bakhtin would have it: “Discourse lives, as
it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object.” Without
that we only have “the naked corpse of the word….”65 However, this is
not to say that the system, linguistic and otherwise, does not skew the
judgment of the one choosing.
Marxist analysis attends to that skewing, explaining individual
behavior in terms of classes, and classes in terms of struggle determined
by the control of the means of production and mediated by the
development of technology. But just as Hegel centers his structural
analysis upon the heart of the existing individual, so Sartre argues
for existentialist freedom within a basically Marxist analysis of the
technological, economic, political, and ideological system.66 Literature
is understood as an expression of the class-governed superstruc-
ture.67 Sartrean literature is “engaged” in the critique of current power
structures.
Recent movements to deconstruct literary works have led to the
atrophy of the possibility of apprehending coherent wholes; one
doesn’t even bother to look for them. That is linked to the parallel
deconstructionist attack on “logocentrism.”68 Represented in the
Johannine Gospel, “in the beginning was the Logos…And all things
63 Malcolm Bowie, Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1994). For Freud’s challenge to philosophy, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy,
D. Savage trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
64 See Paul Ricoeur, “Structure and Hermeneutics,” K. McLauglin trans. Conflict of
Interpretations, D. Ihde ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 27–61.
65 Bakhtin, Discourse, DI, 292.
66 Search for a Method, H. Barnes trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1968).
67 Sartre, WL, 71–2.
68 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, G. Spivak trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974) 43, 74–9.

8 ON LITERATURE 189
were made through Him…,” it is expressed in Plato’s description of the

philosopher who has his eyes fixed on the character of the whole and
the whole nature of each kind of thing within the whole.69 Novelist
Milan Kundera protests against anti-logocentrist claims: “establishment
modernism has proscribed the notion of totality….The novel is one of
the last outposts where man can still maintain connections with life in its
entirety.”70
What to this writer is ill-conceived about the deconstructive attack on
logocentrism is the fact that nature presents itself as a matter of coherent
wholes or systems, beginning with the galactic and solar systems, the
ecosystem, the systematic character of organic beings, and the internal
systems of mammals: circulatory, respiratory, digestive, nervous, and the
like. Underlying living things is the systematicity of DNA molecules; and
underlying it all is the systematicity of the periodic table of elements—
not to mention the systematic character of the language, mathematical
and otherwise, employed in science and in the everyday life upon
which science is parasitic. Beyond this, we construct such entities as the
postal system and the railroad system; our cities contain sewer systems,
electrical systems and the like. Systematicity pervades our experience.
It is perverse to ignore it or discredit it. Nonetheless, it is significant to
hold the apparent coherence of a text up to the ideal of coherence to
find, through deconstruction, where it fails. The wisest approach here
is that enunciated by Whitehead: seek the simplicity of a system—but
distrust it.71
10.
A consideration of the nature and role of literature is embodied in
the character of the departments of literature which have moved from
imparting life wisdom to deconstructing texts in the name of freedom.
At their inception Literature departments or English departments in
the universities, Eagleton claims, were attempts to take the place of
69 Theaetetus,
175a, 173c.
70 Kundera, AN, 66.
71 Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1919), 163. See also Paul Ricoeur, “The History of Philosophy and the Unity of
Truth,” History and Truth, C. Kelbley trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1965), 41–56.
190 R.E. Wood
discredited religion in guiding human life. Matthew Arnoldwas a major

source of this approach. In England, the teaching of literature began in
Mechanics Institutes which supplied “poor man’s classics“ for the moral
guidance of the lower classes. Only subsequently did this approach
migrate to the upper classes. That happened following the trauma of the
First World War. In the early 1930s Frank Raymond Leavis and Queenie
Roth Leavis promoted the study of literary classics as “the supremely
civilizing pursuit,” reflecting, Eagleton says, “a whole political reading of
English history.”72
T.S. Eliot evoked the image of the Tradition that grows by the
admission of new classics which change the way of considering the
Tradition. He viewed poetry as “a living whole of all the poetry that
has been written.”73 Eagleton remarks that new candidates are admitted
only if they meet the standards of the Tradition. According to him, as
we noted, there is thus a self-certifying Tradition. “The case was circular,
intuitive, and proof against all argument, reflecting the enclosed coterie
of the Leavisites themselves.”74 He fails to consider that new works
challenge the assumptions operative in the canon, as Stravinsky’s Right of
Spring challenged the musical canon without cancelling it out.
The New Criticism, represented by Eliot and other Southern
writers like Alan Tate in the 1930s to the 1950s, viewed poetry as
essentially contemplative, teaching reverence and humility before
the world. Eagleton sees this as the turning of poetry into a fetish
which expresses “the ideology of an uprooted, defensive intelligentsia
who reinvented in literature what they could not locate in reality.” Its
Kantian “disinterestedness” was “a recipe for political inertia, and thus
for submission to the political status quo.”75 Similarly, Sartre attacked
the reigning view of literature in Stendhal and Baudlaire: “Art again
became sacred in that it turned away from life. It even set up for itself
a sort of communion of saints; one joined hands across the centuries
with Cervantes, Rabelais, and Dante. One identified himself with this
monastic society.”76
72 Eagleton, LT, 19–32.

73 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood (London: Waking Lion Press,
2011), originally published in 1921.
74 LT, 32–7.
75 LT, 40–3.
76 WL, 84.
8 ON LITERATURE 191
In the literary theory that dominates English and Literature

departments today, one no longer seeks intellectual and spiritual
nourishment from texts. One gets beneath and beyond all that to work
at unconsciously operative substructures. It is not as if such approaches
are simply wrong; it is that, exclusively practiced, they tend to deflect
attention from the kind of wisdom that can be found in the classics.
For Eagleton, Harold Bloom, as expressed, for example, in his recent
work, Where Is Wisdom to Be Found?, exhibits a “defiant return” to
the literary tradition as a source of wisdom for life.77 I see the return
as well warranted. There are such things as broader and deeper insights
into human life. Those who stretch their minds and challenge their
preconceptions, learning reflective reading and re-reading, begin to
discern what makes a classic classic. Such works don’t just happen to stay
around; they prove themselves to those who take the time and discipline
to drink in what they present.
Yes, immersion in the classics does involve a contemplative orientation
which, in turn, presupposes reverence and humility, along with a spirit
of silence. A social order may be measured by how it maintains a space
for the contemplative life which, in turn, nourishes the deep roots of
humanity.78 Without such contemplative space, a culture is wholly
taken up with “the latest” and loses the depth of historical possibilities
of which it is completely ignorant and which could give it the distance
needed to criticize itself. Before a work of beauty, one might, like Rilke,
still hear the command, “You must change your life.” But maybe that
is what a culture, filled with omnipresent noise and utterly lacking in
silence, does not want to hear. Søren Kierkegaard said: Our civilization is
sick. Our cities are factories for producing omnipresent noise. If he were
a doctor asked for a cure, he would say: “Create Silence.”79
A multiplicity of approaches, the old wisdom approach and the
contemporary structural and deconstructive approaches are illuminating,
each in their own way. But the main point of a classic is, as Bloom would
77 Where Is Wisdom to Be Found? (New York: Riverton Books, 2004).

78 Such a view finds expression in Aristotle's Ethics where friendship in the practice of
theoria was highest; and the larger extension of friendship is life in the polis. Nicomachean
Ethics. W. Ross and J. Urmson trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle. J. Barnes ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), X, 1177a 12ff, IX, 1070b 30.
79 Cited as a conclusion to Max Picard’s The World of Silence.
192 R.E. Wood
have it, teaching “aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, wisdom.”80 The

old transcendentals—beauty, truth, and goodness return. I applaud their
return.81 And I would add unity as the overarching transcendental lure
which we are invited always to seek but which does, indeed, ever recede,
drawing us on.
11.
According to our practice, we will end by examining a work in the genre
discussed. Here we will look at two, a novel and a poem. The novel is
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevski; the poem is “Eternity”
by William Blake.
So first the novel. (Here I conjoin discussion of formal elements
with attention to the content and the issues that arise.) There are three
brothers, Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha—and a step-brother, Smerdyakov.
Their father is Fyodor, a completely dissolute man. Ivan is an intellectual
who rages against God’s world over the gratuitous suffering of children.
Dmitri is a sensualist and exhibits bipolar behavior. Alyosha is young,
innocent, and beneficent, an aspirant to the monastic life under the
guidance of the saintly Fr. Zosima. Smerdyakov is completely self-
centered and occupies, in his own way, the center of the novel.
At the novel’s deep center lies this question: if, as Nietzsche
proclaimed, God is dead, is all permitted? The central event, the murder
of the dissolute father, Fyodor Karamazov, and the subsequent trial of
Dmitri is one answer to that question.
Fyodor had been threatened by Dmitri. Dmitri is accused, put on
trial, and pronounced guilty. The actual murderer is Smerdyakov who
subsequently hangs himself. He was emboldened to commit murder
by Ivan’s claim that, if there is no God, all is permitted. In a sense,
Alyosha is the hero of the novel: the saintly young man who gathered a
80 Bloom, Wisdom, 1.
81 See my “The Self and the Other: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Transcendentals,”
Philosophy Today, vol. X (Spring, 1966), pp. 43–63;“Potentiality, Creativity, and
Relationality: Creative Power as a ‘‘New’ Transcendental?,’” The Review of Metaphysics, vol.
59 (December, 2005). See my collection of essays, The Beautiful, the True, and the Good:
Studies in the History of Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
2015).
8 ON LITERATURE 193
community of boys around one whom they had shunned and lay dying.
The book ends with their gathering at his tomb.
Kundera noted that the novel is able to absorb other literary forms.
Here we find the often anthologized “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,”
a story penned by Ivan. Early in the book there is a discussion of a paper
on the relation of Church and State also written by Ivan. Later there are
notes on the life of Father Zosima, Dmitri’s recitation of a verse from
Schiller, Smerdyakov’s guitar hymn, Ivan’s nightmare, and the like.
In contrast to classical works, the focus of attention in not upon
those at the top of the social pyramid. People from all classes and widely
differing occupations take their place within the narrative. Bakhtin noted
the heteroglossia of polyglossia in the novel: different kinds of speech
common to different social levels and occupations. Of particular inter-
est in terms of language is the psychological approach of the prosecu-
tor at Dmitri’s trial; but also the peculiar language of a group of young
boys, of monks, of various types present in a tavern, and so on. The rich,
Fig 8.1 Diane Stephens, To a Butterfly

194 R.E. Wood
the poor, the servant, the boys, the soldier, the monk, the lawyer, the
educated and the non-educated: the novel is a dialogue between all these
types incarnate in distinctively individual characters.
The reader is invited to enter into a dialogue with the central event
and its presuppositions.82 “Is there really a God? And if not, is all
permitted?” are live questions for contemporary humans as more and
more of the highly educated take atheism as the default mode.
Next, in a “defiant return” to seeking wisdom in a “naive” manner,
let us conclude by bringing our discussion to bear upon a particular
work: a very short lyric poem by William Blake, “Eternity,” where the
background relation to the Whole which furnishes the framework for our
investigations comes to expression (Fig. 8.1).
Eternity
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses each joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
The language is simple: nothing beyond the ordinary: no purple

prose. The rime scheme is also simple: at the end of the first two lines
“joy/destroy,” and at the end of the third and fourth lines “flies/
sunrise.” In terms of meaning, “joy” and “destroy” are in conflict,
while “flies” and “sunrise” are coordinate. The meter is mostly regu-
lar: the first line more or less matches the third and the second the
fourth. However, scanning the first and third lines, each of which has
four feet, one finds a reversal of the accent in the third foot: “himself”
is reversed in accent by “joy as.” The first is syncopated, the last more
regular. One could understand this in terms of a reversal of meaning.
The first line accents the self who clutches after the possession of the
object, setting things in irregular rhythm; the third line accents the
object, the “joy” whose possession one forswears, establishing a regu-
lar rhythm. Also, the fourth line—“Lives in eternity’s sunrise”—adds
one unaccented syllable at the beginning of “eternity’s” which does not
82 DI, 282.
8 ON LITERATURE 195
parallel the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables in the sec-

ond line: “Does the winged life destroy.” This has the effect of making
“eternity” stand out. The accented and unaccented syllables of “Lives
in e-” does pick up the one accented and two unaccented syllables of
“kisses each” and “joy as it” in the preceding line and thus stresses con-
tinuity of the action of appreciatively letting go and living in relation
to eternity. The fourth line might seem to require—contrary to ordi-
nary usage, but in order to match its corresponding line—accenting the
“-rise” in “sunrise.” This serves to underscore “rise” as the conclusion.
But one could also accent the last line in a more normal fashion: “Lives
in eternity’s sunrise.” This breaks the pattern of accent on the last syl-
lable in the first three lines and parallels the radical shift in meaning
involved in the last line.
Passing from the consideration of form, let us consider the content.
The poem is dedicated to a butterfly. In the fluttering display of its
shape and the vivid colors and rapidly changing appearance of its wing
pattern, the butterfly is a thing of beauty. It calls us to a halt from our
everyday preoccupations and calls out for our appreciative response to
its presence. But it is a delicate insect. Impelled by curiosity, many a
child has found that capturing it tends to break its wings or at least to
cause their powdery covering to flake off. Imprisoning it in a glass jar for
observation leads to its beating its wings against the sides of the jar until
they are shredded.
The case of the butterfly functions as an image of the general human
relation to everything delightful in life, every joy great and small. As a
term, “joy” stands out by reason of its being repeated in the first and
third lines. One should underscore that joy is not simply a psychic state
but is related to what it is that brings joy. Blake transfers the psychic
state to the thing that brings about the psychic state. Joy is distinct from
pleasure in that we are quite able to pursue pleasure, but not joy. Joy
is serendipitous; it comes upon us by surprise, undeserved, unsolicited.
When the thing comes that brings it about we should learn appreciative
response, “for its own sake,” just because it is what it is. Here the poem
expresses something “impractical”: learning appreciation as due response
to “a thing of joy.” But there is also a “practical” message. What brings
delight does “fly”: it can’t last forever. Sooner rather than later it is time
to move on since other things—duties, for example—press upon us. Life
flows on. In this respect, the message is one of practical wisdom about
impractical moments of serendipity.
196 R.E. Wood
Besides “joy” there is another repetition in the poem: “He who.”

The sameness of the expression masks the difference of the disposition
in the two lines: “He who binds” and “He who kisses.” The sameness of
expression might, however, indicate that both dispositions are possible to
any person. The monosyllabic “binds” has the effect of bringing down a
hammer, while the duo-syllabic “kisses” exhibits a light touch: coming
down and letting go, a kind of delighted skipping.
The surprise in the poem comes in concluding with “eternity’s
sunrise.” What connection with eternity has the appreciation of a
butterfly or other occasions of joy that it symbolizes? One is reminded
of Nietzsche’s line from Thus Spake Zarathustra: “All joy seeks eternity,
seeks deep, seeks deep eternity.”83 We are also reminded of Diotima’s
observation in Plato’s Symposium that Eros is the love of the mortal
for the immortal.84 There is here an announced connection, picked up
by Freud, between Thanatos or death and Eros or love that holds for
all the living.85 Life and death are bound together: the living must die,
and yet life goes on because of the reproductive urge. What has to die
seeks naturally to perpetuate itself through reproducing another like
itself. Sexual desire is the next generation saying, “You must die. Let
me live in your place.” Humanness is that desire capable of reflective
awareness of itself because it lives out of a background relation to the
Whole. Relation to the Whole includes the whole of time. As even Locke
observed, if there is coming into being, there is something eternal; the
only question is where that eternality is located.86 The tradition going
back to Plato and Judaeo-Christian origins placed eternity beyond
time; Nietzsche placed eternity in time; Aristotle and Hegel synthesized
the two. It is characteristic of human existence to be aware of the
encompassing Eternal because it operates in terms of the notion of Being
as all-encompassing intention. The notion of Being is emptiness aiming
at filling; as such, it is the distinctively human Eros, the mortal’s desire
for the immortal.
83 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, 340–3.

84 Symposium, 1997. A. Nehemas and P. Woodruff trans. Plato: Complete Works,
J. Cooper ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 207D.
85 See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy D. Savage trans. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1970), 290–3.

86 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding.(New York: Penguin, 1998)
Bk 4, ch. 10.
8 ON LITERATURE 197
Joy seeks eternity. Blake testifies to that: in not clinging to, but letting
go of the joys that come upon us, we catch a glimpse of eternity. Each
thing is an icon of the Whole. If, instead of accenting “sun” in “sunrise”
we ended with the odd accentuation of the “rise,” we might then enter-
tain the suggestion that the kind of beings who have the psychic distance
that allows for appreciation without possession will themselves finally rise
to an eternal Beyond which ever shines through what occurs in our own
temporal existence.
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———. “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.”
1971. Social Research. Vol. 38, no. 3. Autumn, 529–62.
———. 1977. The Rule of Metaphor, R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, J. Costello,
trans. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 1983. Time and Narrative. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer trans.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1966. What Is Literature? B. Frechtman trans. New York:
Washington Square Press.
———. 1968. Search for a Method. H. Barnes trans. New York: Vintage Books.
Searle, John. 1992. The Rediscovery of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. 1972. Course in General Linguistics. R. Harris trans.
Chicago: Open Court.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1986. Sculpting in Time. K. Blair trans. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 2012. The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The
Return of the King. Del Ray: Mti.
White, Hayden. 2010. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature,
and Theory, 1957–2007. Robert Doran ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
8 ON LITERATURE 199
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1921. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Wood, Robert. 1966. “The Self and the Other: Toward a Re-interpretation of
the Transcendentals.” Philosophy Today. Vol. X (Spring), 43–63.
———. 1987. “Image, Structure, and Content: On a Passage in Plato’s
Republic.” The Review of Metaphysics. Vol. XL (March), 495–514.
———. 2005. “Potentiality, Creativity, and Relationality: Creative Power as a
‘‘New’ Transcendental?” The Review of Metaphysics. Vol. 59 (December).
———. 2013. “Aesthetics: The Complementarity of, and Differences Between
Heidegger and Dewey,” John Dewey, D. Christiansen and J. McDermott eds.
Special Issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2013).
———. 2015. The Beautiful, the True, and the Good: Studies in the History of
Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.
CHAPTER 9
On Film
We begin as usual with a return to the structure presupposed by all our

waking activities, art forms included. All art forms appear in the space
carved out by the general structure of the field of human awareness.
That field is bipolar. At the most obvious pole there is the component of
sensation as a realm of immediate appearance, the limited manifestation
of things in the environment of our own bodies. It arises from the rela-
tionship between the various sense organs and the largely hidden causal
impacts of the environment and is tied in with the solicitation of those
desires, themselves arising from the hidden realm of our own physiology,
that serve the ends of the organism: growth, sustenance, defense against
predictors, reproduction, care of offspring (Fig. 9.1).
At the less obvious counter-pole of the field of awareness there is an
initially empty reference to Being, to the All, to whatever is and to all
there is about each. This reference to the All poses the question of what
underlies the limited manifestation of the sensory surface, both on the
object and the subject sides. Beyond that, reference to the All poses
the question of our place in the scheme of things, “the meaning of it
all,” tied to the choices we humans make from among the possibilities
afforded by our understanding and experience. The distance of the pri-
mordial reference to the Whole prises us loose from immediacy and con-
demns us to choose our way in the light of how we understand our place
in the overall scheme of things. Out of settled dispositions passed on to
others there emerges a cultural world laying out ahead of time, for the
individuals born into it, paths for thinking, acting, and feeling.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_9
202 R.E. Wood
Fig. 9.1 Babette’s Feast. Credit Alamy Stock Photos
Over time the fine arts settle into various sub-spaces within that
world, grounded in the articulation of various aspects of the sensory
field. Set within the field of the senses, fine art opens up a sense of the
Whole; it gathers a world of inhabitance. Such inhabitance inclines us
in a spontaneous way to certain lines of thinking and acting. It brings
certain things closer to us and sets other things at a distance. Among
the fine arts, film is the latest arrival. It shares visual space with painting,
sculpture, and architecture; it shares audile space with theater, poetry,
and music; it shares the space of action with literature and theater. In its
inception, it was called “the seventh art.”1
1 In 1911 the poet Riciotto Canude introduced the term. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and
Psychology of the Cinema. C. King trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)
1 (henceforth APC). Mitry has been called “the Aristotle of film.” As my footnotes will
9 ON FILM 203
Though as esteemed a philosopher as Stanley Cavell has disputed it,

it seems clear to me as to many others that film is the contemporary art
form.2 Erwin Panovsky noted that “it is the movies that mold, more than
any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress,
the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising
more than 60% of the population of the earth.”3
Film is a new art form that came into being through “the won-
ders of modern technology.” Like opera in the nineteenth century
and the cathedral in the thirteenth, film is, indeed, the contemporary
Gesamtkunst, the art form that gathers together the other art forms.
Ingmar Bergman remarked that film is the contemporary equivalent of
the medieval cathedral, which drew together artists and artisans of all
sorts: architects, stained-glass designers, sculptors, mural painters, litur-
gists, composers, and musicians, along with masons and hod-carriers.4
Film draws together scriptwriters, directors, actors, cameramen, lighting
specialists, set and costume designers, musicians, special effects experts,
and stage hands.5 Its peculiarity is that it has the power to make us into
universal voyeurs, to make us present in a way that is impossible in real
life to every mode of human action and to expand our vicarious experi-
ence to any real or fictitious visual and audile space.
Our intention here is to focus attention upon the nature of the film
medium and the peculiar possibilities that it affords. We will approach
the study with a double method: a phenomenological inventory and a
comparison with other cognate art forms. I intend the eidetic inventory
to lay out the fundamental space within which film operates and point
reveal, I owe much to this wide-ranging, magnificently well-informed book. See the com-
prehensive sketch of his work by Brian Lewis in Routledge Companion to Philosophy and
Film, P. Livingston and C. Plantinga, eds. (London: Routledge, Kovács 2009), 397–407
(henceforth RCPF).
2 The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1979), 14 (henceforth WV). It was the study of Cavell’s book that touched off these
reflections by affording many suggestive lines of exploration.
3 Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures,” (henceforth SM),
Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, George Dickie and Richard Sclafani, eds. (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1977), 352 (henceforth ACA).
4 Cavell, WV, 8. Panofsky, SM (363) made the comparison earlier (1934).
5 See Paul Weiss, Cinematics, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975, for a
treatment of each of these contributions.

204 R.E. Wood
out some of the basic possibilities the peculiar character of that space
affords. The comparison with other art forms, most especially painting,
theater, and the novel, will show the peculiarities of film. There is also
a narrative section on the history of film from silent motion pictures
through “talkies” to color and to special effects.
Today “film” is, for the most part, a misnomer, since recording is digi-
tized. This has greatly expanded the integration of spectacular “special
effects.” But “film” as a term has absorbed electronic as well as filmic
processing. So we continue to have departments of Film Studies.
Some theorists claim that the medium of film is light in motion, but
we would have to interpret “light” in the wide sense of that which con-
tains light and dark as well as all the colors, the field occupied by the vis-
ual arts in general.6 Alexander Sesonske claims that the medium of film is
the complex formed by space, time, and motion.7 Following Aristotle’s
terminology, we might call that complex opened by light the remote mat-
ter of film.8 The proximate matter is moving objects, centrally human
action visually depicted, while the form that gives it specificity is the
mythos, the emplotment joining all the visual and auditory features into
a single, organic whole. However, Aristotle himself considered the visual
spectacle, the field now utilized by film itself, inessential to the dramatic
work.9 This is rather surprising since the ancient tragedians and comedi-
ans wrote for the stage. This view of the non-essential character of the
spectacle is linked to the Platonic view that human completeness involves
some “turn within” away from the sensory and that the more disembod-
ied the better, a view carried on in medieval monasticism and even in the
Aristotelianism absorbed by Thomas Aquinas.10 What film underscores
6 See Cavell, WV, 165.

7 Alexander Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film, or a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Movies” (henceforth AF), in ACA, 586.
8 Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX, 7, 1049a–1049b. For a comprehensive treatment of the over-
all conceptual system and the place of aesthetics in it for each of the major thinkers treated
here, see my Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio
9 Aristotle, Poetics, J. Barnes ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1450a,
12; 1450b, 28.

10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2012), I–
II, 57, 3, ad 3. In spite of his novel assimilation of an Aristotelian view of the essentially
embodied human subject, he still found the plastic arts lower than the verbal arts because
of their greater implication in the body.
9 ON FILM 205
is embodiment, although, as in the arts generally, only from the contem-

plative, non-tactual and therefore paradoxically disembodied viewpoint.11
Film is a subspecies of photography. At the mechanical level, the tra-
ditional film is a matter of still photographs. Composed on the reel of
a series of stills, the proximate ground of the work of art emerges with
the rapid sequential projection of these stills on a two-dimensional
screen. At the viewing level, this overcomes one of Zeno’s paradoxes,
the one involved in reducing motion to a series of stills. Film as viewed
sets the photographs in motion to produce the illusion of three dimen-
sions—or rather the four dimensions of space-time—that is the domain
of the artwork. But the illusion exists as such only as it is perceived.
The projection on the screen is still not the full work of art. As Dewey
and Heidegger both noted, the work of art is what it does to constitute
perception, how it works upon us; the art-product—here light on the
screen—is what does the work.12
Film has undergone several phases of development. (Here we move
from phenomenological description to historical narrative.) The first
major transition was from silent films to “talkies.” The second was from
black-and-white to color projection. Most current is the transition to
spectacular special effects made possible by the computer. But within
that general framework, there have been other transitions both in tech-
nique and in conception.
The early film stories specialized in chase scenes: Cops and Robbers,
Cowboys and Indians. There followed melodramas and burlesque shows
adapted from vaudeville and calculated to attract a popular audience. The
higher middle class stayed with the theater. Then filmmakers turned to
filming classic theater; but without the diction upon which it is built, it
soon lost its charm for the middle class. Much later, with the introduc-
tion of sound, the filming of theater reached a high level of success in
Laurence Oliver’s Hamlet and Orson Welles’ Macbeth, both of which
came out in 1948.
11 See Noel Carroll, “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image,” Philosophy and Film,
ed. C. Freeland and T. Wartenberg (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71. The concocters of
virtual reality are working to remedy that by linking the visual with the tactual.
12 Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 162ff, 106–19, 139. This is a
central theme in Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. E. Casey
et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 15, 24 ff, and in Heidegger.
206 R.E. Wood
In the silent era, much of cinema turned to morality tales. As Mitry

reported: “Pretty soon every film became a kind of detailed sermon.”13
Love was not shown as sexual but as a spiritual communion built around
“the husband’s courage, the wife’s chastity and docility, and their mutual
respect.”14 A very long way from contemporary film, indeed.
In films of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin’s (1889–1977) are unique.
They center upon his personal art style as mime and dance. He is best
known for his creation of The Tramp, with a Hitler mustache, wear-
ing baggy pants, tight jacket, small hat and big shoes, carrying a cane,
walking with a rhythmic waddle, while occasionally swinging his cane.
He is a kindly down-and-out person, exhibiting both slapstick humor
and pathos. Chaplin eventually had his own studio, wrote, produced,
directed, edited, composed the music and starred in most of his works.
Rather than following a strict script, he created as he went along.
Creation ultimately happened in the final editing. For The Kid he shot as
many as 53 takes for each finished take so he could be more creative at
the editing stage.15
When talkies first came in (the first was The Jazz Singer in 1927, with
Al Jolson), Chaplin thought they would lose some of the artistic quality
of the silent film. He continued to produce silent films, one of his best
known being Modern Times¸ which appeared in 1936, nine years later
than the first talkie. He eventually worked with dialogue and produced
one of his best in Limelight (1952), a semi-autobiographical work.
In addition to the stage, filmmakers also saw a similarity between film
and the novel since both were shaped by development in time, so they
began turning novels into film form.16 With D.W. Griffith’s Birth of the
Nation in 1915, based on The Clansman, a novel by Thomas Dixon,
Jean Mitry claims that “cinema as an artform was born.”17 The backlash
it produced led to Griffith’s filming of Intolerance which linked four sto-
ries, one from the present, with three others from the past: the story of
Christ’s crucifixion, of the St. Batholomew’s Day massacre, and of the
fall of the Babylonian empire to the Persians. These two works have been
13 APC, 284a.
14 APC, 285–6.
15 APC, 175b.
16 APC, 326b.
17 APC, 67b.
9 ON FILM 207
considered masterpieces at the level of editing and rhythm which made

cinema an art form.18 In terms of technique, Griffith introduced the
symbolically significant montage, which was taken up in a powerful way
by Eisenstein in The Battleship Potemkin.19 Thomas Ince contributed the
shooting script, a detailed plan of the film from the beginning—some-
thing Chaplin never used but which is now commonplace.20
In more recent times, David Lean’s films of Dickens’ Great
Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), which remain scrupulously
close to the text of the novels, were considered significant successes.21
Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) is a model for the filmed novel. It
was based on Frank Norris’ McTeague (1899).22 Mitry considers it
“unsurpassed even by today’s standards.”23
Though special effects developed throughout the history of film,
they advanced light-years with digitization. The first spectacular use of
the new special effects technology was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Oddysey, aided by a strong musical score. From there it mushroomed
into all kinds of fantasy action films. It is Cops and Robbers, Cowboys
and Indians all over again. Here highly sophisticated spectacle tends to
overwhelm the storyline and character development. Add 3D to that and
we get a very powerful medium.
We must add something about color in film. Early films were black
and white. Some of them were tinted to represent the overall meaning of
the sequence. The technology to reproduce natural color was made com-
mercially feasible for use in film in 1925 with the advent of Technicolor,
though earlier versions were available as far back as 1891. Even in pho-
tography, many still prefer the stark contrasts of black and white, for
example, in Ansel Adam’s landscape photos, over their toning down in
color. Color is more natural, but black and white can be more artistic.
The art of color film involves, as in painting, the use of complementarity
18 APC, 311b.
19 Sergei Eisenstein was not only the most accomplished of film directors, he was one of
the best theoreticians of the film. See a collection of his works in Film Form: Essays in Film
Theory, Jay Leyda trans. (New York: Hartcourt 1949).
20 APC, 297b.
21 APC, 329b.
22 It was cut from an astonishing 10 h to a still whopping 4!
23 APC, 362b.
208 R.E. Wood
and contrast, especially in costuming and setting. And as in painting,

framing is crucial.
Here I want to focus upon the relation of film to other art forms. First
of all, note that images are to film what notes are to music and words
to literature. They are the units which are combined to form an artistic
whole in each case. And what is crucial are thus the relations images are
given. In film, we find a combination of script, music, and images. The
ideal film is one which coordinates ahead of time the script, camera func-
tions, mis-en-scène, and music, though often music is added after the film
work has been completed, as in the special case of Potemkin.24
First of all, consider painting, which, apart from every other art form,
is present all at once, though held in the tension between aesthetic form
and reference, between the immediacy of sensory presence and (whether
directly representational or not) the mediation of gathering a world.25
This is also true of print-making and still photography. Film breaks
through the immediate presence of the painting to move us into its
active temporal context.
Sculpture, being three-dimensional, requires the viewer to move
around the object to gain a sense of the transitions between the inde-
terminate number of profiles presented for viewing (though, in the
case of Calder’s mobiles, the sculptural piece moves for the viewer).
Architecture, as the art of creating functional space, adds to this the
three-dimensional interior as well as the transformations rendered by dif-
fering natural and artificial lighting conditions.26 The camera carries us
around the three-dimensional objects virtually present on the screen.
In contrast to sculpture and architecture, painting is all there at once
and observable only from a single perspective, i.e., direct frontal viewing,
no matter what the perspective in the painting itself. Furthermore, even
in realistic painting, being all there at once precludes questioning beyond
the frame or behind the figures presented. By contrast, in photography
such questioning makes perfectly good sense insofar as the photograph
presents the real world which we know extends beyond the frame of the
24 APC, 251b. See below.

25 See Heidegger, OWA, PLT, 48–9.
26 Cf. Paul Weiss, Nine Basic Arts, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1961, 67–84. See also my “Architecture: The Confluence of Technology, Art, Politics,
and Nature,” Philosophy of Technology, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association, 1996. It is reprinted in the volume you are reading.
9 ON FILM 209
picture.27 Though, just as with the painting, what makes a good photo-
graph involves the balance of the forms, the play of dark and light and
of colors within the frame. The frame of the painting, unlike that of the
photo, establishes its own enclosed world. But the same artistic framing
within each film shot requires the same sense of balance.
There is also an interesting phenomenon, the Kuleshov effect, which
resembles the Albers effect in painting. Josef Albers showed that the
same color surrounded on a different field by different colors appeared
different in each field. Lev Kuleshov showed the same unexpressive face
of the actor Ivan Muzhukhin linked to three different situations: a bowl
of soup, the corpse of a man lying face down on the ground, and a half-
naked woman lying seductively on a couch. The face seemed to be look-
ing at each of the objects in turn and to look pensive in regarding the
bowl, sad when viewing the dead man, and smiling at the woman.28 The
point is that the same appears differently in different contexts. However,
a viewer would not notice it if it appeared in events separate from one
another. One would think the same phenomenon would follow from dif-
fering musical accompaniment to the same scene as follows from a differ-
ent script accompanied by the same music.29
Film shares with painting and still photography the two-dimensional
surface which affords frontal viewing from a fixed perspective and pre-
sents us with a virtual three-dimensional world.30 But film as “motion
pictures” is like Calder’s mobiles in relation to the viewer. Furthermore,
film is able to replicate our ability to move around sculptural pieces and
through architectural works. However, as in theater, it sets its own pace
and drags us along when we might prefer to linger. We may zero in on
a painting but as viewers of a film, we can attend to it only in terms of
the time of viewing determined by the film.31 Hence the temporality
involved in the viewing of film is significantly other than that involved in
viewing the plastic arts. It is actually someone else’s—the cameraman’s,
27 Cavell, WV, 23.

28 APC, 100a. Maurice Merleau-Ponty reported the same kind of exercise. “The Film
and the New Psychology,” Sense and Non-Sense, H. and P. Dreyfus trans. (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 54.
29 See above.
30 See Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form, (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), 69–103.
31 There are apparently no films showing the pictures that Mussorgsky describes musically
in his Pictures at an Exhibition.

210 R.E. Wood
and ultimately the director’s— viewing of the plastic work that we are
enabled to experience through the film. One might say that the plas-
tic arts leave us free to pace our own viewing, while film dominates our
viewing by giving us a surrogate point of view. Even though we use our
own eyes, we see through the eyes of someone else and as dictated by
someone else’s pace.32 However, we must add that technological devel-
opments make it possible to freeze a frame and treat it as a still photo-
graph, or to rewind and slow the speed so as to contemplate the action
or a given object at our own pace.
Film’s ability to preserve what it “sees” allows for both filming in seg-
ments and retakes. This involves an enormous difference in time-frame
between the time of filming and the time of viewing. Between the two
is the cutting room or the digital equivalent where the composition
comes into being. As Eisenstein noted, the real work of art only comes
to be in assembling the segments into an integral whole, cutting, splic-
ing, re-assembling.33 The finished product is indeed a collage. Battleship
Potemkin is a masterpiece of the art of film collage. During the prepara-
tion for meeting the ships sent against the rebellious sailors, the shots
varied from 2 to 6 seconds, giving the overall impression of vigorous
activity. All the takes are only the materials that have to be reduced and
assembled to form the coherent whole that eventually comes to be the
final art-product ready to come to life in the perceptions of the viewers.34
The director commands both actor and camera angle and immedi-
ately focuses both by directing the cameraman or functioning as cam-
eraman themselves and through what they finally allow to appear from
a given scene in the cutting room. The director oversees the shooting
angles, manipulates the actors scene by scene, then cuts and splices until
the parts come into an integral whole. Though guided by an overall
interpretation of the script, the way the filming and editing occurs leaves
immense room for playing with possibilities in each scene. As we noted,
this is true most of all in Chaplin’s work.
Because filming can start and stop and because the result can be cut
and recomposed, our ordinary relations to space and time can be altered.
32 Cavell,WV, 25; Sesonske, AF, 588.

33 SergeiEisenstein, “The Cinema as an Outgrowth of Theater: Through Theater to
Cinema,” in ACA, 345–50.
34 Alexander Sesonske, “The World Viewed” in The Georgia Review, 1974, 564 (hence-
forth TWV).
9 ON FILM 211
The final composition can not only shift within the time-frame of the
story from present to past and future, but by superimposition can bring
back the past and anticipate the future within the spatial confines of the
present action. Composition can also juxtapose on the screen two spa-
tially separated events, typically two people on either end of a phone
conversation. Eisenstein did that in Alexander Nevsky (1938) by sequen-
tially following the bursting of the battlelines with the bursting of the
ice in the river. Chaplin did it in Modern Times (1936) when he opened
with images of passengers emerging from a subway and workers enter-
ing a factory followed by images of a flock of sheep. Goebbels did it The
Eternal Jew (1940) when he placed an image of rats fleeing a building
between images of Jews as greedy and gluttonous.
Like and unlike the novel, film can compress action into its essential
features.35 Of course one can also do that in the novel, but only in the
alienative distance of the reconstructive imagination. Because it deals
with words as universally referred, the novelist can describe the essen-
tial in a relatively short span, leaving it to the imagination of the reader
to concretize what is linguistically described. Such compression can be
done much less successfully on the stage which, compared with film, suf-
fers from its extreme spatial and temporal confinement.36 In the case of
film, the essential is expressed in the succession of concrete images. In
presenting action, for example a boxing match, only certain highlights
are shot, for a longer or shorter overall time-span, depending upon the
intent of the director.
Apart from whatever archetypal symbolism might be operating in a
given film, there can be symbols, actually metonymies, intrinsic to that
film itself. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (voted the great-
est movie of all time at the Brussels World Fair in 1958) was commis-
sioned by the Communist government of the Soviet Union in 1925 to
celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the event it portrayed. When the
sailors revolted, they threw their officials overboard, including the ship’s
doctor, Dr. Singelov. During the scuffle his pince-nez fell off and was
entangled in the rigging. It became a symbol internal to this film of the
overthrow of the officials, and indeed of the middle class itself during
35 Sesonske, AF, 588.

36 Panovsky, SM, 354.
212 R.E. Wood
the revolution of which the Potemkin episode of 1905 was the herald.37
Again, in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), the central figure, Susan,
attempts suicide by swallowing an overdose of pills. Welles foregrounds
the glass next to her bed as a symbol of her attempted suicide. (Welles’
Citizen Kane took top billing for the next 40 years.)
In the production of the stills, the camera narrows and expands the
frame by close-ups and fade-backs. It focuses attention within the frame
by zeroing in and fading out, selecting now one, now the other figure
as focus, relegating the rest to the fringe. The camera moves the frame
itself to include, in principle, all that could be seen without the cam-
era. Of course, what one sees is not simply “the real world,” since what
one films may be elaborately staged, as in Eisenstein’s Potemkin Village
or any typical studio set, or it may be an enlargement of a miniaturized
set, or a matter of elaborate special effects made possible by computer
technology.
Jean Mitry contests André Bazin’s claim that the film presents “the
real world,” since, contrary to the ordinary perceptual field, what is
filmed is framed, perspectivally altered, put in relation to prior and sub-
sequent scenes, and paced, according to the instructions of the director.
That detaches what is filmed from the reality in which it is embedded.38
Mitry comments: “By retaining only selected moments, condens-
ing space and time, film imposes on us a vision of the world organ-
ized toward a certain significance.”39 It is this which, though allowing
us to view reality, is nonetheless “affected by a coefficient of unreality
and strangeness.”40 This is exactly what Roman Jakobsen said occurs in
poetry.
As we observed in an earlier chapter, time-lapse photography, as the
extreme of the distinction between the time of filming and the time of
viewing, allows the audience to see things otherwise unseen. Fixed at a
given point, time-lapse photography creates a series of stills separated
from each other by a given and constant interval of time. Put together
and projected rapidly onto a screen, the result of such stills performs
the task of temporal synthesis inexactly performed in everyday life by
37 APC, 39aff.
38 APC, 169ff.
39 APC, 161b.
40 APC, 170b.
9 ON FILM 213
psychological retention so we can observe in a short time the process

that took a significantly longer time to occur in real life.41 Since we live
in the flowing Now, the unity of observed processes is ordinarily only
a matter of necessarily inexact recollective thought. Moreover, we never
focus, the way a camera can, upon a single process over a long period
of time, so that what our retentive capacity gathers for us is, rather than
a single given thing observed over a long period of time, only a series
of discrete observations pulled out from the multiple contents that have
impinged upon our awareness during the period when we were doing
and observing other things.
Since film presents exactly a two-dimensional view of the physical
reality filmed,42 the line between fictional and real in what is presented
through film is easily crossed and the two confused. The possibilities
afforded by computer manipulation makes possible the insertion of fic-
tional characters into scenes with real characters, as in Woody Allen’s
Zellig (1983) or Robert Zemeckis’ Forest Gump (1994, based on the
1986 novel by Winston Groom). Though this affords interesting view-
ing, it also makes increasingly questionable the reliability of filming and
of photographic evidence in general for testimonial purposes.
Like a novel, the film story can be presented objectively or subjec-
tively or in both ways. In the subjective mode, the first person narrates
and comments on what has happened. There is also an attempt to have
the camera produce “absolute subjectivity” by occupying the visual point
of view of the subject who saw of himself what each individual can but
could not see his face except in a mirror. Robert Montgomery tried that
in The Lady in the Lake (1947). The effect was very odd and not at all
satisfying to watch.43
What is filmed is ordinarily guided by an antecedent script. The
script employs a visual medium whose powers, like those of the written
medium generally, can only present the vague outline of an actual vis-
ual world since words stand in for universal concepts that cannot match
individual reality. Hence the old saw, “a picture is worth a thousand
41 On the notion of retention, see Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time
Consciousness, J. Churchill trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 50–97.

43 APC, 208a–10b.
214 R.E. Wood
words.”44 The script involves what Roman Ingarden called “spots of

indeterminacy” and “schematized aspects” that have to be filled in by
the reader’s imagination.45 The movie script, so to speak, provides the
recipe for a performance in a series of entirely different media, first in the
imagination of the director and actor as reader, then in the acting out on
site or on the set, in reduction and assembly in the cutting room or com-
puter, in projection upon the screen, and finally in the act of viewing.
Contrast the written page of a novel with the script of a play or a
screen script. One has to consider here the radical difference between
the silently read, the orally interpreted, and the enacted. Silent reading,
the domain of academics, provides a second-order sensibility, a life-world
performed in the interior of the reader’s imagination, filling out the
world through the necessarily limited description provided by the text.
The orally interpreted adds a whole new dimension of verbal dynamics.
It gives body to the purely interior domain of the imaginatively recon-
structed; it locates interiority on the earth. The word that is heard brings
sound into prominence, which, in the case of poetic diction, constitutes
an essential component of the meaning conveyed. Part of the joy in read-
ing Shakespeare stems from the sheer sonorousness of his lines, “giv-
ing airy nothing a local habitat.” Enactment takes this one step further
by adding the full explicitness of the visual world, which in reading has
to remain only in outline, even in the reconstructions of a reader pos-
sessed of a particularly vivid imagination. Imagination in the three cases
of silent reading, oral interpretation, and visual enactment involves an
attempted entry into the life of the characters referred to in the script,
but it also involves the construction of a visual world. In the first two
cases imaginative construction also involves the look of the characters
in action as well as of the general visual ambiance. That look is made
explicit by film. But even here, members of an audience will take in the
film differently, for that depends, Mitry says, on “the taste, sensitivity,
education, cultural knowledge and mood of each individual.”46 He like-
wise observes, “A film is a mirror in which we recognize only what we
present to it through what it reflects back to us; all it ever reflects in our
44 Of course this only refers to visual representation. What we are producing in this text is
not amenable to visual representation.

45 Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, G. Grabowicz trans. (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), 246–87, 331–56 (henceforth LWA).

46 APC, 80b.
9 ON FILM 215
image. Might this be the reason why the man-in-the-street prefers pure
action or spectacular films?”47
The visual ambiance becomes increasingly important as we move from
the novel to the stage to the film, and that not always for the better.
Compare the verbal suggestions of Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, to the explicit display of nudity and sexual activ-
ity in the film version. In the book nudity and sexuality are submerged
in the larger context of the novel and positioned by the preface in the
largest possible framework. The preface locates the themes of Being
and Lightness in a discussion of Parmenides and Nietzsche. From the
beginning the novel is set within the framework of the most compre-
hensive reflectiveness. The film version does not directly attend to that
framework; nudity and sexuality jut into prominence and threaten to
overwhelm the level of deeper and of deepest significance. The power
of visual immediacy tends to block rather than stimulate the reflective
awareness intended and achieved by the novel.
Contrasted with a play, film so increases the power of the visual that
one could have long scenes of action or extended moments of visual
exploration without any word being spoken. Indeed, in the early silent
films action and visual exploration were clearly the focal elements. As we
noted before, Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians were favorite
subjects, with diction playing an extremely subordinate role in the sub-
titles or intercalated dialogue cards; hence the need for exaggerated ges-
tures.48 By contrast, diction is the heart of the stage.49 So much so that,
as we already noted, Aristotle claimed that reading without enactment,
either audile or visual, is sufficient to take in the power of tragedy.50 And
as Sesonske noted, “the fundamental categories of drama are nothing
like space, time, and motion [the primary formal categories of cinema],
47 APC, 86b. As an epigram to “In vino veritas,” in Stages on Life’s Way, Søren
Kierkegaard cites Lichtenberg: “Such works are mirrors. When an ape gawks in, no Apostle
gazes out.” W. Lowrie trans. (New York: Schocken Books,1967), 26.
49 Carroll, 76.
50 Like Aristotle, Sesonske claims that a play can be “fully experienced and understood”
merely by reading (AF, 586). Such a claim turns upon what “experienced” and “under-
stood” mean. It obviously fails with regard to experience. And there is an “understanding”
involved in completed presence that is not there in the absence involved in reading. Of
course, film also is a mode of presence in absence since the viewer and the actors are absent
from one another.
216 R.E. Wood
but are rather character and action.”51 The move from silent film to talk-
ies allowed subtlety of character to emerge from the stereotypes required
by speechless moving pictures.52
The novel, the play, and the film have in common a focus upon
human action. The real center of a play lies in the action that the dia-
logue mediates, the kind of character it displays, and the sense of inhabit-
ing a world it exhibits. Here the word that is heard is the primary action,
closely related to gesture and requiring more or less in costuming and
set. As we have already noted, the visual spectacle takes on central promi-
nence in the case of film. It is precisely the power of that peculiar promi-
nence that has the deepest effect upon contemporary life, drawing in the
masses of people and moving and shaping our dispositions, especially
when music is added to the action. As we have already noted, it is almost
a requirement of the majority of today’s films that they must weave in
sufficient amounts of sex and violence to grip the audience viscerally. It
is precisely those elements that ancient Greek theater considered best
only alluded to verbally in place of appearing on stage—thus, according
to one etymological suggestion, as ob-scene, opposed to and thus outside
the scene. It would surely be in keeping with the ancient Greek sensibil-
ity in Plato and Aristotle to maintain that such depiction would so arouse
the passions as to disallow or diminish reflective judgment. Without the
discipline of reflectiveness film can pander, as no other art form can, to
the immediate evocation of desire and involve the viewers in their pas-
sions more than it stimulates reflection.
The slowing down of the film has opened up a special dimension of
“the pornography of violence,” beginning with the slow-motion presen-
tation of the machine-gunning of the central characters in Bonnie and
Clyde (1967) and developed further by Quentin Tarentino in Inglourious
Basterds (2009). The technique allows one to “savor” the bodies being
cut down, bleeding, and falling to the ground as one might savor a bal-
let. Along with sex, violence has become a staple in contemporary mov-
ies, around both of which the camera regularly lingers. The sex scenes
are not slowed down, but nonetheless are savored by up-close shots and
51 Sesonske,AF, 586.
52 Sesonske,TWV 567. It was somewhat of a surprise that a contemporary silent film,
The Artist (2011), took five Academy Awards, including one for Jean Dujardin as best
actor.
9 ON FILM 217
perspective variation through the camera’s moving around the couple

involved.
As director Andrey Tarkovsky sees it, most film belongs to enter-
tainment as a phenomenon of mass culture. That distinguishes it from
a real art form. “Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the
civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barri-
ers between man and the crucial questions of existence, his conscious-
ness of himself as a spiritual being.”53 Indeed, “in the art of the latter
half of the twentieth century mystery has been lost.” Today the arts are
almost totally devoid of spirituality.54 As an art form film is poetic, the
most poetic of the art forms, suggesting more than it presents, revealing
a vison of life, allowing for “an affective as well as a rational appraisal.”55
It is able to set thought in motion regarding the most fundamental con-
siderations of the meaning of life. About his own works, he said
What I wanted was to pose questions and demonstrate problems that go

to the very heart of our lives and thus to bring the audience back to the
dormant, parched sources of our existence. Pictures, visual images, are far
better able to achieve that end than any word, particularly now, when the
word has lost all mystery and magic and speech has become mere chatter—
empty of meaning.56
He likewise remarks that progress in distinguishing film as an art form

will be through its distinguishing itself from the novel and the theater.
Film will gradually move away from all adjacent art forms to stake out its
own peculiar space.57
But to continue attending to the difference between film and other
art forms, enactment adds in the visual domain the dimension of ges-
ture, the expressivity of bodily comportment which brings it close to
portrait painting as far as expressivity is concerned. But unlike theater
53 Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time. K. Blair trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1986), 42, 81. (henceforth SIT).

54 SIT, 96.
55 SIT, 18, 20–1, 118.
56 SIT, 228.
57 Tarkovsky, the direct opposite of Eisenstein whose aim was visceral stimulation of sup-
port for the Revolution, worked out of the Russian religious tradition. One of his major
works dealt with the painter-monk Adrey Rublio. SIT, 23. For a comprehensive look at
Tarkovsky’s work, see András Bálint Kovács, “Andrei Tarkovsky,” ACPF, 581–90.
218 R.E. Wood
and like painting, film can bring us close up to capture facial comport-
ment. However, in this respect film is not so limited as painting to a
frozen moment, for it can replicate and focus a whole gestural style. It
intensifies the viewer’s capacity to focus upon the full concreteness of
the character, which is impossible in ordinary life, for in film we can see
characters up close who cannot see us. The latter is more or less true for
theater but the close-up is not.
Film does not exactly give us a “God’s eye view” since a hypotheti-
cal Giver of total being has no point of view: everything would stand
absolutely transparent within and not before such a being. But film does
give us a kind of human omnipresence, limited by the limited receptiv-
ity of the human eye and the necessary perspectivity of human viewing.
Film satisfies the voyeur’s instinct without encroachment upon the pri-
vacy of others.58 One becomes the perennially fancied “fly on the wall.”
Certainly that is virtually the case in theater, although both we and the
actors know that we are seeing and being seen. Film completely absents
the actors from the viewing audience. And by the zoom-in it allows the
viewers to come up close in a way impossible in the theater and not at all
in real life, even for the fly on the wall, without disturbing the action.
In the play, setting, along with costuming, plays a role; but setting
is fixed and the time of viewing allows for comparatively very little by
way of change of scenery between acts. In film, the segmentation of the
scenes which allows separation of the time and place of filming from
the time and space of viewing brings the whole world, real and artifi-
cially simulated, to function as setting. This is the basis for the title of
Stanley Cavell’s major work on film, The World Viewed. The camera can
follow the action indefinitely beyond the immediate space to which a
stage setting is confined, leading on in principle into the entire surround-
ing world.59 We can see this contrast most clearly if we compare opera
performed and opera filmed—the latter, where the filming is limited to
the stage, reached its high point in Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute
(1975)—and when the filming is set free to follow the action beyond
any given setting, as in the cinematic performance of Francesco Rosi’s
Carmen (1984) featuring Placido Domingo.
58 See Cavell, WV, 40. Cavell compares the viewer with Plato’s Gyges in the Republic, II,
358.
59 Sesonske, AF, 587.
9 ON FILM 219
Stage is live, film is not. Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, Marlene
Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe live on in their films. Appearing before a
live audience, stage actors feed upon the audience response. The stage
performance, like any life sequence, disappears when it ends, though
it may live on in memory and in the effects it had on the audience.
A film lives on as long as the medium is not corrupted, as all things
eventually are.60
Actors in a film are more the director’s creation insofar as the direc-
tor controls the takes and the cutting room.61 In line with the immense
difference between the time of viewing and the time of filming, actors
in film do not necessarily go through the same sequence as the final
viewers. A director may shoot at the same time all parts of a film that
take place in a single setting, no matter how far apart they will be at the
time of viewing. Actors in a movie thus have a very different relation to
the overall performance than stage actors. As a result of the possibility
of multiple takes and chronological segmentation and mixing in film-
ing time, the actors only need memorize relatively short portions of the
script for a given filming time. Stage actors, by contrast, need to have
command over the whole script and have relative freedom in how they
perform at any given time. Though the director may control the actors
before and after a given performance, during the performance the actors
are on their own. In film they are never on their own—or if they are, it
is only by the allowance of the director, as Robin Williams or Jonathan
Winters might each be turned loose to “do their thing.”62
Music in film deserves special attention. Though stage might have
musical accompaniment when the play is not a musical, it is not com-
mon today, whereas it would be rare to have a film without musical
accompaniment. Musicality gives rise to what Mitry calls “inexpressible
meaning”63—a kind of contradiction: what music expresses is inexpressible
meaning; but I presume he means not expressible in verbal form. The
image stands between the word and the music: it is expressible in verbal
form, but not in its individuality. According to an old Scholastic adage,
60 Exceptmaybe plastic which has accumulated in the area the size of Texas around
Midway Island….
61 Sesonske, TWV, 568.
62 Sesonske, TWV, 567–69.
63 APC, 26a.
220 R.E. Wood
Individuum est inexpressibile. Musical form cannot be expressed in any

other medium.
There is, of course, a significant difference in the role of music in film
and in opera: in opera music is focal, in film it is subsidiary—unless we
have a filmed opera or a musical. As Aristotle remarked and we have
often repeated, music produces emotional dispositions (ethos) like those
evoked under real conditions. That makes music, in his estimation, the
most imitative of the art forms, for real conditions and their surface imi-
tation in painting can at best give us signs of inner disposition: music
gives the disposition by reproducing it in us.64 Moving the pictures
gives us increased expressivity through gestural style, but music greatly
enhances the re-creation of the disposition. In accompanying film per-
formance, music accentuates the disposition proper to the action and
draws us more powerfully into it than acting alone could ordinarily do.
A PBS tribute to John Williams presented two viewings of a scene from
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) one with and one without the Williams
accompaniment. The difference in emotional impact was amazing. The
music provided “the shark theme,” like the grandfather theme in Peter
and the Wolf. Its introduction created an ominous anticipation of the
frightening appearance of the Great White Shark. Music together with
the emotional possibilities of the visual itself affords the possibility of
emotional manipulation—for better and for worse—that is unlike any
other medium.65
For director Tarkovsky, “the dominant, all-powerful factor of the
film image is rhythm.”66 The distinctive style of each of the great direc-
tors lies in how they “sculpt time.”67 Roman Ingarden noted that film-
ing requires a rhythmic pacing of the transformations of spatial relations
that covers the same domain of temporal68 pacing that belongs to music.
Hence from the very beginning film and music were bonded. The
rhythm involved in both media, unlike meter in poetry, is like the rhythm
64 Aristotle,Politics, VIII, 5, 1340a, 1ff.

65 For an in-depth treatment of music and the film, see APC, 230–74.
66 Tarkovsky, 113.
67 Tarkovsky, 121.
68 Roman Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, R. Meyer and J. Goldthwait trans.
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), 332–9. Tarkovsky, on the other hand, sees music
and film as conflicting. T, 159.
9 ON FILM 221
involved in animal life with breathing and heartbeat varying in duration

and intensity depending upon the character of the action.69
However, this was not the case with Eisenstein, who commis-
sioned Edmund Meisel to write the musical score for the first showing
of Potemkin but wanted the music to change periodically. The charac-
ter of the music was clearly an afterthought. The most memorable
musical accompaniment is taken from the three symphonies of Dmitri
Shostakovich, with No. 5 the most prominent, beginning and ending the
film. It would be interesting to study what different musical accompa-
niments would do for viewing the same visual spectacle. However, not
every musical score is appropriate. Lawrence Welk’s champagne music
would clearly not work nor, I think, would progressive jazz.
There have been attempts to produce a film in order to illustrate an
independently achieved musical score. Walt Disney’s Fantasia is one
attempt. I remember seeing it several times and enjoying it unreflectively.
Mitry found it “A travesty!” …with a few exceptions. He singles out two
sequences in The Nutcracker Sweet which involved successful synchroni-
zation of acoustic and visual movement: the mushroom dance and the
ballet of the exotic fish.70 But dancing hippopotamuses were anything
but elegant.
At the beginning we remarked that film is the contemporary equiva-
lent of nineteenth-century opera and the medieval cathedral. Each is a
matter of collaborative effort on the part of different kinds of artists and
technicians. However, each is controlled by a single person: in the case
of opera, the composer, but mediated through the director; in the case
of the cathedral, the architect. Though the effect of a collective effort on
the part of several different artists and technicians, film is finally the work
of the director-editor who fashions the parts and brings the whole into
being by collage. Through their artistry the film medium establishes in
a two-dimensional projection the creation of a three-dimensional virtual
reality of sight and sound. Through its alignment with music, film is able
to create powerful emotional effects tied to the action “mooded” by the
music. It allows the audience to become omnipresent voyeurs, to experi-
ence vicariously an indeterminately expansive set of possibilities of action
and setting, and to be emotionally drawn into the world depicted in a
69 APC, 105a ff.

70 APC, 263b–264b.
222 R.E. Wood
mode unrivaled by any other medium. As such, it allows us to be emo-

tionally manipulated in an unrivaled way, but it also gives us an enriched
and expanded experience and thus furnishes materials for a more com-
prehensively reflective life.
Like a poem or a symphony which may be read or heard more than
once to gain a fuller appreciation, so also with the film. One then can
move from a participatory to a reflective and critical stance. This allows
for comparison and evaluation.71
Mitry concludes his major work with the following:
Abandoning those still and lifeless gods [of classic theater] for the joy of
movement, artificiality for freedom, and absolute values for relative values,
it [cinema] is an art ultimately worthy of Mankind, one which celebrates
the victory of Dionysius over Apollo.
Weaving together time and space, the present and the past, reality and illu-
sion, with one foot in the camp of reportage and observation and the other
in storytelling and dream, integrating duration and following the develop-
ment of beings and things, the cinema of the future will undoubtedly be to
the cinema of today infinitely greater than what Joyce and Faulkner are to
Paul Bourget. Having been theatrical, pictorial, musical, romantic, the cin-
ema will finally be able to be itself: quite simply, cinematic.72
Following our usual practice, I want to end this treatment of film with
a brief discussion of a single work: an especially meaningful Danish film,
Babette’s Feast, director Gabriel Axel’s adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s
story.73 It won an Academy Award for the best foreign-language film
in 1987 and has been consistently praised by film critics. It has been
called “food film’s food film.” Leon Kass, in his extraordinary book,
The Hungry Soul, distinguishes feeding, eating, dining, and feasting.74
71 APC, 205–6.
72 APC, 379b.
73 Babette’s Feast (New York: Vintage, 1988). Isak Dineson was the penname of Karen
Blixen, The novel was originally published in The Ladies’ Home Journal.
74 The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 163 (henceforth HS). This remarkable book had its original pres-
entation through the invitation extended to Professor Kass by the Institute of Philosophic
Studies at the University of Dallas as a week-long McDermott lecturer. We were skepti-
cal when Kass responded to the invitation that he would address the philosophy of eating.
9 ON FILM 223
Babette’s feast was a feast indeed; and Kass devotes several pages to a
commentary on the film.75
The heroine of the story, Babette Hersant, a refugee from France in
1871, is taken in by a pair of spinsters who had lived with their father, a
Lutheran pastor, in a village, Vorre Vosborg, on the bleak Jutland coast
of Denmark. The sisters were named after the founders of Lutheranism:
Martine after Martin Luther and Filippa after Philip Melanchthon who
wrote the Augsburg Confessions, the defining document of Lutheranism.
The father considered the girls his right and left hands in his ministry
and rejected their suitors.
The story pivots around two suitors: a Swedish army lieutenant,
Lorens Löwenhielm, and an opera singer, Achille Papen. The former left
for service, which ended his courtship of Martine; and the singer, teach-
ing voice to Filippa, made amorous advances and was rejected by Filippa
herself. After the 1870 revolution in France, he recommended Babette
as a cook and housekeeper for the two spinsters. She had been at the
barricades and saw her husband and son executed. For twelve years she
functioned as their cook.
The father had founded a strict Lutheran sect that the sisters took
over after his death. At the time of the story, it had dwindled to a hand-
ful of old hangers-on. The sisters subsisted on a deliberately plain diet
and provided food for the poor. The sisters’ generosity shines against
the background of a rather bleak Danish coastal environment—no veg-
etation to speak of—accompanied by a rather bleak ascetic Christianity.
When Babette takes charge of purchasing and cooking the food, the cost
“was miraculously reduced, and the soup pales and baskets [for the poor]
acquired a new, mysterious power to stimulate and strengthen their poor
and sick.”76
Babette wins 10,000 francs in a lottery, a sum that would make her
independent. One estimate puts the sum at the equivalent of the annual
salary of a professor in France in 1871. As a remarkable gesture of loving
gratitude, she uses it to produce a feast for the women and some friends,
Neither Paul Weiss who wrote on virtually everything nor John Dewey who paid particular
attention to the lives of ordinary citizens had produced anything that approaches the wis-
dom about eating found in this surprising book.
75 HS, 183–9.
76 HS, 184. Quotations are from Isak Dineson’s text as cited in Kass’s book.
224 R.E. Wood
including the few remaining members of their sect, on the occasion of

the 100th anniversary of their now deceased father’s birth. One of the
friends is General Löwenheilm, thirty years removed from the young
lieutenant who had courted Martine. He arrives with his aunt, a member
of the sect. Now on his return, the splendor of his uniform, bedecked
with rows of medals and embroidered finery, stands out in stark contrast
with the plainness of the dress and surroundings of the parishioners. As
the book presents it, the general “strutted and shone like an ornamental
bird, a golden pheasant or a peacock, in this sedate party of black crows
and jackdaws.”77 Wonderful verbal imagery; but it is, indeed, one of the
virtues of film to far exceed the written word in this respect and make
the contrast vividly present.
The General had worked his way up the ranks and was prominent in
royal circles. He had been to Paris frequently and dined at the best res-
taurants, including the Café Anglais with its famous chef. As Providence
would have it, he was, indeed, a connoisseur of fine wine and food.
The parishioners gathered for the occasion had determined that, out of
respect for Babette, they would go along with whatever she provided
for them. The fare included bottles of the finest wine which, on every
other occasion, would not have been part of the ascetical flock’s fare.
The General, astonished, recognizes the Amontillado and the Veuve
Clicquot, 1860. He also recognizes Potage à la Tortue (turtle soup), the
Blinis Demidoff (buckwheat pancakes with caviar and sour cream), and
the most remarkable Cailles en Sarcophage (quail in a sarcophgus). The
latter he knew to have been invented by “the greatest culinary genius of
the age,” none other than the woman who had served the spinsters for
twelve years and now provided this wonderful feast.
The determined parishioners obligingly partake of the vintage and
the food; and the company “grew lighter in weight and lighter of heart
the more they ate and drank.” As the feast continues the atmosphere
becomes more relaxed and celebratory; old wounds between friends
are healed. The feast ends with the group holding hands and dancing
around a well under the starry skies.
A high point of the film is the speech of the General, which surprises
even himself. “Grace takes us all into its bosom and proclaims general
amnesty. See! That which we have chosen is given us and that which we
77 HS, 187.
9 ON FILM 225
have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we
have rejected is poured on us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met
together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!”78 No
doubt he has in mind the reconciliation with his beloved of thirty years,
just now achieved. He has also in mind the faithful ascetic parishioners
and the bliss of the banquet, its ambiance and results.
The film presents the meal as a kind of sacrament of love, transfor-
mation, and reconciliation. Kass concludes, “Souls and bodies nourished,
people are reconciled, imbued with the old spirit, awake to the presence
of the divine.”79
That is the bare bones of the story. What about the filmic features?
To indicate the omnipresence of the author, Karen Blixen (aka Isak
Dineson), director Axel introduces a visually absent narrator of the story.
The film opens with a rack of drying halibut framing the small dirt
street flanked by plain houses with black thatched roofs and white-gray
plastered walls. The sisters appear through the center of the fish-dry-
ing rack frame, framed in turn by the houses on each side and walking
toward the camera. The rack appears again when Babette first arrives.
The sisters take two of the fish and teach her how to prepare them in
a soup which they give to the poor. The fish appear once more when
Babette haggles with a fisherman for a lower price.
The Greek ichthys, which translates into “fish” in English, was an acro-
nym for Christ: Iesus Christos Theou Huios Soter, Jesus Christ Son of God
Savior. The rack might also symbolize his crucifixion. It suggests the
Christian context of the movie.
The centering technique, focused at the beginning upon the sisters
within the frame, is repeated two more significant times: when present-
ing the soldiers of the lieutenant’s regiment on horseback and in line
within a large courtyard, and when presenting Babette in her cape and
hood.
When individuals or couples are presented, they are either in the
left or right third at the outer edge of the frame or just touching the
center. When a horse and buggy are shown moving, the horses continue
to touch the center of the frame. Once, when Babette walks across the
room she eventually moves past the center, suggesting greater rapidity.
78 HS, 189.
79 HS, 191.
226 R.E. Wood
A significant technique is the superposition and sequencing of

elements in a nightmare Martine had after she had found out about the
meal with its wine accompaniment: encompassing flames, the tortoise to
be made into turtle soup, smoke, and wine that looked like blood spilled
on a white tablecloth.
Director Axel chose the Jutland coast over the Norwegian coast of
the novel for its bleak look: the light gray of the pebbled beach against
the gray-blue of the sea and the blue of the sky. His dominant color is
gray: Babette’s dress (with a black cape and hood and a white apron),
the sisters’ dresses, the inner walls of the home. He chose the color pal-
ette for the dinner from Vermeer’s painting of a woman pouring water
from a jug.
One of Axel’s favorite frames is Babette at the beach with her dark
gray dress and white apron standing on the far right of the frame watch-
ing a white seagull flying close to the water. The white of the seagull
matches the white of her apron. Axel saw the gull as a symbol of free-
dom. Babette wins the lottery which will allow her to free her talent for
preparing fine cuisine.
Music is at the center of the film, though only once as background.
This was after the break-up of the singer with Filippa, when a violin plays
a piece in a minor key which ends on a jarring note. A minuet is fea-
tured early in the film for a royal ball attended by the lieutenant before
he meets his beloved. There was the end of a musical presentation by
opera star Achille Papen who has sought recuperation for his health in
the village. This is followed by music lessons for Filippa whom Papen
heard in church, culminating in the love duet from Don Giovanni, which
led to his amorous advances and subsequent rejection. At the very center
were the hymns the small congregation frequently sang. The film nears
its ending with a hymn sung by the congregation while encircling the
well under the stars after the feast.
Dancing about a center suggests a new-found center for their com-
munity. That it is a well suggests the fostering of the new life. That it is
under the stars suggests some sense of encompassing divinity.
After Babette announces that she had spent the whole of the lottery
on the meal, for that was what a meal for 12 cost at the Café Anglais in
Paris,80 the sisters realized that she would not leave; but continuing to
80 There is a problem here. The cost at the Parisian café included the salaries of the chef,
the waiters, and the waitresses, as well as profit for the owners. Babette as chef and a young
9 ON FILM 227
stay with them involved the relatively poor life they led. Babette responds
that a true artist is never poor, presumably because her creativity is her
richness.
The film ends enigmatically with a candle sputtering its last as the
snow falls outside.
Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas. 2012. Summa theologiae. Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute.
Aristotle. 1984a. Metaphysics. W. Ross trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle.
J. Barnes ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1984b. Politics. B. Jowett trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle.
———. 1984c. Poetics. I. Bywater trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle.
Carroll, Noel. 1995. “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image.” Philosophy
and Film. C. Freeland and T. Wartenberg eds. New York: Routledge.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film.
Dickie, George and Richard Sclafani, eds. 1977. Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology.
New York: St Martin’s Press.
Dineson, Isak. 1988. Babette’s Feast. New York: Vintage.
Dufrenne, Mikel. 1973. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. E. Casey et al.
trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Jay Leyda trans. New
York: Harcourt.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.”
Husserl, Edmund. 1964. Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness.
J. Churchill, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ingarden, Roman. 1973. The Literary Work of Art. G. Grabowicz trans.
———. 1989. Ontology of the Work of Art. R. Meyer and J. Goldthwait trans.
Kass, Leon. 1994. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1967. Stages on Life’s Way. W. Lowrie trans. New York:
Schocken Books.
man as waiter received no salary, nor was there an owner who extracted his profit. So the
Jutland feast probably cost something like half the Café Anglais price.
228 R.E. Wood
Kovács, András Bálint. 2009. “Andrei Tarkovsky,” Routledge Companion to

Philosophy and Film. New York: Routledge.
Langer, Suzanne. 1953. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner’s.
Lewis, Brian. 2009. Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. P. Livingston
and C. Plantinga, eds. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, 1964. “The Film and the New Psychology.” Sense and Non-
Sense. H. and P. Dreyfus trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Mitry, Jean. 1997. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. C. King trans.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Panofsky, Erwin. 1977. “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures.” In Dickie
and Sclafani.
Plato. 1997. Republic. G. Grube and C. Reeve trans. Plato: The Complete Works,
J. Cooper ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Sesonske, Alexander. 1977. “Aesthetics of Film, or a Funny Thing Happened on
the Way to the Movies.” Dickie and Sclafani.
Tarkovsky, Andrey. 1986. Sculpting in Time. K. Blair trans. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Weiss, Paul. 1961. Nine Basic Arts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press.
———. 1975. Cinematics, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Wood, Robert E. 1996. “Architecture: The Confluence of Technology, Art,
Politics, and Nature.” Philosophy of Technology. Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association.
———. 1999. Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition.
CHAPTER 10
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life
Following Dewey, we have attempted from the beginning to attend to

the way in which art is related back to its matrix in nature, since we are
organic beings whose internal harmony depends, among other things,
upon our harmonizing with our natural environment. But it is our
nature to transform nature, both within us and without. Following the
natural need for food, clothing, and shelter, we build, we clothe our-
selves, we plant and harvest. Re-working natural materials, we invent
tools for building, farming, hunting, waging war. And in and through
doing all this, we invent regular ways of interacting with each other,
beginning with language. It is language which allows us to transmit our
practices to future generations so that such transformations accumulate
and ramify. But we also learn to transform our bodies, our clothing, our
houses, even our tools with decorative elements; we modulate our voices
in song, our language in poetry; and we invent instruments for produc-
ing harmonious sound (Fig. 10.1).
We see a kind of ideal genesis of these functions in Plato’s Republic.1
He has Socrates describe the coming into being of different levels of a
city. In order to satisfy the needs for food, clothing, and shelter, people
come together to share in the division of labor and its results by draw-
ing upon differing talents. But they also take time to celebrate and sing
hymns to the gods. Both factors involved in the hymns, the aesthetic
1 Republic, II, 268Dff.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_10
230 R.E. Wood
Fig. 10.1 James Carrière, Japanese Tea Ceremony Utensils
transformation of sound and the conception of the gods, add a sur-

plus element in relation to the provision of biological necessities. Tool-
making, aesthetic transformation, conceiving of cosmic functions, and
the formation of the language which allows us to think and communicate
with one another across all possible lines—all stem from the primordial
distance through the notion of Being we human beings have from the
biological needs we share with the animals.
People move beyond this “true and healthy city” in the direction of
surplus elements by introducing luxuries through cosmetology, cloth-
ing design, architecture, elaborate food-preparation techniques, com-
plex musical instrumentation, painting and the like. Human beings
develop skills in an indeterminate number of directions, but, by wal-
lowing in luxury, lose the harmony of soul and citizen at the first level
of the city.2 Hence Plato introduces another level: that of purgation
in which the chief vehicles are music and gymnastic.3 Both are to be
equally cultivated since too much music makes one effete, and too
2 Republic, II, 272D.

3 Republic, III, 410D.
10 THE AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE 231
much gymnastic makes one brutish. The blending of the two produces
emotional balance. However, the music must be of a certain kind, since
through music order and disorder sink most deeply into the soul and
affect its disposition to behave. So much is this the case that one can
predict that political changes will follow from changes in musical form.
(Think of totalitarianism and rock ‘n roll; as a friend of mine said, once
that got behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet system was doomed!)
Here Plato distinguishes between two types of music: Apollonian music
characterized by order, harmony, grace, and proportion, and Dionysian
music characterized by emotional excess, wild abandon. (Think of Bach
and Acid Rock.) Plato has Socrates promote the former and eschew the
latter.
Now what is most significant for our current purposes is that he goes
on to transfer the Apollonian properties from the temporality of sound
to the visual spatiality of the built environment. The citizenry is to be
surrounded from birth to death by a built environment characterized by
Apollonian properties. Here he refers to buildings, utensils, furniture,
clothing and—most surprisingly—painting. The latter is surprising if one
knows the position on painting that Plato has Socrates advance in the
concluding book of the Republic.4 Anticipating modern photography,
Plato compares a painting to a mirror, giving us a copy of a single
perspective on an object whose depth-dimension is the instantiation of
a Form. But, of course, what is crucial in a photograph as a work of art
is not the exact replication of a visible object or set of visible objects,
but the selection of the frame and the balance of elements—light and
shadow, shapes, and colors—within the frame. It is in the consideration
of structuring the built environment that Socrates focuses upon the
appearance of Apollonian factors in painting as well as in the design of
everyday useful objects.
Let us go on to attend more in detail to the areas Plato merely
lists. Let us begin by asking: where is the aesthetic element in eve-
ryday life? In addition to our relation to Nature which provides the
horizon and permeating atmosphere, appearing also in the inter-
stices of the built environment as green spaces with trees, bushes,
grasses, vegetables and flowers, there is also our relation to the every-
day built objects and to what we do in our entire environment. As Tom
4 Republic, X, 596D.
232 R.E. Wood
Leddy notes, the aesthete “extends her aesthetic skills to the objects and
events of everyday life.”5
Architecture furnishes the setting for most of what we do. We have
devoted a chapter to that. The setting for most of the objects Plato lists
is the house. Beyond the spatial relations formed by architectural enclo-
sure, there is interior decoration: spatial arrangement, color coordina-
tion, stylistic unity. One of the aesthetically well-formed objects that
Plato lists is furniture, in which design plays a key role. Its style—at least
in a given room—should be uniform and coordinated with the other ele-
ments in the room. The distribution of the furniture is crucial, so as to
satisfy not only the aesthetic “feel” of space, but also utility, facilitating
rather than hindering function.
Furniture includes couches, chairs, tables, foot-rests, rugs, lamps,
entertainment centers (not usually Heidegger’s Totenbaum and
Herrgottswinkel). Beyond the usefulitems, we also find non-utilitarian art
objects, from knick-knacks and framed photographs to paintings, prints,
and pieces of sculpture. The latter may be religious reminders, especially
the crucifix or Star of David or menorah or statue of the Buddha, and so
on. There are also plants and, at times, cut flowers. Arrangement of the
latter and careful pruning of the former enhance the presence of such
forms. The Japanese are especially adept at flower arrangement and plant
cultivation as they are sensitive to the whole environment, natural and
built.6
Plato also lists utensils: today we would find sets of china (plates, cups,
platters, and bowls), silverware (knives, forks, spoons, and ladles) and also
pots, pans, and jars, vases, decorated boxes, and clocks. What is aestheti-
cally significant is good design properties for matching sets. The Bauhaus
in post-World War I times (1918–33) sought to provide unity of style
for the whole built environment. Known primarily for its architecture, the
archetype of the International Style, the Bauhaus (“The Building House”
as a place for teaching) also concentrated upon good design in every-
day objects, following the lines of Plato’s recommendations.7 What they
aimed at was a Gesamtkunst parallel to Wagnerian opera.
5 Tom Leddy, “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” AEL, 9.

6 See Barbara Sandrisser, Exploring Environmental Aesthetics in Japan (Netherlands: Peter
Lang, 2009).
7 See Magdalena Droste, The Bauhaus: 1919–1933 (Taschen: 2006).
But the best interior design soon degenerates without upkeep. Plants
require regular care: watering, pruning, and periodic fertilizing. For the
home environment in general, there are two prime aesthetic proper-
ties: cleanliness and neatness.8 Regarding the former, dusting, vacuum-
ing, window cleaning, floor washing, and rug shampooing are crucial.
Neatness is another prime aesthetic property in one’s living quarters.
Here the old adage holds: “A place for everything and everything in its
place.” We might add another adage: “A cluttered environment mir-
rors a cluttered mind.” Even people of modest means can be concerned
with cleanliness and neatness. The housewife in days past was often a
model of the aesthetic of cleanliness and neatness, no matter how lim-
ited her family’s resources. And she was sensitive to the beauty of flow-
ers. But it tends to be the case that dirtiness and sloppiness go hand
in hand with limited resources, though I suspect that the former often
contributes to the latter. Those who are dirty and sloppy do not com-
mand well-paid jobs; they tend to be ill-disciplined generally. Of course,
there is the brainy professor whose mind is eminently ordered in their
specialty but whose exterior environment and clothing are a mess. To
me that is a problem of the compartmentalization of life and a lack of
integration.
We have already devoted a chapter to landscaping. Like sculpting, it
carves the lot, distributing living and non-living forms to establish the
setting for the house on the land. Caring for life forms is absolutely cen-
tral. Unlike a painting or a piece of sculpture that is static, landscaping
as the arrangement of forms and colors of living and non-living things
is dynamic, growing; and, without care, it degenerates from something
beautiful, even exquisite, to something ugly. Many people tend to let
things go: the lawn uncut and un-edged, and, along with the flower or
vegetable beds, full of weeds; junk is often scattered around the yard.
With the rise of Home Owners’ Associations, such unkemptness is not
permitted within a given neighborhood.
Clothing is a further item on Plato’s list of things that should exhibit
good design properties. Its parallel in animal display, especially in the
case of birds, is a significant feature of nature. The idea of formal cos-
tuming has its parallel, if not its inspiration, in bird plumage. It is more
pronounced in the male bird, and functions, often with dancing, to
8 See Leddy, “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” AEL, 9.

234 R.E. Wood
attract a female. It also functions to draw potential predators from the

nest inhabited by the more drab and thus more camouflaged female.
However, the aesthetic profusion often seems to be a surplus beyond
that which function requires.9
In earlier times elaborate formal clothing belonged to the tribal leader
or the king. The tradition continues in the few kings and queens now
functioning, but also in the Orthodox liturgy and, on solemn occa-
sions, in the Roman Catholic liturgy. It is in modern times, since the
Industrial Revolution, that clothing style gets extended from the upper
class throughout the population. Rank is still indicated by special cos-
tumes, pins, and embroidered patches. The very rich have their own
dress designers, jewelers, and tailors.
Certain occupations require uniforms. The uniform lends a certain
dignity to the worker or soldier and a feeling of professionalism to the
customers. Uniforms were more frequent some 60 years ago: maids, but-
lers, chauffeurs, soda jerks, the milkman, waiters and waitresses, janitors,
lawn-care providers, even filling-station attendants with their white shirts
and black bow ties, but also priests and nuns. In private schools there are
also school uniforms that set off school as a special place and time. In
Roman Catholicism, pageantry has a significant place: popes and bish-
ops dress up in Renaissance finery, priests and nuns have (or at least had)
their distinctive wardrobes. A not insignificant aspect of the Reformation
was the rejection of the pomp of the Roman Catholic Church. The
Counter-Reformation in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
by way of reaction to the plainness of Reformation churches and church
services, underscored liturgical pomp, and the corresponding Baroque
architecture went to decorative excess.10 The pomp still remains when
cardinals and bishops gather in Rome with the Pope for special sessions;
and the Swiss Guard, in Renaissance costumes, act as sentinels for the
Vatican.
Though royalty is out in most countries, the recent marriage of British
Prince William and Princess Catherine attracted world-wide attention.
All the pomp and splendor surrounding the event seemed somehow
appropriate, even in a democratic world. The clothing, the carriage, the
9 Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York:
Free Press, 1985), 325.

10 See Christian Norberg-Schultz, Baroque Architecture (Milan: Rizzoli, 1979).
Abbey festooned for the occasion, the orchestra and choir, the sermon,
the ceremony, the procession—all together created a marvelous specta-
cle, an uplifting presentation celebrating the solemn vows of marriage. It
even made some opponents of monarchy grudgingly admit the symbolic
value of the whole affair. What was being celebrated was the British peo-
ple and their royalty.
In the past, certain days—Sundays and special feast-days, Christmas
and Easter, Hanukkah, and Ramadan—stood out. Here were times
for special meals and extra special clothing to accentuate the elevated
character of the feast-day. Weddings and funerals also stood out and
were surrounded with special ceremonies and attended by people wear-
ing their best clothing. There are still special modes of dress for formal
affairs: presidential receptions, military funerals, celebrity parties, high-
school and college proms, weddings, and graduations. “Dressing up”
underscores the significance of the occasions or the functions.
Machiavelli used to don his finest garments as a sign of respect when
he read the classics. In a letter to Francesco Vittori, he wrote:
When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the

threshold, I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and
I put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I
enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There, I am
warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing and
was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them and ask them to
explain their actions and they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours
go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no
longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death. I live entirely through
them.11
Dressing up for the occasion is not simply a matter of “keeping up with

the Joneses”; it is a matter of respect and an underscoring of the impor-
tance of the occasion. It used to be the case that one marked the impor-
tant difference between Sunday religious observance and the workaday
by dressing up. On the frontier everybody, even the poorest of farmers,
had their “Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes.” Of course, there were also the
“saddle bums.” Now Sunday is almost entirely overtaken by the secular.
11 The Prince: Second Edition, H. Mansfield, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1999).
236 R.E. Wood
There is also dress-down creep in the offices, with Friday now a come-
as-you-wish day. Those who dress up are what used to be called “stuffed
shirts.”
Functionally, clothing is for protection but also for modesty. Of
course, in the latter function there is great latitude, from the Muslim
burka to the latest Hollywood fashions and on to the limited body cov-
erage of the inhabitants of the rainforests and jungles. But beyond con-
venientia there is venustas. From an aesthetic point of view there are
considerations of fit, style, color coordination, and overall neatness and
cleanliness in appearance.
Of course, there are always “deconstructionists” who typically run
counter to all this “bourgeois” preoccupation. That extends even to not
“dressing up” for special occasions because nothing is special: absolutely
no hierarchy! Today there is a general tendency to ignore formal clothing
completely, except among the well-to-do. I was incensed when the local
pastor showed up in scruffy shoes and a ball jacket for the interment
of my brother’s ashes—as if he was taking out the garbage. Professors
eschew the coat and the tie for the t-shirt or sweatshirt and jeans. Casual
dress is pervasive since there is, for many people, no difference between
one day and another. Likewise, since all people are considered basically
equal, indications of rank by special clothing is rejected in principle. With
the development of a certain kind of democratic society, rank and hierar-
chy tend to disappear, along with the symbols and ceremonies that give
expression to them. The calendar year tends to be flattened out, with
one day very much like another.
Clothing is secondary to physical fitness. Restaurant lunches typically
load the plates way beyond what is required to maintain one’s health.
Hence many men, especially among office workers, show a huge “pot.”
And that’s true across the board for a significant number of men. While
in some cases there might be problems with basic metabolism, generally
speaking, the lack of fitness displayed by the sagging, bloated stomach is
a sign of self-indulgence. Currently also, obesity among children and in
the general population is on the rise.
Women are particularly focused upon style, partly to attract or hold
their man, partly to impress their peers, and partly to feel good about
themselves, attaining a certain sense of elevation and dignity. The aes-
thetic focus is found in the use of cosmetics and the “beauty parlor”—an
odd expression, if you think about it. The term “cosmetics” is rooted
in the Greek kosmeo, which involved the notion of bringing order out
of chaos. It is something like halogen lighting in a museum: well used,

make-up allows certain features to stand out. When it is used clum-
sily, gaudily, obviously, it cheapens its users; but when used subtly, it
enhances. Think in the former case of the gaudiness of the late revivalist
Tammy Fay Baker and her imitators.12
In his Gorgias, Plato distinguished arts of appearance and arts of real-
ity both for body and soul. Cosmetology and the art of the chef are con-
trasted with medicine and gymnastics, while philosophy and legislation
are contrasted with poetry and sophistry. Medicine and gymnastics are
dedicated to health while cosmetology and the art of the chef are con-
cerned with appearance. Cosmetology is concerned with visual appear-
ance while tasting involves a focus upon flavor, regardless of whether it
promotes or degrades health.13
Also involved in appearance is jewelry: necklaces, bracelets, ear rings,
brooches. Jewelry is actually a form of sculpture. But its function is not
to transform its viewers or, not usually, to memorialize. However, rings
of different sorts—class rings, military service rings, and Super Bowl
rings—do memorialize; so does wearing your mother’s brooch or your
father’s military service ring. But for the most part, jewelry is to enhance
the presentation of the wearer, although, in the case of religious pins or
medals, it is to bear witness or as a reminder. Military medals are badges
of honor.
Regarding connoisseurs of food, wine, cigars, whiskey, beer, and per-
fumes, I had been inclined to think of connoisseurship in these areas as
the frivolous function of the relatively well-to-do. There is a certain fri-
volity or effeteness in people like the late historian of Renaissance art,
Bernard Berensen, who had his butler warm his watch so that it did not
chill his wrist when he put it on. He should have learned to dig ditches
or climb mountains—strenuous physical activity that would balance off
musike with gymnastike, as Plato recommended!14
12 See Charles Baudelaire,. “In Praise of Cosmetics.” The Painter of Modern Life.
J. Mayne ed. and trans. (London: Phaidon, 1964), XI, 31–34.

13 Gorgias, 464Bff.
14 One of my students from a well-to-do family tells of a friend of his father who had
become something of a wine connoisseur. But he said he finally could not tell the dif-
ference between wines that cost more than $500 a bottle! It’s a problem most of us will
never have.
238 R.E. Wood
But beyond such effete types, I now realize that connoisseurs are
showing a distinctive human relation to the objects of tasting and
smelling. They are exhibiting the development of intelligence by pay-
ing careful attention to the distinctions in each of these realms, invent-
ing a vocabulary for indicating distinctions, learning to compare different
instances in order to establish a rank ordering of better and worse. In
these matters, it is not simply a question of individual preference; it is a
matter of cultivating a capacity for noticing differences and combinations
and being able to articulate the reasons for preferences that are not sim-
ply matters of animal immediacy. It is not entirely true that there is no
dispute regarding taste; cultivated consumers may be able to recognize
the subtle differences in what they consume.15 Consider the higher status
of restraint, intelligent discrimination, refined enjoyment, appreciation
of fineness versus guzzling beer and wolfing down meat, vegetables, and
potatoes, topped off by pecan pie with ice cream. Yee haw!
The shared celebratory meal is one of the highlights of human co-
existence. As we presented it in the chapter on film, in the movie
Babette’s Feast, the heroine, an exiled Parisian chef, out of gratitude for
being welcomed by a pair of spinsters, used the considerable sum of
money she won in a lottery to prepare a wonderful gourmet feast for the
women and a few of their close friends. The meal, along with fine wine,
culminated in the group dancing together under the stars. What I want
to underscore here is the transformative character of a meal prepared
with love and gratitude. The full aesthetic of the situation is not merely a
matter of subjective satisfaction, but of transformative relation.16
Manners are a kind of conventional stylization that shows respect. In
their modern evolution, they began with developing “courtliness” or
court-esy as a matter of restraining the barbarism of the previous warrior
culture of soldiers newly annexed to the court of the king. In contrast
with the infrequent meetings of rural peoples, living in the city—the
civitas—where people constantly come across others, required the devel-
opment of “civility.” “Politeness”, similarly, has a Greek etymology as
conduct proper to life in the polis. Courtesy, civility, and politeness all
refer to habits of deference developed when large groups of people live
and function in close proximity to each other.
15 See Emily Brady, “Sniffing and Savoring,” AEL 177–93.

16 See Kass, HS.
In all of these things, there is the matter of taste. We might say of

certain persons that they have no taste, while others are seen as having
taste. As Hans-Georg Gadamer would have it, taste is a matter of culti-
vating aesthetic unity in one’s life.17 And that admits of differing man-
ners of exhibition. Taste is shown by unity of style. As Gracian put it,
taste is “the spiritualization of animality,” where spiritualization involves
an integrated sensibility. Taste is different from fashion. The latter is
a group phenomenon that puts us in touch with a large and typically
growing segment of the population dragged about by designers and
their advertisers. Taste is characteristic of cultivated individuals, the unity
of style that ideally permeates every aspect of one’s life. It gives one a
certain distance from fashion that allows one to judge, accept, or reject
“the latest,” whether it be in clothing, cars, painting, sculpture, or phi-
losophy.
When we are immersed in our everyday projects, we learn to glance,
categorize, and respond stereotypically to what presents itself in the
environment, natural and man-made. In the aesthetic attitude, we learn
to stop and attend to various features of that environment in order to
appreciate how they present themselves. We might linger to appreciate
the shape of a particular pine tree that looks like a cultivated bonzai tree,
with its peculiar irregularity. Or we might be struck by the way the bark
of the loblolly pine is constructed out of small patches of differing but
related colors. We might particularly admire a rose the size of a saucer
or another with a profusion of tightly packed pedals. We might try to
“get the feel” for a particular building by walking around and through it,
focusing upon how it appears from different angles.
Photography teaches us to attend aesthetically to what presents itself.
Without the camera, what is always involved is the togetherness of what
appears within the horizon of the field of vision. And though we might
focus upon different objects in turn, the background surrounding us is
always marginally co-present as a whole; in the photograph it is framed.
But then with the invention of the F-stop, the camera can render some
things focal and others marginal. Arto Haapula claims that, through its
framing, photography performs the function Wordsworth assigned to
poetry: it renders the everyday strange.18
17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 33–9.
18 “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday,” AEL, 52.
240 R.E. Wood
Of all buildings, the workshop tends to be the most unaesthetic.

Dewey points to an aesthetic sense involved in the mechanic who keeps
his tools clean and in their proper places.19 Often the only “aesthetic”
object is what used to be called a “pin-up girl.” Minimally, appropriate
cleanliness could be observed, especially in washrooms. Lighting, uses of
color and space, and overall layout would help. But, of course, the first
consideration should be the architecture, how space is laid out for utility,
how the windows are positioned to let in light.
The shopping mall too often tends to be purely functional, but occa-
sionally we find planters, raised beds of flowers and shrubs, a decoratively
articulated floor in the walkways. A skylight overhead might illuminate
a fountain surrounded by flowers. Sculptural pieces might be located in
significant spots.
One of the treasured aesthetic objects of many people is the automo-
bile. Frank Lloyd Wright noted that in vehicles of conveyance generally,
aerodynamic efficiency is linked to sleekness of design. Here form fol-
lows function: the better the functionality, the more beautiful the form.20
Many a young man spends time detailing his car, polishing it, adding
special features like chrome wheels, or having designs painted on the
surface. Some recent car design has followed military functioning and
not aerodynamic properties: large and clumsy box-like structures have
become desirable to many because they have come to be status symbols
in some quarters.
Outside architecture, which typically is present non-focally, music
is the most pervasive explicit aesthetic object in our everyday world.
People everywhere are plugged into their iPods. When we enter our
autos, the radio or CD player brings music to us while we are traveling.
In various public places there is piped music. Often we work or read
with music in the background (as I am doing now, with Telemann in the
background). People frequently go dancing or to bars with live music,
and to concerts, popular or classical. As the expression of ethos, music
sets the emotional tone for its listeners. We considered the eidetics of
music earlier. Here we simply want to underscore how prevalent it is in
our daily lives. People typically like the music that suits their own dispo-
sition and that consequently “speaks to them.” Roughly speaking, there
19 John Dewey, Art and Experience New York: Capricorn, 1934), 5 (henceforth AE).
20 Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture (New York: Mentor, 1963), 141.
is music that speaks to the head; music that speaks to the heart; and
music that speaks to the “gut.”
The novelist Milan Kundera, in his description of kitsch, says, “For the
French, the opposite of real art is entertainment.” He went on to say,
“the word ‘kitsch’ describes the attitude of those who want to please the
greatest number at any cost.”21 We need then to make some distinction
between entertainment (French for “to hold between” or what you do
in the spaces of your life when you have nothing better to do) and a
more serious aesthetic interest. Entertainment is relaxation and distrac-
tion. There is escapist literature, TV, movies, and music. There is also the
cute knick-knack.22
The modern world is increasingly devoted to organized sports, par-
ticipating and observing. There is the thrill of participation, the sense of
achievement in scoring, the suspense that surrounds a close game, the
gracefulness of execution, the trim bodies. Here appreciation of sports
parallels the appreciation of ballet.23 Here is also self-discipline, team-
work, fairness, graceful acceptance of victory or defeat.
Plato distinguished between luxurious wallowing in our own fine feel-
ings (found in much of today’s entertainment) and a real love for beauti-
ful things. The latter requires a “conversion,” a turning of attention from
one’s good feelings to the things appreciated. It was Plato’s purged city
that strove to promote the latter: education culminating in love matters
regarding beautiful things.24 Art as transformative and elevating is higher
than art as entertainment and escape. The basis lies in the depth of our
relations grounded in our relation to the Whole. Remember what Rilke
said, while contemplating a torso of Apollo: the thing of beauty says,
“You must change your life.”25
21 Art of the Novel. L. Asher, trans. (New York: Grove Press. 2000), 135, 163. The sixth
part of his Incredible Lightness of Being was on kitsch.

22 Mark Roche(in “The Function of the Ugly in Enhancing the Expressivity of Art”)
distinguishes kitch and quatch. The former is prettification without metaphysical depth; the
latter is uglification without metaphysical depth. The Many Faces of Beauty, Vittorio Hösle
ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 327–55.
23 Wolfgang Welsch, “Sport Viewed Aesthetically, and Even as Art?,” AEL, 135–55.
For an overall philosophical view of sport, see Paul Weiss, Sport: A Philosophical Inquiry
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).
24 Republic, III, 403C.
25 See the Appendix to the chapter on Sculpture.
242 R.E. Wood
Plato went further than the cultivation of an appreciation of beautiful

things to distinguish those who are lovers of the vision of Beauty Itself
which, he says, is visible through beautiful things.26 Certainly that is
enigmatic. What is at stake is more than securing a definition. It involves
a sense of encompassment, a certain way in which the Whole resounds in
the individual object. In the tradition coming out of Plotinus, it involves
attention, not only to consonant properties on the aesthetic surface
but also to the expression in them of “the light of Beauty Itself” shin-
ing through those properties, corresponding to the sensory and onto-
logical poles of our being.27 Consequent upon an experience of identity
with the One as Source of all, a “being alone with the Alone,”28 atten-
tion to the beautiful surface appears now for Plotinus as the Face of the
Beloved.29 The Christian Dionysian version of that may involve an expe-
rience of theophany, the epiphany of God.30 Even atheist John Dewey
appreciated the way in which our belonging to the Whole can come to
presence in a work of art.31 Buber brings us close to everyday life: “What
is greater for us than all enigmatic webs at the margins of being is the
central actuality of an everyday hour on earth, with a streak of sunshine
on a maple leaf and an intimation of the Eternal Thou.”32
Finally, following our usual practice of ending a chapter with the con-
sideration of a given work or artist, let us focus upon one art form that cel-
ebrates the world we live in: the Japanese tea ceremony. The picture on the
first page of this chapter presents all the paraphernalia involved in the cere-
mony. The tea-ceremony practitioner must be familiar with the production
and types of tea as well as with all the accompanying aspects and rituals.
Training to perform the ceremony correctly takes years, and indeed, a
lifetime to perfect it—something mind-boggling for a typical Westerner.
It requires formal dress: the kimono. It takes place in a special room that
26 Phaedrus 250D.
27 Plotinus, Enneads V, 8, 10. See my chapter, “Plotinus and the Latin Middle ages,”
In PA.
28 Enneads V, 9, 11.
29 Enneads II, 9, 16.
30 Cf. Eric Perl’s study of Dionysius, Theophany: The Neo-Platonic Philosophy of Dionysius
the Aereopagite (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).

31 AE, 192–5.
32 I and Thou, W. Kaufmann trans. (New York: Scribners, 1970), 136–7.
is kept immaculate: cleanliness is central to the aesthetic involved. The

ceremony features the presence of several artistically designed elements—a
wall-hanging, calligraphy, and carefully arranged flowers, antique ceramic
pieces, incense, fire, running water, and tea with sweets—as well as the
overall character of the space involved. Participants are required to have
knowledge of the prescribed gestures and phrases, the proper way to take
tea and sweets, and the general comportment expected in the tea room.
Conversation is kept to a minimum as the place exudes silence and pro-
motes meditation: the sound of running water and crackling fire, the smell
of incense and tea, the feel of old, cherished, ceramic vessels, the look of
carefully arranged flowers and of artistic calligraphy with poems or sym-
bols, and the taste of the tea and sweets. A scroll typically displays figures
representing harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. All the senses are
involved in this display of respect by the host to his guests and their mutual
appreciation of what is provided by art and by nature. Traditional Japanese
knew how to combine art and nature in their own living environment.
At the immediate level, through the awakening of all the senses, the
tea ceremony teaches one to pay careful attention to the surround-
ing world that in “average everydayness” we relate to in a stereotypical
manner: glancing, categorizing, and responding in typical ways. Graham
Parkes remarks: “Our normal, pre-enlightenment experience is condi-
tioned by layers of conceptualization that prevent us from experiencing
the world the ways it is.” He continues,
the atmosphere of the tea ceremony optimally comes to pervade the practi-
tioner’s entire being…. When it goes well, those present have the impression
of contacting the deepest levels of the human being, and of experiencing
from the narrow confines of that simple hut a far wider world.33
This corresponds perfectly to what we have been calling attention to

throughout this work, and in my Placing Aesthetics I tried to show how a
sense of the encompassing Whole is the center of the Western speculative
tradition.34
33 Graham Parkes, “Ways of Japanese Thinking,” Japanese Aesthetics and Culture,

N. Hume ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 85, 92–3.
34 Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1999).
244 R.E. Wood
If the Western aesthetic is centered upon beauty, the center of

Japanese aesthetics is wabi-sabi. Wabi was originally applied to one who
lived apart from society and sabi meant “chill,” “lean” or “withered.”
Wabi now means quiet or sober refinement or subdued taste. Parkes
notes that wabi “is characterized by humility, restraint, simplicity, natu-
ralism, profundity, imperfection, and asymmetry [emphasizing] simple,
unadorned objects and architectural space, and [celebrating] the mellow
beauty that time and care impart to materials.” Sabi applies to old age
that exhibits beauty or serenity as shown in artifacts through wear and
patina or even in evident repairs to the vessels employed. It assimilates a
sense of imperfection and transience.
What is involved in the Japanese tea ceremony exhibits a wabi-
sabi aesthetic. It cultivates all the components of the everyday, with an
emphasis upon impermanence and the wearing of age. That is why for
the Japanese the cherry blossom has come to symbolize life: it is beau-
tiful and it is evanescent. Ultimately, as Buber remarked and the tradi-
tional Japanese lived out: “The script of life is so unspeakably beautiful to
read because we know that death looks over our shoulder.”35
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35 Martin Buber, Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, M. Friedman, trans. (New York:
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Epilogue: Kierkegaard
on the Aesthetic Life
1.
In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard developed o a view of the aesthetic life in
1
his first major work, Either/Or, and, a few years later, through a chap-
ter on “The Banquet” (modeled upon Plato’s Symposium) in Stages on
Life’s Way.2 The peculiarity of these works is that, though presupposing
a philosophical substructure, they are literary in character: collections of
aphorisms, a dialogue, essays, diaries, a sermon, letters. This is central to
Kierkegaard’s intention to call attention to “existence,” that is, to the
character of human subjectivity as individually instantiated rather than as
objectively reflected upon in terms of concepts.3
1Either/Or D. Swenson and L. Swenson trans., two volumes. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Books, 1944) (henceforth E/O).

2Stages on Life’s Way. W. Lowrie trans. (New York: Shocken Books, 1967) (henceforth
SLW). There is a difference between aesthetic theory regarding the arts and the exposition
of the life of the aesthete that I am providing here. For a sketch of the former, see George
Pattiso, “Art in an age of reflection,” Alasdair Hannay ed. Cambridge Companion to
Kierkegaard. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76–100 (henceforth H and
M). Peder Jothan helpfully distinguishes four aspects of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s work:
as a stage of existence, as a view of art and beauty, as a literary style, and as a mode of reli-
gious existence. Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood: The Art of Subjectivity. (Burlington:
Ashgate, 2014), 10ff (henceforth KAS).
3Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. W. Lowrie trans.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 292–5 (henceforth CUP).
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 247

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7
248 Epilogue: Kierkegaard on the Aesthetic Life
The aesthetic stage or sphere is, following Hegelian terminology, the

stage of “immediacy.” It has a variable range. It plays in tandem with
“reflection.” These terms refer initially to what is roughly equivalent to
Hegel’s Nature and Spirit where Nature is everything from the animal
level down, even in us, while Spirit is the distinctively human, modi-
fied by and modifying “Nature” in us. Spirit is the sphere of reflec-
tion that allows for the deliberate transformation of “immediacy.” For
Kierkegaard, the first meaning of “immediacy” is what is given through
our natural endowment: what we would today call our “genetic endow-
ment,” our organism with its sensory presentations and appetites. But
there is a second, a distinctively human mediated immediacy that is the
sphere of the cultivated aesthete.
Unlike the other works mentioned, Sickness Unto Death is focused
upon the conceptual structure of “Spirit.” Again close to Hegel, human
nature is a synthesis of mind and body, of the eternal and the tempo-
ral, of the infinite and the finite, and, following from all this, of freedom
and necessity. But so conceived, the self is not the synthesis, but is the
fact that the synthesis “relates itself to its own self.”4 It is individual self-
presence in the midst of these humanly universal polarities that is crucial.
Hegel provides the basis for these polarities and for the peculiar view
of the self. For Hegel our mind is related to the eternal and infinite via
the notion of Being with which the mind is identified, while everything
related to our body involves us in the temporally immediate and finite.
The notion of Being includes everything in its scope and everything about
everything, but it includes all that emptily and thus in the form of the
question about the Whole and our place in it. When confronted with any
putative limit, we are always able to ask what might exist beyond it, et sic
ad infinitum.5 That is because the notion of Being is all-encompassing—
whatever we may come to think the All consists in. Even John Locke,
sensate empiricist though he was, claimed that, if anything exists, eter-
nity exists.6 The only problem is where it is located: in the ongo-
ing processes of Nature as a whole or in another level beyond Nature.
4Sickness Unto Death. W. Lowrie trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), 146
(henceforth SUD).
5HPM, §386, 23–41.
6Essay Concerning Human Understanding. P. Nidditch ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975), 622. He seems not to be aware how this blows a hole in his empiricism.
Epilogue: Kierkegaard on the Aesthetic Life 249
But such a claim involves a ground in the notion of the All given with
the notion of Being which arises within the mind when it first thinks.
And for Hegel, it is the openness to the Whole that prises us loose from
any finitude, even our own, and hands us over to ourselves, privileged—
or condemned—to form ourselves by choosing between the options
available to us. The I stands over against everything, including its own
determinations. We are determinate/indeterminate: determined by
our genes, our upbringing, and our past choices, so that we have only
a limited set of options for determination. But, as I, each of us is free
to determine oneself within the necessary limits of one’s situation at any
given time.7
This is the context Kierkegaard assumes, for he merely lists, without
developing, the polarities: mind and body, the eternal and the tempo-
ral, the infinite and the finite, freedom and necessity. For him, the syn-
thesis involved in each of these polarities is a relation; but freedom lies
in the fact that the synthesis in us is “a relation that relates itself to its
own self.” I would say that the self-turning relation again follows from
the notion of Being which, along with the whole of what is, includes
the whole of what we each individually are. Such a relation related to
itself is the index of human freedom: detached, via the notion of Being,
from all determinacy, we are each compelled to choose. The three levels
of necessity in us—genetic, cultural, and personal-historical—establish a
“mediated immediacy.” Everything turns upon the principle of choice we
employ in taking up this immediacy.
Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, initial or mediated, is a constant in
human experience; but we can relate to it from different perspectives.
He considers it in terms of two other stages, the ethical and the religious.
If the aesthetic is taken as the primary sphere of existence, its princi-
ple, its “categorical imperative,” is “Enjoy yourself.” And that means,
“Whatever makes you feel good, crude or refined, do it.” The principle
7Though Kierkegaard is clearly in many respects anti-Hegel, whom he views as “forget-
ting, in world-historical absent-mindedness, what it means to be an existing individual,

with passion and inwardness, (CUP, 109), he draws heavily upon Hegelian categories. See
Stephen Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory
of Stages. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1995), 4–8. Exposition of the three levels
can be found in any of the many overall presentations of Kierkegaard’s thought, but espe-
cially helpful is Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis
of the Theory of Stages. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) (henceforth KDI).
of the ethical sphere might be expressed in the imperative, “Do your

duty” and the religious in the command, “Stand before God.”8 CUP, 256.
Either/Or presents us with the fundamental choice between a life ruled
by the aesthetic imperative and one ruled by the ethics of commitment—
concretely, by Judge William’s commitment to his wife, his profession,
and his community.
The work concludes with the relaying of a sermon the judge had heard
that moves us toward the larger context of the Whole to which we relate
in the religious sphere.9 Here we find the conclusion to the self-relation
in the oppositions listed above: “In relating itself to itself, it relates itself
to that which founds it,” namely, God.10 The problem for Kierkegaard is
that the only way to achieve this relation is to leap over the Paradox, the
contradiction that is the God-Man, and thus to transcend reason. 11
2.
All this heavy philosophical lifting is the sub-text behind its concrete
exhibition in particular characters in Kierkegaard’s work. His basic tack
is to embody philosophic principles in human characters, setting the
direction for twentieth-century Existentialists like Sartre and Marcel who
wrote novels and plays in tandem with their more abstract philosophical
works. But Kierkegaard has a peculiar way of presenting his thought. He
produced two lines of work: the better known are his so-called “pseu-
donymous” works, some of which are collected by one pseudonym and
written by others.12 But Kierkegaard simultaneously published in his
own name works that are lesser known and that showed his own com-
mitment to the religious.13 In the former, following the example of
8CUP, 256.
9E/O, II, 339–56.
10SUD, 126.
11John Caputo notes Hegel’s influence on the whole project of the three stages: “Like
Hegel, Kierkegaard thinks of a kind of education of the spirit by way of a gradual ascent
to higher and richer forms of life as lower forms collapse from internal contradictions.”
Kierkegaard, London: Granta Books, 2007), 30.
12The Point of View of My Work as an Author. W. Lowrie trans. New York: Harper and
Row, 1962) (henceforth POV).

13For example, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, H. Hong and E. Hong ed. and
trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing,
D. Speere trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1956) (henceforth PH); and POV, etc.
Plato’s dialogues, he has characters, as editors and authors, present the

works within which each character exhibits another facet of the “aes-
thetic life.”14 This induces “double reflection”: reflection upon the posi-
tion occupied by the character and upon the status of the presenter. As
actual author, Kierkegaard himself stands at a distance two or three steps
removed. This complex pseudonymous procedure is meant to suggest
reflection on the part of us readers upon our own selves to see how we
resemble, or not, the form of life that is described in each character or
exhibited by the point of view of each author or editor. For the educated
readers of texts, it involves reflection for each of us upon how our own
interest in the topic fits within our overall “life style.” The aim of the
pseudonymous works, according to Peder Jothen, is “to provoke, reveal,
seduce, upbuild and call out to each self the true ontological possibility—
not through dogmatic arguments—but through aesthetic means.”15
As an epigram to In Vino Veritas within Stages, Kierkegaard cites
Lichtenberg: “Such works are like mirrors: when an ape gawks in,
no apostle gazes out.”16 The reader provides the perspective for read-
ing, taking it up in terms of their way of life that is either corroborated,
extended, or challenged by the work. The ape/apostle image is also an
image for the three stages: the self-same action in the aesthetic sphere
considered from the principle of self-enjoyment may be taken up within
the context of marriage and profession as fundamental duties that set
limits to the aesthetic, and both within the context of standing reli-
giously before God. The latter two spheres place limits on what is legiti-
mate within the aesthetic sphere.
The epigram also points to the fundamental distinction that works
throughout the pseudonymous authorship: the distinction between the
inner and the outer. Hegel held, with regard to human existence, that
the inner eventually shows itself in the outer. If “interiorly” I think I am
intelligent, I myself only find out whether or not I am right by taking
an intelligence test or attempting to pass in a class (on Kierkegaard, for
example) or solve a complex problem. Or I may think I am a “beautiful
14See my “Recollection and Two Banquets: Plato’s and Kierkegaard’s.” International
Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or I. R. Perkins ed. Atlanta: Mercer University Press,

49–68 [henceforth IKC, E/0).
15KAS 161.
16SLW, 26
soul,” untainted by the world and dedicated to God, but am unwill-

ing to act out in the world with others for fear of tainting my precious
interiority.17
Granted the truth of these observations, Kierkegaard yet strenuously
directs himself against the Hegelian principle that the inner is the outer.
Johannes Climacus, his pseudonym in Concluding Unscientific Postscript
to Philosophical Fragments, repeats the mantra: our age has forgotten, “in
world-historical absent-mindedness, what it means to be an existing indi-
vidual; to exist with passion and inwardness.”18 Here he distinguishes
the subjective thinker from the objective thinker. The emphasis upon the
latter is upon What an object is, whereas the former is concerned with
the How of one’s relation to it. And for human life, the highest truth is
subjectivity, ultimately in the religious sphere: an objective uncertainty
held in the most passionate inwardness.19
In the works of Hegel, objectively contemplating World History, one
finds magnificent thought-castles, while, according to Climacus, the
contemplator lives in a miserable shack nearby.20 “Living” as “an exist-
ent individual” involves a deepening in inwardness that is ambiguously
related to the outer display to others. Either/Or and Stages show, in vari-
ous ways, the incongruity between the outer and the inner. In his own
life, Kierkegaard made a point of appearing regularly in public—but only
for just enough time to be noticed—in order to conceal the fact that he
was busy turning out several works in a period of a few years. At the level
of deepest intent, Kierkegaard was dedicated to showing the incongruity
between the Christendom of establishment Lutheranism in Denmark and
the real requirements of Christian inwardness. It was, on his reading, all
show and little substance: the outer hid the inner.
Actually, inspired as he was by the works of Plato, Kierkegaard is fol-
lowing out the basic premise of the overall argument of the Republic in
the comparison of the just man and the tyrannical man, that appearance
and reality should be reversed: the just man appearing unjust and thus
not gaining any exterior advantage for really being just, and the unjust
17HPM, §§632–671, 383–409.

18CUP, 118ff.
19CUP, 181–2.
20The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard. Alexander Dru ed. and trans. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1959), 156. But who knows how such a one “lives”? Isn’t it presumption
to think you know that? Couldn’t the outer here mask the inner?
man appearing just and thus gaining all the exterior advantages of being,
underneath the just appearance, actually unjust. Thus the latter is able
to acquire riches and fame, with all that they entail, while the just man is
scorned and impoverished—even crucified.21
In the basic conclusion to the overall argument, Socrates presents a
description of the tyrannical man. He appears smiling because he is
strong, handsome, rich, surrounded by all the good things that riches
provide, and basking in the sunlight of public adulation, while inwardly
he is filled with the ravenous beasts of his appetites located in his loins
and clamoring for attention and while “the man,” that is, his mind,
is a little “wimp” seated inside his head and doing the bidding of the
beasts.22 I am always reminded of Hollywood stars to whose hands I am
especially attentive and which frequently show fingernails bitten to the
nub. (This is the case with male actors. In the case of female, “the exte-
rior conceals the interior.”) What is the tortured inwardness concealed
behind that fine exterior?
So Kierkegaard presents various situations in which the outer conceals
the inner. And he poses for us questions such as: what goes on behind
the doors of private dwellings that is not revealed in the public persona
of each of the inhabitants? What goes on inside all those who appear to
us, both strangers, acquaintances, and friends, and even the members of
our own family? And what lies in our own deep interior of which we may
have intimations but which we are afraid to face? Or what may lie hidden
beyond those intimations? Socrates asked himself if he was a gentle being
or a monster like Typhon.23
In presenting instances of the aesthetic stage, Kierkegaard focuses
upon the interiority involved in a life governed by aesthetics in the broad
sense of the term, not by a life in which aesthetics has a rightful place. As
Merold Westphal puts it, for the aesthete, boring/interesting rules over
right/wrong, good/evil: “Excitement is in; duty and virtue are out.”24
One could say that many people live by the aesthetic imperative.
In fact, it is a basic principle driving our economy. Adverts present
21Republic. P. Shorey trans., 2 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), II,
362A.
22Republic, IX, 588c.
23Phaedrus. H. Fowler trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 230a.
24“Kierkegaard and Hegel.” H and M, 105.
“the good life”: it is food, drink, sex, sights, and sounds in maximum
abundance. People work in order to “have fun”: “running around,”
“bar hopping,” “playing the field,” having “one-night stands,” “living
together,” buying the latest to the extent they can afford it or, even
though they cannot not afford it, possessing a credit card and having
been taken in by the latest ad campaigns. All these are living accord-
ing to the aesthetic principle. And if one has enough discipline to get
an “education” (that is, job training with a few irrelevant “humanities”
requirements thrown in), one can found a business, make a fortune,
live in the best neighborhoods, and buy everything on the high end,
including Rolls Royces, Rolex watches, power boats, top-shelf liquor,
the finest wines, gourmet food, and Cuban cigars—meanwhile, serving
the public good by creating jobs for those who are involved in the pro-
duction and distribution of such goods. Kierkegaard’s aesthetes are for
the most part “high-end” aesthetes, well-to-do, cultivated (at least most
of them).
4.
In Either/Or the chief character exhibiting the aesthetic principle is sim-
ply called A and his ethical interlocutor B, who is later identified as Judge
William. The abstract alphabetical designators put them on the same
plane, but B is named in terms of his function and his individuality. A is
not identified further, presumably because, since his principle is private
enjoyment, he has no public function and has not “made a name” for
himself. Maybe he is Johannes the Seducer whose diary A claimed to
have found.
In “The Banquet” there are several figures: the Young Man,
Constantin Constantius (author of Repetition), Victor Eremita (editor
of Either/Or), Johannes the Seducer (author of “Diary of a Seducer” in
Either/Or, whose substitute surname indicates his major function), the
Woman’s Tailor (again, only his function is indicated and not even his
first name which would focus his individuality), and William Afham (per-
haps Judge William, author of the second part of Either/Or). Along with
A, none of them simply follow the aesthetic imperative in the common
ways described above, although their enjoyment might include what
is available through “education.” They are what we typically call “aes-
thetes” who mediate their immediacy by reflection: they have cultivated
tastes. But everything turns upon the immediate, which they consider
“the most divine of the categories.”25 The banquet is set up in such a

way as to appeal to each of the senses: a sumptuous table in a properly
appointed room, orchestral background music, perfume, gourmet food,
and fine wine. They enjoy their after-dinner cigars. They arrive and
depart in elegant horse-drawn carriages.
Either/Or is edited by Victor Eremita, the “Victorious Hermit,” who
gives a speech later in “The Banquet.” The speech reveals him as one
who enjoys things in eremitical silence.26 In his introduction he tells how
he secured the papers of A. Victor took a fancy to a desk which he subse-
quently purchased. He found a secret compartment that he forced open; it
contained various papers. There are two symbols here: the role of chance
and the distinction between the outside and the inside, the secret and the
public, both with regard to the desk and with regard to the papers, especially
“The Diary of the Seducer” which reveals Johannes the Seducer as com-
pletely hiding his real intentions. And as we said, in addition to the secrets
one hides from others, there is the secret of the self, hidden from itself.27
Among the things that Victor found in the secret compartment were
scattered pieces of paper which contained various aphorisms written by A
and which Victor arranged randomly under the heading “Diapsalmata”
or “Refrains.” This randomness is an image of the aesthete’s life which
turns now this way and now that, always searching for “the interesting”
from which he might extract his enjoyment. In this pursuit, chance is
both his ally and his enemy. The aphorisms pertained to the aesthetic life.
A, we see, had a good command of literature and music. He wrote
essays on music, tragedy, and comedy which indicate as much. He knows
Danish, German, and French literature and can discuss it in depth.
Several of the essays that he penned were read before a society whose
members call themselves Symparanekromenoi, a group of aesthetes who
are together (sym) but only alongside (para) one another; they are fas-
cinated with the thought of death (nekromenoi) which gives a certain
aesthetic depth to life.28 As Buber once wrote: “The script of life is so
unspeakably beautiful to read because death looks over our shoulder.”29
25SLW,39.
26SLW,67–76.
27E/O, I, 26.
28E/O I, 135–62.
29Martin Buber, Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, M. Friedman trans. (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1965), 91.

They gather on occasion to listen to essays and carry on conversation.

The banqueteers in Stages might just be that group. They are only
“alongside” one another because they know no intimacy or care for oth-
ers. They are surprised that after a year they are still together and—like
too many newlyweds today, locked into their sensorily aesthetic lives, do
not know how long that togetherness will last.30 The nadir of the focus
of the banqueteers is upon “The Unhappiest Man.”31 They know how
to squeeze aesthetic appreciation even out of misfortune.
One of the key problems of a life governed by aestheticism is bore-
dom. Harries identifies it as the Grundstimmung of the Diapsalmata,
a sense of homelessness in the world, a basic nihilism, focused on free-
dom without any desire to construct something in the common world
but only a world of private enjoyment.32 A remarks: “Boredom rests
upon the nothing that interlaces existence; its dizziness is infinite, like
that which comes from looking into a bottomless abyss.”33 A delivers an
address on that topic to the Symparanekromenoi entitled “The Rotation
Method.”34 One way to overcome boredom is to be busy; but people
who follow this way are the most boring of all. Rather than thinking,
according to conventional wisdom, that “idleness is the devil’s work-
shop,” it is precisely idleness which allows one to pursue the aesthetic
life. In fact, the aesthetic way pursued by the characters in Kierkegaard’s
repertoire presupposes independent wealth and unlimited leisure.
According to one of the aphorisms, the trick is “to play shuttlecock with
the whole of existence” by rotating between remembering and forget-
ting.35 Remembering and forgetting are here not considered in their
spontaneous forms but are developed into an art form shaping the self
which, in the identity between both aspects, becomes “the Archimedean
point from which one lifts the whole world.”36
30Karsten Harries views them as being buried alive in their narcissism. Between Nihilism
and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or. (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 53

(henceforth BNF).The plausibility of this interpretation does not cancel out the view pro-
vided by the etymology I have presented. Harries’ work is a fine example of reading a text
carefully in relation to his own thoughts about human existence.
31E/O I, 215–28.
32BNF, 18 and 21.
33E/O I, 287.
34E/O I, 279–964.
35E/O I, 290.
36E/O I, 291.
Experience itself has to be prepared for such an art, so that one

does not give oneself overly much to any one experience, so as not to
upset one’s balance. Furthermore, such an art precludes any attach-
ments such as friendship, marriage, or an official position. “When you
are one of several, then you have lost your freedom; you cannot send
for your traveling boots whenever you wish, you cannot move aimlessly
about the world.”37 “The whole secret lies in arbitrariness,” varying
the perspective from which you view things.38 One lives in Romantic
irony, standing at a distance from each involvement and whimsically
withdrawing from it.39
A’s aphorisms as well as the presentation of “The Unhappiest Man”
indicate that, as we already noted, at the core of aestheticism, there is
a sense of nihilism and despair. Anti-Climacus in Sickness Unto Death
indicates that this follows from a failure to establish the proper relation
between the two poles of human existence. The eternal and infinite pole
is neglected in favor of the finite and temporal. One flees from oneself
and becomes oblivious of the 70,000 fathoms upon which we float,
opened up in principle by the eternal and infinite grounding relation.40
But when one becomes aware of it, it appears as a yawning chasm that
generates vertigo and upsets the carefully crafted balance.41
A’s exposition sets up a polarity between two extreme aesthetic types:
one is Don Giovanni, the other is Johannes the Seducer. The absence of
a surname in both cases is significant, since neither has any intention of
producing progeny. They act for themselves and not for the species. Like
so many today, their freedom abstracts from their role in carrying on the
species; having received life, they refuse to give it. But, as Plato claimed,
sexual desire is the love of the mortal for the immortal, a link between
37E/O I, 293. The late Bradley Dewey presents a most interesting analysis of seven
different ways of understanding Johannes. 1995. “Seven Seducers: A Typology of

Interpretations of the Aesthetic Stage in Kierkegaard’s ‘The Seducer’s Diary.’” [henceforth
SS] IKC, E/O, 159–99.
38E/O I, 295–6.
39Kierkegaard’s thesis was on The Concept of Irony. L. Capel trans. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1965). Louis Mackey sees irony as “the originating concept of the
modern age.” KDI, 2.
40CUP, 126 The awareness that we float on waters “70,000 fathoms deep” appears fre-
quently in Kierkegaard’s work.

41CUP, 256.
Thanatos and Eros.42 Eros is the next generation saying to us: “You have
to die; let us live in your place.”
Don Giovanni is presented in Mozart’s opera which is the object of
A’s sensitive commentary.43 Harries points out that “this is perhaps the
only example of an experience of genuine love in his [A’s] life…”44 The
Don displays the universal scope of any appetite: it is oriented towards all
individuals that fall under the kind of object correlative to the appetite,
though actualized each time by an individual of the type involved. As
an appetite, male sexuality is normally oriented toward the female. But
rather than resting content with one object, the Don, as sexuality incar-
nate, restlessly moves from object to object. Young/old, tall/short, fat/
thin, beautiful/ugly—none of this makes any difference to the Don: each
is an exhibition of womanhood as generic object of sexual appetite. If
he cannot have them all, he conquers them serially in the largest num-
ber possible. Leporello, his sidekick, records them: 1,003 in Spain alone,
followed by 640 in Italy, 520 in France, 200 in the Rhineland, even 90
in Turkey, and so forth… . He lives in and is governed by his appetite
which—fortunately for the appetite and thus his enjoyment—makes him
spontaneously irresistible to women. He doesn’t have to seduce: women
are immediately attracted to him. As a Don, he has unlimited resources
to carry out his conquests. He is the ideal of adolescent males.
A presents him in a brilliant commentary on the opera. His basic con-
tention is that music is the medium whose form carries the content of
appetite as a continual flow of ever-recurring cycles of attraction, pursuit,
satisfaction and repose, Plato’s “leaky vessel” that has to be continually
refilled as it empties.45 It expresses life itself which culminates in sexuality
which arises with the achievement of organic adulthood and is, indeed,
the sign of organic maturity. But, of course, the Don is without con-
cern for the natural consequence. If it happens to occur, that is left to his
victims to cope with.
The same is the case with his opposite: Johannes the Seducer.46 If
the Don is the immediacy of appetite incarnate, the Seducer is reflection
42Symposium. W. Lamb trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 206c.

43E/O I, 83–184.
44BNF, 32.
45Gorgias. W. Lamb trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 293e.
46E/O I, 297–440.
incarnate.47 Harries sees this as the culmination of the aesthetic stage in

the richest character analysis.48 A presents the Seducer’s diary in which
Johannes records the steps he takes, over a six-month period, to secure
the total commitment of Cordelia Wahl to him as a person. Unlike the
Don, Johannes does not want any old woman, but one who has the pos-
sibility of a deepened personality whom he carefully cultivates, giving her
reading relevant to his quest and engaging in conversations, but without
any suggestion of erotic involvement. When she has reached the requi-
site depth, he uses various techniques to get her erotically involved. He
also pretends friendship with her aunt and a suitor, both of whom he
manipulates for his own purposes. There is no sexuality until her final
surrender, after which he promptly drops her; in fact, it is not even clear
that sexual relations were even realized. Bradley Dewey asks, “Could he
be…a eunuch, ‘fundamentally unerotic’ or ‘sexually impotent,’ more
interested in art than act?”49 And Johannes does say that in service to
the Idea he pursues, he has “self-discipline, abstemiousness from every
forbidden enjoyment.”50
He typically gives himself a maximum of six months for each con-
quest. Meanwhile, he keeps his eye open for future possibilities. And
in his diary he records his progress for future reflective enjoyment.
Jothen notes that what grounds his existence is existing in the imagina-
tion, “reliving past events and fantastical possibilities.”51 What Johannes
enjoys in his conquest of women is his mastery of each situation, before,
during, and after each episode—not in massive numbers like the Don,
but fewer and more select, like a connoisseur rather than a wolf, to be
savored afterwards in imagination.
His central observation regarding himself is contained in an image:
he lives riding the currents of a sea of challenges and enjoyment
while simultaneously occupying a crow’s nest of reflective observa-
tion, high above the storms, from which he directs his action.52 There
47The late Bradley Dewey presents a most interesting report on seven different ways of
understanding Johannes. SS, 159–99.

48BNF, 41.
49SS, 162.
50E/O I, 432.
51KAS, 14.
52E/O I, 320.
are three characters involved in all his relations: his object, himself in
his immediacy, and himself in his reflective distance. All his words and
actions in relation to his prey and those he uses with others as means to
the prey are calculated. He allows no spontaneity and reflectively enjoys
his own enjoyment. Dewey refers to Johannes’ “schizophrenia.” But that
is necessary: “If the hovering self gets too closely involved with the activ-
ity itself…it loses the aesthetic distance it needs to direct the action and
enjoy the stimuli.”53 In fact, he always restrains himself in those sorts of
enjoyment that might catch one up in wild abandon, such as those by
which the Don was governed. That’s why it isn’t clear whether his rela-
tion to Cordelia is consummated sexually or not. In a sense, it doesn’t
matter—a real disappointment for those adolescent males (and older
males who never got beyond adolescence) who secretly admire the Don.
In between the extremes of the Don and the Seducer, immediate
appetite and cultivated enjoyment, there are many grades of aestheticism,
some of which we have noted above. There is another set of aesthetes in
Kierkegaard’s sense, a set that stands in a vertical relation to the horizon-
tal polarity between the Don and the Seducer: it is the polarity between
the detached observer and the poetic contemplator.
In his preface to “The Banquet,” William Apham distinguishes
between memory and recollection.54 The former is a matter of quasi-
mechanical recall; but the latter is related to the former as wine to
grapes. Recollection takes place when the inessential drops away and the
essential appears. This typically occurs in older people whose memory
for particulars dims, while the ability to distill the essential from the past
yields “poetic far-sight”—provided senility has not set in.55 Such sight
allows things to “draw near”: distance opens up closeness. One gains an
appreciative depth.
One of the conditions for such sight is dwelling in silence. Silence
in this sense is not privative, not the absence of sound; it is positive. It
involves the stilling of appetitive craving. It creates the condition for
poetic appreciation. But in the young, who are gifted with better mem-
ory, recollection is poor and their living in appetitive immediacy puts
them at a distance from things. They are to a certain extent like Don
53SS,185.
54SLW, 27–37.
55SLW, 23–37.
Giovanni who, living in his sexual appetite, is close to no woman, though

he ravishes them all. Such people know no silence. In Kierkegaard’s view,
the modern world is diseased: the modern city is a mechanism for the
generation of ever-present noise. He remarks that, if he were a physician
contacted for a remedy, he would prescribe the practice of silence.56
As positive as poetic far-sight might be, as great a cultivation and thus
self-discipline it might require, it is still a mode of aestheticism without
ethical and religious commitment. And there are other Kierkegaardian
aesthetes of the cultivated sort: intellectual aesthetics, those who engage
in philosophic speculation which culminates in the contemplation of
Nature and History or in various forms of detached observation. In addi-
tion to the author of Either/Or vol. I, there is Constantin Constantius, a
psychological experimenter and author of Repetition; Johannes Climacus,
author of Philosophical Fragments57 and its Postscript, a contempla-
tor of ideas; Anti-Climacus, author of Sickness unto Death; Johannes
de Silentio, author of Fear and Trembling who attempts various inter-
pretations of the Abraham–Isaac story; Hilarius Bookbinder, editor
of Stages that contains “Guilty/Not Guilty” discovered and edited by
Frater Taciturnus;58 and William Afham who introduces and narrates
“The Banquet.” All these are more “speculative.” They play intellectu-
ally or—in the case of Afham, poetically—with certain possibilities. Frater
Taciturnus, for example, is interested in “the religious” as a phenome-
non, though he admits that he is not himself religious.59 They might,
like Walter Kaufmann, mourn the disappearance of the religious because
of the loss of the source of all the beautiful art religious people have pro-
duced.60 Climacus takes on Hegel’s speculative system directly and lays
out certain options for the religious stage, though, again, he is not him-
self religious—indeed, he is himself dispositionally like Hegel in that he
is employing categories to single out Existence. Such types enjoy theory,
56Cited by Max Picard as the conclusion of his work, The World of Silence, without iden-
tifying the locus.

57Philosophical Fragments. D. Swenson and H. Hong trans. (Princeton: Princeton

58SLW, 363–444.
59SLW, 1967, 437.
60Religion in Four Dimensions: Existential, Aesthetic, Historical, and Comparative. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1977).

observation, speculation or poetizing. So in Kierkegaard’s terms, even

Aristotle’s life of theoria is a life of self-enjoyment.
These are disciplined modes of constructing thought-castles, though
Kierkegaard seems more disposed to poetic far-sight than he is to
abstract speculative appreciation. The basic question is, again, the per-
spective from which one relates to both poles of one’s existence. What
is the overall principle of life within which these practices are embedded?
How does it stand with respect to one’s dedication to others, to one’s
role in carrying on the human enterprise in the familial and professional
aspects, and how do both the aesthetic and the ethical spheres together
stand before God? How deep is the inwardness, especially in relation to
the latter? Minimally, that would involve the awareness that “we float
on waters 70,000 fathoms deep” as a more profound aesthetic. The aes-
thetic and ethical spheres would be positioned within an awareness of the
cosmic context that would be more than conceptual.61
Kierkegaard himself transferred the notion of sensory beauty in art to
life itself as an art. Such an art requires a focal point. In his earlier years
it is this which he lacked. “Vainly I have sought an anchorage, not just in
the depths of knowledge, but in the bottomless sea of pleasure.”62 He
thought he had found such an anchorage in his fiancée, Regina Olsen,
but he soon broke off the engagement and hinted at his reasons in sev-
eral of his works. At last he found it in being a poet and thinker who
viewed his work as a God-given vocation.
In the second part of Either/Or, Judge William both carries on a
polemic against aestheticism and argues for its higher existence within
the context of a marital commitment. It is the latter which gives one’s
life solidity, binding together what might only be “aphorisms,” that is,
atomic fragments, found in life itself. Marriage is the real poetic life. The
judge says, “There are two things that I must regard as my particular
task: to show the aesthetic meaning of marriage and to show how the
aesthetic in it may be retained despite life’s numerous hindrances.”63
61Sylvia Walsh provides a detailed study of Kierkegaard himself as the poet who concocts
the characters and views, but also, like and unlike the cultivated aesthete, becomes the artist
of his own life viewed as a divine call. Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics.
(University Park Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) (henceforth
LP).
62Cited in Harries, BNF, 6.
63E/O II, 8.
Further, he says, “I sacrifice myself to my work, my wife, my children or,

to be more accurate, I do not sacrifice myself to them, but find my joy
and satisfaction in them.”64 As Harries points out, basically he proposes
seeing life as a vocation rather than as an experiment.65
On the other hand, Bradley Dewey asks, “If you had to decide who
had the most vital, engaged, and interesting self—Johannes or the
Judge—who would it be?” He leaves no doubt, for Johannes had “pow-
erful reflective capacity, focused self-consciousness, penetrating analyti-
cal skills.” He is more highly developed than many at higher stages. So
Dewey notes that “Kierkegaard’s development of the self and his doc-
trine of the stages are, in fact, decoupled.”66 For all that, A was a narcis-
sist. He himself said, “I have found in myself the most interesting person
among my acquaintances.”67 And, of course, “interesting” is a basic
characteristic of the aesthetic life.
But for Kierkegaard, the ultimate framework within which the aes-
thetic stage and even the ethical stage are embedded is the religious,
situating the larger community within which one might secure an ethi-
cal commitment, within the cosmos and before God. Climacus in the
Postscript distinguishes two modes of religiousness, unceremoniously
called A and B.68 The first involves a general relation to God that may be
rafted upon a sense of cosmic depth, while the second involves a distinc-
tively Christian commitment. A is a-historical; B is grounded in the entry
of God into history. For Climacus, the latter involves passing through
the affront to reason presented by the Paradox, the Absurd that is Christ
as the infinite become finite, as the God-Man.69
Climacus says, “Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardnesss; inward-
ness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially passion, and at its maximum
an infinite, personally interested passion for one’s eternal happiness.”70
Confronted with the Paradox, the individual is driven to the ultimate
mode of passionate inwardness.71 One’s ultimate destiny is at stake, and
64E/O II, 174.

65Harries,BNF, 120.
66Dewey, SS, 178–9.
67E/O I, 396.
68CUP, 506–7.
69CUP, 512–5, 540.
70CUP, 33.
71CUP, 510.
yet one cannot syllogize one’s way into belief. Only a leap provided by
grace, if such occurs, can take one over the abyss of contradiction. Yet,
having made the leap, one can never rest content with thinking “I am
a Christian.” One can only set to work to open oneself to the grace of
constantly progressing in becoming a Christian.72
Christendom is the place where the external trappings appear, com-
plete with doctrinal fidelity, rule-keeping, and regular communal wor-
ship. It is here precisely where the outer conceals the inner, the place
where the “whitened sepulchers who are filled with dead men’s bones”
are found. Here one thinks one is a Christian. In Kierkegaard’s time,
if a child asked a mother, “What is my religion?”, she might reply
with a question, “In which country do we live?” With the answer, “In
Denmark,” the conclusion would be, “Then you are Lutheran.” One has
to be driven into inwardness by a living awareness of the Absurd to tran-
scend the complacency of such merely external observance.
Imagine someone who really was a God-seeker came to a Lutheran
believer and asked where to find God. Let’s say the believer took out a
loaf of bread and a cup of wine and said, “Eat and drink. If you receive
the witness of the spirit, his body and blood will come to you and
you will be united with Him.” What is a rational person to think? For
Kierkegaard it is the affront to reason that evokes the deepest passion for
the leap in which one is carried over into belief. Then is opened up what
it means to be an existing individual, to live at the deepest level of pas-
sion and inwardness. Here is the most profound aesthetic, but one only
available through commitment and continual openness.
We have presented Kierkegaard’s view of the aesthetic life against the
background of Hegel’s analysis of human structure: Spirit as a relation
between mind and body, time and eternity, finite and infinite, freedom
and necessity which relates itself to its own self. Peder Jothen claims that
those who have written on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics have not explored
the ontological moorings that gather the fragments together, so that his
work would attempt to remedy that.73 In what follows, I will make that
attempt by going to “the things themselves” that constitute the field of
human experience as such. (Here we are only reviewing the overall struc-
ture within which this work has been generated.) The basis of this view,
72CUP, 533.
73KAS, 5.
in Hegel and in fact, is the bipolar character of human existence. One

pole is the biological-sensory pole, the most obvious in our experience of
ourselves and what surrounds us sensorily. What we sense are actual indi-
viduals, whereas, as objects of sensing, they must have a universal char-
acter: they must be individuals of the type correlative to the sense power,
as, e.g., color is correlative to seeing. But both the act of seeing and the
underlying powers, in seeing and in the objects seen, are not objects of
sensing.
Of course, to know that is to have the ability to apprehend not only
the individual and actual given in sensation, but the types and the powers
involved. We have come to call that ability “intellect.” But what founds
intellect is what occupies the counter-pole to the sensory world, the
ontological pole established by the notion of Being. It is what first arises
when we become aware of intellectual power, and what orients us toward
the whole of what is by way of the question: what is the Whole and
how are we related to it? The proffered answers are generated by reli-
gion, philosophy, and natural science. With the openness of the Whole
as object of questioning comes the openness of space and time as encom-
passing wholes within which we have our sensory experience. This allows
us to apprehend meanings applicable whenever or wherever we might
find their instances. It allows us to apprehend the universal.
At the same time, projected toward the Whole, we are set at a distance
from any part, including any part of ourselves and thus are forced, con-
demned to choose how we will relate ourselves to the given situations. So
the notion of Being, at the ontological pole of our being, founds both
intellect and free will.
These are then the poles of experience: the biologically mediated
awareness of the sensory environment and ontological pole of reference
to the Whole as object of questioning. This structure, as human nature,
creates the fields of meaning. Interpretations and choices, passed on
to others, forms a world of meaning, a set of ways of thinking, acting,
and feeling peculiar to a given tradition which necessarily stamps those
inducted into it.
So each of us is genetically grounded and culturally formed. When the
capacity to make a free choice emerges, each of us has begun to create
another set of determinants for which we each have to take responsibil-
ity. What we are in any given moment is the result of three determinants
which we cannot not have: a genetic, a cultural, and a personal-historical
determinant. This sets up a tension between I as center of awareness and
choice and Me as the currently determinate self. The question always

implicit is: what am I going to do with Me?
Now finally, to come to the area of Kierkegaard’s central concern:
these three determinants percolate downward into the center of the self
to form what a long tradition has called ‘the heart.’74 It establishes a
magnetic field of attractants and repellants unique to each individual and
is the default mode for the typical patterns of our choices. The heart is
what brings things close to the self, no matter how far or close spatially.
My family is closer to me than my brain. The heart is the domain of radi-
cal subjectivity, of deepest personal inwardness, generator of our strong-
est emotional reactions. It limns the space for what it means to be “an
existing individual…with passion and inwardness.”75
As we said, there are different general patterns of choice that form the
three spheres of human existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the reli-
gious. Within the overall bipolar field, the aesthetic occupies another set
of poles: at the level of sensory gratification, between appetitive immedi-
acy and reflective gratification, and at the level of our wider relation to the
Whole, between poetic immediacy and philosophic reflection. Insofar as
any of the character types found in these regions abstract from ethical and
religious commitment, for Kierkegaard they still occupy the aesthetic as
the lowest level of human experience, no matter how developed they are.
Though he gives a direction to contemporary deconstructionists in his
pluralist interpretation of the Abraham story, he also holds up the mirror
to whatever resemblance its practitioners might have to the aesthetic life.76
What Kierkegaard presents is the aesthetes’ own view of the aesthetic
life with no reference to any higher sphere, with the emptiness it even-
tually displays because it is without any binding commitments to fam-
ily, friends, the broader community, and the divine—and ultimately for
Kierkegaard himself, to Christ. Like everyone else, the aesthete has to
die; but the depths of existence would have passed him by. Kierkegaard
invites us to place the aesthetic-philosophical exercises exhibited in his
work within the deeper contexts of existence.77
74See Kierkegaard’s PH.

75CUP, 118ff.
76See Walsh LP, 245.
77For a treatment of aesthetics through a phenomenological dialogue with the Western
tradition from Plato to Heidegger, see my Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic
Tradition (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999).
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Author Index
A Böcklin, Arnold, 160

Abram, Murray, 67 Boethius, 157
Adams, Ansel, 207 o Bogart, Humphrey, 219
Albers, Josef, 99, 209 Bourget, Paul, 222
Alberti, Leon Batista, 65 Bowie, Malcolm, 188
Alexander the Great, 102 Brancusi, Constantin, 81, 82, 111
Aligieri, Dante, 87, 89, 166, 186, 190 Breugel, Pieter the Elder, 104, 110
Allen, Woody, 213 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 107
Apollinaire, Guilliame, 109 Buber, Martin, 24, 114, 156
Aquinas, 204 Buddha, 49, 113, 232
Aristotle, 4, 15, 75, 131, 132, 145, Burneat, Myles
152, 173, 177, 180, 184, 196
Arnold, Matthew, 190
Augustine, 6, 86 C
Calder, Alexander, 208
Callicot, Baird, 28
B Caputo, John, 250
Bahktin, Mikael Carlson, Allen, ix, 12, 15, 21
Baker, Tammy Fay, 237 Carrol, Noel, 205
Baudelaire, Charles, 86 Cassirer, Ernst, 185
Bazin, André, 212 Cavell, Stanley, 203, 218
Berensen, Bernard, 237 Cervantes, Miguel de, 181
Bergmann, Ingmar, 203, 218 Cézanne, Paul, 116
Blake, William, 99, 192, 194 Chaplin, Charlie, 206
Blixen, Karen, 225 Christ, Jesus, 16
Bloom, Harold, 191 Christo, 6, 50, 91
Boccione, Umberto, 78, 81 Clark, Kenneth, 103
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7
270 Author Index
Clerk Maxwell, James, 23 F

Cocteau, Jean, 105 Faulkner, William, 222
Collins, Peter, 59 Freud, Sigmund, 187, 196
Corbusier, Le, 56, 60, 65, 66 Fromm, Eric, 27
Correggio, Antonio da, 100
Courbet, Gustave, 103
G
Gabo, Naum, 79, 80
D Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 187, 239
Daguerre, Louise, 109 Gehry, Frank, 68
Damish, Hubert, 107 Giedion, Siegfried, 56, 79
Danto, Arthur, 104 Goebbels, Joseph, 211
David, Jacques-Louise Goethe, Wolfgang, 111, 138, 167
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 99, 100 Goldsworthy, Andy, 6, 29, 30, 78, 90,
De Chardin, Teilhard, 23 91
Derrida, Jacques, 68, 145, 188 Gratian, Balthasar
Dewey, Bradley, 257, 259, 263 Graves, Michael, 67, 70
Dewey, John, 8, 9, 15, 71, 81, 87, Griffith, D.W., 206
102, 103, 108, 113, 114, 132, Groom, Winston, 213
138, 158, 173, 175, 179, 182, Gropius, Walter, 56, 66
184, 185, 205, 223, 229, 240,
242
Dietrich, Marlene, 219 H
Dinesen, Isak, 222 Haapula, Arto, 239
Disney, Walt, 221 Harries, Karsten, 65, 67
Dixon, Thomas, 206 Hegel, G.W.F., 7, 9, 15–17, 27, 48,
Domingo, Placido, 218 71, 92, 100, 101, 108, 110, 111,
Dostoevski, Fyodor, 192 114, 126, 130, 151, 152, 154,
Duchamp, Marcel 155, 160, 186, 188, 196
Dunning, Stephen, 249 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 7, 9, 13, 16,
23, 31, 35–41, 49, 68–71, 73,
84, 86, 98, 172, 182, 187, 205,
E 208, 232
Eagleton, Terry, 166, 171, 172, 183, Hepburn, Ronald, 12, 14
186, 187, 189–191 Hepworth, Barbara, 78
Eisenman, Peter, 67, 68 Herbert, George, 172
Eisenstein, Sergei, 207, 210–212, 217, Hildebrand, Adolph von, 78, 83, 84,
221 87, 102, 109, 111, 116, 124
Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 190 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 36
Elkins, James, 101 Hopkins, Gerard Manley
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 11, 24 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 166
Empedocles, 177 Husserl, Edmund, 130, 145, 213
Author Index 271
I Leavis, Queenie Roth, 190

Ince, Thomas, 207 Leddy, Tom, 232, 233
Ingarden, Roman, 138, 146, 175, Leopold, Aldo, 11
214, 220 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 166
Iser, Wolfgang, 187 Locke, John, 196
Loos, Adolf, 65
Lossky, Vladimir, 108
J Lotman, Yuri, 186
Jakobsen, Roman, 212 Luther, Martin, 167, 223
Jarzombek, Mark, 67
Jolson, Al, 206
Jothen, Peder, 251, 264 M
Joyce, James, 222 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 235
Mackey, Louis, 249, 257
Malevich, Kasimir
K Malraux, André, 110
Kahn, Louis, 56, 71 Marcel, Gabriel, 23, 38, 151, 157,
Kandinsky, Wassily, 28, 97, 100, 102, 158
103, 111, 114, 125 Matisse, Henri, 101, 109, 114, 118
Kant, Emmanuel, 84, 86, 97, 106, Ma Yuan, 96
150, 151 Meisel, Edmund, 221
Kass, Leon, 12, 222, 223, 225, 234, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 87, 97,
238 98, 109, 116, 209
Kaufmann, Walter, 6, 16, 24, 36, 156, Meyer, C.F., 69
242 Michelangelo, 77, 86, 88
Keats, John, 180 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 70
Kierkegaard, Søren, 10, 126, 155, Miller, J. Hillis, 178
186, 191, 215 Milton, John, 186
Klee, Paul, 98, 100, Mitry, Jean, 103, 202, 206, 207, 212,
114, 118, 119 214, 219, 221, 222
Klein, Jacob, 179 Mondrian, Piet, 28, 88, 100, 103,
Kline, Franz, 97 111, 113, 114, 121, 122,
Kubrick, Stanley, 207 124–126, 159
Kuleshov, Lev, 209 Monroe, Marilyn, 219
Kundera, Milan, 181, 182, 189, 193, Montgomery, Robert, 213
215, 241 Moore, Henry, 76–82, 152
Mussorgski, Modest
Muzhukhin, Ivan, 209
L
Langer, Suzanne, 101, 130, 155, 209
Lean, David, 207 N
Leavis, Frank Raymond, 190 Napoleon Bonaparte
272 Author Index
Newton, Isaac, 17, 23 R

Nicholson, Ben, 78 Rabelais, François, 190
Nicholson, Marjorie Hope, 19 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 159, 160
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 16, 184, 192, Read, Herbert, 80, 82
196, 215 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 100
Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 60, 61, 70 Reynolds, Joshua, 95, 101, 102, 111,
Norris, Frank, 207 112, 114
Nussbaum, Martha, 177, 180 Ricoeur, Paul, 5, 134, 168, 171, 176,
187–189, 196
Rilke, Rainer Marie, 6, 75, 82, 87, 88,
O 114, 126, 191, 241
O’Keefe, Georgia, 78 Roche, Mark, 241
Olivier, Lawrence Rodin, Auguste, 75, 81, 83, 86–89
Olmstead, Frederick Law, 29 Rolston III, Holmes, 26
Ortega y Gasett, José, 26 Rosi, Francesco, 218
Ouspensky, Leonid, 108 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 87
Ruskin, John, 54, 56, 82, 83
P
Panovsky, Erwin, 203 S
Parkes, Graham, 243, 244 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 163, 165, 176, 185,
Parmenides, 170, 177, 178, 215 188, 190
Parrhasios, 110 Schiller, Friedrich, 193
Pater, Walter, 100, 155, 175 Schlegel, Friedrich, 71
Pattison, George Schopenhauer, Arthur, 71, 83, 95,
Perl, Eric, 242 111, 151, 156–158
Pevsner, Antoine, 56 Searle, John, 166
Phidias, 81, 86 Shakespeare, William, 166, 185, 214
Picard, Max, 157, 158, 191 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 221
Picasso, Pablo, 109 Sloterdijk, Peter, 91–93
Plato, 28, 60, 68, 72, 73, 76, 82, 87, Smithson, Robert, 90
100, 101, 106, 132, 142, 152, Socrates, 178, 229, 231
169, 170, 174, 179, 184, 186, Spielberg, Steven, 220
189, 196, 216, 218, 229–233, Spinoza, Benedict, 24
237, 241, 242 Spurling, Hillary, 109
Plotinus, 28, 82, 242 Stein, Gertrude, 109
Plutarch, 157 Stendhal, 190
Poe, Edgar Allen, 153, 184 Stephens, Diane, 193
Pollock, Jackson, 105 Stroheim, Erich von, 207
Pope, Alexander, 185, 234 Strunck, Jürgen, 109
Sullivan, Louis, 63, 65, 66, 70, 72
Author Index 273
T White, Hayden, 171

Tarentino, Quentin Whitehead, Alfred North, 23, 24, 189
Tarkovsky, Andrey, 183, 217 Wilenski, R.H., 60, 77, 79, 82
Tate, Alan, 190 Williams, John, 220
Telemann, Georg Philipp, 240 Williams, Robin, 219
Thoreau, Henry David, 11, 20, 25, 26 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 81
Titian, 103 Winters, Jonathan, 219
Tolkien, J.R.R., 177 Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Tschumi, Bernard, 67 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 99
Wood, David, 12
Wood, Mark, 44, 46
V Wood, Robert E., 5, 151
van Dyck, Anthony, 100 Wood, Robert L., 85
van Gogh, Vincent, 69, 95, 100–102, Wordsworth, William, 23, 172, 239
110, 114, 115 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 56, 66, 70, 82,
Venturi, Robert, 67 240
Virgil, 186
Vitruvius, 57, 58, 65
Vittori, Francesco, 235 Y
Voltaire, 185 Yeats, William Butler, 163
W Z
Walsh, Sylvia, 262 Zemeckis, Robert, 213
Wayne, John, 219 Zeno, 205
Weiss, Paul, 24, 203, 208, 223, 241 Zeuxis, 84, 110
Welk, Lawrence, 149, 221
Welles, Orson, 205, 212
Welsch, Wolfgang, 241
Westphal, Merold, 253
Subject Index
A Animal, 1, 4, 6, 11, 13, 17, 20, 21,

Abstraction (Abstract), 103, 107, 121, 25, 43, 53, 101, 131, 156, 164,
123, 168
o 173, 176, 221, 230, 233, 238
Absurd, 263, 264 Aphorism, 95
Academic, 125, 214 Apodeixis, 179
Action, 5, 13, 16, 44, 48, 86, 104, Apollonian (Apollo), 6, 82, 88, 93,
113, 134, 139, 147, 172, 175, 100, 107, 114, 126, 148, 222,
176, 180, 195, 202–204, 207, 231, 241
210, 211, 214–216, 218, 220, Appearance. See Manifestness
221, 235 Appetite, 1, 6
Actor, 183, 203, 209, 210, 214, 218, Architecture (Architect), 9, 15, 29,
219 31, 40, 47, 48, 53, 54, 56, 57,
Adjective, 38, 165 59–62, 65–68, 70–72, 77, 79, 82,
Adverb, 165 83, 91, 138, 141, 154, 202, 203,
Aesthetics (Aesthetic, Aesthete, 208, 221, 230, 232, 234, 240
Aestheticism), 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, Art (Artform, Artist), 2, 6–10, 12,
49, 110, 152, 244 14–16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 28–30,
Aletheia.See Truth and Unconcealment 35, 36, 38, 39, 49, 50, 54, 56,
Allegory, 178, 179 57, 60, 62, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73,
Alphabet (Alphabetical), 168 76–79, 81–84, 86–88, 90–93,
Ambiance, 45, 72, 214, 215, 225 95, 97, 98, 100–108, 110, 111,
American, 141 113–115, 118, 124–126, 131,
Angel, 37 132, 137, 141, 150, 152–156,
158, 160, 172, 175, 182,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7
276 Subject Index
184, 185, 201–210, 216, 217, Book, 24, 29, 91, 98, 103, 110, 136,
220–222, 227, 229, 231, 232, 157, 166, 171, 183, 186, 187,
237, 241–243 193, 203, 215, 222–224, 231
Article, 84, 165 Boredom, 256
Artificial, 42, 45, 60, 71, 84, 208 British, 235
Asymmetry, 244 Byzantine, 107
Atheism (Atheist), 158, 194, 242
Attribute, 3, 71, 113, 165
Audience, 132, 136, 142, 145, C
148, 153, 157, 160, 164, 165, Calligraphy, 243
170, 171, 175, 205, 212, 214, Camera (Cameraman), 26–28,
216–219, 221 87, 102, 106, 107, 109, 203,
Aura, 158, 173, 183, 184 208–210, 212, 213, 216, 218,
Author, 11, 147, 176, 182, 185, 225 225, 239
Authority, 92, 186 Canon (Canonical), 84, 185, 186, 190
Awareness, 1–3, 13, 17, 18, 22, 28, Catharsis, 177, 180
40, 44, 49, 68, 71, 114, 117, Cathedral, 62, 63, 65, 70, 72, 75, 82,
130, 158, 166, 167, 187, 196, 157, 203, 221
201, 213, 215 Catholic, 2, 142, 187, 234
Cause (Causal), 17, 87, 97, 137, 157,
166, 195, 201
B Cave (Plato), 72
Ballet, 153, 216, 221, 241 Character, 1, 4, 6, 13, 19, 59–62, 66,
Baroque, 142, 144, 234 71, 75, 77, 83, 87, 103–106,
Bauhaus, 70, 99, 232 110, 113, 121, 126, 141–143,
Beauty (Beautiful), 12, 19, 20, 22, 26, 145–148, 152, 164, 167, 172,
28, 39, 47, 49, 54, 59, 60, 62, 174–176, 178–185, 189, 194,
72, 81, 82, 95, 102, 106, 112, 204, 207, 213, 214, 216, 218,
150, 154, 155, 174, 191, 192, 221, 235, 238, 243
195, 233, 240–242, 244 Chartres, 62
Being (notion of), 2, 3, 6, 28, 36, 37, Chinese, 95, 105
53, 167, 196, 230 Choice (Choose), 3–6, 42, 53, 130,
Bestand.See Standing reserve 134, 166, 187, 188, 201
Biology (Biological), 3, 6, 13, 14, 17, Chora, 68
23, 53, 187, 230 Choral, 68, 141, 143
Bipolar, 1, 2, 4, 5, 28, 53, 106, 158, Christianity (Christendom), 16, 223
167, 192, 201 Church, 65, 133, 140, 141, 193, 226,
Body (Bodily), 9, 30, 50, 65, 87, 88, 234
93, 104, 169, 176, 204, 214, Cinema, 202, 206, 207, 210, 215,
236, 237, 248, 249, 264 222
Citizen, 223, 230
Subject Index 277
City, 19, 21, 28, 50, 64, 82, 131, 141, Contemplation (Contemplative,
178, 229, 230, 238, 241 Contemplator), 133, 180, 190,
Civil (Civility), 238 191, 205
Civilization, 41, 111, 191, 217 Convenientia, 58, 59, 67, 68, 236
Classic (Classical), 9, 57, 81, 101, Cosmetic, 236, 237
110, 125, 129, 141–144, 147, Cosmos (Cosmic), 14, 16, 30, 36,
157, 158, 180, 185, 186, 190, 41, 42, 49, 56, 62, 72, 103, 106,
191, 193, 205, 222, 235, 240 113, 133, 156, 157, 178, 230
Clothing, 14, 72, 107, 113, 229–231, Costume, 203, 234
233–236, 239 Counter-Reformation. See
Collage, 210, 221 Reformation
Color, 3, 4, 6, 19, 20, 28, 29, 42, 45, Courage, 138, 173, 178, 206
49, 69–71, 83, 95, 97–100, 103, Courtesy, 238
105–107, 110, 120, 123–125, Creativity (Creative), 28, 77, 78, 82,
154, 159, 195, 204, 205, 207, 148, 154, 181, 192, 206, 227
209, 226, 231–233, 236, 239, Criterion (Criteria), 185
240 Criticism (New Criticism), 190
Comic, 180 Culture (Cultural), 1, 5, 7, 9, 13, 37,
Commentary, 145, 223 38, 47, 50, 84, 85, 126, 138,
Communist, 211 156, 167, 170, 175, 191, 201,
Community, 7, 20, 36, 50, 91, 158, 214, 217, 238, 243
165, 166, 193, 226 Cutting room, 210, 214, 219
Comportment, 217, 243
Composer, 131, 139, 141, 145–147,
151, 153–155, 157, 203, 221 D
Composition, 82, 102, 103, 106, 122, Dance (Dancing), 9, 110, 132, 140,
123, 125, 142, 153, 210, 211 143, 144, 154, 206, 221, 224,
Concept (Conception, 226, 233, 238, 240
Conceptualization), 3, 13, 24, Danish, 222, 223
53, 66, 72, 77, 81, 82, 133, 150, Death, 15, 16, 30, 40, 41, 67, 120,
178, 184, 185, 230, 243 123, 153, 160, 196, 223, 231,
Concerto, 136, 144 235, 244
Conjunction, 17, 36, 69, 164, 165 Declarative, 165, 174, 178
Connoisseur, 224, 237, 238 Deconstruction (Deconstructive), 59,
Consciousness, 13, 17, 23, 82, 187, 67, 68, 181, 186, 189, 191
217 Decoration (Decorative), 14, 48, 62,
Consonant, 132, 134, 137, 146, 168, 65, 83, 102, 151, 229, 232
242 Definition, 186, 242
Construct (Construction), 35–37, 53, Department, 189, 191, 204
56, 59, 63, 64, 66, 70, 79, 84, Depth, 13, 22, 25, 49, 50, 55, 84,
102, 129, 131, 143, 168, 176, 86, 88, 97, 103, 108, 110, 116,
183, 184, 186, 189, 214
278 Subject Index
118, 125, 126, 151, 156, 178, Distinction, 39, 68, 81, 98, 99, 103,
185–187, 191, 241 134, 139, 146, 153, 166, 171,
Description, 36, 53, 92, 163, 180, 173, 182, 212, 238, 241
189, 205, 214, 241 Divine. See God(s)
Design, 14, 39, 44, 68, 70, 72, 103, DNA, 189
230–233, 240 Doric, 57
De Styl, 66 Drama (Dramatic), 9, 26, 45, 135,
Determinacy, 69, 110 140, 143, 149, 155, 175, 180,
Development, 16, 25, 26, 28, 30, 36, 204, 215
59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 105, 114, Dutch, 101
125, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, Duty (Duties), 15, 114, 195
157, 164, 170, 174, 176, 181, Dwelling. See Inhabitance
188, 205–207, 210, 222, 236, Dynamics, 132, 136, 145–147, 154,
238 164, 168, 170, 183, 214
Dialogue (Dialogical), 23, 54, 169,
178, 179, 181, 194, 206, 215,
216 E
Diapsalmata, 255 Earth (Heidegger), 9, 35, 36, 40, 41,
Diaries, 247 49, 69–71
Diction, 147, 175, 180, 185, 205, Editor, 221
214, 215 Ego. See I
Difference, 56, 61, 102–104, 132, Egyptian, 81
147, 153, 168, 172–174, 177, Eidos. SeeForm; Eidetic
182, 196, 210, 214, 217, 219, Elements, 17, 21, 39–41, 43–45, 47,
220, 235–238 49, 56, 59, 65–67, 77, 104, 111,
Digital, 210 121, 122, 139, 152, 160, 175,
Dimension, 42, 48, 50, 56, 67, 70, 176, 184, 192, 215, 216, 226,
71, 76, 78, 109, 118, 119, 130, 229–232, 243
156, 164, 171, 179, 180, 205, Emotion (Emotional), 22, 66, 80,
214, 216, 217 82, 109, 136, 139, 142–144,
Dionysian (Dionysus), 93, 100, 148, 151–154, 156, 160, 173, 177,
222, 231, 242 220, 221, 231, 240
Director, 153, 183, 203, 207, Empiricism (Empirical), 2, 134, 168
210–212, 214, 217, 219–222, Emplotment, 175, 176, 180, 204
225, 226 Enactment, 214, 215, 217
Discourse, 95, 102, 111, 165, 168, Encompassing, 3, 14, 24, 28, 40, 50,
181, 188 53, 68, 72, 84, 85, 112–114,
Disposition. See Ethos 125, 126, 156–158, 177, 184,
Distance, 3–5, 22, 97, 107, 108, 153, 196, 226, 243
157, 170, 177, 181, 191, 197, Engineering, 56, 57, 59, 63, 66
201, 202, 211, 230, 239 English, 29, 170, 174, 189–191, 225
Enjoyment, 18, 238
Subject Index 279
Entertainment, 25, 217, 232, 241 188, 191, 194, 196, 217, 220,
Environment, 1, 2, 8, 10, 12–15, 236, 240–242
17, 20, 21, 25, 29–31, 37, 39,
40, 42, 44, 49, 50, 61, 66, 68,
70, 72, 81, 82, 90, 97, 100, F
101, 104, 105, 107, 125, 164, Fantasy, 118, 176, 177, 183, 184, 207
167–169, 172, 175, 201, 223, Fashion, 36, 195, 221, 236, 239
229, 231–233, 239, 243 Fiction, 171, 176
Epic, 180, 181 Film (Filmmaker), 205, 206
Epigram, 126, 215 Finite, 248, 249, 257, 263, 264
Eros, 178, 179, 196 Flower, 20, 25, 27, 28, 43, 48, 61, 66,
Essay, 5, 11–14, 36, 39, 95, 143, 171, 101, 231–233, 240, 243
192, 196, 207 Form. See Eidos
Essence (Essential), 13, 28, 36, 37, Fourfold (Heidegger), 36, 37, 39, 40,
40, 48, 68, 69, 78, 81, 98, 102, 49
105, 108, 111, 114, 116, 118, Frame (Framing), 8, 18, 27, 28, 41,
133, 154, 156, 167, 171, 175, 77, 84, 88, 105–107, 109, 123,
177, 211, 214 160, 208–210, 212, 225, 226,
Eternity (Eternal), 24, 88, 89, 93, 231, 239
112, 114, 156, 185, 192, Freedom, 114, 130, 152, 186, 188,
194–197, 242 189, 219, 222, 226
Ethical (Ethics), 2, 10, 26, 38, 184, French, 144, 241
191 Friendship, 178, 191
Ethos.See Disposition Function, 2, 7, 16, 18, 27, 36, 43, 53,
Etruscan, 81 56–59, 62–69, 72, 84, 102–104,
Existence (Existential, Existentialism), 112, 114, 116, 125, 134, 136,
1, 20, 23, 28, 30, 37, 38, 67, 73, 148, 167–169, 171, 172, 175,
126, 158, 160, 168, 178, 196, 176, 179, 195, 208, 218, 229,
217 232, 233, 235–241
Experience, 1, 3–6, 8, 13, 15, 16, 21,
22, 24, 27, 28, 35–37, 48, 53,
54, 68, 78, 84, 86, 87, 93, 106, G
108, 113, 114, 124, 126, 130, Game, 21, 25, 176, 241
132, 151–153, 156, 158, 173, Garden, 15, 19, 20, 25, 27, 42, 45,
177, 181, 187, 189, 201, 203, 48, 61
205, 210, 215, 221, 240, 242, Genetic, 5, 130
243 Genius, 29, 168, 173, 185, 224
Expression (Expressivity), 16, 37, 48, Genius loci, 53, 61
54, 57, 60, 63, 69, 77, 82, 84, Genre, 180–182, 185, 192
88, 102, 108, 111, 114, 116, German, 19, 75, 126
118, 125, 130, 136, 144, 151, Gesamtkunst, 203, 232
152, 157, 163, 169, 173, 185, Gestalt, 57, 125
280 Subject Index
Gesture, 135, 215–217, 223, 243 House, 20, 39–41, 47, 48, 61, 70,
God-Man, 16 105, 116, 225, 229, 232, 233
God(s). See Divine Humility, 190, 191, 244
Good, 4, 28, 29, 68, 77, 83, 95, 102, Hymn, 193, 226, 229
107, 111, 146, 167, 173, 178, Hypomneme, 28, 169
179, 192, 208, 209, 232, 233,
236, 241
Gothic, 64, 81, 82, 86 I
Greek, 16, 19, 41, 62, 66, 69, 81, I. SeeEgo
83, 95, 110, 137, 143, 152, 183, Id, 187
216, 225, 236, 238 Idea, 75, 78, 138, 143, 156, 175,
Gymnastic, 16, 230, 237 179, 182, 184, 233
Identity, 16, 138, 182, 242
Ideology (Ideological), 187, 188, 190
H Image, 27, 42, 48, 72, 78, 87, 93,
Happiness, 263 106, 118, 138, 149, 179, 184,
Harmonic Series, 14, 131, 136 190, 195, 205, 208, 211, 215,
Harmony (Harmonious), 9, 14, 28, 217, 219, 220
50, 66, 77, 79, 107, 130, 131, Imagination, 9, 14, 27, 78, 82, 83,
136–139, 143, 229–231, 243 95, 109, 152, 181, 211, 214
Heart, 5, 6, 15, 23, 38, 86, 99, 133, Imitation. See Mimesis
139, 156, 172, 175, 181, 188, Immediacy, 22, 125, 167, 173, 201,
215, 217, 224, 241 208, 215, 238
Hermeneutics. See Interpretation Immortals, 36, 37, 49, 50, 69, 79,
Heroic. See Spoudaios 196
Heteroglossia, 181, 193 Imperative, 6, 114, 126, 165
Hexameter, 177, 179 Individual (Individuality), 3–5, 13, 24,
Hierarchy (Hierarchical), 4, 66, 150, 40, 48, 101, 116, 130, 131, 135,
165, 174, 181, 236 145, 146, 156, 166, 168, 176,
History (Historical), 1, 5, 15, 18, 19, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 187,
21–23, 36, 42, 58, 59, 66, 67, 188, 190, 194, 201, 213, 214,
81, 82, 95, 98, 99, 101, 105, 219, 225, 238, 239, 242
107, 108, 110, 114, 125, 129, Infinite (Infinity), 3, 88, 114, 151,
139, 140, 142, 163, 164, 167, 173
171, 176, 186, 187, 189–191, Infinitive, 165
204, 205, 207 Inhabitance. See Dwelling
Hollywood, 236 Insight, 117, 178, 179, 191
Home, 19, 39, 40, 70, 138, 140, 222, Inspiration, 37, 67, 87, 118, 184, 233
226, 233, 235 Instrument, 117, 135, 137, 139, 140,
Horizon (Fusion of; Horizontal), 184, 142–145, 147–149, 229
187 Integration, 18, 44, 175, 204, 233
Subject Index 281
Intellect (Intellectual), 4, 5, 35, 38, 130, 143, 147, 151–156, 159,

78, 81, 110, 126, 155, 156, 173, 160, 165, 178, 179, 184,
179, 191, 192 189–193, 195, 196, 203, 210,
Interiority, 151, 214 212–214, 216–219, 221, 222,
International Style, 57, 63, 65–67, 79, 226, 231, 233, 237–239, 241,
232 242, 244
Interpretation, 53, 72, 80, 93, 134, Light (Lighting), 3, 25, 30, 37, 40,
146–148, 180, 182, 183, 185, 44, 45, 49, 56, 60–62, 65, 69,
210, 214 71, 72, 83, 84, 86, 88, 97, 106,
Interrogative, 165 107, 119, 144, 157, 160, 174,
Inwardness, 78, 89, 154 178, 196, 201, 204, 205, 209,
226, 231, 240, 242
Literature (Literary), 9, 67, 87, 147,
J 149, 163, 167, 171–173, 175,
Japanese, 20, 25, 232, 242–244 177, 178, 180–182, 184–191,
Jewelry, 237 193, 202, 208, 241
Johannine, 188 Logic, 66
Joy, 151, 153, 154, 156, 194–197, Logos (Logocentrism), 132, 188, 189
214, 222 Lutheran, 133, 223
Justice, 16, 41, 75, 81, 178 Luxury, 230
Lyric, 27, 141, 180, 194
K
Kitch, 241 M
Knowledge, 3, 7, 14, 17, 21–23, 56, Manifestness. See Appearance
57, 126, 153, 155, 178, 214, 243 Manners, 238, 239
Marriage, 234, 235
Marxism (Marxist), 188
L Mass, 66, 69, 78, 79, 217
Landscape (Landscaping), 9, 14, Matter, 4, 18, 22, 24, 35, 37, 40, 68,
19, 20, 28, 29, 35, 39–41, 43, 72, 88, 105, 111, 116, 121, 125,
47–50, 69, 101, 117, 207, 233 131, 134, 148, 158, 174–176,
Language, 5, 7, 9, 31, 36–38, 86, 183, 184, 186, 189, 204, 205,
114, 125, 131, 132, 134–136, 208, 212, 213, 219, 221, 233,
146, 151, 156, 163, 165–167, 235, 238, 239, 241
170, 172, 179–182, 189, 193, Meaning (Meaningful), 4–6, 9, 36–38,
194, 203, 229, 230 40, 48, 50, 53, 54, 60, 66–69,
Life (Living, Life-world), 6, 10, 11, 80, 84, 89, 103, 108, 114, 125,
15, 18–22, 24–26, 28, 37, 40, 134, 135, 140, 142, 149, 150,
41, 47–50, 53, 54, 59, 68–70, 154, 155, 164, 166–175, 183,
72, 82, 86, 88, 93, 101, 103, 185, 187, 194, 195, 201, 207,
114, 115, 120, 121, 124–126, 214, 217, 219, 222
282 Subject Index
Mediation (Mediated), 7, 8, 22, 40, Music (Musical, Musicality), 9, 14,

85, 110, 131, 148, 167, 188, 15, 54, 71, 100, 106, 129–133,
208, 221 135–158, 160, 164, 172, 175,
Meditation (Meditative), 22, 25, 26, 179, 182, 190, 202, 206–209,
38, 39, 42–44, 47, 49, 50, 88, 216, 219–221, 230, 231, 240,
159, 160, 243 241
Medium, 8, 78, 79, 83, 95, 118, 125, Muslim, 236
130, 133, 154, 170, 203, 204, Mystery, 25, 29, 30, 35, 47–49, 79,
207, 213, 219–221 85, 86, 90, 113, 119, 120, 126,
Melody, 14, 66, 100, 130, 131, 135, 157, 158, 217
137–140, 143, 148, 155, 157, Mythos.See Plot and Emplotment
160, 180
Memory. See Mneme
Metaphor, 14, 71, 72, 135, 158, 164, N
168, 172, 173, 178, 179 Narcissist (Narrative), 149, 164, 171,
Metaphysical (Metaphysics), 14, 23, 172, 178–180, 193, 204, 205
28, 36, 54, 72, 151, 156, 172, Nature (and human nature), 1, 3–7,
184, 185, 192, 204, 241 9–13, 15–18, 20, 21, 23–30, 35,
Meter, 164, 174, 177, 180, 194, 220 42, 45, 49, 50, 54, 56, 59, 61,
Metonymy, 211 65, 72, 78, 82, 84, 86–88, 90,
Mexican, 81 102, 109, 111, 112, 114, 116,
Middle Ages (medieval), 28, 142, 242 124, 131, 156, 158, 180, 189,
Mimesis. See Imitation 203, 229, 231, 233, 243
Mind, 9, 17, 22, 30, 35, 86, 87, 99, Necessity, 97, 152
111, 131, 148, 149, 156, 166, Neo-classical, 185
175, 191, 225, 233 Norwegian, 226
Mis-en-scéne, 208 Noun, 38, 165
Mneme. See Memory Novel, 145, 146, 181, 182, 189,
Modernism (Modern), 41, 57, 59–61, 192–194, 204, 206, 207, 211,
63, 64, 66, 67, 71, 75, 77, 79, 213–217, 222, 226, 241
81, 91, 99, 101, 106, 137, 140,
142–145, 189, 203, 217, 231,
234, 238, 241 O
Mood, 25, 44, 79, 83, 97, 99, 100, One. See Unity
103, 114, 138, 153, 160, 163, Ontology (Ontological, and Regional
214 ontology), 203, 205, 220
Mortals, 36, 37, 39, 49, 69, 196 Optative, 165
Motif, 30, 62, 65, 75, 83, 135 Oral (Oral tradition), 100, 134, 145,
Motion, 102, 104, 125, 154, 204, 163, 164, 167, 168, 170, 175,
205, 209, 215, 217 178
Muses, 37 Organism (Organic, Organicity), 1, 2,
7, 15, 16, 41, 48, 66, 70, 75, 77,
Subject Index 283
80, 81, 97, 124, 132, 145, 158, Philosophy (Philosophic), 2, 36, 171,
164, 167, 169, 175, 176, 180, 176–179, 182, 184, 186, 187,
185, 189, 201, 204, 229 237
Ornament, 65–67, 70 Phonemic, 131, 166–169
Orthodox, 234 Phonological, 168
Orthotes.See Truth Photo (Photography), 27, 28, 75,
Ousia.See Substance 109, 118, 208, 209, 212, 239
Physics, 17, 18, 23
Physiology, 53, 201
P Picture, 18, 89, 99, 102, 103, 105,
Page, 3, 9, 183, 214, 223, 242 110, 111, 149, 156, 204, 209,
Painting (Painter), 9, 54, 69, 72, 75, 213, 216, 217, 220, 242
76, 82–84, 88, 95, 97, 99–102, Pietas, 38
104–107, 109–114, 119, 125, Plainchant, 142
126, 208, 209, 217, 220, 226, Plant, 17, 20, 26–28, 40, 42, 44, 45,
230, 231 80, 164, 229, 232, 233
Pans, 232 Plastic, 54, 78, 150, 155, 156, 182,
Paradigma, 151, 185 210
Paradox, 205 Play, 14, 25, 37, 39, 47, 56, 71, 79,
Participation, 24, 104, 115, 132, 157, 83, 140, 144–147, 152, 158,
175, 241 160, 173, 175, 178, 209, 214,
Passion, 149, 216 216, 218, 219, 226
Past, 5, 50, 66, 78, 87, 91, 108, 130, Pleasure, 4, 27, 151, 156, 195
141, 145, 165, 167, 181, 185, Plot. See Mythos
187, 206, 211, 222, 225, 233, Pluralist, 266
235 Poetry (Poetic), 15, 20, 125, 132,
Patina, 80, 83, 244 151, 179–182, 184, 190, 237
Pattern, 25, 28, 30, 57, 80, 97, 108, Polarity, 257, 260
131, 136, 143, 152, 164, 167, Politeness, 238
174, 179, 195 Politics (Political), 53, 58, 66, 188,
Performance (Performer), 129, 139, 190, 231
143, 146–149, 152, 153, 177, Polyphony, 66, 142
183, 214, 218 Postmodern, 68
Periodic table, 189 Pots, 232
Person, 5, 28, 104, 110, 116, 149, Power, 13, 16, 20, 27, 49, 82, 86, 88,
155, 156, 164, 166, 179, 180, 89, 92, 98–100, 102, 109, 113,
196, 206, 213, 221, 239 118, 154, 169, 173, 186–188,
Perspective (Perspectivity), 47, 77, 192, 203, 213, 215, 216, 223
107, 108, 208, 209, 216, 218, Preposition, 165
231 Presence (Presencing), 3, 6, 19, 22,
Phenomenology (Phenomenological), 35, 38, 40, 44, 49, 104, 120,
8, 98, 116, 166
284 Subject Index
160, 177, 178, 195, 208, 225, Recollection, 213

232, 242, 243 Reference, 2–5, 35, 53, 105, 106,
Present, 3, 28, 35, 42, 43, 49, 54, 59, 113, 134, 140, 151, 158, 165,
65, 84, 97, 102, 107, 109, 111, 166, 169, 201, 208
113, 116, 125, 130, 144, 165, Reflection, 12, 22, 25, 38, 45, 49,
181, 193, 203, 206, 208, 213, 104, 124
214, 239, 243 Reformation. See Counter-
Principle, 10, 56, 57, 80, 81, 117, Reformation
133, 135, 164, 178, 179, 184, Refrain, 66
212, 218, 236 Relation, 1–3, 6–8, 10, 13, 16, 17,
Proem, 178 21–23, 27, 29, 36, 37, 39, 40,
Profundity, 244 166, 169, 172, 175, 183, 195,
Projection (Projector), 145, 158, 205, 196, 208, 210, 219, 231, 238,
214, 221 241
Proportion, 64–66, 70, 98, 107, 108, Religion (Religious), 2, 5, 10, 62, 66,
140, 148, 231 79, 92, 101, 113, 149, 151, 158,
Prose, 9, 132, 136, 155, 174, 180, 190, 232, 235, 237
194 Renaissance, 70, 81, 107, 110, 142,
Pseudonym, 250, 252 234, 237
Psychophysical, 180 Representative-Calculative, 38
Restraint, 238, 244
Reverence, 13, 190, 191
Q Rhapsode, 169
Quatch, 241 Rhythm, 9, 15, 48, 65, 71, 79, 80, 83,
Question, 2, 3, 16, 18, 37, 40, 65, 98, 102, 113, 124, 131, 132, 139,
121, 149, 155, 158, 160, 174, 143, 145, 154, 160, 175, 194,
192, 194, 196, 201, 217, 238 207, 220
Role, 38, 40, 47, 59, 62, 91, 181,
189, 215, 218, 220, 232
R Roman, 19, 58, 145, 148, 181, 214,
Rank, 66, 224, 234, 236, 238 220, 234
Rationalism (Rational), 151, 169, 217 Romanesque, 81
Reader (Reading), 40, 68, 125, 137, Romanticism, 19, 79, 101
146, 166, 170, 171, 182–186, Russian, 172
191, 194, 211, 214, 215
Reality, 16, 84, 101, 105, 124, 143,
157, 158, 176, 190, 212, 213, S
221, 237 Sameness, 47, 147, 174, 196
Reason, 4, 15, 16, 26, 54, 56, 64, 99, Scene (Scenery), 13, 18, 118, 149,
108, 111, 119, 134, 137, 156, 156, 184, 205, 209, 210, 212,
165, 166, 172, 173, 186, 195, 213, 215, 216, 218, 220
238 Scholastic, 219
Subject Index 285
Science (Scientific), 2, 11, 17, 23, 41, Shape, 4, 20, 24, 45, 60, 62, 78–80,
69, 87, 104, 116, 156, 157, 166, 82, 93, 99, 100, 106, 110, 119,
171, 173, 181, 189 120, 172, 195, 231, 239
Score, 138, 142, 145–149, 182, 221 Shot, 206, 209–211, 216
Screen, 205, 208, 211, 212, 214 Silence (Silent), 38, 43, 44, 97, 120,
Script, 206–210, 213, 214, 219, 244 125, 138, 146, 157, 158, 191,
Scroll, 243 204–206, 214, 215, 243
Sculpture, 7, 9, 15, 55, 59, 75–78, Simile, 173
81–83, 86–88, 90, 95, 101, 111, Simplicity, 81, 92, 189, 244
151, 152, 157, 202, 208, 232, Skill, 17, 59, 63, 98, 230, 232
233, 237, 239 Sky, 30, 37, 41, 44, 50, 60, 65, 70,
Seeing, 3, 4, 9, 20, 27, 78, 107, 151, 71, 73, 104, 113, 115, 159, 226
173, 218, 221 Skyscraper, 63, 64, 70
Self, 151, 157, 194 Socratic, 181
Sense (Sensing, Sensory), 1–8, 14, 17, Sonata, 143–145, 149
21–24, 28, 35–38, 42, 48, 49, Soul, 100, 114, 151, 169, 176, 180,
53, 54, 59, 68, 69, 72, 76–81, 217, 230, 237
84, 86, 90, 92, 97, 104, 106, Sound, 14, 20, 125, 130–132, 134,
109, 112, 113, 116, 126, 131, 135, 137, 138, 140, 145, 155,
135, 137, 139, 142, 146, 147, 160, 165, 167, 169, 171, 179,
149, 157–159, 170, 179, 184, 183, 231, 243
201, 202, 204, 216, 242, 244 Soviet, 211, 231
Sensibility, 13, 16, 23, 36, 49, 106, Space, 4, 5, 7, 18, 20, 23, 28, 29,
214, 216, 239 35–37, 40, 43, 47, 50, 56, 60,
Sentence, 16, 92, 125, 130, 134, 135, 61, 64, 71, 78, 79, 91, 101, 105,
164–168, 172 146, 167, 168, 170, 182, 191,
Serenity, 42, 86, 113, 244 201–204, 212, 218, 240, 244
Sermon, 206, 235 Spatio-temporal, 8, 9
Set, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 18, 27, 30, 42, Speaker, 135, 145, 165, 169, 174
47, 54, 59, 60, 62, 64, 68, 69, Special effects, 203–205, 207, 212
71, 75, 77, 78, 83, 90, 97, 100, Spectacle, 81, 180, 204, 207, 216,
105–108, 121, 123, 136, 137, 221, 235
140, 149, 155, 157, 164, 170, Speculative, 2, 36, 158, 243
176, 177, 182, 183, 190, 202, Speech, 131, 132, 135, 136, 139,
203, 205, 209, 212, 214–217, 143, 145, 150, 158, 163–167,
221, 231, 234, 240 169, 170, 181, 188, 193, 217,
Setting, 6, 17, 19, 38, 42–44, 47, 49, 224
70, 89, 99, 119, 120, 147, 176, Spirit (Spiritual, Spirituality,
194, 217–219, 221, 232, 233 Spiritualization), 17, 27, 28, 38,
Sex, 216 48, 56, 87, 101, 108, 118, 121,
Shakespearean, 183 131, 136, 154, 157, 191, 206,
217, 225, 239
286 Subject Index
Spoudaios. See Heroic Taste, 21, 83, 95, 203, 214, 238, 239,
Stabilitas, 59, 68 243, 244
Stage, 91, 123, 142, 171, 183, 203, Technician, 221
204, 206, 211, 215, 216, 219 Technique (Technical), 7, 56, 81, 99,
Standing Reserve (Heidegger). See 105, 111, 114, 125, 129, 140,
Bestand 153, 154, 184, 205, 207, 216,
Story-telling, 9, 165, 167, 171, 176 225, 230
St. Peter’s in Rome, 64 Technology (Technological), 17, 39,
Structure (Structuralism), 2, 4, 6, 24, 50, 61–64, 77, 109, 188, 203,
39, 59, 63, 66, 85, 130, 158, 207, 210
170, 178, 187, 188, 201, 240 Temple, 14, 15, 62, 66, 69, 105
Style (Stylistic), 53, 59, 62, 66, 67, Text, 9, 114, 125, 133, 135, 142,
81, 104, 114, 125, 135, 141, 146, 147, 149, 170, 182–184,
142, 148, 171, 172, 175, 181, 186, 187, 189, 191, 214
185, 218, 220, 232, 239 Thanatos, 196
Subjectivity, 108, 114, 125, 126, 130, Theater, 9, 140, 202, 204, 205, 209,
213 216–218
Substance. See Ousia Theology (Theological), 187
Sumerian, 81 Theophany, 24, 49, 242
Super-Ego, 187 Theory (Theoria), 57, 67, 187, 191
Swedish, 223 Thing, 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 12–14, 16, 21,
Symbebekota, 165 25, 26, 35–37, 39, 41, 56, 60,
Symbol (symbolic), 25, 54, 59, 62, 66, 71, 76, 84, 87, 99, 108, 113,
79, 80, 120, 145, 150, 155, 163, 114, 118, 125, 147, 155, 157,
211, 226, 235, 236, 243 165, 168, 173, 182, 189, 195,
Symmetry, 77 201, 219, 229, 239, 242
Symphony, 68, 71, 135, 138, 143, Thinging of Things (Heidegger), 37
144, 146, 149, 151, 222 Thinker, 36, 88, 89, 184
Synthesis, 1, 2, 61, 212 Thinking. See Representative-
System, 1, 14, 22, 64, 69, 108, 130, Calculative and Meditative
132, 136, 138, 166, 167, 169, Thou, 24, 93
174, 188, 189 Thought, 5, 9, 11, 18, 24, 105, 106,
111, 151, 167, 179, 185, 206,
213
T Time, 11, 16, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28,
Take, 2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 16, 17, 19, 30, 40, 45, 47, 50, 54, 56, 62, 64,
38, 41, 60, 61, 64, 65, 79, 89, 75, 83, 95, 108, 130, 137, 143,
102, 123, 134, 153, 177, 191, 154, 160, 166, 167, 169, 174,
206, 214, 219, 229, 243 181, 183, 187, 201, 205, 206,
Talent, 129, 130, 149, 164, 226, 229 210–212, 215, 219, 220, 225,
Talkies, 204–206, 216 234, 244
Subject Index 287
Tone, 62, 100, 119, 130–132, 135, Verlässlichkeit, 69

137, 143, 154, 155, 160, 174, Verticality (Vertical), 57, 92, 105, 124,
240 143
Tool, 229, 240 Vessel, 243, 244
Totality. See Whole Viewing, 18, 105, 108–110, 117, 205,
Tradition, 2, 4, 5, 36, 38, 59, 70, 81, 208–210, 212–214, 218, 219,
82, 85, 99, 102, 148, 171, 181, 221
186, 190, 196, 234 Violence, 86, 216
Tragedy, 172, 175, 177, 180, 215 Vitruvian triangle, 58, 59
Tranquility, 22, 243 Vowel, 132, 134, 168
Transcendental, 192 Voyeur, 203, 218, 221
Transformation, 6, 16, 30, 50, 68,
112, 126, 166, 177, 187, 208,
220, 225, 229, 230 W
Translation (Translator), 38, 78, 167 Wabi-sabi, 244
Truth. See Aletheia, Orthotes Water, 21, 25, 40, 41, 44, 104, 160,
Type, 4, 18, 20, 30, 40, 44, 45, 47, 226, 243
53, 59, 61, 62, 137, 140, 178, Whole. See Totality
180, 181, 193, 231, 238, 242 Wisdom, 189, 191, 195
Word, 9, 37, 68, 89, 91, 109, 130,
133, 134, 139, 142, 143, 145,
U 152, 164, 169, 172, 174, 183,
Ugly, 19, 180, 233 188, 216
Unconcealment. See Aletheia, Truth Work, 1, 9, 23, 27, 30, 35, 47, 54,
Understanding, 3–6, 21, 22, 53, 57, 68, 76–78, 82, 84, 86, 88, 89,
62, 67, 69, 72, 73, 80, 126, 146, 91, 98, 114, 118, 124, 126, 135,
155, 156, 164, 176, 177, 184, 149, 159, 167, 171, 175, 177,
201 178, 183, 185, 186, 191, 192,
Unity. See One 205, 206, 218, 235, 242
Universal (Universality), 4, 5, 9, 79, World (Worlding of the World—
84, 98, 112, 146, 166, 168, 176, Heidegger), 37
182–184, 213 Writing, 11, 28, 99, 110, 145, 163,
Useful, 72, 231, 232 167, 169–171
Utility, 58, 72, 232, 240
Z
V Zen, 42
Value, 26, 29, 42, 99–101, 111, 171, Zoion politikon, 4
172, 222, 235 Zoom-in, 218
Vatican, 19, 234
Venustas, 58, 59, 67, 68, 236
Verb, 165

Robert E. Wood - Nature, Artforms, and The World Around Us - An Introduction To The Regions of Aesthetic Experience-Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

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N AT U R E ,

Nature, Artforms, and

ISBN 978-3-319-57089-1 ISBN 978-3-319-57090-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939338

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Age fotostock/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The True is the Whole.

This work is a sequel to Placing Aesthetics,1 which “placed” aesthet-

1Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University

Press, 1999) (henceforth PA).

art forms appears in the niches of human life determined by three

3We will discuss this further in our Introduction.

The reader is asked to attend carefully to these features to make sure

Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004) (henceforth ANE)

aesthetics of everyday life, a final chapter pays attention also to that

Irving, USA Robert E. Wood

Columbia University Press, 2005) (henceforth AEL).

———. Phenomenology of the Mailbox. Philosophy Today, Summer, 147–59,

2 The Aesthetics of Nature 11

4 Architecture: The Confluence of Art, Technology,

10 The Aesthetics of Everyday Life 229

Epilogue: Kierkegaard on the Aesthetic Life 247

Author Index 269

Subject Index 275

Fig. 2.1 David Wood, Swirling waters 12

Fig. 7.1 Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead 159

The basic claim of my previous work is that there is a “human nature,”

OH: Ohio University Press, 1999).

© The Author(s) 2017 1

The organic center of “information processing” is the brain. But it is

2 See my “What Is Seeing? A Phenomenological Approach to Neuro-Psychology,”

Science, Reason, and Religion, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 139.

Even the question of a possible Infinite Being is included within the

and trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 59–71.

of what is other than that self-presence. Such self-presence is a matter of

language but enter into the language provided by others. Language

5 See my Introduction and the work of Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology of Feeling: An

mental condition of alternating swings between exaltation and depression.

§915/483 (henceforth WTP).

for including such items, but I appeal to a developed sense of form

1996), 338–40/German 370–2.

11 Thisfirst appeared in my Placing Aesthetics, and is reprinted here with permission.

(London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 241–2.

experiential substratum. Hence every art form can be called “poetic,

trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 148–51 (henceforth PLT).

that of the presentation of Nature. As we have also said, the aesthetics

The Aesthetics of Nature

We can approach Nature in several different ways, beginning with natural

Club Books, 1980).

© The Author(s) 2017 11

Fig. 2.1 David Wood, Swirling waters

appreciation brings more than sensory awareness to what is presented

8 For the ways in which metaphysical sensibility transcends sensory presence in

to be the expression of religious sensibility.15 Following upon Christianity

15 LFA, I, 9–11, 94.

New York: Vintage.

Nature in one sense is the enduring matrix for everything distinctively

Now, scenic appreciation of Nature has a history. Prior to the rise

Washington University Press, 1959).

York: Dover, 1992).

Irving, USA Robert E. Wood

Fig. 2.1 David Wood, Swirling waters 12

Fig.  7.1 Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead 159

The Aesthetics of Nature

Fig. 2.1 David Wood, Swirling waters

Fig. 3.1 Zen Garden, Ryoan-Ji, Kyoto. Credit Alamy Stock Photos

Fig. 3.2 Mark Wood, Fishing by moss boulders and double waterfall

Fig. 3.3 Mark Wood, Pathways

Architecture: The Confluence of Art,

Fig. 4.1 Chartres Cathedral. Credit Alamy Stock Photos

Fig. 4.2 Joseph Korom, First Star Bank, Milwaukee