Beardsley, Morgan, and Mothersill—On Art and The Definitions of the Arts

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1961),
pp. 175-187

ON ART AND THE DEFINITIONS OF ARTS: A SYMPOSIUM

[SK's comments]

THE DEFINITIONS OF THE ARTS

Monroe C. Beardsley

THERE IS ONE VALUABLE—but inadequately appreciated—contribution that aesthetics has made to the growth of 20th-century philosophy in general.

Its generic concepts,
art and work of art,
have served as

paradigm cases

of most of the forms of

waywardness

to which

concepts

are subject:

they have worked overtime as Horrible Examples.

When philosophers were making much of the point
that
some important terms have

variable meaning,

and in some contexts are

ambiguous,

the term "art" provided a fine example,
especially of

the process-product type

of ambiguity.

In some contexts it certainly entails conscious skill,
but
we recall also Shelley's skylark pouring forth its soul
"in profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

When "emotive meaning" came into view,
with all its devious consequences,
the term "work of art" seemed to provide a fine example of "persuasive definition,"
however defined—

for it has widely been assumed to be

classifiable among

the normative or "emotive" terms.

Finally,

through the influence

(at first clandestine,
but after 1953 public)

of Wittgenstein, and others,

many philosophers gave up
the traditional idea
that
general terms are, or ought to be,
definable by necessary and sufficient conditions—

and then these aesthetic terms became

prime examples

of "family-resemblance" and "open-texture" terms.

i.

It is this third development that I would like to comment on first,
to set up my problems for this paper.

It consists in challenging
what seemed so plain and incontestable,
for example,

to Clive Bell,

when he wrote:

"For
either all works of visual art
have some common quality,
or
when we speak of 'works of art'
we gibber."

By which he meant
(and certainly many have agreed with him)
that "work of art"

has, or should have,

necessary conditions of application.

Now it was, I believe, Paul Ziff
who first argued in some detail
that the term "work of art"
has to be defined
in terms of "overlapping and interacting criteria."

In his argument he distinguished between

restricted "uses"

of "work of art,"
as when a painting is called a work of art,
or a musical composition, etc.,
and

the generic use,

in which it encompasses all these species.

He reached two conclusions.

He concluded,
first,
that "work of art,"
as applied to a particular painting,
designates a certain set of properties,
and as applied to another painting
a different, though overlapping, set;

so that there are no necessary conditions for being a "work of art" in this "use,"
though any two paintings will have some properties in common.

In short,
Ziff argued
(though the term was not then widely current)
that
"work of art," as applied to paintings,
is
a "family-resemblance" term, in Wittgenstein's sense.

But he concluded,
second,
that the set of properties

used in grouping paintings

together
does not overlap at all
the set

used in grouping music

or poetry,
so that "work of art"

in the generic "use"

can only be defined disjunctively:

a work of art in general is anything that possesses some subset of the set of properties
"pertaining to paintings,"
or
some subset of the set of properties
"pertaining to poems,"
etc.

Both of these conclusions are among the propositions I would like to question.

Another interesting article
in this same line of thought
is the well-known one by Morris Weitz.

He explicitly took over Wittgenstein's classic reflections on the

[176]

word "game."

He argued that "art" is the same sort of word,
since objects called by this name have no necessary properties in common,
and therefore that it is a word with "open texture,"
whose meaning is ready to be adjusted to new works and new forms as they appear.

It is, he held,

"the very expansive, adventurous character of art,
its ever-present changes and novel creations"

that make it

"logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties"

—or, rather,
which make it undesirable to "close the concept"
by insisting, for example, that
in order to be called music or a novel,
an object must have certain properties at least.

Here is another claim that I want to question:
that
because there is no telling what experiments in the drama or in noise may come

in the future,

we can have no good reason for laying down certain necessary conditions in

our use

of the term "tragedy" or the term "music."

Certainly it stands to reason
that no

use

can be

future-

proof.

But please do
give us just one

good reason

for bartering
with these particular gods.

The Wittgensteinian Turn problematizes not just the act of definition, but the purported "reasons" for it also.

Ziff and Weitz have recently received support
(but not very strong support, I think)
for some of their views.

W. B. Gallie holds with Weitz
that
"in some of its uses," the term "work of art" is a "family-resemblance term,"
and with Ziff
that
in other "uses,"
it "is probably a sheer blanket term,
standing either for paintings or for poems or for musical composition and so on,
without any suggestion of an important community of 'artistic nature' between these diferent kinds of production."

Like other British writers over the past decade,
he makes a good deal of

the supposed

uniqueness and hyper-individuality

of works of art—

a healthy emphasis

that,
in my opinion,
has been

carried unhealthily far.

Well,
what are some "reasons",
"good" or otherwise,
why the

deal made

of this

uniqueness

should be sized just so?

Most obviously:
One such set of reasons has to do with what is (differently) at stake here for each of the above-named arts.

For a musician, the difference between,
e.g.
saying what words cannot
and
saying words without saying them
is only secondarily an Aesthetic question;
more immediately,
it is a citizenship question.

i.e.
If music cannot be made without inviting this charge,
then it cannot be made at all.

The obverse case,
wherein a litterateur is accused of writing just for the sound of it,
at least requires some extra bootstrapping,
e.g., of the Zhdanovist kind,
to be made into the same kind of accusation.

Take a look around
at the contingencies du jour and ask:
just which

emphases

is it that have been

carried unhealthily far

in recent years?

His conclusion is put this way:

In any field of activity in which achievements are prized because they renew or advance a highly complex tradition, the point of view from which our appraisals are made—our concept of the achievement in question—would seem always to be of the kind I have called "essentially contested."

An "essentially contested concept,"
in Gallie's terminology,⁵
is one that satisfies

a rather complicated set of conditions,

which are not very clear.

---

⁵ See "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, N.S. LVI (1956), 167- 98.

---

Hmm.

They seem to be rendered quite

clearly

on the contemporary internet.

Is this a false clarity?

Is this clarity due not to Gallie himself but rather to subsequent writers developing the

terminology

?

The most important feature of such a concept
is that a given user,
though

contending that his "use" of it is the best,

because it fits in with his own theories and values in the subject in question,

acknowledges that others are bound

to have a different concept,
in terms of their theories and values.

There is thus

no possibility

of reaching agreement on a definition of "art,"
nor is it

desirable to try

to reach agreement.

Well,
these joint conditions of

contending

and

acknowledging

don't seem to describe the 20th c.

"art"

situation well at all.

How much "acknowledging" can one do,
and still be said to "contest"?

Maybe that is one point of unclarity.

That
the choice of a definition of "art"
and
the acceptance of a theory about art,
or about good art,
are closely connected,
is an important point—

though Gallie sometimes writes as though these acts are not only connected but indistinguishable.

But consider the first part of his statement,
especially the reference to "tradition,"
which is clarified by his artificial example of an "essentially contested concept" in the earlier paper.

Whatever may be said of his artificial concept, I think, does not apply at all well to the arts.

For I do not think
that
paintings, poems, musical compositions,
are aptly described
as
belonging to

"a field of activity

in which achievements are prized

because they renew or advance

a highly complex tradition"

—they

may be

prized this way,
but it seems to me a rather peripheral way to prize them.

One would think so.

But,
take a longer view,
parse value behavioristically,
and
realize that

advance

does not necessarily mean radically advance;
what of it then?

There certainly exist derivative works and simple

traditions,

but are these really able to be

prized

commensurately with their quality?
I think not.

J. Kemp's argument,
so far as it bears upon my present problem,
may be summed up in these words:

We can, of course, provide a working criterion for testing whether something is a work of art or not:

music is the kind of noise, other than conversation, coughing and handclapping, to be heard at concerts, paintings are the framed objects one sees in art-galleries . . .

But if a question such as "What is music?" is thought to require a less flippant-sounding answer than this,

it must,
if error is to be avoided,
be

interpreted historically,

i.e., as meaning
"What is common to everything that

has so far been

written to which the name 'music' can properly be given?"

For if we try to avoid this historical limitation, we shall find that

sooner or later

someone will come along and compose something that obviously has to be called "music" even though it does not fit our definition or criterion.

Philosophers of art cannot legislate for the work of artists; and, in general, definers of activity-words cannot legislate for the performance of the corresponding activities.

It is not at all evident to me that if we agree on a definition of "music," then "sooner or later someone will come along and compose something" that does not fit the definition

[177]

but "obviously has to be called 'music'"—

unless we assume that

whatever anyone calls "music"

has to be accomodated

in our definition.

Well,
this just begs the question against Wittgenstein,

clandestinely

if you insist,
but all the same.

Introducing the notion of

whatever anyone calls music

seems to suggest that the "concept" is "contested", and in the most severe way.

After all, the less contestation,
the easier it is to

accommodate

everyone's usage.

If I'm following the Wittgensteinian bouncing ball, it is not just 'classical categories' which are 'dissolved', but also the contestation itself. The "anyone" problem simply doesn't exist. Hence we can only concur with Beardsley's resolution to ignore it, but perhaps not for the reasons he gives.

Moreover, to

propose a definition

or analysis for the term "music"
is, of course,
not at all to

"legislate" what creative artists shall do,

and it imposes absolutely no limitations at all upon creative activity

—unless

the artist is so petulant

as to say,

"If you won't let me call the ingenious noises I make 'music,'
then I will stop making them."

Well, if

the artist

is indeed completely undeterred,
that does not exactly show the

proposed definition

in the best light.

But total defiance and total

petulance

as rhetorical constructions serve the question poorly. Probably everyone indeed carries on more or less as before, except that they have shown themselves in (perhaps) a new way.

e.g. Say that you inform me, formalistically and matter-of-factly, that you do not consider me to qualify as a man by your "proposed definition" of the term; then, after the next holidays have come and gone, you realize that there was no Christmas card from me this year. "Petulance", you say? Well, it takes one to know one.

ii.

It seems to me useful for aesthetics to have

a generic term

to mark out,

though vaguely,

the objects within its field of interest.

And perhaps with proper qualification,
the term "work of art" will do.

But it does suffer from quirks that make it unsatisfactory for certain philosophical purposes, in my opinion, and we would do better to select a different term,
say
the neologism

"aesthetic object."

I am willing to grant that we want to throw light on the actual uses of "work of art,"

but we may accomplish this end

in a roundabout way

by studying the problems involved
in defining

certain terms that

present fewer problems all at once.

My rule for introducing "aesthetic object" is like Ziff's disjunctive formulation.

I stipulate that
all musical compositions are aesthetic objects,
all literary works are aesthetic objects,
all works of plastic art are aesthetic objects, . . .
etc.

This is an incomplete list, of course.

The point of it is to turn attention from

a broad question that has proved difficult to manage

to

narrower questions that offer more hope

—and have not been very much dealt with.

We want to know (and this is the broad question) whether all aesthetic objects

have common features

that could be used to give a definition of "aesthetic object."

Well,
you had better

complete

the

list

first.
Otherwise the

questions

have been distorted rather than merely

narrowed.

And then,
it seems that to continue enumerating the list,
even modestly,
is merely to return to the original problem,
in all its original

broadness.

But before we can answer this broad question,
let us divide it up,
and ask about the species:

Do all musical compositions have certain common features?

All literary works?

All paintings?

and so on.

But though the narrower questions seem easier,
they turn out to be far from easy—
at least when asked in our time.

For seldom if ever in the history of the arts have the borders of the arts been in such dispute.

First consider painting,
which elicits the most violent reactions.

Some of the protest comes, of course, from the astonished man in the street—

for example, a propos of Jackson Pollock, a letter-writer in Life magazine a while back described the condition of his basement floor:

"On the northeast sector is a huge blob of greenish yellow enamel spilled in the spring of 1943 when I knocked the paint can off a box.

This represents my idea of 'Frustration.'". . .

etc.

The American shows that go abroad are targets of the strongest attacks—and not only from Mr. Krushchev, who visited the American National Exhibition in Moscow in the summer of 1959.

Pointing to one of the American works, he said to the exhibition's curator, Richard McLanathan,

"Pеople who paint like that are crazy,

but people who call it art are crazier still!"

Of the 1958 American show that travelled about Europe, the critic on a Milan newspaper said:

"It is not painting, it is not America . . .

Droppings of paint, spraying, burstings, lumps, squirts, whirls, rubs and marks, erasures, scrawls, doodles, and kaleidoscope backgrounds.

When will they send us a real American show?"

And in The Reporter, Eric Sevareid wrote that the American exhibit at the 1958 Biennial at Venice
was

"the most deserted exhibit in the park. . . .

Nothing, but nothing, except the most extreme, vacuous abstractionism.

Smears and blobs and dots and simple color panels. . . .

It's a joke. . . .

Modern painters get away with murder."

These commentators are talking, of course, about painters like Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko.

To complicate the situation,
we have to cope not only with

the vogue of abstract expressionism,

but
with a sort of

revival of dada,

at least in a purified form.

For the sculptor and collage-maker,
it is the day of the objet trouvé: the junk-yards and attics yield up their old car parts, pieces of sheetmetal, pipes and springs, to be welded together.

And the trash-bins are ransacked for shreds of paper, bottles, cans, torn nylons, and whatnot.

Richard Stankiewicz and Robert Rauschenberg have been most favorably mentioned.

But while

early dada

was

[178]

usually meant,
and usually felt,
to be

an attack on fine art,

the

current fashion

of assembling unlikely materials is heralded as

an enlargement of the medium itself.

To be clear, I don't go in for the Cultural Marxism analysis insofar as it is a top-down conspiracy theory. Gotta say, tho . . . insofar as it is a mere description of functional outputs, I can't argue with its winning combination of parsimony and granular detail in accounting for the above-noted change. If people want to use it this way, knowingly and advisedly, strictly in transaction with other knowing, advised writers, who am I to sound the alarm?

Just realize that the conspiracy-theory version becomes highly un-parsimonious as soon as you notice that

  (1) the gatecrashers love power and self-enhancement far more than they hate oppression, and

  (2) all else being equal, they (anyone!) would much rather

the medium itself

simply be

enlarged

to accommodate them, rather than vice versa. That's why the Long Marchers so often get waylaid at the first water station.

In contemporary music
the situation is at least equally fluid.

First, there is a broadening of the elements of music by the inclusion of new sounds.

In musique concrète, recorded sounds from all sorts of sources ... are artfully combined
(these are musical objets trouvés).

There are the film sound tracks of Louis and Bebe Barron,
...

Two other developments in music start from opposite directions.

The first is accidental composition.

... John Cage, for example, ...

The other is complete pre-calculation (for example, in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez), ...

As far as the ear is concerned,
however,
sheer chance and arbitrary formulas

may produce rather similar sounds,

as the composer George Rochberg has recently pointed out.

By now a terrible cliche, but of course there is some (a certain kind of) truth to it; and besides, it is fertile ground for consideration of some weighty aesthetic issues.

The mystery here is 'dissolved' by realizing that

chance

in this context
also is, so to speak,

arbitrary

so far as the conventions of 'traditional' composition are concerned.

Now, provisionally:
If this "arbitrary" quality is 'what is heard',
while the difference in intention between chance and

formula

is not 'heard',
then we have at least a rarefied case of Intention failing (utterly) to survive the journey from object to subject.

On the literary scene,
the situation is somewhat less in turmoil

—perhaps because so many of the possibilities of borderlinishness were tried out a while ago—

see, for example, the surrealist fun with random or "automatic writing"
(Lautréamont, Apollinaire)
which "is now considered an experiment that failed," according to an authority on surrealism.

Wouldn't we like to know
if
playing out the string
of some "formula",
of "chance",
and of

automatic writing

all tend to

produce similar

results on the

literary scene

as on the music scene?

If not,
then this too would bear significantly upon Intentionalism, per above.

But the experimental drama has certainly raised questions.

Critics have debated whether Waiting for Godot is really a play.

An off-Broadway production called The Connection found Brooks Atkinson dubious about its species.

Apparently
"you are never quite sure when it begins,"
and pan-handlers work the audience during the intermission.

But various similar devices to keep the events on the stage
—the relations among dope addicts—
from being separated from the audience
"make The Connection,"
he said,
"look more like an experience than a play."

The Thurber Carnival was called an "unplay" in The New Republic.

And
what can one make of a CBS Television Workshop production (May 1, 1960), Afterthought,
which contained no actors at all, but only props and sound effects to tell the story?

Can a play, by definition, be a play if it has no dramatis personae?

iii.

Now
these examples,
it seems to me,
odd as some of them may be,
point up some interesting and important problems that arise when we try to get clear in our minds what we are talking about when we talk of the arts, or of any particular art.

One of the problems we can dispose of,
I think,
fairly quickly.

Obviously
one reason why some of the critics (professional or amateur) whom I have quoted

don't want

to call a certain object by the name "art,"
or by the name of a particular art,
is that
the object

appears not to have been made deliberately,

was not an intentional act of expression,

and so on.

"Art," they would say, has

а genetic reference:

no art without an artist.

I think that this is

least felt

in the case of

music.

Even people who would insist that the strains of Shelley's skylark are not literally art, might be willing to call them a "song."

It is now quite conventional to speak of electronic computers as "composing music,"

and I have read that Mozart invented a game in which children could compose simple country dances by throwing dice—but I have not checked this.

In any case,
I am quite sure that

the term "music,"

in ordinary and in critical uses,

does not entail

that
the sounds
so called
have been

conceived by a human being.

In the plastic arts,
the conflicts are more complicated and subtle.

In the example of the greenish-yellow paint on the basement floor, for example,
the Life correspondent's crowning touch of absurdity was that it was produced accidentally.

Probably Mr. Krushchev shared Mr. Sevareid's feeling that painters "get away with murder," when

[179]

their canvasses are hung, though they have apparently done so little work.

Isn't it analytic that a painting must be painted—not scrawled, squirted, dripped, sprayed, etc.?

Or
is painting merely
"the application of paint to a surface,"
which would embrace all methods,
including knocking a paint-can off a box?

(The result of this might be called
"profuse stains of unpremeditated art.")

Now, this sort of question doesn't seem to me a very searching one.

If the purist wants to say,
"That can't be a painting
because the paint was squirted or sprayed,"
then let us introduce another term for things produced that way.

We have engravings and carvings,
so

why not

squirtings and sprayings?

Why not

?

Because we cannot

introduce   terms

into language.

This much all the same,
even after

squirtings and sprayings

have indeed (more or less) taken their place in the practical art-cosmology.

If that is not sufficient for the "terms" to catch on,
then nothing could be.

If the search for definitions is at all sensible, then such episodes as this one are meaningful and must be heeded.

If "painting" has to be a genetic term,
let us reach for the handiest term to cover all these species of two-dimensional surfaces—

say,
"visual design."

Still,
the same sort of objection may be raised.

"How can it be a visual design if it was not designed?"

But now it is clear that this question either confuses two senses of "design,"
an intentionalistic and a non-intentionalistic one,
or else it embodies an illegitimate inference.

Well,
much as I would like to think that there is
a

non-intentionalist  sense of "design"

I doubt that there really is.

The obvious tack here is to turn to the audience, who also have "intentions", and who have been known occasionally to find 'pattern' (and "design") in places where we can say unequivocally that none was intended, where there has in fact been no human presence to "intend" anything at all.

I think this is most of the answer, but I do not think that this is adequately reflected in any "sense" of any "term". And I suppose that this is to break with the 'look and see' admonishment in the same breath as exalting it.

There is a perfectly good sense
in which
the snowflake seen under the microscope

is a design,

without having been designed.

I don't think so.

Maybe if it's a drawing of a

snowflake

?

Or else, if . . . well, never mind.

And this sense
—which refers not to

the process of creation,

but only to

the resulting look of it

—is one that is

desperately needed

by

the critic.

The critic desperately needs

not
for "design"
to be understood
as

a genetic term

.

And if that is
what it is?

I would advise him to use a different term.

And . . . if there simply aren't any ?

I have as of yet read Beardsley's books only superficially, and once; but it seems to me that this crusade against "Intentionalism" is not really about the needs of critics, or not just about that. (Ironically, this requires me to parse Beardsley in a way which may not have been intended.) The point seems urgent enough to bear such indulgence: what is at stake, we might say, is a True Blue lacuna in the language™, precisely here, with a "term" such as "design", which (I think) just is an Intentionalistic term, but which we (critics) may be fooled into applying much more loosely than 'look and see' would dictate.

Maybe something IS hidden here, after all?

More likely, all description is description of something. To describe, we first have to look, and even if everything is visible, we cannot be looking at everything, all at once.

Whether the greenish-yellow paint on the basement floor is a visual design, I do not know—I am only arguing that

the fact that it was spilled

does not prevent it from being one.

The point may be shown,
too,
by the chapter on "Zen in the Arts"
in Alan W. Watts's book on Zen Buddhism.

The bowls used in the cha-no-vu tea ceremony
are
"Korean rice bowls of the cheapest quality, a peasant ware of crude texture from which the masters have selected unintentional masterpieces of form."

Moreover,
the art of making rock and sand gardens (bonseki),
which is called

"the growing of rocks,"

consists in selecting and arranging the rocks,
finding those in which

the "intentionless intention" of wind and sea

carved the right forms.

Watts, by the way, in his most fascinating and penetrating monograph, Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, has
clarified the distinction
between

the "controlled accident"

of the Zen rock-gardener or painter or archer
and

the "goofing off"

of the Beat Zen-imitator,
who thinks he is following the Zen ideal of "naturalness" by giving way completely to accident.

As examples of the latter he cites the ten Ampex tape-recorders of John Cage, letting their sounds fall where they may-and also "torn-up bits of paper dropped on a board and stuck where they fall."

Of course I'm here for all of this;
but Cage specifically is,
I also think,
sold a bit short by this sort of critique.

This absolutely was 'an idea whose time had come' in the so-called West into which Cage was thrust by birth;
we're all better for his various efforts, even if we (rightfully) wish that he (and many others!) had said a bit less (and different!) about it.

I would prefer to view Cage as a popularizer rather than as an outright charlatan.

It is true that the terms
"musical composition,"
"visual design," and
"literary work,"
have

in some contexts

a genetic reference—

to the composer, the designer, the worker (poet, or maker).

But

in other contexts

they can be used without this reference.

So
in this second sort of context
the question still remains:

what is a musical composition,
a visual design,
etc.?

Again,
I think that this context does exist,
but it is very narrow and fragile.

The most obvious example of it is the Professional world of practicing artists, strictly in their capacity as colleagues and collaborators.

This is where
'the piece',
'the music',
'the players', and
'a musician's musician'
live.

But these are

references

that
not many laypersons
are going to catch.

iv.

My way of trying to answer such questions
probably appears
in its clearest and most defensible form
when

applied to music

—if it is not convincing here,
its other applications are not likely to be.

Whatever music is,
its genus,
I suppose all will grant,
is sound.

Well . . .

this too has been questioned . . .

precisely along the lines being traveled here!

Suppose, then,
we are confronted with sequences of sounds,
of various sorts,
and
we are trying to decide where to draw the line
between
those we shall call "music"
and
those we shall call merely "noise."

We do not, of course, expect a sharp line.

We would like to keep in close touch with any prevailing usage,
at least among musicians.

Now
we can assume agreement on two further propositions,
I think:

(1)

Some sound-sequences are music—

say
the sounds made by four string players reading the score of Schubert's A minor quartet.

(2)

Some sound-sequences are not music—

say
the sounds made by a buzz saw going through a log—grain, knots, and all.

We may set these two examples somewhere near

the extremes

of a spectrum.

Suppose we look through this spectrum for

some difference

that is evidently important,

and

therefore deserves

to be marked by some word.

We look for the emergence of a property that is absent from the buzz sawing, and seems to be a very

[180]

notable feature of the Schubert quartet.

If anyone admits the importance of this property,
but prefers not to mark it by the name "music,"
we can invite him to suggest a more appropriate term.

But "music" would seem to be the most rationally defensible candidate.

When we ask musicians what they would select,
some of them would reply at once:
"melody."

This was apparently the view of Eduard Hanslick.

Melody and harmony, he said, are "the two main factors" in music,
without which there is no music at all:

"When South Sea Islanders rattle wooden staves and pieces of metal to the accompaniment of fearful howlings, they are performing

natural music,

that is,

no music at all."

Hanslick makes it clear that
in his view,
as we go up the line from buzz saw to Schubert,
we have not arrived at music,
in the proper sense,
until we come to

tones,

with a scale and fixed intervals,
and

tone-sequences

that combine into melody.

And to cite a recent example,
Viktor Zuckerkandl appears to hold the same view.

But

what is it

about melody
that makes these men
want to call melody "music"?

What is the difference between a melody and a mere sequence of tones?

It is hard to describe,
but perfectly audible:

a melody is a sequence of tones that

cohere into a path,

with tendency and direction,

that belong together enough to create

a single auditory entity

moving through auditory space and time.

It is not merely

succession,

but

movement,

with its own kinetic properties.

The melody rises and falls, rushes and holds back, glides and skips, lingers and lets go.

There is

an orderly process

to behold, marked by cumulation of force, consummation, climax.

This musical movement is

a quite distinct phenomenal thing,

which is

present from the first

introductory bar of Schubert's quartet,
but

wholly absent

from the buzz-sawing.

It appears to a high degree in melody.

But it is also present

to some degree

in all rhythmically-organized passages of sound that have no exact tone at all—
a drum-solo, for example.

What I am suggesting, then, is that we have music whenever this movement appears,
which it may do
(though perhaps seldom with high intensity)
in pure percussive sequences.

I do not see that there is any more useful point at which to draw the line, if we accept the very principle that is tacitly being used by Hanslick and Zuckerkandl

I'm content to take it or leave it.

The equally obvious and much more interesting question
is
whether any such

lines

can be

drawn

phenomenally

?

And then,
an obvious prerequisite
(which we are far short of here)
is:
less 'theory',
more (careful) 'description'.

But it seems that

movement,

e.g.,
is itself a description rather than the object of a description.

Also that
there must be some real question here
as to whether this "movement"

appears

in the

quartet

even if no listeners "appear" in the auditorium.

Now,
it is an interesting fact that we have the term "music"
and also the term "musical composition,"
with all its species.

We can often recognize that it is music we are listening to, from a few bars,
but we do not speak of such a fragment as a musical composition.

Sometimes we may not be able to tell until after several hearings whether we are listening to music or not.

But we know

what to listen for:

that coming-together of the sounds into a continuity of musical movement.

Arguably, the above sort of definition is not complete unless it includes within it a verdict on this question of

listening for;

and the verdict it should include,
I think,
is that this quality cannot be "listened for" at all.
It cannot be sought, it can only be found.
This is the only way that a "phenomenal" definition can be made sensible.

To "listen for" a "melody" is to laugh last after a joke has been told.

The notion that

sometimes we may not be able to tell

immediately

whether we are listening to music or not

actually suggests very strongly that the music-quality cannot be sought.

The complementary observation is:
many times we do (think we) know this immediately,

i.e. 'pre-predicatively' or 'pre-conceptually';

and certainly in those cases there can be no talk of "listening for".

This movement is the basic coherence that constitutes the differentia of music.

But what we call a musical composition,
I suggest,
is a stretch of music that also has a definitely perceptible degree of

completeness:

it is to some extent self-sufficient,
generating its own momentum,
and coming to its own conclusion.

I would argue, then,
that some minimal degree of
coherence and completeness
is a necessary condition of musical compositions,

both in the well-considered ordinary meaning of the term
and in the most useful critical sense.

v.

When we come to the question of defining the plastic arts,
we first note an interesting difference from the terminology we have just considered.

While we can provide the term
"a visual design"
as an analogue for
"a musical composition,"
there is

for the visual arts

no analogue for "music."

What is the significance of this?

Well, first,
let us suppose we had such a term,
say "visic,"
and

see how we would be using it.

The genus within which we are working here
has to be conceived very broadly—
say,
the visual field, or some part of it.

Take, for example, a random view of leaves and grass as seen through a window.

Such a scene will have

a certain degree of coherence

—that is, it will hang together, because of textural similarities in shape and hue.

This stretch of visic,
like a segment of abstract wall-paper pattern, or fabric,
can be distinguished (though not sharply) from

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a stretch of the visual field that has no coherence at all, where the parts have nothing to bring them together or reconcile them to each other.

But
in fact,
it is not too easy to find or create examples of thorough incoherence in the visual field.

Laws of nature being what they are

—inverse-square laws,
laws of crystallization,
surface tension,
etc.—

it is not even safe to rely on accident.

Suppose, for example, that green and purple paint are dripped at random about the floor.

If they are sufficiently intermingled,
and if the drips are made in such a way as to preserve some uniformity of shape or size,
the result will quite possibly be some visic
though whether it is good visic is, of course,
another question.

This,
then,
is one reason why there is not much use, perhaps, for the term "visic,"
since it would be so broad as almost to exhaust its genus.

Alternatively,
the music side of the

analogy

has been rendered too narrowly!

(Duh!)

Suppose we move along the scale of visic,
then,
to more and more coherent patterns.

We come upon a new and significant distinction,
I believe,
when we find a stretch of visic that is

held together,

not by

textural harmonies

alone,

but by

structure.

Suppose, for example, there is a single tree standing out in the center, as I look out the window.

Here there may easily be two discriminable aspects that work together.

First,
there may be

centrality—

that is,
objects group themselves about,
are oriented with respect to
some dominant pattern or focus.

Second, there may be

balance—

the weights and directions of force of subordinate areas take on opposition and tension with respect to each other and to the central focus.

And at the same time,

with the appearance of structure,

the stretch of visic takes on

a certain degree of completeness

or self-sufficiency.

And

if we wished,

then,
to make a distinction between visic and visual designs,
we could draw the line at this point
and say that

textural coherence is sufficient

to make visic,
but

structural coherence and completeness,

to some degree,
is

necessary

for a visual design.

The distinction between "visic" and "а visual design" is of theoretical use to the aesthetician,
I believe,
but

its practical use to the critic

may be questioned.

For
the objects he has to deal with
are (in a broad sense)

framed

—either with clearly-marked borders,
or by being set against a contrasting wall-background.

And this framing

just by itself

is able to impart

a slight degree of completeness

to almost any stretch of visic that may be cut out with a scissors.

Not a high degree—

but enough

to allow its defenders, if they wish to claim for it the name of "visual design,"
to make out a case for their claim.

Well,

what's a

critic

for,

if not for calling shenanigans on such a

claim

?

Framing the canvas will not, of course, transform its coherence from a textural into a structural coherence,
and so one could still withhold the term "visual design" on that ground.

And in fact,
I think this would be a clarifying thing to do,
if we could invent a less ridiculous term for what I have called "visic."

For it would provide a convenient way of describing what is present and valuable
in
a Jackson Pollock, for example,
without arousing

false expectations of what is not there.

Well,
if we simply must
take a position on

what is present and valuable in

some artwork,
and
if we simply must

describe

this
to some eager inquisitor,
then
we are indeed in danger of

arousing false expectations

in that person.
Certainly!

But how did we get here?

Beyond all that kind of thing,
I do wonder if the

frame

is not a very

valuable

part of a Pollock,
and if there's nothing at all deflationary or controversial in saying so?

An interesting bit of recent art history
throws some light on these considerations.

A few years ago, Art News published a full-page segment of Monet's Pond and Covered Bridge (ca. 1919).

By photographing a small portion of the painting and blowing it up again,
the magazine suggested that it was Monet who invented abstract expressionism,
since, of course,
the resulting piece of visic lost its structure and its representational aspect.

Indeed, it was a rather borderlinish case of visic, at that.

As the critic, Frank Getlein, remarked, in an ironic discussion of this experiment,

"There was no image, there was no form, there was no composition, only the pure joy of smearing thick pigment around on a canvas."

Perhaps a little more could be said on behalf of its coherence,
but in any case,
I should say that
even if it is visic,
it is not a visual design.

vi.

The problem of defining "literature" is much more complicated,
partly because

а multiple distinction

is required.

We want to distinguish verse from prose,
poetry from other verse,
novels from historical narratives,
etc.

Hmm.

Why not similarly

distinguish

folk songs from symphonies?

The answer cannot be:
because

we

did not

want to

.

Why?

Though we have both the traditional term "literature" and the more technical term "literary work,"
we

find it more natural

to describe particular writings as

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poems, plays, novels, essays, etc.

And similarly
we are

inclined to praise

a poem by saying that it is
"a good poem"
rather than
"a good literary work."

How different is this from the folk song and the symphony?

I'm asking sincerely this time, because I'm really not sure. I would bet that there is some such difference in how they are spoken of, certainly in the context of contextless Middlebrow Mass Culture (which is, like it or not, the only place to look for true comparisons along these lines).

Perhaps the LLMs can finally tell us what we actually have been

inclined to

say over the years.

Instead of tackling the whole broad problem here,
let us consider what it is to be a poem,
and see whether the distinctions made earlier for music and visual designs are helpful here.

First,
it is to be noted that
we do have the terms "poetry" and "poem,"

and it seems to me that one feature of our usage is that
(as with music)

we can recognize

poetry from a line or two,
or from a simile or metaphor,
but such touchstones

may not yet be

poems.

It is tempting to say "complete poems,"
but I feel a certain redundancy in this—
a discourse (this being our genus) has to be complete to some degree to be a poem.

Second, as Charles Stevenson has shown,
the word "poem" itself is subject to some subtle variabilities of meaning.

My purpose here is not to discuss

all aspects

of the problem
of what is meant, or is to be meant,
by "poem,"

but to argue briefly for certain

necessary conditions.

That is,

necessary

but not
sufficient?

And to make this argument clear,
I shall take as а model the smallest piece of discourse that can
(as I think it will be generally agreed that it can)
be called a poem.

I shall take a miniature imagist poem—a haiku by the 18th-century poet, Gyōdar, quoted, in translation, by Alan Watts:

Google AI (23 Mar 2026) identifies the poet as
Kaya Gyodai (1732–1793).

Leaves falling,
  Lie on one another;
   The rain beats on the rain.

What makes this a poem?

Since I am concerned only with certain necessary conditions,
I feel justified in ignoring an important aspect of poetry,
namely its sound.

That is, I shall not consider the question whether a poem must be verse (that is, metrical language)—

nor shall I be concerned about the question whether the syllable-count of the translation adheres to the rules of the haiku.

That these three lines have

a fairly strong coherence

is plain enough.

It might even be argued that poems are
to some degree coherent
by the definition of their genus,
"discourse."

But I should consider grammatical correctness and similar elementary requisites sufficient to make a discourse.

And we would still be left with the possibility of incoherence on a higher level—the failure of one sentence or clause to connect with the previous one.

Consider, for еxample, the first two lines again:

Leaves falling,
  Lie on one another.

What can follow this?

Many things, of course.

We might say,
"Life is cheap this year,"
giving it a moralistic twist.

Or
"The tree looks down, ashamed,"
personifying nature more explicitly.

Not that these
would

be good,

but
they would still

go with

the first two lines:

it would be possible to give

a reason why

the third line belongs after the first two.

Admittedly,
coherence is a fairly minimal quality in discourse,
for many lines chosen by chance would be found to fit in some roundabout way.

However,
I should think the following a fairly complete disorganization:

Leaves falling,
  Lie on one another;
   Ball-point pens are 6½ cents apiece.

I think this is not a poem.

Well,
don't

think

this too hard,
else this "thought" becomes self-defeating.

i.e.

A

fairly strong coherence

makes for a surprisingly easy détournement;
and détournement, whatever else you think about it, cannot be explained away as mere

disorganization

.

Rather, the entire "organization" is maintained intact, or very nearly so.

Watts
has an interesting remark
about the poem.

The artificial haiku always feels like a piece of life which has been deliberately broken off or wrenched away from the universe, whereas the genuine haiku has dropped off all by itself, and has the whole universe inside it.

A saying difficult to apply,
but full of sense.

First of all,
it is fairly clear that he is talking about completeness:

the genuine haiku

can stand by itself

in some independence of other things.

A love-letter, a cry for help,
is much more

dependent upon its context

or occasion.

Consider,
by way of experimental contrast,
the difference between it and the following pseudo-haiku:

Coming down on the train,
  I encountered a man
   Who greeted me very cordially.

I think this is not a poem.

And that is chiefly because it raises such tantalizing questions
—who? why? to what end?—
and the need to answer them,
without the slightest intention of answering them.

It reads like the beginning of a long—probably boring—anecdote.

But somehow of the

[183]

haiku
we do not ask:
what leaves?
what kind of tree?
how long did the rain last?

what leaves?
  what kind of tree?
   how long did the rain last?
    what kind of pen costs only a few cents?

But this completeness is bound up with
a third property,
which is suggested by Watts' remark
that

the haiku has the whole universe
—or better, it has a universe, or a small world, anyway—
inside it.

To me that means that the discourse is not merely

a logical or chronological sequence

of images or concepts—

it takes on a second level of

emergent symbolic meaning.

Revolver, please.

I fail to see why this does not also reduce

the discourse

to

a chronological sequence

.

i.e.

To play at Wittgenstein(ianism) a bit,

emergence

for us here seems something like what a 'mental process' is for Malcolm's Wittgenstein:

we are constantly seduced into speaking as if there were a time before

symbolic meaning

and a time after its "emergence";
or, perhaps to avoid this, we instead point to the simultaneous impression of two

levels

of "meaning".

But both descriptions are clearly wrong, because there was no 'beforetime', and there was no 'first level'.

Of course there could be as many "levels" to a poem as we would like there to be; but these do not "emerge". We do not 'see' them simply by 'looking'. They cannot be 'found', only 'sought'. It is this process of 'seeking' meaning that has chronology and texture. What it does not have is the same basis in our 'form of life' that an unsought "symbolic meaning" does.

Perhaps this is very vague and delicate,
but it is there.

These falling leaves are

not just

falling leaves—
they somehow protect one another.

And there is

more to this rain than meets the eye

or ear.

The poem has a thickness of meaning,
a semantical depth,
and that is what counts to make it a poem.

One more experimental contrast:

Leaves falling,
  Pile up in the yard;
   Someone will have to rake them.

This is not quite a poem, I think.

It is a sound inference;
it is coherent
(though not so complete, because
it sounds like a hint for action).

Perhaps one could argue that the act of raking here is made into a symbolic act;
and setting off the lines by themselves
(like framing a piece of visic)
goes some way toward claiming that this is a poem.

It focusses our attention and invites reflective meditation on
the significance of what is happening,
or not happening,
to discover, if we can,
reverberations of symbolic meaning.

But I believe that in this case we are frustrated—the potential lawn-raker is not really made into another Solitary Reaper.

So we have not poetry,
but

non-poetry

pretending to be poetry.

My thesis
that
in recognizing something as an aesthetic object of one sort or another,
we do, in fact, take some coherence and completeness as necessary conditions,

may be challenged on several grounds.

I will comment briefly on two.

First,
the thesis may be rejected as trivial on account of

the excessive vagueness of its central terms,

"coherence" and "completeness."

Remember that I do not say that these are

the only properties

that decide whether something is a musical composition, a visual design, or a literary work.

But I do say that

it makes good sense,

and in some cases very plain sense,
to say that one piece of music

hangs together better,

or

rounds itself off better,

than another;
and the same is true of poems and paintings.

It is true that

the property of coherence

that is found in both music and poetry is

somewhat abstract,

and of course,
a visual design is not complete in the same way as music that leaves no unsatisfied expectations when it ends.

Nevertheless,
it seems to me that

there is sufficient content to these terms

so that
one who is looking for movement in music
and
one who is looking for balance in a painting
may be said to be

applying the same general criterion.

Perhaps it is

the same

but it is not a

criterion

.

Second,
the thesis may be attacked
on historical grounds.

Does it reflect merely
a special aesthetic theory,
or the limitations of an individual taste,
or the predilections of a particular period?

An interesting test is provided by Roger Shattuck's book on some French experimenters of an earlier day and his generalizations about 20th century arts.

He finds that one of the main revolutionary elements in 20th-century arts is a revolt against
"the classical concept of unity."

But it is not

unity in general

that even the most extreme innovators rejected,
but

"the fundamentally discursive unities."

In shying away from the word "unity," however, criticism in all the arts has unwittingly settled on another term to convey the idea of how the parts of a modern work of art are put together. . . . This factotum word is juxtaposition: setting one thing beside the other without connective. The twentieth century has addressed itself to arts of juxtaposition as opposed to earlier arts of transition.

Does this mean, then, that 20th-century aesthetic objects do not have coherence or completeness?

Shattuck makes clear, I think, that "without connective" does not mean "without connection."

The musical phrases, pictorial shapes, lines of verse are set side by side in bold contrast and abrupt changes,
and the observer may have to

do more work

to perceive

the emergent relationships

that are implicit in them.

But they must be there.

I'd prefer to argue
that
the sheer amount of

work

must be held constant
for purposes of all arguments about
the

perception

of

relationships

among

parts

;

also that

emergence

and "work" are strange bedfellows here.

If Apollinaire,
starting from "an utterly random sequence of experiences while sitting in a cafe,"
put together "difficult, disconcerting, fragmented works
whose disjunct sequence has neither beginning nor

[184]

end,"

the question still remains whether these works fuse together enough to become poems, or even poetry.

Well, if we stop taking the audience to be "working", if we in fact positively take them not to be "working",
then, all the same,
much that has traditionally been thought to

fuse together enough

still does;
it still is found to be as such.

If we can always find some "relationships",
then the real test seems to be:
what happens when we do not look for them?

vii.

I should like to consider one more complication in the problem of defining the arts,
namely,

the apparent tendency

of terms like "music" and "poem"
to

become value-terms.

Consider the relation between two forms of expression that occur frequently in criticism:
"an X"
and
"a good X."

There are poems,
and there are good poems;

there is music,
and there is good music.

Two general observations on this relationship will, I think, be acknowledged to be just.

First,
being a good X entails being an X,
and
being a poor X entails being an X.

Something can't be good music, or great music, or low-grade music,

unless it is

music,
any more than something can be a good ladder without being a ladder.

We may sometimes want to say of an object that it "would make" a good ladder,
but this assumes that it is not a ladder now,
though slight changes might transform it into one.

Importantly, these

ladder-changes

may be
extrinsic changes.

Daresay,
most of the time this is what they are.

Second,
there is

a continuity of meaning

between the three expressions:

"a good X," "a poor X," and "not an X at all."

This has an interesting consequence.

We praise by saying that music is good;

we can also say that it is poor.

But we cannot say that it is bad
(or if we do,
this is taken to mean that it is simply very poor).

So as we cast about for something even more damning to say,
we

find it handy

to treat "not music at all"
as if it were a sort of

superlative prejorative.

e.g. Perhaps a rope "would make a good ladder" because we can actually (conceivably) imagine putting it to something resembling that use; and/or, the circumstances which would prompt us to put it to that use are imaginable and relatively common (if not likely) circumstances.

But a broomstick or a roll of paper towels wouldn't be called "a bad ladder" so long as we don't make any such "connection"; and indeed, this connection is unlikely to be made: the circumstances under which it is likely to be made are themselves unlikely.

Is this what is meant above?

But then, this is not nearly as

handy

in the case of music or poetry as it is in the case of tools and appliances:

rather, it seems to be precisely the interloping of

"not music at all"

in circumstances where "good music" is expected which is itself the meta-circumstance which elicits the charge of "not . . . at all".

i.e. Here the paper towels have been previously and knowingly unfurled and hung from a second-story window; and now someone is referring to them (or trying to use them) as a "ladder". There is no "would make" about it; rather, the making is a done deed.

So, for example, in 1877,
Tchaikowsky wrote to Madame von Meck,

I cannot call that music which consists of kaleidoscopic, shifting phrases, which succeed each other without a break and never come to a close, that is to say, never give the ear the least chance to rest upon musical form. Not a single broad, rounded melody . . .

Nevertheless,
though Tchaikowsky could manage to condemn Wagner's Die Walküre by refusing to call it "music,"
this does not mean that "music" is a normative term.

For the situation is one in which

the blame attaches to Wagner,

rather than his opera,
on

the tacit assumption

that he called it music.

This is shown by the fact that

there would be no evaluation

if Tchaikowsky's remark, "That's not music,"
were made, say, of a thunderstorm.

Now,
suppose a dispute should arise
as to whether some newly created and performed sequence of sounds
is really music.

Let the composer, in all humility,
bring it to us and say,

"I think what I have written here is music,
but I'm not sure.
Help me decide."

" . . . I first thought I was in pain, but I later realized I was mistaken . . . "

Take, for example,
the recording of Henry Cowell's Ongaku.

Reviewing it in the New York Times, Eric Saltzman wrote:

The motion is like that of ripples on the water—there appears to be motion where there is really none . . . This music has a static, literally timeless quality. . . . One can take pleasure in the skillful creation of lines and melodies.

There are some puzzles here.

First,
"skillful" is clearly irrelevant,
once we admit no contradiction in music's being created by machines.

Second,
it might seem as if we had here a counter-example to my definition of "music" in terms of movement,
since the reviewer says the music doesn't move.

But something is odd about the attempted distinction between music that

really moves

and music that

only "appears" to move.

And in any case, Saltzman says that it contains melodies, and melodies involve—they are—a kind of movement.

Now,
what reasons could one give,
if challenged,
to argue that this really is a musical composition,
not mere noise?

According to my view,
one would point out its movement,
that is,
its musical coherence

(and of course,

help the questioner to hear it,

if he doesn't at first).

And one would point out its completeness,
its coming to some sort of conclusion.

And similar remarks would be in order if it were a visual design or a poem, or an aesthetic object of some other sort.

Now,
suppose it were agreed for the moment
that it is a musical composition,
and the further question is raised
whether it is a good one.

What reasons could one give to support that judgment?

Again,

one would point out its degree of coherence into a single concentrated whole,
and also its completeness—its satisfactory consummation.

That is not all there is to say,
but it is a part of what to say.

[185]

We have,
then,
this apparently paradoxical situation.

For the very qualities
that

count in favor of its being music

also

count in favor of its being good music.

But the paradox dissolves.

Coherence,
when

present to a certain minimal degree,

counts in favor of calling something music;

when

present to a higher degree,

it counts in favor of calling music good music.

So, too, with completeness.

Here, then,
is the peculiar relationship between the two propositions,
"This is a musical composition"
and
"This is a good musical composition."

It explains why people have thought "music" must be a normative term,
but it also explains why it is not,

for though coherence is part of the meaning of "music,"
it is not part of the meaning of "good" as applied to music,
rather one of the grounds of goodness.

Wha?

I fail to see how

the grounds of

some predicate would not be

part of the meaning of

that predicate.

Consider this comparison:

To be a knife at all,
an object must have a blade.

A blade, by definition, is much thinner than it is broad,
and so the knife must have some minimal degree of sharpness,
so to speak.

But sharpness is also one of the criteria of goodness in knives,
one of the grounds on which we say it is "a good knife."

Still,

this does not make "knife" a value-term,

since
the degree of sharpness it requires

to be a knife

falls short of that degree it requires

to be a good knife.

Well, okay.

What if it just is 'good to be a knife'?

It's not, of course;
and that's why knifehood is less hotly disputed than musichood.

But it sure is 'good to be music'!
That's why we're all here!

Haven't you noticed, Professor?

Nor, I think, does "knife" become a value-term
even if it should be the case
(as it probably is)
that

any object with a part thin enough to make it a knife at all will be capable of cutting something—such as room-temperature butter.

Formerly I thought that
"This is good music"
and
"This music has aesthetic value"
meant the same thing.

But now I see that this was a mistake.

For any sequence of sounds that is coherent,
in a purely musical way,
and complete enough to qualify as music,
will probably, on this account alone,
be capable of affording to some degree the sort of experience we call "aesthetic,"
and the саpacity to afford this experience is (I consider) its aesthetic value.

In short, all music
(I am now inclined to think)

has some degree of aesthetic value.

But of course
it does not follow that all music is

good music;

indeed, this is certainly not the case.

Moreover,
even if all music has some aesthetic value,
"music" is not a value-term,
for when we call it "music" we are not calling attention to

its aesthetic value,

but rather to

the grounds of its aesthetic value

—that is, to those (or to some of those) properties in virtue of which it has the capacity to arouse aesthetic experience.

Hmm.

I suppose this does cover a large swath of usage, but I can't imagine that very many people understand this usage this way; and then, there are a few other swaths, some of which are veritably dripping with

value

.

There is this close connection,
then,
in criticism
between

description or classification

and

evaluation,

that
some of the same skills are needed
in determining whether something is music
that are required
in determining whether, if it is music, it is good.

The critic at work can take comfort in this fact:

that it is usually much easier,
and requires less fine discrimination,
to see that something

has enough of the relevant qualities

to be a musical composition
than to decide

how good it is

—and the same goes for visual designs and poems.

Seems backwards!

But this is not always so,
and today's borderline cases provide exceptions.

The layman is likely to think that if a very fine discrimination is required to decide whether something is music or not, it certainly cannot have the relevant qualities in a sufficiently high degree to be good music.

Therefore it can safely be ignored, or ridiculed.

It is true that once we are morally certain we have heard in the music all that there is in it to be heard, music that is barely music will not be great music.

But sometimes,
after several hearings,
a shapeless and discontinuous sequence of tones may suddenly pull together into a new gestalt,
and leap at once from the class of apparent non-music to the class of good music.

viii.

The foregoing analysis
of
the relation between
being an X-type aesthetic object
and
being a good X-type aesthetic object,
brings out, I think,
the elements of truth and falsity
in
Collingwood's remark that

The definition of any given kind of thing is also the definition of a good thing of that kind: for a thing that is good in its kind is only a thing which possesses the attributes of that kind.

This principle is mistaken on at least two points.

For
(1) there

are always some

properties
that
count toward an object's

being an X

that
do not have any bearing upon its

[186]

being a good X.

For example,
audibility
is a requisite for music,
but
cannot be cited as a reason
for saying that a musical composition is good.

Well, of course we can

always

find

examples

when we need to.

How to math out such a proposition,
so as to preempt such cheap recourse?

How to say what it is to

count

in this way,
or not?

Doesn't a

property

cease to "count"
just when it is

requisite

?

i.e.
Because "requisite"-ness is asymmetrical,
such that
absence counts against
but presence doesn't count for?

e.g.
May I "count" the

audibility

of the buzzsaw in favor of its being music?
Only if I'm already in the bag for the buzzsaw.
But you do not have to be in the bag
against cell phone radiation
to note that its in-"audibility"
counts against its being music.

This would seem to have something to do with "audibility" being a Waltonian standard feature of music, and this is not the same as its being a property that "counts toward" the sort of ontological verdict we are after here.

And
(2) even when
the same properties are involved
in being an X
and
in being a good X,

it is different degrees of them

that are relevant,

as I have said.

Hmm.

This theory of concepts is suddenly not quite classical and also not quite contemporary.

Prototype Theory a la Lakoff does posit

degrees.

and this indeed nets out as something like

being a good X

or not.

But membership writ large is not a matter of degree:
both penguins and robins are 100% birds.

Now, is "goodness" a matter of possessing properties in greater or lesser degree? I can envision coaxing this out of the most popularized examples, in the same vein as Beardsley tortures the "audibility" confession out of music: the robin does (and just is) more birdy-stuff than the penguin. Right? Sure, but this tactic feels unsustainable.

The cognitivists regularly namecheck the family resemblance trope, and presumably that isn't just for street cred. So, what would an assessment of degrees of wingedness or beakedness look like? It would look almost (perhaps not quite!) exactly like the assessment of robinness and penguinness that we had hoped it would resolve.

Of course it may be that for Beardsley we are dealing here with a notion (don't say a 'concept'!) of "goodness" that has little to do with that of Prototype Theory. TBC on that.

Collingwood's principle is important,
for
he uses it as a basis
for an Expression Theory of aesthetic value.

What the artist is trying to do is to express a given emotion. To express it, and to express it well, are the same thing. . . . A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails.

It seems to me,
then,
that we have found a fundamental difficulty in the Expression Theory of Art,
at least in the form in which Collingwood holds it.

For it says, first, that
we have a work of art
if and only if
someone has expressed something;
second, that
when someone expresses something,
we have successful expression;
and third, that
when expression is successful,
the result is a good work of art.

Thus

there is no distinction

between
works of art and good works of art—

it is logically impossible for there to be
works of art that are not good.

Well, yes, it is quite

a   difficulty

insofar as it grates harshly against our pretheoretical intuitions; i.e., it doesn't pass the smell test.

But now, the theorists of the world have never before let that be any kind of deterrent, have they?

Surely, Professor, we're not going to make that particular margin call after going neck deep ourselves?

Collingwood,
to be sure,
speaks about art in general
rather than about poems, music, etc.

But I judge that his Expression Theory
would not permit us to speak of anyone
as
composing music that is not good.

Hmm.

That is to say,
all music succeeds in

expressing

just the

given emotion

?

We might better argue that none does!

Yes, that is unintuitive.

Also and nonetheless, it is a theory!

Perhaps he could say
that
it is the very same act of expression
which,
when carried through to a certain extent,
gives us music or visic or poetry,
and
when carried to a higher degree of success,
gives us good music or visic or poetry.

And
in this way
he might claim that
the distinction between good and not good music
can be subsumed under the Expression Theory.

But there are still many objections
to
the concept of artistic success.

Harold Osborne
has defended Collingwood's general principle
on the ground that

any property
whose presence in various degrees
is taken as a ground for

a comparative evaluation

of music, for example,
must be

common to all

music.

Interesting!

Could

comparative evaluation

be an unexpected casualty of the family resemblance thesis?

In one way, it would be odd indeed if we were to "compare" tokens-of-a-type on some basis that was (noncontroversially) seen not to be

common to

the type.

And then, if there simply are no such "common" properties, for any type at all, then this is exactly what we have been doing the whole time.

On this, there is an old saying about comparing apples and oranges. Like most old sayings, it succeeds in making you think but fails to be worth living by:

this comparison is not 'fair';

but someone tell us, please, where it is written down that comparison generally simply must be 'fair'?

I think that the conceit to 'fairness of comparison' is what needs to be questioned here; namely because we truly have no need for it in the 'private' domain of 'aesthetics' unless and until we somehow go public in the manner of the dead-tree critic and the Ivory Tower professor. Beardsley's Anti-intentionalism about artistic creation has a complement here in the crucial distinction between private thoughts and public discourse; but it seems that the world thus made safer for critics-and-criticism is (was) made quite hazardous for any ordinary people with strong opinions about incommensurable tokens; that is, about anything at all. The prescription seems to have been: drop the opinions, cling to the conceit. But that is pointless and life-denying. I mean, it's not even nice!

This seems reasonable, taken in one way.

If having more of Q
(or Q to a higher degree)
tends to make one composition better than another,
then
both of
the compositions to be compared in this respect
must have the quality to some degree.

On the other hand,
some music does not contain modulations,
yet a certain indecisiveness of modulation,
when it occurs in some contexts,
may be a defect—
just as
a particularly firm but surprising modulation
may be a ground of praise.

Still,
perhaps this is because
modulations become merits or defects

only in so far as

they affect
the degree of coherence or completeness,
or

some other broad quality

that is in fact common in some degree

to all music—and necessarily so.

Well, okay.

And I suppose we can explain how and why

they affect

?

God forbid, we can (learn to) predict this??

If not, then there's no reason to believe this explanation.

But

even if Osborne's statement is true,

it does not establish Collingwood's principle

that

"the definition of any given kind of thing
is also the definition of a good thing of that kind."

For
on the one hand,

not all

of the common properties of music

need be specified

in

an adequate definition—

some may be
contingent, but universal,
and hence available for comparison.

And on the other hand,

not all

the properties

mentioned

in the definition of music
need be
properties that

vary in degree

from work to work,

or
if they do vary,
count as

reasons for positive evaluation

in proportion to their intensity or quantity.

Thus
all musical compositions have a duration,
and
this is no doubt analytically true,
but
duration is not a ground of musical goodness.

So,

duration

is

contingent, but universal,

and hence available for comparison

i.e., of music-to-music,

Duration is vacuous
in the sense of not

needing to

be specified

in an adequate definition

in spite of being
a property which is both (truly!) common to all and

varying

in degree

among members.

This is unsatisfying, if not actually wrong, just because 'necessary' and 'sufficient' mean very different things and hence have to be carefully distinguished.

If the point (or part of it) is that "duration" is 'necessary but not sufficient', then I suppose I don't know exactly what 'sufficient' is supposed to mean.

It seems that there are (at least) two senses of insufficiency: call them vacuousness and overinclusivity.

If duration is 'vacuous', that's because it (somehow) manages to be 'common to all' without (somehow!) demanding to be "specified" in a definition. To adapt W's example, it is as if all games did turn out, after all, to involve competition, yet the property competition turned out (somehow!!) not to "need" to "be specified" in the definition of game. But then, something doesn't quite add up here, does it?

Duration is not just 'vacuous' qua duration. It also is 'overinclusive' in the sense that many other kinds besides 'music' possess the property of duration, just as many nongames involve competition. But is this the reason why the duration-condition is vacuous within a definition of music? Beardsley never says so. Maybe he thinks he's playing it safe this way. i.e. He does not want to rely upon the ontology of any kinds other than music in making a case about music. Why should he bring anything else into it? We are not trying to define film, baseball games, sleep, or anything else besides music which, as it happens, might turn out to share the 'common property' of having a duration.

But then, the only way to explain why the duration-condition is vacuous in a definition of music just is by pointing up its 'overinclusivity'. Why? Because mere 'vacuousness' within a kind could very well be marking a distinguishing essential feature if only it turns out that no other kinds share it. But then, if we examine no other kinds, then we cannot rule out the possibility that the property is unique to the kind we are examining. The definitional project is, in fact, determined from the start by . . . pretty much everything else that exists! ('It exists' is the ultimate definitional vacuity.)

Beardsley smuggles this in without acknowledging it, i.e., by choosing the example he chooses (duration), which anyone literate enough to read his paper will tacitly assume cannot possibly be a property possessed only and uniquely by music. But if we cease to make precisely this assumption, then the condition just has ceased to be overinclusive; and by then, any property that is quite obviously shared by all members of the category has been granted its 'sufficiency' de facto.

Of course that's an incredibly stupid maneuver, and I'm not accusing anyone of actually making it. The point is: we haven't actually begun the inquiry at all unless and until we've made some comparisons (probably tacit, and probably by-the-pound) of the kind we are interested in with who knows what else. That's just part of the definitional procedure, whether it is acknowledged or not. And then, must it be acknowledged? Only if not mentioning it is doing some hard work, 'in the background' as it were, on behalf of the given argument. And that seems to be precisely the case here. This is how Beardsley is able to present such a seemingly remarkable fact in such a nonchalant manner: not only are there

common properties of music

after all, but they are bought so cheaply that

not all

of them need figure in a definition! Ho hum! But I have to think this comes from breezing past the (preliminary) observation that duration is 'necessary but not sufficient', which should be a mere formality but, evidently, is not.

Why doesn't Beardsley just say that duration is 'neither necessary nor sufficient'? Perhaps because this is not what is directly at issue this time around. Rather, the question is whether

the definition of any given kind of thing

is also the definition of a good thing of that kind

On this, Khatchadourian tied "goodness" to function, and this seems to be exactly what is required to

establish

the Collingwood-Osborne

principle.

Do not artworks have functions?
Well, they may have functions.

What if someone denies this in a given case?
Well, it's not too hard to infer a function per se for/in almost anything pretty much as soon as that thing has become an 'intentional object' of ours; this is the inference which allows us to say, e.g., that a dull, rusty knife nonetheless just is a knife all the same, hence it (somehow!) bears the full burden of the cutting-function just as penguins bear the full burden of birdhood, i.e., of being bad birds, unable to make their domain-escape to some other superordinate category where they could thrive as exemplars rather than merely survive as exceptions. (Then again, sometimes it's better to be the fiftieth-best tuba player in Los Angeles than the third- or fourth-best in Minneapolis.)

So, functions can as easily be used against the principle as used in its service, unless we stipulate an empirical method and threshold of evidence for adducing functions of an object; and of course this is entirely doable, but it's unparsimonious and probably leaves some significant borderlands uncharted. TBC.

Again,
some have a greater duration than others,
but the fact that X lasts longer than Y is not a reason for saying that X is a better musical composition than Y

or,
if it sometimes is,
indirectly,
that is only when the increase in length becomes in turn the basis of a greater complexity of musical structure or a build-up of more powerful regional qualities.

¹ ...

[187]

...

⁹ ... For fuller accounts of composition using electronic means, ...

Cf. the very interesting discussion by G. H. R. Parkinson, "The Cybernetic Approach to Aesthetics," Philosophy, XXXVI (1961), 49-61, esp. his concept of music (53, 56).

¹⁰ ...

²¹ "On 'What is a Poem?'" The Philosophical Review, LXVI (1957), 329-60. Stevenson proposes an analysis of "poem" in terms of a sort of weighted average of a set of properties—a further refinement of "family resemblance" terms.

²² ...

---

ART PURE AND SIMPLE

Douglas N. Morgan

AS WE KNEW Mr. Beardsley would do,
he has combined intelligence, learning, and perceptiveness with literate grace.

Because I share his

"objective" approach

to art,
and have felt certain serious difficulties in my own thinking which so closely parallels Mr. Beardsley's here,

the following remarks are
in a manner of speaking
challenges to myself,
as well as to him.

In these remarks I shall try to show:

(a)	that the explicit concept of "art without the artist," while admittedly advantageous in some contexts, may prejudge and falsify the case for "romantic" and contemporary art;
(b)	that the implicit concept of "art without the

[188]

audience" blurs a crucial distinction, and thus renders Mr. Beardsley's definitional categories impossible of precise application and insufficient for their purpose; and that, as a result, his proposals would leave us art so pure that it is too simple.

ART WITHOUT THE ARTIST

We have not yet quite forgot

the spectral memory of biographical criticism.

Mr. Beardsley's heroic way of exorcising this specter is to define "art" and its cognates in "objective" terms.

"X is music"
need not mean, in any part,
"X was humanly composed";

"X is music"
may mean only
"X phenomenally moves as coherent sound."

"Y is a painting"
does not entail
"Y was painted";
it entails only
"Y is a coherent, complete visual design."

I really hope this is not at all what

objective

means.

The fact of authorship is as "objective" as it gets.

It is rather

biography

which fails to be "objective", notoriously and noncontroversially so; or so (once again) I can only hope.

I can think of some good reasons to

exorcise

authorship from the discourse, but this is hardly necessary for purposes of ensuring objectivity. There is not much trouble for the mere fact of authorship to stir up. Events don't perjure themselves, chroniclers do.

In some contexts,
there are responsible reasons for wanting to interpret "art" in this way.

The question is
whether so radical and general an exorcism is necessary,
and
whether these categories can be held as necessary conditions for deciding the admissibility of works in the various arts.

Mr. Beardsley's present justification for his decision
to
exclude the artist
and to
concentrate exclusively upon the work of art,
is only that

it is conventional today,

especially among musicians and other artists,

to speak in this way;

the usage prevails.¹

---

¹ See p. 178.

John Cage, by the way,
whose 4' 33" Mr. Beardsley expressly excludes (note 15),
is presumably not a musician,
or at least not so here.

Is it not somewhat curious to

select in advance

those works to be accepted as "musical,"
and then to justify one's subsequent definition of "music" by reference to "musicians'" usage,
those musicians being
presumably
the men who composed the very works one decided in advance to call "music"?

I confess, too,
some unhappiness about Mr. Beardsley's easy acceptance of the notion of "electronically composed music,"
which still has to these old-fashioned ears a strange ring.

If machines are to be said actually to "compose" music,
they can presumably compose good or bad music,
i.e., they can be said to do so well or ill.

Should we then want to say that one machine is more talented or ingenious than another,
or
that it has a sounder sense of structural form and a subtler orchestrative ability on the whole, but is unfortunately a bit weak in its scoring for strings?

---

I am certain that we

we should

not.

What of it?

To note that both humans and machines may

"compose"

is not to prescribe that anything and everything else we may predicate of the one must then be permitted in the case of the other.

Machines were not always able to compose.
If they one day become able to display

talent

then it will be from that day on that we may

say

this of them.
But until then, there is nothing improper about saying that they can "compose" yet cannot be "talented".
Is this not in fact the case?

This justification

[that musician-speak "exclude[s] the artist [and] concentrate[s] exclusively upon the work of art"]

would seem to me unconvincing,
even if it were true;

and it seems to me doubtful that it is even true.

Ah yes, that whole thing.
i.e. My whole thing,
the whole reason I still write a blog in 2026.

Morgan seems to be saying that

the artist

is something more than just the proximate cause of the artwork, something more than a toaster causing bread to crispen or a pigeon causing a message to be transmitted. Rather, the crispiness somehow belongs to the toaster, transitively now: a two-way relation with 'proximate causality' marking only one of two directions.

What to call the other direction? I don't know. I need more philosophy for stuff like this. I'm sure this has a name. Anyway, in the unlikely case of a conscious, agentic, self-reflexive toaster, one such back-relation that could be named is that of intention. i.e. Adapting Carroll: if you proclaim the intent to freeze bread, yet all your toast comes out hot and crispy, day after day, then here are all the grounds I need to ascribe to you a crisp intent rather than a frigid one. That is, the crispness belongs to you, not because it is a property of you (it's not), but because you intended it and (for all I can tell) made good on your intent.

And now adapting Skinner: The question is not whether toasters can have intentions but whether people can. That is one way of problematizing the 'belonging' back-relation, and I'm here for it. This time around, however, I want to stick to matters of causality, because I think that the way to explain to someone like Morgan just what is really going on with

musicians and other artists

who seem to

exclude the artist

is to, first and foremost, see if we can all agree that this is de facto to "exclude" a 'proximate cause' of the work. In turn, if we are good Logical Behaviorists, this is also how we prevent the toast from 'causing' even the insentient toaster to get saddled with intentions! I do think this is what we need! But I'm not yet prepared to defend it, so I won't rely upon it here.

What is it to "exclude" a proximate cause? Obvs, this forces any causal ascriptions to pack up and move: that is, to move back, to back up a step. At that point, there are three possibilities (in theory) for what they find waiting for them in their new digs: (1) a more 'distant' cause, which is nonetheless also a 'proximate' one; (2) the 'ultimate' cause; (3) no cause at all.

I trust it is obvious what I mean to connote with the notion of an ultimate cause which is itself uncaused. If it's hardly obvious from this that I myself am an atheist and a materialist, that at least is a confusion that I'm willing to accept blame for. For now, let's table the really heavy metaphysical stuff (maybe permanently??) and try to meet the very specific objection Morgan is raising here, which is that Beardsley has staked too much on the way that certain artists talk. I am one of those artists, if I am an artist at all, and I'm here to say: you cannot possibly stake too much on this. Rather, you have to take the Wittgensteinian view; not of concepts, rather of language, of forms of life, and of the relation between them. That is the kind of phenomenon this is. It's so much more than a matter of which

usage prevails.

It is, actually, just the sort of thing which led Wittgenstein himself to avow,

"I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view."

Speaking for myself, nothing compels this avowal more forcibly than the very kind of philosophical writing I am presently attempting. Subjectively, this indeed is the experience of being a conduit rather than a cause. This has been the case pretty much from the beginning here, though I doubt I've remarked on it much until recently.

This feeling is not quite as intense in music, at least not for me, but then, the noncausal "usage" is veritably hegemonic in that domain, even among some intensely 'relational' people. I don't consider that fact to be disputable, and I think it is quite simply and causally explainable. Try this: work incessantly at an instrument for a decade or two, then try to play any of the most difficult repertoire and find that there isn't much of it that you can play at all. Or, spend those first few decades playing only by sight or only by ear, then one day sit down and try to play the other way. I don't mean to say that any of this bends inevitably toward religious reverence, only that there is more to it than the customary reminder of your own limitations, a reminder you can as well gather from almost any other life-domain. There is something more than that going on here if and when you've already given yourself to music and yet it refuses to give itself to you in quite the way you would like. If you have objectified it from the start, then the relationship will simply take that course. There's always plenty of this afoot as well. But if you were gullible enough to expect mutuality, then eventually you land as the conduit between everything you can imagine and everything which actually exists, and that is when you begin speaking of 'the music'.

Now, here comes Prof. Morgan traipsing along, perhaps with Prof. Dickie tiptoeing silently behind him playing a prank, both now chancing upon the apparent speaking-into-existence of some

art without the artist.

The two behold the thing and can see only a Moloch where the speaker has seen God. And if I may attempt to be generous in the face of hostility, all concerned see exactly what there is. No mistakes are made here. The mistake, rather, is for any party to try to win the others to their own view by way of explanation.

---

I said above that there is not much trouble for the mere fact of authorship to stir up. I mean that the sentence

  (1) Stefan composed 'Isolation'.

is close to the barest kind of "biographical" detail; bare enough, at least, that 'intentionalist' criticism cannot make any use of it.

The more hazardous sort of detail is, say,

  (2) Stefan got the idea for the title 'Isolation' from a sign hanging outside a veterinary hospital.

I presume the reason this is the more 'hazardous' sentence is: it permits speculation about causes; it gives partial, incomplete causal information. Of course one could speculate wildly about (1), or about almost any such bare proposition; yet by being so bare a proposition assures that any such speculation is made to appear as wild as it really is.

The whole reason to eschew "biographical criticism" is: it speculates wildly about causes.

Now, the bare fact of authorship hardly presents the familiar form of this danger. On its own it can hardly be said to invite the response,

  (1.1) But why??

Perhaps if a book was expected and a mere sentence produced, then the 'Why?' response is 'invited';

or, perhaps a simple question was asked, and a simple answer suffices;

or, most infamously, people just are interested in little else with such ferocity as they are interested in each other, hence we are told not to be so surprised when someone is not content simply to be told that someone did something, but also insists on knowing 'Why?'.

All of this is familiar. It is necesary to rehash it anyway, because only now do we see all that is at stake when and where we find people speaking in a way that stops short even of (1), to say nothing of (2). That is to enact an elision of earthly causality without going quite so far as disavow the very thought of it.

On the contrary,
I shall suggest that Mr. Beardsley is introducing

definitional categories

which prejudge the case

of much historic art
(typically, that which we loosely call "romantic")
and of much of the most interesting work being done today.

In Mr. Beardsley's view,
phenomenal coherence and completeness
together define
a musically aesthetic object,
a visually aesthetic object,
a literarily aesthetic object,
and so on.

Coherence is said to be a necessary condition of music, visic, and literature in general;

structural completeness is additionally necessary to define "a work" in each field.

These categories

are

matters of degree.

Mr. Beardsley carefully and correctly refuses to

specify any degree

as requisite for phenomenal-aesthetic constitution.

Minimally,
they do,
as Mr. Beardsley maintains,
obtain necessarily of aesthetic objects.

The theoretical trouble is that,

thus minimally construed,

they also obtain of utterly

any object whatever;

they are among the conditions for

the perceptual constitution

of objects in general.

I don't follow.

The post facto realization that an

object

has been

constituted

certainly does invite the assessment that this "object" has presented with some

coherence and completeness .

In one sense this is a projection backwards of something which cannot have been operative in the process it purports to describe; in another sense, it is simply how we speak of such things and need not be quibbled with, provided it is not asked to do any harder work than Morgan asks it to do here.

But

Mr. Beardsley

has taken pains to give some medium-specific descriptions of what just what this "coherence and completeness" would consist in, in the case of artworks. These descriptions are not domain-neutral; certainly not so as to

obtain of utterly any object whatever .

A madrigal must, to be sure,
be heard as minimally coherent and complete,
to be heard as a work of art,
or

as a madrigal;

but so, and equally,
must a buzz-saw's buzzing be heard as coherent and complete,
in order to be heard

as a buzzsaw's buzzing,

or as an annoying mechanical noise.

A bowl of fruit

on a table must be seen as no less minimally coherent and complete than

Cézanne's painting of it,

in order to be seen as a bowl of fruit.

I conclude that,
in this minimal degree,
Mr. Beardsley's discovery of phenomenal-perceptual conditions of aesthetic objects is unenlightening.

It seems, rather, to be too open to this particular misreading.

Now, admittedly, if we try to describe things any more thoroughly, perhaps we risk narrowing the definition so far as to render it obviously underinclusive; and then, if we try to generalize things, on the level of such notions as "completeness and coherence", eventually we do open ourselves to the above criticism. That certainly could be a clue that something is wrong with the definition.

Still, I would prefer to parse the definition generously, and then to say, plainly, that many artworks are utterly and quite uncontroversially lacking in precisely the properties that the definition relies upon. That option is available here, and I don't know why we would pass it up.

Whether
any specifiable degree
of perceptual coherence and completeness
will serve in general to distinguish aesthetic from other objects,
I doubt;

after all,
a simple I-III-V-I chord progression in C major possesses a great deal of both,

and so does a cow,
when contemplated aesthetically.

Well, per above, when we

contemplate a cow aesthetically

then there has been (somehow)

the perceptual constitution of

a cow, rather than, say, a bowl of fruit, or any kind of painting; and then, cows can and do vary widely from their prototype, just like paintings and tonal harmonies do.

Probably we have to admit some version of this domain-relativity for all well-conventionalized concepts, and this forces a corresponding relativization of "perceptual coherence and completeness" which blocks Morgan's move here.

More important is the fact that,
if a rather higher degree of coherence and completeness be posited as a necessary condition for the constitution of an aesthetic object,
we shall have to exclude as extra-aesthetic a very great many important works which most of us will want to retain as works of art;

So, I guess I had implicitly assumed that the whole point of taking a

phenomenalistic

tack was to say just this;
and that the resulting definition would be drastically underinclusive only for those of us who actually

want to retain

some of the weirder stuff. But Bearsdley clearly intends (ha!) to do justice to the full gamut, so I should not assume any of this.

I don't know where Subjectivism and Cultural Relativity come into all of this. I would think: everywhere; and so that is the real problem with Phenomenalism.

(What percentage of the audience has to experience the "coherence" in order for it to count as "objective"? This is an absurd question; and isn't that the real problem here?)

or,
as an alternative,
we shall have so to extend our uses of "coherence" and "completeness" that these categories become unhelpful.

If by "classical" and "romantic"
we mean to refer intentionally
("the artist seeks balanced purity of form and clear simplicity of linear movement"
or
"the artist unleashes his terror and awe in the presence of the Almighty"),

these hallowed concepts are rendered irrelevant by Mr. Beardsley's anti-intentional stipulation.

Pro tem,
let us accept the stipulation.

But,
just as Mr. Beardsley has done with "design,"
"classical" and "romantic"

can be taken phenomenally as well,

without intentional reference.

Thus,
among anonymous works and without even thinking of their authors,
we can easily dis-

[189]

tinguish extremely "classical" works from those which we should call extremely "romantic."

The urn Keats described

is clearly classical,
while

his description,

Keats himself aside,
is clearly romantic.

Thus non-intentionally taken,
I submit that Mr. Beardsley's coherence and completeness,
interpreted strongly enough to distinguish aesthetic from other objects,
prejudicially favors "classical" over "romantic" art.

Hmm. Et tu, Morgan?

Obvs, to make this objection, Morgan has first to accept that the "coherence and completeness" of "classical" works is, for lack of a better way of putting it, really there to be experienced. Similarly, "coherence and completeness" must be really absent from "romantic" works. Only then does the anti-intentional stance evince this particular

prejudice

in favor of the works which do

objectively

possess the given properties, and against those works which 'objectively' lack said properties.

I won't bother gaming out the entire back-and-forth which ensues from this Et tu rejoinder, since we all know it by heart by now . . .

Mr. Beardsley has every right to prefer
a well tempered clavier
to
John Cage's prepared piano,
...

I share these preferences.

But
we should take some care
not
to impart our preferences into our reflections,
and thus
to try analytically to legislate the use of the word "music."

[sic. ". . . and thus not to try . . ."??]

Moreover,
and even more seriously,
these categories must be "rubberized" if they are to be made to stretch over the whole rich range of art,

somewhat as psychoanalytic categories must be (and are) rubberized to enable them to encompass every possible psychological event,

and as Marxist categories must be (and are), rubberized to enable them to encompass every possible historic situation.

I do not claim,
against psychoanalysis as a therapy,
that people do not compensate and sublimate;

I do claim,
against psychoanalysis as a theory,
that compensation and sublimation and the rest are

so wide-open

as to permit literally any circumstances to be explained,

and that the "Theory" is therefore no theory at all.

I do not claim here
(though I might do so elsewhere)
that the rich do not exploit the poor;

I do claim against Marxism as a theory that exploitation and alienation and the rest are so wide-open as to permit any historical circumstances to be explained and claimed as evidence, and that therefore they really constitute no theory at all.

Nor,
finally,
do I deny that some degree of coherence and completeness can be found in all art,
if we search hard enough for it;

but only that,

if we search this hard elsewhere,

we'll find them equally outside art as well.

I do question whether,
when we understand these categories generously enough to admit extremely romantic art,
we have much of anything distinctive or significant left.

Aren't buttercups and thunderclaps
sensorily coherent and complete?

I would think so.
Still, it must be granted that

extremely romantic art

at the least,
may be

complete

without the person.

Otherwise we seem to be headed for the argument that the person is literally a part of the work. But even the likes of Reybrouck and Jucker/Barrett will not support this. 'Made by a person' does not mean 'made by a particular person'. The requirement of an anthropomorphic stamp is universalist, not particularist.

And then, it may well be that the 'human touch' we confront in art-philosophy is particular; but in that case, no general theory of phenomenal anthropomorphism is adequate to explain this, and so most of R and J/B goes out the window anyway.

Anyway, note that the specter of the

hard   search

has made an appearance. It's always notable when that happens.

Consider a pair of conversations:

B:	Every pictorial work of art must be visually coherent and structurally complete.
C:	But what of this visually incoherent and incomplete Delacroix? Isn't it a work of art?
B:	Ah yes, indeed, but that just means that we must look deeper for its coherence and completeness. If it weren't coherent and complete, it wouldn't be a work of art. But it is a work of art. Therefore . . .

. . . and, I submit, it will always be possible to find some more or less appropriate degree of coherence and completeness.

This is the right move, and I suspect we can catch Mr. Beardsley in its crosshairs on another occasion.

On this occasion, I'm not so sure.

I take in instance Mr. Beardsley's own example of a "fairly complete disorganization" in poetry:

Leaves falling.
  Lie on one another;
   Ball-point pens are 6½ cents apiece.

Admittedly, there does seem to be a semantic disorganization here.

But this is overcome once we take our clue from the level of sound which Mr. Beardsley so astonishingly ignores.

We find the first two lines set in brilliant sonant contrast with the last.

We first relax with the soft, almost lazy movement of the alliterative "I" sounds of leaves and falling and lie;

the tempo too is gentle, lulling the reader tenderly—only to shock him all the more abruptly with the brisk, sharp, military alliteration of point, pens, apiece.

And this vivid contrast guides us to the inner semantic richness, contrasted as well:

How natural and lovely the leaves,
rich and free for us all in the forest!
How ugly the bristling machines for which we pay our poor money!

I do not argue that this is a good poem.
In fact, I think it is a miserable poem.

But I do insist that coherence and completeness can be found here.

We turn to our second and corresponding conversation:

C:	Every pictorial work of art must exhibit a passion that rent the painter's soul.
B:	But what of this serene David, or this Poussin, or this Tobey, or this Mondrian?
C:	Ah yes, indeed. These too are works of art. They do not look as if they exhibited passion. This means only that we must look deeper. For if they didn't exhibit passion, they wouldn't be works of art. Therefore . . .

[190]

. . . and, I correspondingly submit, it will always be possible to find evidence that passion is exhibited, even in an Attic amphora.

The point of course is that

categories

like coherence and completeness on the one hand
or
the exhibition of passion on the other

must be made flexible

if they are to serve plausibly to admit

widely varying kinds of art;

and if they are made thus fleхible,

they become theoretically useless.

Less technically and more brutally,

I fear that some angry young artists today would reply to Mr. Beardsley's proposals with contempt:

"I spit on design.
I spit on coherence.

My world, my life is neither coherent nor complete.

It's dirty.
It's violent.
It's vacuous.
It's overwhelming, terrifying, nauseating, preposterous, fantastic, absurd.

'Coherence' and 'completeness' are pedantic catch-words,
coined to disguise idle rationalistic dreams.

Until this real world is coherent and complete
(or can once again be seen and felt that way),
all 'well designed' art is kitsch, fake, phony, escape in the worst sense of the word.

"You men,"
he might go on,
"are not only deserting art,
you are deserting life as well.

You embrace formulas and sets of symbols in place of the stuff of life.

In my art I give what is,
not a sham of design.

I make.
You make believe.

I believe or die—or decay to your state of moribund pedantry."

Now, all this may be—I think it is—somewhat childish.

We need never surrender theory to practice,

and practitioners often say as well as do the funniest things.

Nevertheless I think we must listen and look attentively.

What has happened in the fine arts during our century involves

such fundamental changes

in our listening and looking that traditional categories like Mr. Beardsley's coherence and completeness

may simply no longer apply.

Certainly they will no longer

apply simply.

They must be radically recast or supplemented or relinquished completely.

So
let us put words in the mouths of some not-very-imaginary artists of our own age.

Let them read Mr. Beardsley's paper, and let us listen.

Take the theater:

"Brooks Atkinson says of The Connection that it looks more like an experience than a play.

Capital!

The time for playing is done.
The time for experiencing is come.

The Connection involves us directly in the life we all so desperately seek to avoid.

In and through the theater we must experience vividly, acutely, nakedly.

Our defenses are down.

We are forced to take account of our very selves and other pathetic facts;
our symbolic retreats are blocked.

Who wants the 'Well Made Play' in an ill-made or unmade world?

Only the timid man who needs to retreat to his neat, cоherent, complete little never-never land."

Take painting:

"Go ahead!
Put the tree in the middle of the canvas.
Balance with a nice horse on one side, a nice house on the other.
Paint it all prettily, smooth and slick and coherent in texture.
Organize the structure, with every leading line and every mass and every color-area obediently graded and integrated.

And what do you have?
Junk.

When I paint,
I act.

My movement is my art,
for my art is no longer artifice.

It is honest.

Maybe good,
maybe rotten,

but it's me.

If I shock you,
why then I shock you.

If I frighten you,
why then I frighten you.

But

I shall force you to see what is there

on the canvas before you,

I shall not let you substitute anything

for art or life:

not balance or symmetry or harmony or organic unity or any other feeble category.

Not even coherence and completeness."

Finally, take music:

"Music is sound.

But why must it forever be contrived and artificial sound?

Why not hear what is all about us,
waiting to be heard?

I strive

to rescue sound from symbolism,

to let you hear it and love it as it is,
without

forever asking what it means.

You'd rather hear fifths and thirds and octaves and neatly adjusted modulations from one conventional key to another, wouldn't you?

Then why don't you build yourself an eighteenth century drawing room and hire yourself a string ensemble and spend the rest of your life listening to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik over and over again?

Those of us who take music seriously take people seriously and take nature seriously.

We are free to reject prefabricated sounds as we reject prefabricated people.

Our ears are open,
as are our eyes and minds and hearts.

Men make music in many ways,

for many reasons.

Men hear and love music in many ways for many reasons.

Why not welcome this openness and love it,
instead of trying to force today into the mold of yesterday?"

Sure. Well played.

Once again, the

person

issue really ought to be subsumed in the

meaning

issue.

Equally,
we have to be clear that the "person" issue does not exhaust the "meaning" issue.

If we can manage to hold these two ideas before the mind,
without one simply obliterating the other,
much is then clarified,
including (especially) the basis for skepticism of
(or at least distaste for)
the "person" emphasis;
that is, specifically in its capacity as "meaning".

While I am far from endorsing each of these mythical artist's words, and even farther from acclaiming all their work,

I believe that we must take account of
their conception of

the nature and function of

the experience of art.

Here man does make a difference.

Not
all the difference,
perhaps;

not
so much of a difference
as some hypnotic artists of our day proclaim;

but
some difference.

"Art without the artist" is some-

[191]

thing.

It may even be coherent and compiete.

But it is not yet art,
any more than the artist without art is an artist.

In

recognizing that artists make art

we need not be

plunged back into biographical criticism.

We simply hold fast to an elementary truth so easy for us, in our hunger after purity, to forget:

that men make art and men love art and the art men make and love is a natural expression of the human spirit.

Art without an artist, like love without a beloved, all too soon becomes sterile and sentimental.

ART WITHOUT AUDIENCE

It is less clear
but no less true
that Mr. Beardsley's interpretation of art
excludes as irrelevant
not only the artist,
but also the audience.

Yes,

irrelevant

to the definition.

Definitions do tend to

exclude

stuff.

"X is music"
does not entail
"X is believed by A to be music"
or
"X is heard by A as music."

X may be music even though neither A nor B nor anyone else, for that matter, hears it as music;

X could be music

even if no one ever realized that fact.

This is quite the specter haunting the entire definitional-ontological project.

So long as it possesses coherence in sound,
it is music;

so long as the coherent sound is structured,
it is a musical work.

Or so, at least,
Mr. Beardsley seems to believe.
But there is here a puzzling ambivalence.

If Mr. Beardsley's interpretation of music
were

strictly and consistently phenomenalistic,

then one could not say,

"X is music

but does not appear to be so,"

for "appearing to be so"
would suffice to constitute it as music.

If "music" really is defined phenomenally,

anything that appears to be music is so by definition.

We are then prohibited from saying
"I used to think that X was music,
but now I see that I was mistaken."

Worse yet,
we are not permitted to discover that

something we had thought not to be music

really is so,

and this is a serious prohibition.

For,
as Mr. Beardsley correctly points out,
repeated listening may bring coherences and structures to our attention,
and we can come to hear as music what had before seemed only noise.

A

prohibition

?

Not really.

Where is the stipulation that our initial impression cannot be open to revision? If there is one, I have missed it. Rather, as correctly noted, there is a tacit allowance for revision, in the event of

repeated listening .

What's so bad about that? I guess it's that, for a self-styled "objectiv"-ist like Morgan, a definition just is not supposed to be allowed to float according to 'subjective' experience. But if that's the objection, it could have been stated in two sentences.

To permit this,
we need a distinction between
"X is music"
and
"X is heard as music."

And this seems to be

a qualification upon

strict phenomenalism.

Does Mr. Beardsley,
or does he not,
want to make this distinction?

The alternative—so far as I can see, the only one which will save phenomenalism—is to say that
the "X's" differ in the two cases.

X₁,
which was not heard as music,
was not music, by definition.

X₂
(which was heard only after repeated hearing of X₁)
was heard as music
and therefore was music, by definition.

X₁ and X₂ are both phenomenal objects

(or, strictly, classes of phenomenal objects).

Mr. Beardsley cannot be after
the X-ness that X₁ and X₂ share,
for X₁ is not music.

He is presumably after
the X-ness that X₂, X₃, X₄ . . . share,
all of these being heard as coherent and complete.

Another necessary qualification arises from
the familiar observation that

the nature and degree of
the coherence and completeness we
hear in sound or see in color
is
a function not only of
that which we see or hear,
but also of us who hear and see.

We have learned

to see and hear coherences and completenesses of certain kinds.

"This belief may never have been expressed;
even the thought that it was so, never thought."

(On Certainty, §159)

"Just as in writing we learn a particular basic form of letters and then vary it later, so we learn first the stability of things as the norm, which is then subject to alterations.

"This game proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground."

(§473-4)

We who perceive are not perfect mirrors, upon which what is "given" reflects in all its purity, but rather wiggly, distorted ones,

warping everything

we say we "see."

Nor more [sic] are we model microphones or sound-analyzers, sifting "given" frequencies out of white-noisy hissing steam.

Our curves,
in current jargon,
are far from flat,
for we hear in considerable measure what we expect and want to hear.

Well, who knows if

what we hear

can coherently (ha!) be talked about in such a thing-like manner as this.

The problem here could very well be a problem of description, not of 'perception'.

In order, therefore,
for any unnamed degree of coherence and/or completeness to function as a necessary condition of music,
we seem to need

as a parameter

a listener

—the average man,
alas,
or the professional musician,
or the highly trained critic, perhaps.

We need

as still another parameter

the circumstances or context

of hearing or seeing.

Under some conditions,
the Schubert Quartet isn't heard as music
by me;
under others it is.

We seem
therefore
to need a paradigm considerably more complex
than Mr. Beardsley's.

I'm not here to defend

Mr. Beardsley

but let's be duly thorough.

Presume for the moment that the theory of subjects

warping everything

is necessarily (also) a theory of some un-"warped" ultimacy which is unavailable to natural perception.

This permits of no degrees of 'unavailability':
if we perceive something,
then it is part of our phenomenal world;
and if not, then not.

That is,
the

heard as

is heard.
It is not part of the ultimacy,
but rather a part of perceptible nature.

If A hears a "coherent" passage
where B hears a jumble,
the theory of "warping" does not apply in quite the same way as above.
Where we are concerned with just this divergence between A and B,
we are concerned with something earthly,
not with something ultimate;
not unless A is some kind of god, anyway.

Now, perhaps some amount of confusion enters here due to the tendency of Mr. Beardsley, along with a sizable cohort of colleagues, to suggest that it simply must be possible for B to later "hear" (more likely, to be brought to hear) the "coherence" that A has "heard" the music "as" possessing.

But notice, now, that the need for

parameters

has dropped out:
Why?
Because now A just is the parameter,
all by him or herself.
We take no

averages

this way,
nor do we consult any

highly trained

experts.

The question is far simpler than that:
How to bring B to hear the music as A has heard it?

A bad idea?
A terrible one, actually!

But so is the idea that a Phenomenalist definition of art should require grounding in some representative sampling process!

Maybe that idea sounds more fair to a Western Social Democrat; but fairness need not enter into this particular matter, and it probably shouldn't enter into it, pending a whole panoply of further conditions and assumptions.

It might work this way:

"X is a piece of music"
means
"X is a member of a certain class of sound objects,

namely
that class whose members are

in general disposed

to evoke,
when attended to
in manner A
under conditions C
by observers of type T,
experiences to which 'coherence'

[192]

and 'completeness' will seem appropriately applicable."

The theoretical questions
then become even more familiar:

we must once again set about specifying
the A or so-called "aesthetic attitude,"
the C or necessary context of apprehension and appreciation,
and
the T or training necessary to the "recognition" of the relevant emergent relationships.

How,
pray,
is Mr. Beardsley analytically to specify these
as

discoverable in the music itself,³

that is,
without resurrecting the audience?

He seems to be asking:

  'If a tree falls in the forest
    (or just stands there)
      and no one is around,

        how can it be said
          to have phenomenal properties?'

---

³ What I wonder here is,
of course,
a special case of the more general, much-debated question of
what it means to speak of a character as being "in the music."

We are to look,
says Mr. Beardsley,
"for the emergence of a property
that is

absent from the buzz sawing,

and seems to be

a very notable feature of the Schubert Quartet."

Here we meet once again with the 'necessary and sufficient' issue.

Appeal to a single, salient point of contrast with the concept-to-be-defined indeed is not worth much:

if we are seeking only a 'necessary' condition, then it matters not what other kinds share the property;

if we are seeking only a 'sufficient' condition, then any nonmember will lack it, hence it matters not which one we choose as a foil.

Instead, Beardsley seems to be using

the buzz sawing

as a sort of negative description.

This is to presume that there will be only and exactly one such difference to

emerge

from the (phenomenal) comparison, and that this will be just the one Beardsley intends (Hee-yuk!) to point up.

It seems that there must be, actually, an inordinate number of these phenomenal differences, perhaps even between two "buzz saws" (unless they have been very carefully engineered to be . . . indiscernible . . .) This is common sense, at least, but I'm not sure how it could be proven analytically. Indiscernibility can never simply be ruled out, for the same reason that "emergent" discernibility can never be ruled in.

That much conceded, I think this does show, at least, that Beardsley's phenomenalism is indeed caught in the bind of its own rhetoric. The best available example, actually, involves bringing the foil closer to the mark, so as to cause it to share as many properties as possible, but (still) without sharing the target property.

i.e.,
Expand the quartet into a full orchestra,
and then to point to

". . . a property that is absent from the pre-concert warmup cacophony, and seems to be a very notable feature of the symphony . . ."

The buzz saw is the brighter, shinier object, but its de facto possessing of myriad phenomenal differences actually confounds the task it has been enlisted to fulfil here.

So.
We are also,
it will be recalled,
to limit ourselves to the sounds alone,
without reference to

their respective sources

or to any

categorical canons of criticism.

Now,

on which of the many

differentiating qualities
are we to settle?

The quartet sounds, for example,
different in its resonance;

as we say,
it sounds like two violins, a viola, and a cello.

The buzz saw sounds like a buzz saw.

The quartet's sounds are tones and chords on our scales;

the buzz saw's sounds are noise.

Depending on the size and grain and knot formation of the log being sawed,
the buzzed sounds may be more or less regularly repetitious than the Schubert sounds.

How is one,
unless

armed in advance

(as Mr. Beardsley and we of course really are armed)
with such categories as
melody,
harmony,
rhythm,
treble and bass scales,
tonality, and
the like

—listening,
that is,
to the sounds themselves,
alone and naked—

to determine which similarities and differences are "there" and to be attended to?

A Congolese drummer seems not to make Mr. Beardsley's kind of music.

Does an Indian sirdarist?

Per Google AI, yes, Scrabblers, this almost certainly is a confusion of SIRDAR with SITAR.

(And, don't let the double duplicate fool you: SIRDARS is one of those Words that is far more 'playable' than it is 'probable'.)

Anyway, the point about

categories

almost lands, but not quite:

If any or all of these (just these) "categories" were part of our "phenomenalist" mandate, then yes, of course, we would need to be

armed

with them to have any hopes of identifying or applying them.

But must we be similarly "armed in advance" with the "categories" of "coherence and completeness"? This is the mandate that Beardsley actually issues, and not one of Morgan's small arms appears in it.

This time Morgan undersells Beardsley's rhetoric, for the appeal to "coherence and completeness" is, at least on its face, an appeal to entirely nontechnical, domain-general concepts.

I trust I hardly need to name the assumption (here a silent assumption) which would warrant understanding "coherence and completeness" to be the same kind of conceptual weapon as "scales" and "tonality". TBC.

Sound patterns,
after all,
are everywhere,
and

phenomenal sound patterns

are

wherever we want to hear them.

Spring clocks tick and tock at 2 AM with infuriating irregularity.

Electric clocks of a certain vintage groan and grind in minor mood.

The wind, like the train, whistles, and even the surf can pound directionally.

Are they then "heard as" music?

And are they then music?

---

Well, don't ask a question if you don't want the answer!

For now, let's not worry too much about what may or may not be meant by

pattern.

But yes,
there sure is 'a lot going on' in the good ol' natural environment!
To say nothing of any man-made accoutrements!

And what reasons can he offer for supposing that these specifications can thus be made in general,

broadly enough

to cover
different kinds and works of music,
differing contexts
and
different audiences,

yet

precisely enough

to permit
accurate distinctions between music and non-music?

Well,
if
we are nothing but "warpers" of all that is perceptible to us,
then indeed
we are all

different audiences

and there is, in that case,
certainly no hope of phenomenal objectivity.

What I have here proposed
is just one more of those dreary technical formulas,
and one which doesn't even have the virtue of being accurate.

All I claim for it is that it is more nearly adequate than Mr. Beardsley's formulation.

If one really wants to do this sort of thing with "coherence" and "completeness,"
no less technicality than this will do.

But this won't do either.
For much contemporary art
doesn't even fit
this cumbersome, cautious formula.

Not only isn't it

intended to appear

coherent and complete
(which, by stipulation, is irrelevant),
it doesn't even

appear so.

To meet this challenge,
Mr. Beardsley admits that the coherence and completeness

may not be immediately evident.

Much more may be demanded of the observer,
in order that he perceive

the "emergent relationships."

"But," Mr. Beardsley insists,
"they must be there."

And if those relationships aren't there in Apollinaire,
then Apollinaire's work just isn't poetry, or a poem.

Ipse dixit.

Hmm.

Yet another problem with calling some property

emergent

and leaving things at that, is that any absence of the property can be explained away as inconclusive.

How hard

must

we look?

Not that any emergentist would be so negligent as to 'leave things at that'; but then, it can't be quite right to say that we have reached a conclusion anytime

those relationships aren't there   .

Here all conclusions are provisional and none can be final. Emergence is a temporal concept, and it cannot be rushed.

Now,
this word "there"
[as in "they must be there"]
really is a puzzler.

When is a relationship found "there"
and
when do we who observe "just put it there"?

Relationships are everywhere.

The names of literally any two objects in the world can be logically related somehow,
and any objects that can enter simultaneously or successively into a perceptual field are perceptually relatable somehow.

Which
of the relationships we discern in an auditory experience
shall we claim to have

"emerged" from the field,

and which are

"projected into"

the objects perceived?

This, I think, is
a complex epistemological question,
on its way to becoming a psychological question.

In general,
I suggest that
those perceptual relationships which

we expect and others report

are said

to "emerge" and be "found,"

while those relationships which

surprise us

and which seem idiosyncratic to us
are more likely to be classed as "projections."

The relevance to Rorschach and T. A. T. interpretations is evident.

The underlying question is not
whether we do or do not "discover" coherence or completeness
in the presented phenomena.

The questions rather concern

what "discovery" means,

and

what specific kinds

of coherence and completeness
function in our intercourse
with art and with the world.

And what kinds-of-kinds,
kinds-of-kinds-of-kinds, . . .

Complex rhythmic coherence and structure presumably function in an African's hearing of some African music;

complex harmonic coherence and coherence function in a European's hearing of some European music.

To hear either
(or to "discover" either),

we must have learned how

to listen for it.

If this is true,
then we must agree with the tantrum-throwers above!

If this is entirely a matter of learning,
then indeed we are not quite

living

when we merely repeat the Scavenger Hunt over and over.

I recently learned that Wittgenstein is nowadays labeled a 'holist' for his dissent from the above (from the Augustinian) account of the

function

of

learning. Perhaps this is to be 'a holist about learning', or maybe a 'psychosocial holist'. It is not to be a holist about much of anything else, however. As I know from music school, you only have to do j once for all the k's to label you a j-er.

By

discriminating,

refining,

sifting schemata,

experimenting and rejecting,

we learn to grope our way through incoherent and incomplete noise toward music,

somewhat as we have learned to grope through incoherent and incomplete verbal sounds in learning to understand languages,

and through visual chaos to see things in the world about us.

Obvs,
W again says 'Big Fat No' to all of this.
TBC.

In short,
the coherence and completeness we "discover" in music was "there all the time waiting to be discovered" only in the peculiar sense that a very great many other things were "there" as well.

Within very broad limits,

the act of "discovery" itself

conditions what is "discovered."

This much seems right.
Minus all the

sifting

of course.

One of the remarkable achievements
of today's objets-trouvés artists
is to exhibit

the wonder of unsuspected relationships

as they emerge
when apparently unrelated bits of junk
are cast or pasted or mounted or bolted together.

Yes indeed!

Just don't mistake

relationship

for

coherence

!

Only by wresting them out of their usual habitats
can these objects

[193]

really be seen at all;

and sometimes
when they are seen,
they can be seen as almost magically related in vision to other objects similarly torn loose from all their customary moorings.

Bluntly isolating visual characters,
welding into unity characters that don't "belong" together,
sharply skewing all our expectations,
our painters deliberately torture the "look" of things to make them really visible

—or, better,
to remake them into really visible things.

The nature we merely know cannot be felt and doesn't deserve holding a mirror to;
so our painters crack and stain the glass.

And what shall we do, pray,
when despite our best intentioned efforts,
we don't find any relationships at all

(or, better,
any interesting relationships,
for some can always be found)?

Shall we say that the relationships are not there,
and that the poetry is not a poem,
or the visic not a design?

Or
shall we more modestly confess
that
if the relationships are there,
we
—perhaps for want of some perceptual acuity,
or because of some prejudice of our own—
haven't been able to find them,
and so much the worse for us?

I see no way of

answering such a question in general.

I would start where the Young Punks left off:

In what kind of world would you, sir, like to live?

If it's more honest to put it on oneself,
as above,
then that is what we should do.

If we build on a foundation of honesty,
the rest will take care of itself.

And
if not,
then not!

I'm convinced that all this trouble begins in fear. It's all just as Becker says: it's the vital lie told at the atomic social level. We fear little else so completely as we fear being honest that we have not seen or heard what the quickest, loudest talkers so quickly and loudly declare themselves to have seen or heard. We make a show of agreement, knowing that there are no trivial matters when it comes to group cohesion.

If a man whom I respect tells me that a given piece of music is worth my serious and repeated attention
(or that a given sound pattern is music after all),
and if I have the time and energy to devote to the enterprise,
I may well attend carefully,
up to a point.

When that point is reached,
I shall resign,
for want in my personal economy of what it takes to get the relationships out of the music
(if, indeed, they are "there").

I admit that the fault may be my own,
and that my respected authority
may turn out to have been a charlatan.

But what real difference does it make?

The effect is that I listen no more.

Hmm.

If

respect

is a thing,
and also

authority

is a thing,
then
the 'honesty' heuristic carries the day.

Indeed,
it makes no difference if you

listen no more

so long as you have been honest.

If there is beauty "there,"
it is lost upon me,
as surely as is the music of Persian poetry,
which I expect never to learn to read.

As with the conception of art without an artist,
the conception of art without an audience
has
its responsible reasons for being:

one wants to avoid,
at almost all costs,
the resolution of the work into its merely historic psychological-sociological effects.

I share this desire whole-heartedly.

But equally,
I want to see the situation as nearly whole as I can.

And
in this whole there is
the living and loving participation
of those human beings we call
the audience of art.

Is that . . . a necessary condition I smell??

🤨   🤨   🤨

A NOTE ON CONCEPTUAL
ANALYSIS, DEFINITION
AND THE РАТНОOLOGY OF
CATEGORIES⁴

---

⁴ ...

Mr. Beardsley's argument against Collingwood
by the way,
deserves a mild demurrer.

Beardsley is of

[195]

course formally correct in pointing out
that

if
"X is an A"
means exactly the same as
"X is a good A,"

then the word "good" is strictly redundant.

But surely Collingwood knew this perfectly well.

Beardsley is really just recommending
that
"art" and its species-words
be used in a

value-neutral and art-without-artist

manner,
instead of in the

value-laden and art-with-artist manner

which Collingwood prefers.

I think we can be forgiven for failing to notice the

value-neutral

quality of Beardsley's argument!

Beardsley has sought to eliminate certain "value" considerations;
but it seems obvious that other such 'considerations' remain!

In many contexts,
I myself prefer Beardsley's use over Collingwood's,

but I do not pretend by this preference to refute
—or indeed even to discuss—
any "expression theory of art" at all.

The theoretical issues, if any, remain exactly where they were before.

---

In Section I,
Mr. Beardsley undertakes to call into question

the Wittgenstein-Ziff-Weitz refusal

to admit the possibility of defining key terms in criticism and theory of art.

With Beardsley,
I do not see any possibility of proving a priori the impossibility of defining any term,
nor do I believe that there is any such animal
as

"the logic of the concept of art";

certainly Mr. Weitz's argument from the novelty of art to the eternal hopelessness of defining "art" is unpersuasive.

With Mr. Beardsley's opponents,
on the other hand,

I have never seen

any such definition that was

nearly adequate.

I believe that
specific definitions
do usefully serve
specific purposes
in specific contexts,

but
I gladly join Weitz et al.
in calling into question
the interest and usefulness of attempts at

omnibus definitions

of "art" and its species-terms.

We do try
to analyze, compare, and clarify
critical concepts.

It does not follow from this
that
we fail unless we come up with unique, universally applicable, airtight nickel-plated definitions of every critical term.

Different definitions are

relatively

useful or useless

in different contexts.

A customs inspector
might perhaps need

a legalistic definition

to enable him to decide whether an ambiguously designed article of furniture is to be charged duty as a "chair" or as a "sofa," ...

But
it does not follow from any of these instances that the article

"really is"

a chair ...

any more than it follows that the customs officer's working definitions give the "real" or

[194]

"correct" meaning for each term.

All that follows is that

in each case

we can find

a socially acceptable solution

to

a practical problem.

It must be,
then,

either

that

the

problems

to which Weitz's 'honorific' theorist-critics set themselves were in no way

practical

ones;

or else

that

these theorists failed not just to land on

omnibus definitions

but actually failed to find

solutions

to even their own parochial concerns

.

The

customs inspector

is not simply at liberty to proffer his own "solutions" to the "problems" of enforcement. Different forms of government pursue different "solutions" by different means, but it is rare that the person enforcing the rules is also the person who has made them. That is where the analogy with theorist-critics ends.

Anyone who assumes that

we can find

a socially acceptable solution

in each case

obviously hasn't really faced any "cases", or perhaps hasn't really had to "solve" them.

The danger
in the search for such definitions as these
lies in a kind of paralytic inertia
to which our conceptual analyses are peculiarly prone.

There is nothing naughty about defining any term in any context;

but when,
as so often happens,

the context is later expanded

and its limits forgot,

and when the definition is

used as a weapon or as a barrier,

disease sets in.

Categories
first petrify,
then putrefy.

Indeed.

What is this
really, but
a punchier version
of Weitz's own argument?

Having painfully defined a complex term,
we all too easily extend our definitions
much more broadly than we ought,
and begin to suffer the familiar pangs of categorial sclerosis.

From here it is but a tiny, gentle step
to the legislative prescription of art
(and proscription of "non-art"),
and we find ourselves

building an academy

again.

I do not,
of course,
accuse Mr. Beardsley of any such ambition,
and I gladly welcome him as a partisan of all that is good and true in contemporary as well as in traditionally romantic art.

It is simply that what he says can,
it seems to me,
be more usefully said without exposing ourselves to the historic disease.

That theories of art have historically been architectonically "definitional" in their orientation and construction ought not to conceal from us the richness of some of their analyses.

Collingwood,
for all the belaboring he has received during the past several years,
offers us many sensitive insights into art.

...

I hope that we who
enjoy art and try to understand it
—and what else is aesthetics?—

can content ourselves with somewhat less than universal definitional machinery.

Musical sounds do indeed move,
as Mr. Beardsley says;

but wherein have we really advanced anything at all by adding that music is movement,
or that "music" means "movement"?

¹ ...

[195]

...

---

CRITICAL COMMENTS

Mary Mothersill

THE QUESTION AT ISSUE between Mr. Beardsley and Mr. Morgan is whether the expression "work of art" can be defined in such a way that the definition

(a) will provide a generally applicable test for settling disputes about what is or is not a "work of art";
and
(b) will do so without incorporating particular critical prejudices or philosophical mistakes.

Mr. Beardsley tries to show that it can.

What he rejects is the Wittgensteinian claim that "work of art" cannot be defined but only "elucidated" by an indefinitely long listing of "family resemblances."

He notes that some of those who hold this position have argued that any strict definition of a term such as "music" would have

illiberal connotations for criticism,

that it would debar a priori artistic innovation and experiment.

Mr. Beardsley believes this fear to be unfounded and holds that it is desirable to have a general definition of "work of art."

In support of this claim,
he cites controversies in the popular press about whether various examples of abstract music and painting really should be counted as "works of art."

What is required in order to settle such disputes without critical bias is,
he suggests,
a definition which refers only to phenomenal characteristics of the perceptual object.

The thing to avoid,
he believes,
is
building in

a requirement about modes of production;

this would stack the cards against electronic music and other such experiments.

The criteria he proposes are coherence and completeness;

these are

at least necessary

conditions
and so
we can say that Mr. Beardsley offers

a partial definition

of "work of art.

Coherence and completeness
have often been spoken of as

aesthetic values,

and there is a question whether the proposed definition does not commit us to

a particular view of standards

for good or successful works of art.

Mr. Beardsley,
as I understand him,
holds that there is a logical continuity between being a work of art and being а good work of art
and that
coherence and completeness,
which are minimal requirements for the former,
are also contributory values for the latter.

Thus
a vari-colored surface may have sufficient coherence to qualify it as
work of art
or, as Mr. Beardsley prefers to say,
an "aesthetic object"
and yet lack preeminent aesthetic value.

What is meant by "minimal coherence and completeness" is suggested in his literary and musical examples.

Mr. Morgan finds the proposed definition unacceptable for a number of reasons.

In the first place,
he thinks that it cannot be made to work as a test,

since
phenomenal coherence and completness,
unspecified in degree,
are

trivially general features

of any perceptual object,

aesthetic or non-aesthetic.

But if the requirements are tightened up enough to permit us to make distinctions at all,
then they will be such as to discriminate against what Mr. Morgan refers to as

"romantic" art,

that is

art which is intended

[196]

to be

"incoherent" and "incomplete."

This makes my day!

Thank you!

In the second place
Mr. Morgan thinks that a definition of "work of art" which fails to mention the artist has sinister overtones,
since
it may lead us to neglect "an elementary truth" to which we must "hold fast,"
namely
"that men make art and men love art and the art men make and love is a natural expression of the human spirit."

If a

truth

is well and truly

elementary

then it is actually dangerous to

hold

it too tightly.

Mr. Morgan discerns a further difficulty in the attempt to make phenomenal features decisive without specifying the appropriate conditions for observation and qualifications for the observer.

Among Mr. Morgan's objections
there are two which I think are well founded.

(a) Hе is correct in holding that
"coherence" and "completeness'
in whatever sense they may be said to characterize perceptual contents,
afford no basis for
distinguishing the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic.

I thought we were
trying to

distinguish

the artistic
from
the non-artistic?

What is

perceived as an object

is

to that extent categorized;

it appears "in focus"
and
stands out more or less clearly against its perceptual background.

An experience of

total incoherence and incompleteness,

whatever that would be like,

would not be an experience of an object at all.

Suppose I am lost in a forest at night;
I strain my eyes to try to make out whether an area of darker gloom is a tree trunk or a montage of shadows.
Its outlines become more definite;
it does not vanish when I approach;
it has coherence and completeness;
it is an "object."

What more does it need
in order to become
an "aesthetic object" in Mr. Beardsley's sense?

Well . . . , indeed it needs nothing further

to become

an "aesthetic object".

But
perhaps it is not (yet) an artwork
(not yet an art-object or art-artifact).

(For Binkley et al,
this scene need only be 'indexed'
so as to enjoy full ontological privileges.
If that is so,
then this compels us to return to search for the criterion responsible for producing the

"object";

and at that point,
what are we left with
(in the given example)
but "coherence and completeness"?
If something else was afoot, our

commenter

has not yet shared it!)

I find it hard to imagine what kind of answer his theory would allow him to provide.

The terms "coherence" and "completeness"
as they occur in the vocabulary of critics
have a different and less trivial use.

One painting may be more "coherent" than another.

But this is

within the language of criticism;

it presupposes that
we are talking about works of art
and know that we are.

We could try to discover the conceptual boundaries
by working, so to speak from the inside,
ranking paintings as
coherent, less coherent, even less coherent,
and so forth,
until we reach something which we are sure is
"not coherent enough to count as a painting at all."

But wouldn't our intuitions be likely to falter just at the borderline cases which are crucial?

If one is genuinely in doubt about whether to call something a "poem" or not,
would it help to ask,
"Is it coherent?"

I should think not.

Take Mr. Beardsley's haiku example:

Leaves falling
  Lie on one another;
   The rain beats on the rain.

Is it a "poem"?

Unless it is "coherent and complete,"
it can't be.

Is it "coherent and complete"?

Mr. Beardsley finds that it clearly is.

Knowing very little about Japanese poetry,
I take Mr. Beardsley's word for it
that this really is a genuine haiku,
that it has the proper number of lines
and so forth.

I can see that it has a kind of poetic coherence.

But I would not be as surprised as I ought to be,
according to Mr. Beardsley's theory,
if I were to discover that haikus have six lines and that this is only the first half of one,
or that they have two lines.

(This is a haiku and a half.)

In fact
I could even entertain the suggestion that these lines are the opening sentence of a short story

—by Somerset Maugham, I suppose—

or a fragment of a movie scenario.

In other words

I would not trust my intuitions

of coherence and completeness
in dealing with
poetic

conventions with which I am unfamiliar.

Well,
is it reasonable to expect our definition
to cover

unfamiliar

territory?

(If we are "unfamiliar" with something,
how do we know it exists?)

(Do conventions exist??
If so,
they seem, here, to have the ontology
of Mandelbaum's Fortune Telling.)

(With a sonnet it would be different;
but then,
at least as far as completeness goes,
I wouldn't need intuitions—I could count.)

So here I think that Mr. Morgan is right and that his suggested emendations of the haiku bring out the point quite neatly.

The second objection
has to do with
Mr. Beardsley's failure to specify the conditions under which tests for coherence and completeness are to be made.

People who have no ear for music or happen to be in a state of emotional disturbance are likely to find any composition "incoherent."

Even connoisseurs have difficulty with new idioms.

Mr. Beardsley is aware of this difficulty of course,
though he seems to regard it as unimportant.

But if he is serious in holding that his definition is designed to adjudicate disputed cases,
then it is important.

If the question,
"Is it coherent?"
is crucial,
then we must know

whose opinions are to count.

[197]

Mr. Morgan notes this deficiency and suggests some of the factors which would need to be specified in order to correct it.

At the same time
he deprecates the whole enterprise
and remarks that a specification of test conditions
would be
"just one more of those dreary technical formulas."

This suggests a question about Mr. Morgan's own position:

he objects to talk about coherence and completeness which,
as he says,
"leaves out the audience."

That is all right.

But
he seems

also to object

to

"bringing in the audience"

in the usual way,

that is
by

laying down conditions

for being

qualified to decide

on the question at issue.

What does he want?

Great question.

There is nowhere to go from there, other than to abandon even 'special purpose' definition.

He says that he wants to see the situation "as nearly whole" as he can
and adds that
"in this whole there is the living and loving participation of those human beings we call the audience of art."

Well, maybe so;

but what bearing does this have on the point under discussion,
namely
how to establish that a particular work is or is not coherent and complete?

Indeed

it is hard to make out

Mr. Morgan's position in general.

Like Mr. Beardsley,
he rejects the Wittgensteinian position
according to which
"work of art" cannot be strictly defined.

On the other hand
he is against the idea
that there must be
"unique, universally applicable, air-tight, nickel-plated definitions of every critical term."

He adds that
different definitions are useful in different contexts,
which seems sensible enough.

His objections

to a general definition,
however,
appear to be

identical with

the reasons offered by the Wittgensteinians

whose conclusion he rejects.

That at any rate seems to be the point of his observation that
"having painfully defined a complex term,
we all too easily extend our definitions
much more broadly than we ought
and begin to suffer the familiar pangs of categorical sclerosis."

His final remark to the effect that
what Mr. Beardsley says
"can be more usefully said
without exposing ourselves to the historic disease,"
is completely baffling.

Mr. Beardsley tries to give a definition;
according to Mr. Morgan,
he fails to do so.

What then, is it,
that "can be more usefully said?"

I should like to add a final comment
on the question
whether a definition of the sort
proposed by Mr. Beardsley is desirable.

The situation which he thinks would be clarified if we had some acknowledged formula is the one in which
a spectator,
confronted by something new and strange,
asks,

"But is it Art?"

I do not believe that this question

deserves the respectful attention

which Mr. Beardsley gives it.

The man who asks,

"But is it Art?"
is

not interested

in philosophical distinctions.

Indeed

he is not asking a question at all;

he is simply airing his prejudices.

The man who takes time to write to the editors of Life to say that the paint spilled on his cellar floor is just as good as Jackson Pollock

is the same one who lets us know that his four-year-old daughter can paint as well as Picasso.

(In other generations she would have been able to paint as well as Monet and El Greco.)

There is nothing to say to this man,

not because he is stupid

but

because he is not serious.

In general
those who protest most loudly
about contemporary music and painting,
who insist on telling us that,
whatever it is, it isn't Art,
are just those who

have the least interest

in art of any kind,
old or new.

Well . . . ,
this is a kind of

interest!

It is the kind
which human beings
are most apt to show in each other!

So,
perhaps it's better to say:
when there is lots of something,
that thing is cheap.
But there is, regardless, a lot of it!

Anyway, yes, right on with this part. The problem of the self-appointed everyman art-crank is a pseudo-problem par excellence. The rage for definition was never really about this at all.

What do they care about "coherence and completeness?"

Even if the technical difficulties of Mr. Beardsley's definition could be ironed out,
it would still be ineffectual for dealing with the kind of problem which he takes as central.

But

if we exclude these contexts as beneath notice,

then why do we need a definition at all?

Where a practical or legal question is at stake,
there are,
as Mr. Morgan points out,
available criteria for distinguishing works of art from objects whose value is chiefly utilitarian.

Customs officers do not need philosophical clarification.

One can perhaps imagine special circumstances in which it would be important to know whether something was a work of art or the product of accident.

Thus,
to adapt an example borrowed from Dewey,
suppose an archaeologist digs up an interesting rock and it is exhibited in the geology section of the natural history museum.

When examined
it appears to be some sort of artefact,
perhaps a primitive tool.

It is moved to a different showcase.

Still further examination suggests
that it is not a tool,
has no practical function,
but is more probably

[198]

an ikon or some sort of ornament.

It is reclassified and moved again,
this time to a case in the primitive art section.

Its classification

makes a difference

(this was Dewey's point)

in how we look at it.

A piece of rock may be beautiful,
but
our interest and admiration have a different quality
if we believe it to be the product of a creative mind.

The relevant questions here seem to be:

"Did it come about by accident
or is it an artefact?"

"If it is an artefact,
is it an implement or an object of art?"

"Was it made to be used or to be enjoyed
(not, of course, that these are exclusive)?

If we need a general criterion for distinguishing works of art from other objects,
what is wrong with this one?

Why does Mr. Beardsley go out of his way
to find a definition which is
much more elaborate and,
for the reasons noted,
difficult to defend?

Part of the answer is that
Mr. Beardsley wants to

rule out objections

to a work of art
which rest on the claim that it was

produced mechanically

(or by a four-year-old).

If I am right,
then such objections are not worth bothering with.

And even if they were,
the point could be disposed of in a simpler way.

Not all beautiful objects are works of art.

The question of whether something has aesthetic value need not be prejudiced in the least by the fact of its being an artefact or on the other hand of its being a product of nature or accident.

Granting this,
what objection is there to saying that works of art,
as we ordinarily believe,
are produced directly or indirectly by artists?

Mr. Beardsley's concern may be this:
if we say that a work of art is
by definition

the creation of an artist,

then,
he supposes,

we may be led to think that the value of the work is

in some way dependent

on qualities or characteristics

imputed to the artist on independent grounds

—his aspirations, wishes, fantasies, love affairs,
or whatever.

This leads to bad criticism,
as Mr. Beardsley has argued elsewhere.

But the common sense criterion which I have sketched

does not, as far as I can see,

offer any support whatever

to the "intentional fallacy."

From the fact that
works of art are the products of design
it certainly does not follow that

the value

of a work of art
can be

determined inferentially

from premises which

make assertions about the designer.

In this respect I think Mr. Beardsley is

more cautious than he needs to be

and perhaps also somewhat utopian.

He wants a safeguard against a certain kind of critical confusion.

But
those who are circumspect and sensitive to aesthetic value
need no safeguard,
and
those who are not are likely in any case to ignore it.

---