beardsley aesthetics 01a

Monroe C. Beardsley
Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism
(1958)

[SK's comments]
[revision in progress]

[15]

▪ I ▪

AESTHETIC
OBJECTS

What is a work of art?

we can't be sure what the problems are until we know which statements are statements about these things.

we have to know how to tell when something is a work of art before we can tell who is a critic.

Got it.

The critic cannot just think this is what he's talking about, whether or not he turns out to be right. He needs to know.

And we can't 'just tell' that he thinks this, when he does. Even if he is right, we are wrong. We've just got to know.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy—Intention

[SK's comments]
[final revision: 31 Oct 2026]

[from a bad scan; many things fixed manually, with varying degrees of confidence]

[Greek words dashed out by the still-unilingual SK.]

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Intention

My meaning is what I intend to convey, to communicate, to some other person. Now intentions are, of course, intentions of minds, and these intentions presuppose values. Meanings and values are inseparable.

Wilbur M Urban, The Intelligible World
(New York, 1929), p. 190

Messrs Monroe C. Beardsley
and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.

Gentlemen,

You, Sirs, in the Dictionary of World Literature, discussing "Intention," do not deny that an author

may or may not succeed
in his purpose,

but do say that

his success or failure,
in this respect,
are

indemonstrable.

You proceed to attack the criticism of a work of art in terms of the relation between intention and result;

in the course of this attack you say that

to pretend "that the author's aim can be detected internally in the work even where it is not realized is merely a self contradictory proposition",

and
you conclude the paragraph
as follows:

"A work may indeed fall short of what the critic thinks should have been intended, or what the author was in the habit of doing, or what one might expect him to do,
but
there can be no evidence, internal or external, that the author had conceived something which he did not execute."

In our subsequent correspondence
you say that
even if a criticism
could be made in terms of
the relation of purpose to result,
this would be irrelevant,
because
the critic's main task is
"to evaluate the work itself",
and
you make it very clear that
this "evaluation"
has much more to do with

"what the work ought to be"

than with

"what the author intended it

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to be."

In the same connection you cite the case of a school teacher who proposes to correct a pupil's composition;

the pupil maintains that

what he wrote

is

what he "meant to say";

the teacher then says,

"Well,
if you meant to say so and so,
all I can say is that

you should not have meant it"

You add that
there are

"good intentions
and
poor intentions,"

and that intention per se is no criterion of the worth of the poem

I not only dissent from all but the last of these propositions, but also feel that

you have not done justice to the principle of criticism that you attack;

and, finally, that

you confuse "criticism"
with "evaluation,"

overlooking that

"values" are present

only in

the end to which
the work is ordered,

while

"criticism" is supposed
to be disinterested.

wimsatt and beardsley dictionary article

Dictionary of World Literature:
Criticism — Forms — Technique
Edited by JOSEPH T. SHIPLEY
(1943)

[SK's comments]

I couldn't find the 1943 edition online, but I found a circulating copy at the Los Angeles Public Library. Sclerotic bureaucracies aren't all bad, all the time.

[326]

INTENTION.   Judgments about the author's intention appear in the processes of interpretation and evaluation of literary works.

The present article examines the meaning of such judgments, their role in criticism, and their mode of proof.

In referring to the meaning of a literary work, one should distinguish between

(1) the meaning of the work itself,
and
(2) the meaning that the author intended to express in the work.

These two mean-

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ings are here called

"actual"

and

"intentional"

respectively.

the intentional fallacy (wimsatt and beardsley, orig. 1946)

Wimsatt and Beardsley
"The Intentional Fallacy"
in
Margolis,
Philosophy Looks at the Arts
(Third ed., 1987)

[SK's comments]
[some italics omitted]
[final revision: 2 Oct 2026]

---

Late in the process, after encountering an outrageous typo, I discovered that someone or other has made numerous silent excisions as compared with the 1946 original. The source Margolis gives here is:

W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), Chapter I.

These annotations are arduous, and I decided it was too late to change course.

Mea culpa, and quod bene vertat.

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19. The Intentional Fallacy
W. K. WIMSATT, JR. AND
MONROE C. BEARDSLEY

[...] [epigraph] [...]

I

The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions,

notably in the debate entitled The Personal Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard

.

But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning.

The present writers, in a short article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary¹ of literary criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implications at any length. We argued that the design or intention of the author is

neither available nor desirable

as standard for judging the success of a work of literary art,

and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes.

It is a principle which

accepted

or

rejected

points to the polar opposites of

classical "imitation"

and

romantic expression.

It entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history, and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its allusiveness.

There is hardly a problem of a

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literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not be qualified by his view of "intention."

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 3—Part 2

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

 

[SK's snark]

 

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Part II
What is artistic form?

 

Excellent question. Perhaps this should be Part I?

 

 

Different views of artistic form

Form is an important concept for talking about art. ... However, ... it cannot serve as the

defining feature

of all art ... Formalists and neoformalists ... overplay their hand. ... But much art

possesses form

and that, in large measure, is often why we appreciate it. ...

So, what is artistic form?

Perhaps the most common way of thinking of artistic form is to conceive of it as

one half of a distinction—

the distinction between

form
and
content.

The neoformalist tries to clarify this contrast by turning it into the distinction between

meaning
and
mode of presentation.

However, ... if there are artworks without meanings, ... then this way of conceptualizing form entails that such artworks lack form altogether.

But ... Often "meaningless" artworks—such as works of pure music—are what we typically take to be the greatest exemplars of artistic form. ...

This suggests that one might look for a broader way of crafting the contrast between form and content.

One way

of doing this is to say that

content is
whatever makes up the artwork,

and

form is
the way that
whatever makes up the artwork
is organized.

Content is the
matter;

form is the
manner.

Form operates on whatever comprises the content. Again, this makes our conception of

the form

of an artwork

dependent on

our conception of

the content

of the artwork. That is, one cannot determine

the manner of its organization,

until one knows

what is being organized.

A problem arises here almost immediately. ...

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the notion of content, as just stated, is

excessively ambiguous,

and this ambiguity is likely to infect whatever we say about artistic form ...

...   Imagine a historical painting of St. Francis and a donkey. What

makes up

this artwork? In one sense, ... oil paint. At another level ... lines, colors and closed shapes. ... representational figures that refer to certain subjects or referents, ... which, in turn, may also be expressive of the human quality of kindness. Furthermore, the painting may take a point of view ... It may ... suggest a thesis about St. Francis: ... the painting may even advance a more general theme: ...

...   this list could be even longer if our descriptions of these dimensions were more fine-grained.

 

In other words, criticism can never be fully 'objective' so long as fine-ness of grain is left to the critic themselves to decide upon. The "grain" can always be tailored to critical needs, turning up as much or as little basis for commentary as is needed/desired.

 

Wolterstorff—Kissing, Touching, and Crying

Nicholas Wolterstorff
"Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying"
(2003)

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[17]

I

From Friday, March 15 through Sunday, March 17, 2002, the Vienna Philharmonic performed four concerts in New York City, three in Carnegie Hall, and one, on Sunday evening, in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Two of the three Carnegie Hall concerts were enthusiastically reviewed inside the Arts section of the New York Times of Tuesday, March 19, by one of the Times regulars, Allan Kozinn. The heading for the review was "Fresh Power in Familiar Works." In his review, Kozinn writes that Bernard Haitink, the conductor of the Carnegie Hall concerts,

imposed order and an almost narrative sense of drama on [Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8] without taming it or smoothing its raw emotional edges. The Vienna players were in their element: the brass and winds produced the textured chords that are central to this orchestra's trademark sound, but it was the dusky, dynamically fluid string playing that gave the performance its soul.... The Schubert Ninth, on the Saturday program, was appealing in a similarly visceral way. Its familiar themes were writ large and driven hard, yet there was also sufficient transparency in the orchestra's sound that details of the music's inner lines sometimes shone through and altered the perspective.

The review of the concert in St. Patrick's Cathedral took up three columns on the front page of the Arts section, and then continued inside with three columns at the top of page 5, side by side with the two columns of the other review. The concert was described as a "free program to honor the victims of Sept. 11"—this being the date, in 2001, that a terrorist attack destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. The review was headed "A Somber Memorial from the Vienna Philharmonic." The reviewer, another of the Times regulars, James R. Oestreich, wrote,

The memorial program anchored a basic sense of mourning in the Christian season of the Passion, centering on Haydn's unrelentingly somber "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross." The evening opened with the solemn Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. It ended with Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," a simple consolatory choral work, performed without applause and with everyone in the audience holding a lighted candle.

One concertgoer was quoted as saying afterward, "After all the angst and the anger and the hassles of the last few months, the Mozart was like a benediction. It seems O.K. to let go a little, to let the dead rest in peace." Another attendee was quoted as saying, about the whole evening, "It is a warm, wonderful gesture [on the part of the Vienna Philharmonic]. It is very generous and very healing."

How unthinkably rude it is, even within the social norms of New York City, Planet Earth, ca. 2002, to subject this attendee's pronouncement to the scrutiny of analytic philosophy!