Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 115-127 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331580 . Accessed: 26/09/2014 00:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Aesthetic Education. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Art as Communicable Knowledge HENRY P. RALEIGH The following remarks are addressed to the notion that fine art is a special mode of thought and knowledge. This speciality is most interest- ing, for we suppose the value of that knowledge shares in the value we place on knowledge in general, and, additionally, in the special value we place on art for both aesthetic and nonaesthetic reasons. The impli- cations this holds for a theory of art education are obvious. Insofar as aesthetic speculation may regard the experience of fine arts as essentially an exchange of knowledge, this would certainly be considered as con- tributing to a theory of fine arts as communicable knowledge. As a kind of knowledge, even special or unique, it must be supposed as well that it can be learned and promoted by educational means. Art as knowledge in the above sense is especially, perhaps peculiarly, a modem innovation. In the traditional view, from the Latin ars and the Greek techne, art was any knowledge that served as a skill in trans- forming material. Art was craftsmanship and learned as such. That the experience of art was a form of divine or inspirational madness was never entirely absent from classical aesthetics. Inspired madness was more a disease of poets than artists and was not believed by the ancients to be a functioning, valuable knowledge. The fine arts stood in sometimes subservient, sometimes purely mystical relation to philosophy, the para- gon of true knowledge. St. Thomas did speak of art as intellectual, its apprehension the response of the "maxime cognoscitivi" - sight and hearing. But art was still essentially "making," a job, in the classic sense, HENRY P. RALEIGH is Chairman of the Division of Art at the State University College at New Paltz, New York. He has contributed to several scholarly journals including the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His article "The Problem of 'Expression' in Art and Art Education" was published in the April 1968 issue of this Journal. He is also a Journal consultant. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 116 HENRY RALEIGH to be well done and one only loosely identified with the absolute source of knowledge - Beauty. There is little change in the predominant Greek attitude until very much later when, in aesthetic thought, the fine arts begin to assume the position of a different kind of mental operation, vague to be sure, but somehow representing a mysterious, universal truth. Baumgarten, following Leibnitz, had attempted to frame a logic of the imagination and separated the mind into two levels. One of these, a region of confused imagery, was the seat of artistic knowledge. Kant, in summarizing and structuring these newer views, was among the first to see art as autonomous and not necessarily reduced to an alien prin- ciple or jurisdiction. He made of art a kind of judgment, a union between the imagination and the understanding. Art is not merely ex- periential but the bridge joining theoretical and practical knowledge. This judgment, for Kant, was formal and subjective, not mediated by cognition of an end or any reflective idea. In itself, the experience of art may serve in judgment, yet it was not knowledge. To Kant, as to those who had preceded him, art was really the matter of a metaphysical idea, and the artist, unknowingly, exercised a distinct and largely detached quality of mind called Imagination. With Schopenhauer the real oppo- nents, at least in modem terms, are given their first, characteristic form: art versus science. Schopenhauer divorced the objects of cognition from the blind, irrational apprehension of an underlying reality. The route to this felt knowledge was aesthetic vision. Art alone tore the objects of the mind out of the fleeting, momentary qualities of rational, pragmatic scientific thought. Unhappily, art was more an escape from knowledge than a form of knowledge in itself and Schopenhauer, as Plato, Vico, and Baumgarten, concluded that art was but an opiate and the genius ultimately a madman. This conclusion, Romantic and traditional as it is, has not satisfied modern rationalists who have come to prefer the thesis that art and science seek the same truths but in different ways. That art and science are the same but different is important to the theory that the fine arts represent communicable knowledge. During the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries the artist had enjoyed a brief peership with the scientist and in some instances he was the only experimental, methodological worker deserving of the term. The reasons for this were partly due to a quest for technical solutions to difficult and advanced pictorial and three-dimensional problems and partly a desire to elevate the social status of the artist. Frequently the artist of that time was a geometer, engineer, and alchemist as well as a superb craftsman. But science and mathematics soon outstripped the comparatively humble This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AS COMMUNICABLE KNOWLEDGE 117 level of technology that occupied the artist, and the artist as scientist died ignobly. The alternative is to hypothesize artistic activity as another, equivalently valid, hopefully verifiable way of truth-seeking and thus avoid the unequal comparison between the technological funds of knowl- edge of artist and scientist. This has apparently found favor in the present time. Out of Romantic aesthetic conjecture has grown a belief that art is an activity that reveals the unity and harmony of the universal structure. Art is the assembler of wholes; science is the disassembler, the analyzer of parts. From a meager and rather negative Platonic view that art informs, that is, communicates knowledge by imitation, through Schiller and Schelling and the regard for art as an objective philosophy, there has developed a consistent theme of art as knowledge. The usual modes of thought and perception arrange and classify objects as parts of enti- ties, selecting and reordering these as parts of greater entities--all against some ultimate purpose. Art suffers no restrictions of utility of ends; it deals with whole appearances. Science is concerned with the coherent relations between things, art with the thing in itself. The ques- tions must obviously be asked, "What is the exact nature of this special knowledge?" and, "What is it knowledge of?" An examination of but a few of the moder speculative ventures into this problem of aesthetic knowledge will indicate the general directions to which such questions have led. One of the first of these examinations, much influenced by the psy- chologism of the period, was Conrad Fiedler's. Writing in the late 1800s, Fiedler inherited Goethe's and Herder's interest in visual, Gestalt "wholes." A work of art cannot be known or judged in the same way as a product of nature. In the Kantian tradition, artistic judgment is not rational nor is it conceptual knowing. Conceptual abilities start with appearance forming concepts of what is given: "In abstract cognition we possess the means of submitting appearances to certain demands of our thinking faculties, and thus appropriating them for ourselves by transforming them into conceptual Gestalt-formation."' There is another form of cognition, and for Fiedler the true and final level is that of artistic perception. Scientific abstraction rushes through and beyond the world of appearances. Art reveals what is there: "It should be understood that man can attain the mental mastery of the Conrad Fiedler, On Judging Works of Visual Art, trans. Henry Schaefer- Simmern and Fulmer Mood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 31. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 118 HENRY RALEIGH world not only by the creation of concepts but also by the creation of visual conceptions."2 Unlike the Romantic theorists before and the Expressionists after him, Fiedler's artist is neither an emotional escapist nor an objectifier of his feelings. As does abstraction, feeling (sensation) obstructs and inhibits the artist's perceptions: ".. . we must be able to forget every sensation in order to further our perceptual grasp of the object for its own sake."3 His artist is a strange creature of science who neither thinks nor feels, only perceives dispassionately. Detachment and disinterest have been borrowed from the Kantian aesthetic contemplation and made a virtue of the personality. Just how visual conceptions will help give a "mental mastery" is not explained. That is to say, Fiedler does not tell us what or how artistic perception cognizes. However, we are told something of what it is supposed to be. Very similar in his regard for the perceptual function and the con- comitant distinctions of mental processes is Hugo Miinsterberg: science is connection, art is isolation: "To isolate the object for the mind means to make it beautiful, for it fills the mind without an idea of anything else."4 The value of art is to separate the single experience from a network of multiple experiences. Drawing from the argument, advanced by William James for one, that all mental processes result in an isolation of singulars, Miinsterberg continues the opposition to scientific thought by noting that other perceptual activities lead to some action or to further visual relationships. The art object holds us in arrestment. Why should we be held in this suspension? Disappointingly, it is not to gain something from contemplation freed of all practicality and purpose but only to effect a physiological release of tensions and strains. The "synaesthesis" of Ogden and Richards is of the same order, although purportedly being an advance over earlier theories of the reciprocal relation of aesthetic pleasure and physiological functions. Synaesthesis, according to Ogden and Richards, is mental harmony, impersonal and disinterested.5 From semantic and psychoanalytic studies has come a distinct attempt to explain art as an interpersonal knowledge. These arguments require the casting of art in a special role as the symbolic reconstructor of the human psyche. As a theory of aesthetic knowledge such interpreta- 2Ibid., p. 40. 3 Ibid., p. 29. 4Hugo Miinsterberg, The Principles of Art Education (New York: Prang, 1905), p. 20. 5 Cf., C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, J. Wood, The Foundation of Aesthetics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1925). This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AS COMMUNICABLE KNOWLEDGE 119 tions have interesting implications as well as serious deficiencies. It may be probably agreed that any activity which resulted in information about one's self, if more than intuitional "guessing," could be considered knowledge, especially if this information could be acted upon in the performing of a descriptive service. A theory of knowledge is expected to hold, directly or indirectly, that knowledge qua knowledge must be useful in some way, usually in some operable sense. Any psychoanalytic assumption about the human constitution supposes some pathology of that constitution that may be treated educationally. In the simplest sense, unconscious and unorganized knowledge is reorganized in the con- scious to improve the efficiency of the organism, to restore proper emotional functions. Significantly, psychoanalytic treatment of emotional pathologies is educational and not medical or surgical. Could art, there- fore, be considered educational and involving useful knowledge? This is unlikely in current psychoanalytic interpretations of art. Anton Ehrenzweig divides form or form language into articulate perceptions.6 These have obvious correspondence to the assumed psychic structure of the conscious and the unconscious. The production of art entails the articulation of inarticulate form language, the latter essen- tially pangenital, driven into the unconscious because of the prohibitions of civilized conventions. Aesthetic articulation, the form quality which structurally determines that a form is an art form, is like any convention, the acceptable facade behind which inarticulate, secret form language lurks (in Ehrenzweig's words, "Gestalt-free"). While in a pure therapy transaction the raw material of the unconscious may be revealed as operable information, the stylistic articulations that characterize art for- ever prevent the Gestalt-free imagery from being acted upon and thus resolved. The tug-of-war between articulation of the inarticulate always wins in favor of conventionalized, safe, articulate structure and the artist is eternally driven to go on to yet another creation, and his audience to yet more "secret" communications without ever knowing why. Art cannot hold out the relief of knowledge but only the frustration of "almost" knowledge. Art is self-perpetuating, blind, hardly satisfactory knowledge. Other psychoanalytic references, such as H. Westman's return to a near Neo-Platonism, deny that "aesthetic experience" can be regarded as a superior knowledge.7 After Jung, Westman views art as the symbolic carrier of archetypical forms whose meaning is beyond objective grasp and sensed only existentially. The ontological implica- 6 Cf., The Psycho-Analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953). 7 Cf., The Springs of Creativity (New York: Atheneum, 1961). This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 120 HENRY RALEIGH tions very often approached in psychoanalytic aesthetic speculations are invariably cut short by the overbearing tendency to consider the artist and his audience as unconscious and ignorant victims of their psychic drives. Since such psychic drives are fundamentally the same, analytic "knowledge," whether pangenital or mythical, is repetitively the same. Inversely, if men were more knowledgeable, they would have no need of art either to produce it or to see it. Symbolic investigations of art have come, perhaps, the closest, method- ologically, to a theory of art as knowledge. They have done so, un- doubtedly because it was just such an aesthetic theory that symbolic investigators sought to find, basing their research on the fact that other, more familiar modes of knowledge may be understood as systems of signs and referents.8 More interesting as a synthesis of the stronger features of both semantically derived and psychoanalytic theories of art have been Sir Herbert Read's studies. Read, like other theorists, believes there is a special, investigatory distinction in artistic processes that is akin to sci- ence although not similar in method. In The Forms of Things Unknown, Read adopts from Charles Morris the term "appraisive-valuative" to indicate the type of discourse which is represented by art. This is distin- guished from scientific discourse which is "designative-informative." To demonstrate that art obeys internal, structural relationships similar to linguistic, grammatical structures, even to note functional, material limitations which correspond to the orthogonal restrictions of language, is to prepare the ground for the claim that art is engaged in the trans- mission of some kind of information. The nature of that transmission is, of course, "appraisive-valuative." But what is appraised and valuated by the fine arts? Not the objects of reality, for a painted representation is only a designative sign for the thing it represents. The alternative, pur- suing the theory of art as knowledge, is to arrive at the impasse of the symbolists: the art object appraises and valuates itself; or passes on to a metaphysical impasse of unknowable knowledge that lies beyond the mind and beyond the level of "descriptive-informative" knowledge. For Read, the cognitive quality of art is found in its treatment of singularity: "The apprehension of singulars, in any complete sense, is the artistic process itself."9 The notion of art as involved with this special attribute of the world 8 For a criticism of such semantic based theories see Max Reiser's "The Se- mantic Theory of Art in America," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 15, No. 1 (September 1956). 9 Herbert Read, The Forms of Things Unknown (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), p. 44. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AS COMMUNICABLE KNOWLEDGE 121 seems to be a consequence of the phenomenal, singular quality of art objects themselves as well as the desire to distinguish a mode of appre- hension by contrast to apparently pluralistic and relational apprehension. It is not plausible to conceive of the art object as relational in sensate experience. The assumption here is always that art knowledge is like scientific knowledge in that it informs, interpretively, of a cause and effect world but in its own way of expressing the singular. The mis- leading and probably self-defeating result of this assumption is that scien- tific discourse does, by the very nature of the symbolic devices employed, impart an equivalent structural sequence in the events or series it chooses to describe. The process of artistic activity may well be similar but the product, since a physical object, is not symbolic of a serial activity. It is always a singular and cannot be viewed any other way.10 The singular symbol of a propositional formulation is arbitrary and like a painted representation, or, more abstractly, a painted geometric shape, may or may not refer to something in reality but does not evaluate or appraise, or in any manner provide information about its referent. The significance of the singular symbol, the fact of its being apprehended as knowledge about something, is relative to the possibility of verification of the pro- position in reality. The art object, as a singular symbol, cannot at all be verified in reality in order to gain reifiable knowledge. This is no more possible than to do the same for the symbol "one" or "x." The way out of the dilemma for the symbolic theorist, if he wishes to avoid an ate- ological absolute, is to internalize knowledge, referring it back to some- thing within the participant in the aesthetic experience. The referral activates or reconstructs some knowledge already present. Read accepts the Jungian theory of psychologically continuous mythic materials. In this respect artistic knowledge is merely an endless reminiscing of the primordial past in psychic symbols which alter their forms but never their content. Read, however, would have the best of two possibilities. He finds a vital difference between the repetitive psychic symbol and the pure aesthetic symbol which is concerned only with the sensations pro- duced by the art object. "It (the aesthetic object) is a perceptual mode that excludes all details of accident and environment not intrinsic to the thing itself.""' As knowledge, the aesthetic symbol is caught again in its own trap of informing the observer that it is there and no more - a symbol of 10 The cinema, on the other hand, suffers no such disadvantage and the nature of its communicability is much closer to that of literature. 1 Read, op. cit., p. 80. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 122 HENRY RALEIGH itself. Both Cassirer and Whitehead have argued for art symbols as a type of intuitive knowledge, claiming that such special information is one of the ways of achieving an objective view of reality. Cassirer wished to give an autonomy to art by separating the symbolic functions of art, language, and science. He considered art as a language of forms of feelings, not of concepts. "Science gives us order in thoughts; morality gives us order in actions; art gives us order in the apprehensions of visible, tangible, and audible appearances.1'l2 We would assume that such apprehension is special insofar as it reveals something of objective reality, but in Cassirer's view this is not exactly so: ". .. art gives us a new kind of truth- a truth not of em- pirical things but of pure forms."13 We are led back to classical theories which sought the sources of knowledge in categories of absolute beauty or absolute forms that lay behind, as logical necessity, and beyond the knowledge of objective reality. The presence of a visual art object as totally given to immediate apprehension of the senses is troublesome to account for in any specu- lation concerning the knowledge, truth, or meaning of the arts. The forms of literature may very well, as John Hospers has remarked, con- tain statements about the world which, as information, may or may not be relevant to it as art. From a novel, for example, Hospers believes we may learn truths about human nature not as directly presented but in- directly, simply by virtue of its being true to human experience: "Appre- ciation of art gives us new 'ways of seeing' but no knowledge, no facts, no propositions; so also with music and much literature, especially poetry."14 Not all would exclude poetry from the realm of cognitive meaning. Bertram Jessup15 requires as a test of cognitive meaning only repeat- ability of the described experience, whether of a scientific report or of a poetic statement. This cannot be claimed for the visual object, for there is nothing to which it may be compared and thus tested for repeatability unless it be a matter of further visual cognitions. Obviously a painting does not teach us to "see in new ways." We may see something else or something different. There is no evidence that art teaches us to see differently, although Heinrich Wolfflin had suggested an evolution in 12 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 168. " Ibid., p. 164. 14John Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), p. 206. 15 Bertram Jessup, "On Fictional Expressions of Cognitive Meaning," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Summer 1965). This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AS COMMUNICABLE KNOWLEDGE 123 visual perception. We suppose, both practically and for purposes of critical operations, that all viewers of the art object see it in exactly the same way. If art could promote changes in the perception of reality this would indeed be considered a contribution to knowledge. Still, we know that an Impressionist painting of a bowl of flowers is different from an Expressionist treatment of the same subject and both in turn are quite different from the real bowl of flowers that may have served as inspira- tion for the paintings. We know, as well, that the painters saw the original bowl of flowers just as we did - only their presented forms are different. It is the stability of perception that handily allows us to dis- tinguish the paintings from one another and from the object of reality. There is yet another approach to the view that visual art communi- cates knowledge. This view requires a very rudimentary definition of knowledge: knowledge is literally any resultant of the action "to know" and is often equivalently identified to it. Such theories of art as com- municable knowledge sustain themselves on tenuous grounds since they would tend to include all effectory situations or stand as almost purely tautological. These views might be subsumed under general expressionist theories of art but are different in the respect that they attempt to frame expression or feeling as a type of knowledge or some form of com- municable meaning. John Hospers, for example, accepts a most inclusive definition of "meaning" in art: ".. . a work of art means to us whatever effects (not necessarily emotions) it evokes in us; a work which has no effect on us means nothing to us, and whatever effect it does evoke con- stitutes its meaning for us."'6 This would not be helpful as a suggestion of an aesthetic theory of knowledge for we must ask if no effect is not as significant a meaning as a positive effect. It would be true, too, that to recognize an object as an object intended to produce an effect, although no further addi- tional effect may be reported, is, nevertheless, an effect deducible as meaning. However, Hospers is not concerned with formulating a theory of aesthetic knowledge for he notes that even the statements made of the world by literature are irrelevant as information. The alternative to this is to claim for art, not informational communication, but a special and exclusive function of emotional communication. Under certain assumed conditions "objectified-feelings" might be construed as knowledge, em- ploying a definition of knowledge in common usage: information of a kind that can lead to further, unspecified action; that is susceptible to methodological treatment; that is communicable as understanding. "6 Hospers, op. cit., p. 95. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 124 HENRY RALEIGH Arguments of this nature draw in part from Kant's theory of knowledge, assigning to the mind some active principle which exercises a power held to be a necessary condition for the knowledge of objects or the self. In Art and Scientific Thought, Martin Johnson compares both art and science relative to their roles of communicating agreed to patterns or structures: "... each attempting to communicate mental images through patterns and structures and forms, in the qualitative domain of mea- surement respectively."17 In the face of a persistent belief that art objects are independent and unique entities it is difficult to speak of "agreed to patterns and struc- tures" in the same way that one may speak of them in science. While it cannot be denied that art objects do have patterns and structures as do all entities, their existence as art objects depends not on any relational dependence on other structural systems (other objects), but on a total distinction from all other structures and patterns. The criterion of reasonable agreement for scientific entities is well known and this alone is sufficient to diminish the value of such a comparison to the arts. Straddling the positions of art as a different mode of perceptual reality and as objectified emotion is the recent suggestion advanced by Harry S. Broudy. Underscoring the importance of the problem of art as knowledge and recognizing the inherent difficulties in this stance, Broudy does not entirely abandon the belief that art must serve some sort of cognitive function: ". . . it is exceedingly hard to construe works of art as statements of meaning. But as objects of perception they can and often do express a meaning by making an image of some feeling or ideas or some combination of them."'8 Broudy argues that while such expressed meanings are not assertions, they are "clues" from which assertive inferences may be made. The difficulty here is only delayed. A search for inferred assertions is no more clear or accessible than a search for assertions of meaning immediately given. Yet more difficult is the possibility, since inferences are by clues, of gross misinterpretation and an inference of "no-meaning" is as defen- sible as of "some-feeling" or "some-idea." Most thorough in its search for adequate grounds on which to base an aesthetic theory of objectified feeling is the thesis of Milton C. Nahm. Nahm recasts the Kantian theory in moder behavioral terms: "The 17 Martin Johnson, Art and Scientific Thought (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1949), p. 24. 18 "The Structure of Knowledge in the Arts," in R. A. Smith (ed.), Aesthetics and Criticism in Art Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966). This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AS COMMUNICABLE KNOWLEDGE 125 behavior called 'feeling' is knowledge of the nature of the stimulus."'9 Space permits only an outline of certain salient features of Nahm's theory. The artist reproduces his feelings in the object, although he need not refer directly to the specific stimulus and he is most likely uncon- scious of the referent. The generic source of these feeling-symbols is the artist's biological and cultural past. In its biological, primitive origins the human mind held a structural potential, an emotional predisposition to react to its environment in a way most probably suited to insure its survival. This assumed nervous mechanism is not learned nor is it con- trolled by the individual. Before a stimulus, it serves to produce, rather to reproduce, the best biologically appropriate feeling response out of all other possibilities of response. Imagination is thus "the organism's effec- tive presentation to itself of a stimulus."20 Moreover, all man-made symbols are recognitive and "In all men, 'reproductive imagination' operates to permit recognition of the presented stimuli for feeling."21 Such symbols are the perceptual recognition of an earlier knowledge of morality, science, ethics - all of the differentiated feeling responses, externalized as concrete expressions of man: By means of art, the maker actualizes the symbols in sensuous media. Those who experience the art actualize in their own experience the predisposition to action which, in its primitive form, is the mechanical reaction of organisms behaving with some appropriateness to particular features of their en- vironment.22 This position removes the difficulties encountered in other symbolist theories; the art object appraises itself. For Nahm, the art object reappraises and revaluates man himself and leads him to unspecified ends of action. Nahm's psychoanalytic implications are evident and therein lies a familiar weakness. The aesthetic experience is less a form of self-knowledge than quite literally a neurotic response. Despite Nahm's claim that aesthetic experience is characterized by a sense of exaltation and courage that furthers action, his description of the sensation bears the qualities of a pure neurosis, uncontrolled and trig- gered by stimulus cues of varying strengths. The argument would not lose in plausibility by considering the aesthetic effect as a neurotic reaction to situations designed for such an end. However, neurotic be- havior cannot be ranked as a kind of knowledge, that is, as rational 19 Milton C. Nahm, Aesthetic Experience and Its Presuppositions (New York: Harper, 1946), p. 355. 20 Ibid., p. 357. 21 Ibid., p. 366. 2 Ibid., p. 368. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 126 HENRY RALEIGH behavioral. While a neurosis, as a survival device, may be advantageous to the organism, the disadvantage is the very inability to know and con- trol the response. The failure, in all events, to identify the function and purpose of further, unspecified and nonaesthetic actions restricts Nahm's behavioral assumption from leading to a theory of aesthetic knowledge. Still, Nahm's thesis is not dependent on this. We must examine the pos- sibility of the art object recalling knowledge, not necessarily leading to further action, even unspecified action, as increments of information. Through a reinstatement of precedent images along subsequent ones, "feeling reinstates the past of the race or of the culture."23 The artist is really a re-creator of the "reinstated image." The images take the material form of a symbol of emotional recall. It is inconceivable to suppose that an object, as a painting, could embody as complex a ner- vous reaction as emotions without the introduction of culturally agreed to symbols. But these symbols have changed notoriously over the past and even culturally approved manifestations of neurotic reactions vary rad- ically from culture to culture and time to time. It is true as well that symbolically reinstated knowledge of feeling-stimulus cannot account for why we distinguish, as a matter of course, a range of inferiority and superiority among art objects. We perform such judgments among objects presenting exactly the same symbolic referent. Nor can it be argued that the judgment involves various levels of craftsmanship, for a conditioned response, most particularly a neurotic one, requires only the symbolic cue. The material qualities of representation are of little or no consequence. Extreme neurotic response and certain other condi- tioned reflex actions operate in the presence of the most impoverished stimulus. Undeniably, the fine arts are productive of emotions, although they are not exclusively a vehicle for producing emotions. There is no evi- dence that emotions, no matter how defined, may be considered knowl- edge of or about something. The organism's expression of emotion in the face of an event or situation or object can say no more than reporting the sensations of having feelings. The feelings may, through the appli- cation of some non-feeling knowledge or methodology, psychological, biological, philosophical, be examined as if they were a knowledge unknown to the one experiencing the feelings. Still, it cannot be stated that knowledge is a resultant of aesthetic experience. At best, it may be said that the one undergoing aesthetic experience has a "feeling" of knowledge but no knowledge either of itself or the outside world or any 23 Ibid., p. 365. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AS COMMUNICABLE KNOWLEDGE 127 conditions of the outside world. All such attempts lead ultimately to the conclusion that references which the usual symbols of knowledge must have are unknown. It may therefore be conjectured if the question of the nature of the knowledge represented by the fine arts may be meaning- fully asked. Further, it seems reasonable to query the relationship of the development of theories of aesthetic knowledge to the stylistic develop- ment of the fine arts. It is, perhaps, not accidental that theories of aesthetic knowledge become more pointed in their premise that art is a kind of communicable knowledge as the styles of the fine arts reach higher levels of abstraction away from reality. That is, abstract and non- objective forms take on more the appearance of all symbol systems whose forms are arbitrarily assigned. In the latter case the meaning, that is, the referents of the symbols, are agreed to. In fine art, such forms are called "creatively-unique" and there is no agreement as to their referents. This content downloaded from 134.76.63.66 on Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:11:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions