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SYMPOSIUM:%20WHAT%20IS%20A%20RULE%20OF%20LANGUAGE?%0AN.%20L.%20WILSON%20AND%20R.%20M.%20MARTIN%0AI.%20N.%20L.%20WILSON

For the moment I wish to commence the first wide sweep by registering a protest against what might be called the drawing of invidious type distinctions, that is to say, the withholding trom certain types of entities some of the rights and privileges of entityhood. The nominalist practices this form of discrimination by granting existence to indivduals and denying it to properties—to put the matter rather

N. L. WILSON 89 crudely. Advocates of extensional languages implicitly draw invidious type distinctions as I shall indicate shortly by outlining a nonextensional language which avoids the kind of distinction in question. I have not shown that there is any reason against the drawing of invidious type distinctions, I have merely suggested that there is no reason for doing so. And perhaps I should make it clear that I do not advocate abandoning type distinctions altogether. As a first step in breaking down class distinctions let us bring properties under the theory of descriptions. Just as the city of Chicago may be referred to in English by English by the name "Chicago" or by the description "the windy city," so also may the quality, blue, be referred to by the name "blue" or by the description "the color of the sky." In both object language and metalanguage the sign of identity will be used between both individual expressions and property expres-




















SYMPOSIUM:%20THE%20CONCEPT%20OF%20EXPRESSION%0AIN%20ART%0AVINCENT%20A.%20TOMAS%20AND%20DOUGLAS%20N.%20MORGAN%0A-%0AI.%20VINCENT%20A.%20TOMAS%0ATolstoy,%20Santayana,%20Bosanquet,%20Ducasse,%20Reid,%20and%20Dewey,%20among%20many%20others,%20have%20exploited%20the%20concept%20of%20expression%20in%20their%20theories%20of%20art%20and%20aesthetic%20objects.%20They%20use%20the%20term%20%22expression%22%20to%20refer%20to%20(1)%20the%20creative%20activity%20of%20artists,%20(2)%20a%20characteristic%20of%20works%20of%20art,%20and%20(3)%20a%20characteristic%20of%20aesthetic%20objects.%20Let%20us%20refer%20to%20(1),%20the%20process,%20as%20artistic%20expression;%20to%20(2),%20the%20characteristic%20of%20products%20of%20art,%20as%20objective%20expression;%20and%20to%20(3),%20the%20characteristic%20of%20aesthetic%20objects,%20as%20aesthetic%20expression.%0AAs%20we%20shall%20see,%20(1)%20is%20defined%20in%20terms%20of%20(2),%20and%20(2)%20is%20defined%20in%20terms%20of%20(3).%0AThe%20basic%20concept%20of%20expression,%20then,%20is%20(3),%20and%20in%20what%20follows%20I%20shall%20be%20mainly%20concerned%20with%20it.%20My%20main%20thesis%20will%20be%20that%20the%20%22two%20terms%20theory%22%20of%20aesthetic%20expression%20is%20untenable,%20and%20that%20if%20we%20want%20to%20be%20clear%20about%20(3),%20and%20therefore%20about%20(1)%20and%20(2),%20we%20must%20adopt%20some%20version%20of%20the%20theory%20that%20in%20aesthetic%20expression,%20%22the%20expressive%20thing%22%20and%20%22the%20thing%20expressed%22%20are%20really%20%22one%22%20thing,%20not%0A%22two.%22%0A1.%20Artistic%20expression.%20Theorists%20of%20art%20generally%20distinguish%20between%20artistic%20and%20nonartistic%20expression.%20When%20dogs%20and%20cats%20express%20their%20feeling%20in%20the%20manner%20described%20by%20Darwin,%20they%20are%20not%20engaged%20in%20artistic%20activity.%20Similarly,%20in%20man,%20behavior%20which%20is%20merely%20symptomatic%20of%20a%20feeling,%20such%20as%20blushing%20when%20one%20is%20embarrassed%20or%20swearing%20when%20one%20is%20angry,%20is%20not%20artistic%20expression%20of%20feeling.%20Collingwood%20says%20it%20is%20just%20a%20%22betrayal%22%20of%20feeling,%20Dewey%20says%20it%20is%20%22just%20a%20boiling%20over%22%20of%20a%20feeling,?%20and%20Ducasse%20says%20it%20is%20%22%20a%20merely%0A127


CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART VINCENT A. TOMAS AND DOUGLAS N. MORGAN - I. VINCENT A. TOMAS Tolstoy, Santayana, Bosanquet, Ducasse, Reid, and Dewey, among many others, have exploited the concept of expression in their theories of art and aesthetic objects. They use the term "expression" to refer to (1) the creative activity of artists, (2) a characteristic of works of art, and (3) a characteristic of aesthetic objects. Let us refer to (1), the process, as artistic expression; to (2), the characteristic of products of art, as objective expression; and to (3), the characteristic of aesthetic objects, as aesthetic expression. As we shall see, (1) is defined in terms of (2), and (2) is defined in terms of (3). The basic concept of expression, then, is (3), and in what follows I shall be mainly concerned with it. My main thesis will be that the "two terms theory" of aesthetic expression is untenable, and that if we want to be clear about (3), and therefore about (1) and (2), we must adopt some version of the theory that in aesthetic expression, "the expressive thing" and "the thing expressed" are really "one" thing, not "two." 1. Artistic expression. Theorists of art generally distinguish between artistic and nonartistic expression. When dogs and cats express their feeling in the manner described by Darwin, they are not engaged in artistic activity. Similarly, in man, behavior which is merely symptomatic of a feeling, such as blushing when one is embarrassed or swearing when one is angry, is not artistic expression of feeling. Collingwood says it is just a "betrayal" of feeling, Dewey says it is "just a boiling over" of a feeling,? and Ducasse says it is

128 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART impulsive blowing off of emotional steam." As Hospers says, "A person may give vent to grief without expressing grief." Unlike merely giving vent to or betraying a feeling, artistic expression consists in the deliberate creation of something which "embodies" or "objectifies" the feeling. We should notice that the process of embodying or objectifying a feeling is one and the same as the process of expressing it. The definition of artistic expression is not circular, however, because according to it artistic expression is a consciously controlled making of a product which, in the second sense, expresses, embodies, or objectifies a feeling. 2. Objective expression. The expressiveness of a product of artistic expression is a disposition of it. A painted canvas or a piece of carved marble "embodies" a feeling, i.e., is objectively expressive, in the sense that it has the capacity to cause, under assigned conditions, an aesthetically expressive effect in a contemplative perceiver of it. This definition, of course, transfers the problem of analysis to the concept of aesthetic expression. But by adopting it, we gain two advan-tages. First, we are able to avoid an unsatisfactory feature in what T. S. Eliot says about objective correlatives. According to Eliot, works of art are expressive in the sense that they are "such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." But just as "a person may give vent to griet without expressing grief,". so, too, a work of art may evoke grief without expressing it. What is lost on Eliot's view that the expressiveness of a work of art is merely its capacity to evoke a feeling in a spectator is the notion of embodiment, the same thing that would be lost if we were to think of the process of expression as being merely the process of betraying, or of giving vent to, a feeling. If we define both artistic and objective expression ultimately in terms of aesthetic expression, the notion of embodiment can be retained. The second advantage is that on this view we do not make the class of expressive things co-extensive with the class of works of art. There are many more things which embody

VINCENT A. TOMAS 129 or objectify feelings in the sense that they objectively express them than there are things which are products of artistic expression of feelings. Real landscapes, and not merely pictures of landscapes, are objectively expressive. Hence, if we hold that anything is objectively expressive if it has the capacity to cause, under assigned conditions, an aesthetically expressive effect in a contemplator of it, and do not specify the way in which it must have acquired this capacity, we leave room for those things which have the capacity by accident, as well as for those which have it by design. We should thus have no trouble in avoiding having to speak of a piece of driftwood, which is admittedly objectively expres-sive, as if it were a work of art, like a man-made carving, when in fact it is a product not of art but of the blind workings of water, wind, and weather. 3. Aesthetic expression. Possibly the majority of writers on the subject since Santayana agree with him that aesthetic expression is such that the following two propositions are true: (i) "In all expression we may thus distinguish two terms: the first is the object actually presented, the word, the image, the expressive thing; the second is the object suggested, the further thought, emotion, or image evoked, the thing expressed." (ii) "Expression depends upon the union of two terms. ... The value of the second must be incorporated in the first."? Of course, as Santayana tacitly assumes, expression involves three terms, the third being the mind in which the presented object evokes "the thing ex-pressed," or to which the value of the second term appears as being "incorporated" in the first. The import of (1) and (11) may be illustrated by the stock example of the music which some listener experiences as sad. When music expresses sadness, (i) the three terms involved are the listener, the music, and the sadness. But ii) the listener apprehends the music and the sadness as one thing, not as two. The sadness is said to be incorporated or embodied in, or to be fused with, the music. This second defining condition is what serves to distinguish an expression from a sign. In the normal sign situation, something presented stands for or represents something which is not presented. Thus, the leitmotif we hear represents Siegfried,

130 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART who has not yet made his entrance on the stage. But when music expresses sadness, it does not represent sadness. It presents it. In Dewey's terminology, the expressive object does not "lead" to an experience; it "constitutes one."8 4. Ambiguity of the "two terms." The contrast between an expression and a sign raises a so-called problem of ex-pression. It is the problem of construing the defining conditions (1) and 11) in such a way as to make them compatible with each other. For, it would seem, the concept of aesthetic expression is a concept of something such that if, for a con-templator C, A expresses B, B is presented "in" A, though A is something given, and is not given, but suggested or evoked. The problem is to explain how this is possible. The "central problem of the aesthetic attitude," Bosanquet said, is "how a feeling can be got into an object."® As Reid puts it (his italics), "How do perceived characters come to appear to possess, for aesthetic imagination, qualities which as bare perceived facts they do not possess? How does body, a nonmental object, come to 'embody' or 'express,' for our aesthetic imagination, values which it does not literally con-tain? Why should colours and shapes and patterns, sounds and harmonies and rhythms, come to mean so very much more than they are?"10 This problem, to which Santayana, Reid, and others have devoted so much attention and ingenuity, is, I submit, a pseudo-problem. It presupposes something false, namely, that (Reid's italics) "The embodiment of value in the aesthetic object is of such nature that the value 'embodied' in the perceived object or 'body' is not literally situated in 'the body. The 'joy' expressed in music is not literally in the succession of sounds."ll To see why this is false, let us ask what exactly are the two terms of aesthetic expression: "the object actually presented. . the expressive thing," on the one hand, and "the object suggested... the thing ex-pressed," on the other. a) The first term is not a physical thing or event. An interpretation of the two terms theory over which, I think, we will not need to linger is that the first term is a physical thing or event— the picture or statute which reflects light rays, or the plucking of a string which produces sound waves

VINCENT A. TOMAS 131 in the air. Santayana occasionally makes statements which lend themselves to this interpretation, as when he says, "The first term is the source of stimulation. . . "12 Similarly, Gotshalk says that "a person may assert that a certain non-representational painting expresses calmness and gentleness. ... since the painting is the clear causal source of the feeling qualities evoked, these qualities are immediately taken as suggested by the painting, and their suggestion is taken as an integral feature of the painting's being."13 Passages like these, in which paintings or music are regarded as "the source of stimulation" or "the clear causal source of the feeling qualities evoked," suggest that the first term is Eliot's objective correlative. If the objective correlative were indeed the first term in aesthetic expression, we should have to say, in accordance with Santayana's second defining condition, and as Gotshalk seems to say, that the emotion it has the capacity to evoke in a contemplator is incorporated in, or is "an integral feature of," the physical state of affairs which is the cause or the causal condition of the emotion. In other words, when music expresses sadness to a listener, (i) the three terms involved would be the listener, sound waves, and sad-ness, and (i1) the listener would apprehend the sound waves and the sadness as one thing, not as two. But the listener does not apprehend sound waves at all. Not these, but sound qualities, are "actually presented," i.e., are the content of his contemplative perception. What expresses sadness to him is an apparent or phenomenological object, not its presumed physical cause. b) The two terms are equally "apparent" or "presented." The two terms theory might be interpreted in such a way as to make the first term, "the object actually presented," that which appears to us in aesthetic contemplation. The second term would then be, presumably, something that does not appear, but is "the object suggested." What thus appears, it is often said, is the aesthetic surface, consisting of sense qualities (colors, sounds, smells, etc.) and their relations-in Santayana's terminology, sensuous material and form; and what is suggested by the surface is feeling import. On this view, the first term in the sad music we hear is a pattern of sounds, devoid of feeling import; and

132 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART the second term is its sad-feeling import, devoid of sensuous embodiment. The very attempt to state this view precisely makes it evident that the distinction between surface and feeling import (between "body" and "what is embodied," or between "the expressive thing" and "the thing expressed") can be made only by an effort of abstraction. The idea of what Reid refers to as "bare perceived facts" is, as Collingwood says, "the product of a process of sterilization."14 An aesthetic surface does not appear to us stripped of its feeling import; on the contrary, in aesthetic contemplation, whatever appears is emotionally charged. Direct inspection of the content of aesthetic perception reveals no basis whatever for regarding its sterilized sensuous pattern as being something "actually presented" and its feeling import as being something "sug-gested." From the phenomenological point of view, feeling import is "literally in" aesthetic objects in precisely the same sense that colors are. "Body" and "what is embodied" are equally given in aesthetic experience, and Santayana's formulation of the criterion for distinguishing the two terms is, therefore, unsatisfactory. c) A sense in which the two terms are equally "objective." If the two terms theory is reformulated so as to make the criterion to be used in distinguishing between the first and second terms the same as the one marking off the subjective from the objective elements in the phenomenological content, it seems to fare no better. Discussion of it, however, is complicated by the treacherous ambiguity and vagueness of the words "subjective" and "objective." These sometimes mean "bodily" and "extra-bodily," re-spectively. When they do, those elements of a phenomenological content are subjective, or "in the subject," which are intuited as being situated in the body of the perceiver; and those elements are objective, or "in the object," which are intuited as being outside the body.15 Reid sometimes uses these notions in formulating the two terms theory. In one place he writes : •.. in aesthetic experience we are not, normally, thinking about our bodies, but rather about the sounds and the colours. These are, in perception,

VINCENT A. TOMAS 133 taken as existing in the world external to the body. Now, though these objects are, in the sense just stated, but causes in us of values, we do not, aesthetically, regard them as causes, but as themselves "expressing" values. Our question is, How do the values get there? The only possible answer is that we put them there—in imagination. They are not, aesthetically, apprehended as belonging to the organism. The focus of interest is in the external object, and to the external object they become imputed. 16 As will be indicated in (d) below, Reid also thinks of the subjective and the objective in other senses than the ones just specified. But in the sense specified, the second term is as objective a feature of the phenomenological content as aesthetic surface. Reid admits this when he writes that values "are not, aesthetically, apprehended as belonging to the organism." When music expresses sadness to us, we do not feel the sadness to be in us, the way we feel the nostalgic sadness evoked by a (possibly gay) popular song, which we knew in our youth, to be in us. Or, as O. K. Bouwsma says, in his playful but discerning "The Expression Theory of Art," when music expresses sadness, the sadness is to the music like the redness to the apple, not like the burp to the cider.17 The endeavor to construct a version of the two terms theory in which the first term is objective and the second is subjective, in the senses just specified, leads away from our subject. We then cease to discuss the concept of expression and deal with that of evocation instead. 18 If we stick to our subject, and to the senses of "subjective" and "objec-tive" that have been specified, there is no reason whatever for distinguishing two terms, one subjective, the other objective, in the aesthetic object. d) A sense in which the two terms are equally "subjec-tive" It will be said that the criterion by which we distinguish the two terms is an epistemological, not a phenomeno-logical, criterion-that, on general epistemological grounds, we must distinguish between objective and subjective components in the aesthetic object. People and probably animals can literally be sad, but music cannot, no more than the

134 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART sea-foam, if Ruskin was right, can be cruel or can crawl. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, then, feeling import is, in an epistemological sense, "in us," not "in the object." Thus, Ducasse says that it is true "that in ecpathy the object is not apprehended as out of us and the feeling as in us. . . • The teeling is apprehended as if it were a quality of the object. Nevertheless, when we are not actually going through the epathizing process, but describing it, we are well aware of the duality of object and subject, and of the fact that the feeling is experienced by the subject."19 Simi-larly, Perry says, "That feeling does somehow color its object is an undeniable fact of experience, and a fact recognized by common speech in so far as all of the familiar feelings assume the form of adjectives." However, "It seems necessary at some point to admit that the qualities of feeling may be 'referred' where they do not belong, or that an object may for summary purposes of poetic suggestion be endowed with characters that accurate judgment will attribute to their effects or to their context. 220 And, still in the same vein, Reid says that although the hedonic effects of things are "in aesthetic experience apprehended to some extent as if they were hedonic properties of the external thing," the fact is that "they belong, analytically and abstractly regarded, to the side of the subject and not of the object." In Reid's opinion, "most philosophers would be ready to admit that."21 Hence, it music expresses sadness to a listener, what is happening is that his listening to the music causes the listener to be sad, and he erroneously interprets the sadness affecting him to be a characteristic not of himself but of the music. Again we have the problem of explaining "how a feeling can be got into an object." It gets there, it is variously said, by being incorporated or objectified (Santayana), empathized (Lee and Lipps), distanced (Bullough), imagined (Reid), or in some other way "projected" from the subject into the object. In these versions of the two terms theory, contemplative perception of the sad music is dual. It consists in part in our taking the first term for what it really is, and in part in our mistaking the second term, or feeling import, for what it really is not. The prima facie plausibility of these versions largely van-

VINCENT A. TOMAS 135 ishes, I think, when we notice their tacit shifts in the meaning of the word "object," or, better, the way they shuttle back and forth between the use of "object" in the sense of aesthetic, i.e., phenomenological object, and its use in the sense of ontological, i.e., "real" object.22 When these shifts or shuttlings are made explicit, what these versions all contend is that while feeling import admittedly does characterize the aesthetic object, in precisely the way sense qualities do, there are reasons for believing that it does not characterize the ontological object. Feeling import is not "literally in" ontological objects in the sense that it is, after all, an effect in, and therefore existentially dependent on, the contemplator; if there were no contemplators, there would be no feeling import, even though there were ontological objects. At the same time, these versions take it for granted (else why do they protest so much the objectivity of feel-ing?) that the first term characterizes not only the aesthetic object but also the ontological object. The qualities constituting it are presumed to be "literally in" the ontological object in the sense that they would characterize it even if no contemplators existed. We may well ask, therefore, What, exactly, according to these versions, constitutes the first term? What qualities of aesthetic objects are "objective" in the sense that, unlike feeling import, they are also qualities of ontological objects? The most likely candidate is the sterilized aesthetic sur-face-the pattern of sense qualities devoid of feeling import. The difficulty here is that if we hold that this surface is objective in the sense required, i.e., that colors, sounds, and other sense qualities are "literally in" the ontological object, whereas feeling import never is, we are accepting some sort of naïve realism with respect to the former, at the same time that we are arbitrarily denying it with respect to the latter. This is what Reid does most of the time that he discusses aesthetic expression. Reid never notices that the same sort of reasons that are given for believing that feeling import does not characterize ontological objects may also be given for believing that sense qualities do not characterize ontological objects. Reid says, "When our blood is stirred and we feel martial, we call the trumpet's note martial. From the queer intentionat charges the with creati Montel@gic 0bjeu5,1

父ん Hint Wi 136 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART shivers it gives us, we say that the flute 'complains.' "23 When we apprehend phenomenologically objective feeling, that is, the feel of bodily processes is being "imputed" to an external thing. Yet the very same thing may be said about sense qualities. "What is the color of the sky," Prall asks, "but the way it strikes our eye, the way it feels through vision?"24 Hartshorne suggests that when we see a red book, "what we intuit as red is the state of our own nerves. . .."25 Santayana, in spite of his adherence to the two terms doc-trine, is consistent on this point. When he proposes its phenomenological objectivity as the differentia of aesthetic pleasure, he writes: "If we say that other men should see the beauties we see, it is because we think those beauties are in the object, like its color, proportion, or size. ... But this notion is radically absurd and contradictory. ... A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction. But modern philosophy has taught us to say the same thing of every element of the perceived world; all are sensations; and their grouping into objects imagined to be permanent and external is the work of certain habits of our intelligence." For Santayana, in this place at least, the status of phenomeno-logically objective feeling is no different from that of phenomenologically objective color or sound quality. The one is no more or no less "literally in" the ontological object than the other: "Convenience and economy of thought alone determine what combination of our sensations we shall continue to objectify and treat as the cause of the rest."26 So far, to avoid complicating our argument, we have made no mention of representation. But a theory of expression must account for the expressiveness of aesthetic objects which are represented, as well as presented, entities. The expressive thing need not be a sensuous pattern; it may be something represented by such a pattern. And it need not be something sensed or perceived; it might be something conceived or imagined. As Ducasse says, "the realm of possible objects of aesthetic contemplation includes every entity which in any way whatever can become a content of attention."27 Now, in no matter what way an entity becomes a content of contemplative attention, it is, qua such a content, "the thing presented. the expressive thing," with its characteristic

VINCENT A. TOMAS 137 feeling import. It is doubtful that anyone who feels obliged to insist that feeling import is not literally in the object would want to insist, when the aesthetic object is a non-existent, imagined object, that any other quality is. But then by what criterion would he distinguish between the two terms? 5. The aesthetically expressive object is one thing, not a fusion of two. If the preceding contentions are sound, and none of the three criteria usually put forward for distinguishing two terms in aesthetic expression is satisfactory, to save the two terms theory we must find some other criterion which is satisfactory. One possible alternative, that of the alleged independent variability of the two terms, is reserved for consideration below. Meanwhile, in view of the difficulties in the two terms theory so far considered, it seems worth while entertaining the hypothesis, defended by Pratt, Hart-shorne, and Langer, that the aesthetically expressive object really is but one thing, and not a distinguishable fusion of two. All three of these writers hold fast to the phenomenological distinction between subjective and objective feelings. The sadness evoked by bereavement is in us, but the sadness expressed by music is not in us but in the object. If the relation between subjective and objective sadness were one of identity, this would raise the question how a feeling can be got into an object in an insoluble form. But, according to Pratt and Langer, the relation is one of analogy of structure. Pratt, reserving the word "emotion" for subjective feelings exclusively, holds that "visual and especially auditory processes intrinsically contain certain properties which, because of their close resemblance to certain characteristics in the subjective realm, are frequently confused with emotions proper."28 On his view, sad music sounds the way (subjec-tive) sadness feels.? According to Langer, "there are certain aspects of the so-called 'inner life'—physical or mental— which have formal properties similar to those of music— patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfilment, excitation, sudden change, etc."30 What the sad music reflects to the contemplator is "the morphology" of subjective or "real"

138 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART sadness.31 In sum, according to Pratt and Langer the sad music is like subjective sadness in its structure, and, when savoret in aesthetic contemplation, bodile likent. Ot ourse, etc., it does not feel exactly like it. Charles Hartshorne's view is more radical. In his fascinating but apparently strangely neglected The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation,32 he presents "the contradictory of the doctrine of the irreducible distinctness of sensory qualities and affective tones."33 He contends that sensory qualities constitute a subclass of feeling tones, as do subjective emotions. "Indeed, a maximum of attention upon sensations themselves shows them to be feelings, to possess emotional qualities as their intrinsic essence."34 "The 'affec-tive' tonality, the aesthetic or tertiary quality, usually supposed to be merely 'associated with' a given sensory quality iS, in part at least, identical with that quality, one with its nature or essence. Thus, the 'gaiety' of yellow (the peculiar highly spechc gaiety is the yellowness of the yellow. The two are identical in that the yellowness' is the unanalyzed and but denotatively identified x of which the 'gaiety' is the essential description or analysis."35 On Hartshorne's view, when music expresses sadness to a listener, his experience of the music is a species of the same genus as his experience of subjective sadness. The two experiences qualitatively are not merely analogous; they are generically identical. Hartshorne also contends, rightly, I believe, that quality as well as structure is expressive. the three views agree that in aesthetic expression, the reeling import apprehended is not something numerically identical with subjective feeling, though there are resemblances between them. It is because of the resemblances that the two are called by the same name. They all agree that feeling import is emphatically not a characteristic erroneously imputed to the aesthetic object, but veridically so. And, on all three views, taking the aesthetic attitude is not a way of shitting gears which makes it possible for us to interpret "even our 'subjective' affections not as modes of our being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon."36 Rather, it is a way of making ourselves receptive to the

VINCENT A. TOMAS 139 ordinarily disregarded feeling import of the phenomenon. The concept of aesthetic expression remains mysterious, I think, except on a theory in which these assertions, all of which the two terms theory denies, are incorporated. 6. On the alleged independent variability of the two terms. It seems widely accepted that any theory that acquiesces in the deliverances of aesthetic observation by asserting that feeling import is in the aesthetic object, in whatever sense aesthetic surface is, cannot account for the independent variability of "the expressive thing" and "the thing ex-pressed"; that this fact, if such it be, can be accounted for only by some version of the two terms theory, reënforced by the laws of association. A typical formulation of this point of view is one by Henry D. Aiken: Unless the emotional effect of a work of art is located in us rather than in the object itself, we fall at once into aesthetic paradoxes which have continually beplagued the theorist. It, as Prall suggests, we identify the solemnity or galety of a work of music with its specifications of tempo, loudness, soner, ch, and stradicion as he says, a quicke think, it becomes unintelligible why it 1s that the same specifications of tempo, loudness, and so on, do not express the same specifications of feeling to all people, or even to all discriminating observers. In point of fact, the different values which different qualified observers attribute to the same work are, in part, due precisely to the fact that while they perceive the same, or closely similar, sensory surfaces, these do not succeed in evoking in each of them the same degree or even the same kind of emotional feeling. Indeed, the variability in the "expressiveness" which the same work of art has for different observers largely explains why there exists such a wide discrepancy between the descriptions of the quality of the impact which the same works of art produce upon different ob-servers.37

140 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART Bearing in mind the distinctions we found to be needful above, we may observe with respect to the first sentence in Aiken's passage that if by "work of art" and "object itself" is meant "physical," or, more generally, "ontological" object, not only is its emotional effect "in us," but so is its sensory effect. The "work of music with its specifications of tempo, loudness, timbre, pitch, and so on," if it is to function as the expressive thing, must be an aesthetic object, i.e., a content of attention aesthetically contemplated. There is a possible ambiguity in the phrase "and so on." The sensory surface experienced by two contemplators, who are listening to the same orchestra, might be the same, or closely similar, when what the surface suggests to them is very different. In such a case, if the listeners are attending not only to the surface but to what it suggests, they are not attending to the same aesthetic object; and a difference in the feeling import they experience can be attributed to a difference between the objects being attended to. Aiken, no doubt, means to exclude this and similar possi-bilities. His view seems to be that, as a matter of fact, two contemplators, listening to the same orchestra, and attending only to a sensuous surface, can (a) both be apprehending the same surface and (b) can one of them apprehend the surface as solemn and the other apprehend it as gay. The first thing to be said about this possibility is that, far from its being a "point of fact," whether it ever occurs is still a subject of controversy. Hartshorne analyzed what he describes, in what might very well be an understatement, as "a considerable quantity of experimental data (chaps. ii, iv, vii) which hitherto has lain scattered through the psychological literature, largely unknown to philosophers, and apparently not as yet correlated and seen as a whole even by psychologists."38 One of his conclusions is that "The assumption that persons whose sense of the meaning of a piece of music differs can yet have the very same sense perception of sounds is, so far as I know, devoid of all evidence."39 Gestalt theorists not only deny the assertion Aiken begins with the words, "In point of fact" ; they seem also to regard "the variability in the 'expressiveness' which the same [physical] work of art has for different observers" as

VINCENT A. TOMAS 141 evidence of divergence in the phenomenal object appre-hended. 40 If we left the matter here, we could conclude the case against the two terms theory by saying that of four criteria for distinguishing between the two terms, three of them are useless for this purpose, while the fourth assumes something to be a well-known fact which is in truth a matter of con-troversy, yet to be resolved. But the case becomes stronger when we determine what the root of the controversy is. Experimental results which seem to bear on the question whether sensory surface and feeling import can vary independently are not facts which speak for themselves. Suppose that when two subjects listened to an orchestra playing a tune with a brisk tempo, one of them reported that the music he heard was solemn, and the other reported that the music he heard was gay. How shall we interpret this fact? Possibly the subjects heard "the same music," but each experienced a different feeling import. But possibly the difference in feeling import is due to the fact that they did not hear "the same music. " To decide between these possibilities, we need first to apply some criterion which tells us when the music two people hear is "the same."41 I have no idea of what that criterion might be. Obviously, the criterion of identity of stimulus will not do. Possibly the interpretation one makes of results like our hypothetical one is determined, in large measure, by the theory one espouses concerning the nature of sensation, affection, and aesthetic expression. Thus, if one's theory implied that "quick solemnity" is not a contradiction in terms, one might be inclined to attach considerable weight to reports of disagreement in the feeling import experienced by different subjects in the presence of the same physical stimulus. Reports of such disagreement would count as "evidence" in favor of the independent variability of the two terms. On the other hand, if one's theory implied that "quick solemnity" is a contradiction, one might be inclined to sift such reports; and one might even emerge with the conclusion that the assumption of independent variability is, despite the reports, "devoid of all evidence." If this is what the state of affairs is, the decision between the two terms theory and its rival cannot be made by a mere

142 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART appeal to experimental data of the sort Aiken might have had in mind when he wrote that independent variability of aesthetic surface and feeling import is a point of fact. What the data tell us is ambiguous, and to remove the ambiguity we must apply a theory. When we consider which theory can most fruitfully be applied, we must bear in mind the logical difficulties involved in the usual versions of the two terms theory. 7. Application of the concept of aesthetic expression to artistic expression. If an account of aesthetic expression on the lines suggested in section 5 is correct, how should artistic expression, which is defined in terms of it, be conceived? What is the artist doing when he is "embodying" or "ob-jectifying" feelings in a sensuous medium? An enlightening preliminary point is one made earlier. Not all objectively expressive objects are products of artistic expression. We may adopt the attitude of aesthetic contemplation toward natural objects, such as sunsets, real land-scapes, and driftwood; and, when we do, we find our experiences of them have their feeling import. Yet no one embodied his feelings in them. This fact suggests that artistic expression of feeling is not a process by means of which an artist endows a sensuous material with a feeling quality it does not have, but one in which he is working with materials already charged with their specific feeling import. Reid says, "Expression, we shall argue, implies 'embodiment' of some sort in a 'body.' ... And in some sense something other than the "body' must be 'embodied. "42 On this view, it would seem, there is the feeling of the artist, and there is something other than his feeling, say a red patch devoid of feeling quality, and artistic expression or embodiment is the mysterious act which fuses the feeling with the patch. When the also nete #43;) artist objectifies cheerfulness by painting a rosy apple, he is, so to speak, welding cheerfulness to a red, round patch. But the artist could not fuse a cheerful feeling with a depressing gray or a somber black. And when he does objectify cheer- just aesthetic fulness by using cheerful colors, he is not fusing a feeling to anything. Rather, in large measure, the task of the artist who is objectifying, embodying, or expressing feeling is one of

VINCENT A. TOMAS 143 selecting, from among a variety of materials each item of which is already charged with specific feeling import, that one or combination of them which, when contemplated by him, feels like the feeling he wishes to express. 43 NOTES 1 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1938), pp. 121-24. 2 John Dewey, Art as Experience (Minton, Balch and Co., New York, 1934), p. 61. 3 C. J. Ducasse, Art, the Critics, and You (Oskar Piest, New York, 1944), p. 58. 4 John Hospers, Meaning and Iruth in the Arts (The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1946), p. 62. 5 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1932), p. 125. & George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1936), p. 147. 7 Ibid., pp. 148-49. 8 Art as Experience, p. 85. * Bernard Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic (Macmillan and Co., Ltd., London, 1915), p. 74. 10 Louis Arnaud Reid, A Study in Aesthetics (The Macmillan Com-pany, New York, 1931), pp. 62-03. 11 Ibid., p. 60. 12 The Sense of Beauty, p. 54. 13 D. W. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1947), p. 138. 14 The Principles of Art, p. 163. 15 Compare Carroll C. Pratt, The Meaning of Music (McGraw-fill Book Co., Inc., New York, 1931), pp. 157-59. 16 A Study in Aesthetics, p. 79. 17 In Max Black, ed., Philosophical Analysis (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1950), p. 100. 18 Compare Carroll C. Pratt, The Meaning of Music, p. 162. 19 C. J. Ducasse, The Philosophy of Art (The Dial Press, New York, 1929), p. 177. 20 Ralph Barton Perry, General Theory of Value (Longmans, Green, and Co., New York, 1926), p. 31. 21 A Study in Aesthetics, p. 79. 22 Cf. C. D. Broad, The Mind and its Place in Nature (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., London, 1925), pp. 141-43. 23 A Study in Aesthetics, p. 79. 24 D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Analysis (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, 1936), p. 148.

144 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART 25 Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1934), p. 247. 26 The Sense of Beauty, pp. 35-37. 27 The Philosophy of Art, p. 224. 28 The Meaning of Music, p. 191. 29 Ibid., p. 203. 30 Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Penguin Books, New York, 1948), p. 184-85. 31 Lord., p. 193. 32 See note 25. In leafing through a random selection of books dealing with our subject, and published later than Hartshorne's work, I found not a single reference to this book; and this seems odd. Those who accept the two terms theory will find it contains arguments worth refuting. Those who reject that theory might welcome its powerful support. 33 The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, pp. 6-7. 31 Ibid., p. 133. 35 Ibid., p. 7. 36 Edward Bullough, "'Physical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle," in Melvin Rader, Editor, A Modern Book of Esthetics (Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1952), рр. 403-4. 37 Henry D. Aiken, "Art as Expression and Surface," The Journal of a The Philosoph a CicholY 2 Pesembe, .45), P. 91. 39 Ibid., p. 186. 40 Cf. Kurt Koffka, "Problems in the Psychology of Art," Bryn Maver Notes and Monographs, IX 1940). 41 Compare Arnold Isenberg, Analytical Philosophy and the Study of Art (A Report to the Rockefeller Foundation, 1950), p. 36. 42 A Study in Aesthetics, p. 47. See also p. 60. 43 I do not want to imply that prior to the act of expression, the artist is fully aware of what he is trying to express.













THE CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART VINCENT A. TOMAS AND DOUGLAS N. MORGAN II. DOUGLAS N. MORGAN Lucidity and intelligence are as welcome as they are rare in contemporary aesthetics. Mr. Tomas' paper gives abundant evidence of both. As I understand it, he argues as follows: By making one distinction too few-that between the epistemological object and the phenomenological object— we have been making one distinction too many—that between the expressive thing and the thing expressed. First let us state, as clearly as we can, the position to be discussed. Tomas claims that, in any sense in which the pitch is "in" the music, the sadness is "in" the music also. Frequency may be the physical correlate of pitch, but frequency is not heard; pitch is. There may be physical correlates of sadness-presumably these would be highly complex-but these also are not heard; the sadness is heard as a quality of the music. On the other hand, we may say that the heard pitch is "in" the listener, whereas the physical vibrations are "out-side" him. But in this sense, and in this sense only, the sadness is "in" the listener. Thus, wherever we locate the pitch, there also must we locate the sadness. More speci-fically, the expressive quality is not first felt within the listener, and then later objectified outside himself, "embodied in" the music. Rather, Tomas suggests, the expressive quality—at least as "feeling import"— is "in" the phenomenological object as presented to the listener. Only a confusion between an object of knowledge and an event in experience could give rise to the supposition that there are in fact two distinct terms: the expressive quality

146 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART Insofar as Tomas' thesis is clear, it is, in my judgment, true, and indeed beyond question true; it is much more true than it is theoretically important. Unfortunately, not all of it is clear, and much of that which is unclear seems to me to be both important and highly dubious. The present paper will contain two parts. Part I will be devoted to a clarification of the meaning of the question about the locus of the sadness of the music. In Part II we shall examine the evidence for the suggested answers to the question. Certain preliminary linguistic resolutions are in order before we enter upon the discussion proper. I shall use the term "phenomenal" to describe events in experience, as appearances or phenomena; my "phenomenal object" will be Tomas' "phenomenological object." I shall reserve "phenom-enological" to describe theories about phenomena. I shall not (as Tomas seems to do) identify "epistemological object" with "ontological object" and distinguish both from "phenom-enal object." Instead, disclaiming any prior metaphysical commitment, I shall speak simply of "physical object" as contrasted with "phenomenal object." I Let us consider the issue, or apparent issue, at stake between Mr. Aiken and Mr. Tomas. The former asserts that two people, listening to the same music, may find it expressive of different qualities. Tomas suggests, on the other hand, that when this situation occurs, the people are not really listening to the "same" music, even though the physical stimulus may, for all practical purposes, be identical. If Aiken's assertion be taken merely to mean that the two people in question physically hear physically similar (or "identical") sounds, and that they then present different reports, one finding the music "gay," and the other finding the music "sad," then I cannot see that Tomas or anybody else would dare to disagree with him. But Aiken is said to want more than merely this bare assertion; he claims that, because of the above admitted fact, we must "locate" the sadness within the listener's response (or within the lis-tener), rather than within the object. Tomas argues that this is a non sequitur, and that the first admitted physical fact is

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 147 aesthetically irrelevant, because aesthetic listening is not physical hearing. We may understand the sentences "The music appears sad," "The music is apparently sad," "The sadness is heard as in the music," and "The sadness is in the phenomenal music," all to be strictly equivalent. I do not know any theorist today who will want to deny that, in this narrow sense, the sadness is "in" the music; indeed if this were not the case, the sadness would not seem to be "embodied" in the music, and the paradox would never have arisen in the first place. Surely Aiken, in the passage cited by Tomas, need not deny that the sadness is "in" the music in this sense. But to admit that the sadness appears to be in the music (or is in the phenomenal music) is not to admit that the presence of the sadness there is primarily explicable in "objective" terms, or in terms of anything in the subject's environment at the time of listening. Even though phenomenally objective, the sadness may still have been projected, and thus be causally subjective. Tomas suggests that, in Aiken's example, the phenomenal content of the two listeners must be understood to be distinct, so that we do not have two different responses to the same phenomenal stimulus, but rather two different responses to two different stimuli: in the one case, the music is actually heard as gay, in the other as sad; gaiety and sadness are presumably Ehrenfels qualities of the respective (but dis-tinct) pieces of music. Tomas also regrets that he sees no way of determining the issue, no criterion for decision. I first suggest that, under the present interpretation, this lack of a criterion is no mere matter of temporarily inadequate psychological information, and that no amount of speculation will ever supply such a criterion. For, whatever additional facts we collect, it will always remain, and systematically must always remain, open to us to explain that what had been thought to be a characteristic of the response was in fact a characteristic of the observed object, or conversely. I am, therefore, dubious whether we are debating a single significant problem, if we conceive it in these terms.?

148 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART The underlying problem is a large and important one, and one which is not often faced in philosophy. It may well be that ignoring this problem is a cause of much of our epistemological confusion. This problem is the meaning of the question we are asking when we ask "where" the quality is, "in" us or "in" the object. What, exactly, is meant by saying that a quality is "in" a subject or an object? Obvi-ously, "in" is a metaphor. The problem here is to indicate what is involved in explicating the metaphor. We shall find five more or less plausible senses in which the expression "The sadness is in the music" may be construed.3 One broad meaning may simply be that the quality in question is among the qualities "belonging to" the object in that if we were able to present a complete list of such qualities (which, of course, we are not) the quality in question would be among those listed, and would presumably be comparable in status with the other qualities. Let us call this "Sense A" of the sentence "The sadness is in the music." This sentence will then mean, "Sadness, like pitch, loudness, etc., is a quality of the (phenomenal) music." A related meaning of the word "in" is that in which the object might be properly described as possessing the quality in question, even in the absence of any percipient. If there are any naïve realists, they believe that apples are red even when nobody looks at them, and would remain red even if nobody ever looked at them, while they might deny to the apple the attribute of deliciousness or desirability if no one ever tasted or desired it; under these conditions, the color might be said to be "in" the apple, while its deliciousness and desirability might be said to be attributed to (or "pro-jected into") the apple from the "outside." On a more sophisticated and traditional level, primary qualities are sometimes said to be "out there in the object," while secondary qualities are said to be "in here in the subject." Let us call "Sense B" of the expression "The sadness is in the music," "The music is sad (or would be sad) independent of any percipient." A further sense of "in" is causal, in a way distinct from that excluded in Tomas' paper. When we ask about the sadness, we may be asking not merely whether the sadness

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 149 is among the qualities of the music, as heard, but whether the indisputable occurrence of the sadness among the phenomena in the total experience which we call "listening to a piece of music" is to be attributed causally to some that su if the pubioci environmen, be to some fair of music" will mean "The phenomenal sadness is caused by (or primarily caused by) some aspects of the subject's en-vironment, rather than by some aspect of his response to that environment." We shall call this "Sense C" of our paradigm. Still another approximation to the relevant meaning of "in" is that in which a meaning is said to be "in" a sign. Here we seem to mean not exactly "belonging to," nor "independent of the percipient," nor "arising out of the environment," but rather something like "revealed by." The "mening a vered isnt ord only in that it is restealed) said to indicate or point at its referent. Some few musical expressions are referential-meaningful in this sense, but I take it as generally agreed that "musical meaning" cannot be generally understood thus naively. If musical reference were verbal, or even very closely word-like, the so-called paradox of expression would hardly have arisen. Musical expressions, like most verbal expressions, would be fully distinct from their referents. In order to account for the peculiarities of the aesthetic sign-situation, it has been thought necessary to people the semantic menagerie with such queer animals as nondiscursive symbols and nonreferential meanings. I doubt that the "in" of "The sadness is in the music" will be fully explicated until the taxonomy of these sports is fully developed. Meanwhile, let us call this "Sense D" of our type-sentence, which will here mean that sadness is referred to by the music. In order to explain our final sense, it will be necessary to make one further set of analytic distinctions. It is said that music "is," "sounds," or "feels" sad; or that we "are" or "feel" sad when we hear it. Because of the importance (as in Ducasse) of "feeling," let us concentrate on the word "feel."

150 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART Setting aside what may be called the propositional-attitude use of "feel," (as in, "I feel that a given proposition is true," which seems to mean merely, "I believe it with no great certainty," and which does not enter into our problem), we find a series of relevant senses. Consider first the sentence "I feel sad." Here we have an intransitive use, which might be paraphrased as "I am sad," or "Sadness is a pervasive characteristic of my mind now." Note that the sentence in question is not normally to be analyzed as it the verb were transitive, thus: "I am aware of sadness." For I may very well be sad without being aware that I am being sad. Let us simply call this the "intransitive-personal" sense of "feel." A transitive-personal sense of "feel" may, evidently, be simply equated with "intuit," or "am aware of." Thus, in the case of sadness, "I feel sadness" may simply mean "I am aware of sadness (in myself or in someone else)," without the additional suggestion that I am experiencing any emotion at all. This becomes more obvious in the physical-touch sense of "feel" —and presumably all these various senses are but metaphorical extensions of the physical sense, thus: "I feel the velvet," meaning that I touch the velvet and intuit its surface. Another transitive-personal sense, related to the one just mentioned, is that in which we say that we feel not the velvet or its surtace, but the smoothness of the velvet. Here again we have an "intuit" sense of "feel," but the object of the feeling is said to be not an object, but one of the object's qualities. Unfortunately, we who speak English also use the word "feel" in impersonal situations, and consider it perfectly proper to say of the velvet that it "feels" smooth... meaning, presumably, that one experiences smoothness when and if he transitive-personally feels the velvet (or its surfaces, if such a distinction must be made). One step removed from this is the sense in which we say that the velvet "looks" smooth: it looks as if it would feel smooth, were we to touch it— whether we do in fact touch it or not. The nouns which correspond to these respective verb-usages differ, and reveal an important distinction of sense.

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 151 Thus the experience which I have will be called a "feeling." But only persons have "feelings." Velvet has rather a "feel" than a "feeling." Tweed has not a different "feeling" from velvet, but a different "feel." Now, at last, we return to music. When I listen to music I may (although I rarely do) intransitive-personally feel sad: I may actually experience sadness. Or, and this may be quite distinct, I may transitive-personally feel sadness; without inquiring into its source, I may become aware of sadness, even without experiencing it, as when I see a sad face on a stranger or a dog. Or, still again, I may say that a given piece of music is sad (or "feels" sad) intending to assert by my words only a transitive-impersonal sense of "feel": The music "feels" sad in the sense in which the velvet "feels" smooth. The music may "sound" sad in the same sense, I suppose. Just as we would not quite say that the velvet has a feeling of smoothness, but only a feel of smoothness (it is we who have the feeling), so we might be well advised to say not that the music has or contains (or that there is in the phenomenal music) a feeling of sadness, but rather that it has a feel of it. Everyone will want to deny that the music as an object physical, phenomenal or anything else, experiences any feel-1ngs at all. But as Tomas indicates) this does not commit us to a denial that there is any real connection between music and feelings. Of course, the music does not experience sad-ness, any more than the velvet experiences smoothness. But nobody ever maintained that it did. It does not follow that the sadness is wholly an individual matter of actually evoked response. At the very least, the sadness of the music may be classed as dispositional, and one may say that "sad music" means music which has a disposition to evoke sadness, just as "smooth velvet" means velvet which has a disposition to evoke sensations of smoothness. And just as no one can well deny that some phenomenal velvet "really" does feel smooth, so no one should want to deny that some phenomenal music "really" does feel sad. The important and interesting parallel lies not between "music feels sad" and "velvet feels smooth." It lies rather

152 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART between "music sounds sad" and "velvet looks smooth," for in each of these there is a presentation to one sense, which seems to partake of a quality more usually associated with some other sense. Even "velvet looks smooth" does not merely mean dispositionally. In addition to its cue for touch, the visual experience has a peculiar "smooth" look, as we see it. We recognize (or so we think) that "smoothness" is here a metaphor, that visual objects cannot "really" be smooth; only tactile objects can. So, in our sophisticated fashion, we attribute the smoothness of the look to the supposed dispositional feel. Now, it may be that in saying that music "sounds" sad we mean the sadness to be dispositional also, but if so the disposition is of a peculiarly refined order, since sad music, when listened to as music, does not ever make us (intransi-tively) feel sad. The disposition is never realized. We may mean something like this-and let us call this "Sense E": The music sounds as if, were one to respond to it emotion-ally, sadness would be the appropriate emotion to feel.® Not, of course, that we here-now are to respond to it in this way— we are too intently absorbed in the music to trifle with actual emotional experiences-but we recognize what we hear as somehow appropriate to a sadness which we might in fact feel if we were to feel anything at all. As I understand Tomas, he wants to assert that the sadness is "in" the music at least in Senses A and C. As a mere report of experiential fact, most of us will, I expect, agree. But insofar as Tomas claims to be making post-experiential empirical assertions of theoretical interest or usefulness, I have serious doubts that we should want to go much further than Sense E. It may be that Sense E is what those who speak of music as symbolic-expressive in Sense D are getting at. II The claim made by Tomas in his paper-namely, that the sadness is an actually presented quality of the heard content of the music rather than the exteriorization of a felt response —can be interpreted as empirical, although of course (as Tomas expressly says) the facts do not unequivocally confirm or disconfirm his answer. The claim cannot be intended

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 153 merely as a discovery of philosophical analysis, or as a revealing tautology, for Tomas admits that he does not know how one could determine its truth, and cites certain empirical evidence as relevant. I suppose that reference to psychological categories is therefore in order. Unfortunately, the categories are not entirely clear, and the evidence, so far as I can make out, is inconclusive. I am not entirely certain of the extent to which psychological considerations are relevant, but Tomas himself has raised the issue. If we attend to the way in which categories are actually used in psychology, the weight of evidence seems to support Aiken's position. Tomas may of course claim that the phenomenal report is both incorrigible and ultimate, and thereby reject a priori all psychological considerations. The sadness is "in" the music simply because it is heard there, and no better evidence to the contrary is even conceivable, let alone admissible. In this sense, the phenomenal report may be self-warranting, but it is also theoretically uninteresting. If we are ever to transcend the privacy of the individual, we must at least posit common areas of experience. Such common areas we may conceptually reify in psychology, as we do in physics. The thing or object thus reified then comes to exercise a normative function: our private perceptions are measured against it, and corrected in the light of the properties we have posited as belonging to it. Some such procedure seems necessary in order to make possible any general empirical theory. It may not be necessary to posit physical objects; I do not wish to debate the metaphysical issue here. But unless. I can perceive "the same object" more than once-however "same object" be defined-and unless two or more of us can perceive "the same object," science is solipsistic soliloquy. It is granted that my perceptions differ, one from another, and that my perceptions differ from yours. It is always open to us logically to claim that these are perceptions of different phenomenal objects, and hence strictly incomparable, just as it is open to the color-blind person to insist truly that his phenomenal apple is gray, rather than red. But grounded agreement, communication, and knowledge always require more than merely private phenomenal reports; at the very

154 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART least it must be possible to make assertions about states of affairs other than one's own phenomena. It is absurd to try to base any general theory on systematically discrete and strictly incomparable phenomenal reports; it is equally absurd to try to refute any theory on the admitted evidence of such reports. We must confess the impossibility of proving the "same-ness" of the common object, and go ahead to assume it anyway. We must hold literally all perceptions, all phenomena, as in some sense corrigible. And we must devise ways of distinguishing trustworthy from untrustworthy perceptions. All this, if obvious, is as true in theoretical aesthetics as anywhere else; its denial, consistently carried out, commits us to radical skepticism. Its relevance to the present discussion should be clear. The next step will be to examine certain of the principal means of distinguishing among perceptions those which will be called "trustworthy" because they depend upon "external evidence," in contrast to those which will be called "untrust-worthy" because they are "projections" or "exterioriza-tions" of the subject's personality. Parenthetically, it must be noted that the entire categorical "in here-out there" polarity is exaggerated by the Aiken-Tomas dispute. It is probable that even the most "subjective" response is qualified by some external stimuli, and that even the most "stimulus-bound" response is qualified by some characteristics of the perceiving subject. Nevertheless, a continuum may be usefully conceived without any commitment to the actual occurrence of either pole. Admitting the inadequacy of the terminology, let us say that some qualities or characteristics are "recognized" or relatively objective in origin, while others are "projected" or relatively subjective.® The first psychological category which comes to mind is that called "projection." In its more strictly technical sense, 10 projection is obviously irrelevant to the present problem, and will be ignored. In a more popular sense, the term has been defined as the process whereby psychic elements-needs, feelings and emotions, or images and contexts of images

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 155 activated by such affective states are referred by the experiencing subject to the external world without sufficient objective evidence. 11 Two kinds of situations prevail in psychology, and two different answers are given to our question.12 The general problem is how to distinguish between "projection," as above defined, and "recognition" of "genuinely objective" features of the environment. Given a subject's report of his phenomenal field, by what criterion shall we say that this feature is projected from within his personality, while that is truly found outside him? In the usual color-blindness tests, one is asked to report what one sees, or what number one sees. "Normal" people ("normality" being statistically defined) report, say, a red seven on a green ground. Color-blind people report no recognizable shape, or a different shape. In the usual "projective" tests (Rorschach's and TAT's) one is asked to describe, explain, or tell a story about certain presented images. Most of the images presented are deliberately ambiguous in some degree; it is occasionally necessary to reject a card, the responses to which run too consistent. On the basis of the protocols, numbers of responses are counted, content-analyses are run and speculative personality pictures are drawn. In the case of the color-blindness tests, we should presumably say that the subjects are reporting what is in fact presented to them: that they are recognizing a fact about the object "out there," rather than projecting, exteriorizing, or objectifying a subjective feeling from "in here." This is precisely what we want them to do. In the case of the projective tests, on the other hand, we should presumably say that the subjects are not recognizing any "presented" fact (we have gone to considerable pains to present them with no "recognizable fact") ;13 rather, we hope, they are simply putting into the picture their own personalities The relevance of the present discussion is simply this: if there is a ground for any real distinction between "recogniz-ing what is out there" and "exteriorizing what is in here," this ground should be equally applicable to the problem of the sadness of the music. But, unhappily, the only empirical

156 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART ground available in these cases is a mere consensus. If very few people reported the red seven on the green ground, we should not say that it was "there" but that almost nobody recognized it; we should instead say that it wasn't "there," and that those few who said that they "saw" it there were merely exteriorizing. If, on the other hand, almost everybody reported that he saw a bloody bear chasing a nude woman on a Rorschach card, we should say that this image was there, and that those who didn't see it were in some sense blind; except negatively, the card would be useless. In these cases, there simply doesn't seem to be any loftier criterion of the "here" and the "there," the "in" and the "out," than mere consensus. In some sense, the man who, even though in the distinct minority, finds the bear chasing the woman in the Rorschach card is truthfully reporting what he "finds." Tomas is perfectly correct in asserting that we "find" the sadness in the phenomenal music. But such a man would be mistaken in saying that anybody who didn't "find" the bear chasing the woman was blind, since in fact the man had projected his own personality traits into the card, rather than strictly "finding" them. This is a causal explanation of how the card came to appear as it does to him. But, if the analogy holds, the man who claimed that anybody who didn't hear the sadness in the music was deaf, , might be said to be mis- taken, since he talled to recognize that other people may exteriorize other responses. It is of course perfectly possible, as Tomas suggests, that our actual perceptive fields may differ importantly. The man who sees the bear and the woman may argue that in his perceptual field, the bear is chasing the woman, whereas in the perceptual held of one who does not see what he sees, the bear is climbing a tree, or there isn't any bear there at all. True enough, but so what? To what theoretical end can this distinction be put? I who hear some music as sad may honestly claim that I am hearing something different from what is being heard by the man who finds it gay, even though the physical stimulus is nearly identical in the two cases. But again, so what? How is this of any theoretical interest? For we wish, above all, to generalize. And what is phe-

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 157 nomenally or phenomenologically peculiar to my perception is of idiosyncratic interest to me and my psychoanalyst but to nobody else. I could, always and everywhere, maintain that my perceptions are veridical, and that when I hear the sadness as "in" the music, then, by God, the sadness is in the music, simply because I hear it there. When I see pink elephants upon the ceiling, then, by God, there are pink elephants upon the ceiling, simply because I see them there. Admittedly, no one can demonstrate my error to me by any rationally conclusive technique. I may eventually discover that nobody else reports that the elephants are there, and that I cannot feed peanuts to them, and I may conclude that I am exteriorizing some characteristic of my disordered mind. So, too, I may try to fit my intuition of sadness into a social-pragmatic framework, and find that it doesn't fit. Many other people don't report this music as sad, and I can't locate the sadness conceptually. I still "hear" the sadness, of course, just as I still "see" the pink elephants. The phenomenal content may well remain unchanged. But the theoretical interpretation of the content has changed. And in trying to understand the aesthetic experience, or in trying to understand art, or in trying to understand anything else, we are engaged in a theoretical enterprise which commits us to certain extra-personal criteria of validity. This suggests that the "two-term theory" of expression is perhaps not quite so ill-tounded as lomas makes it out to be. At the very least, it is a theory of expression, and I do not quite see that any private phenomenal report, as such, is a theory about anything. Suppose we ask, quite simply, "Is there, or is there not, some generic phenomenal object?" If not, the sadness of the music is an individual difference of no particular interest. The sadness certainly is not a characteristic of the generic physical object, and the examination of this generic physical object seems to exhaust theory. Aesthetics becomes a branch of physics, physiology, and psycho-physical psychology. If there is a generic phenomenal object, it will remain possible to ask of this object-although obviously not of the physical object-whether it is properly called "sad," or whether the sadness "found" be not imputed by the subject story

158 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART to the object. In other words, you and I must in our experiences of a piece of music share a common (phenomenal) object. If you find it sad and I do not (and Tomas can hardly claim this to be logically impossible, without begging his question by definition),14 we may inquire why this is so. Is it that I am deaf to the sadness that really is in the music? Or is it that you are merely exteriorizing some aspect of your response? It may be possible to approach a solution to our problem, even if not definitely to solve it, if we consider the extremes, setting aside for the time the entire question of the physical object, and asking merely which characteristics we wish to attribute causally to the phenomenal object, and which to the phenomenal subject. Clearly, we shall want to say that the heard sound (not merely the sound waves) is "there," and is not projected by the listener, in that the heard sound is phenomenally presented; anyone who doesn't hear any sound is deaf, and anyone who hears only some of the sound is partially deaf. More specifically, the usual psychological dimensions of sound: pitch, tempo, rhythm, overtone struc-ture, and loudness these, we shall say, are "there"; the Seashore tests determine relative degrees of deafness to these various dimensions. Less obviously, the familiar modes of musical structure rhythm, melody, and harmony—will be treated as "there" ; at least we can, within limits, teach people from other cultures to hear our harmonies, and we ourselves can learn to hear theirs. On the other hand, I suppose that we should all want to consider such a characteristic as "familiarity" to be an instance of exteriorization. The musical object may indeed sound "familiar," but it would seem odd indeed to say that the familiarity is a characteristic of the musical object proper, since it will sound familiar only to a person who has heard some such music before. If I say of a given piece of music that it sounds "familiar" (or "nostalgic" or "reminiscent"), I am simply saying that it sounds familiar to me. The predicate is at least two-termed, rather than one-termed. Any one-term predicate can be (and presumably is, by some people, primitive, childish, or sophisticated) attributed causally to the object. But neither the phenomenal "dis-

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 159 covery" nor the grammatical attribution prove anything about the causal locus of the quality. Again, consider the familiar case in which one finds a piece of music exciting on first hearing, less so on second, and dull thereafter. Limit the discussion to the phenomenal object. Shall we say that the music altered its characteristics, or that our response altered, or both? Tomas will presumably say that the music has altered: that, although the physical stimuli remain constant, the phenomenal content has changed. I shall say that this may be true, but that this is not a very interesting fact. For the only sense in which serious theory is possible is the sense in which we shall be able to say that I was hearing the same music, the music being a common object among my different hearing experiences. Heard tonal changes remain, heard harmonic modulations remain, heard rhythmic patterns remain, but heard excitement does not. Why, then, is it not plausible to attribute the "heard" excitement to the listener, rather than to the object listened to? And why, if plausible with heard excitement, not with heard sadness? In contrast to those instances already considered, there is another group in which we do not need to rely on a con-sensus. Even though very few people hear and discriminate extremely subtle differences in pitch, we nevertheless ascribe the differences to the object, and do not say of such people that they are projecting or hallucinating. Presumably the ground for our distinction in these cases is the tact that we have physical correlates for the phenomenal events. This gives us the second of our criteria for distinguishing the "in here" from the "out there." Professional color-matchers make hue-discriminations much more subtly than the rest of us do; but we say that they are making "real" discriminations (and not merely "projecting") because we trust a spectroscopic report over our own eyes. As in the case with pitches, we have physical correlates which function normatively. We find, then, two working definitions of "objective" : 1) consensus, or degree of agreement among observers; and 2) physical correlation. In psychology, we use the latter whenever possible and the former (despite its counterintuitive implications) 15 in all other cases.

N , but 160 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART On the psychological evidence, we may conclude that the sadness is properly ascribable to the phenomenal object, rather than to the phenomenal subject, if and only if either or both of the following tests holds: 1) Most people report sadness as present in their phenomena caused by the "same" physical-stimulus music. This is the case analogous with the color-blindness consensus solution. 2) In some music, some people report sadness and these reports correlate consistently with some physically measurable characteristics: a minor key, a slow tempo, or the like. This is the case analogous with the acute ear which detects subtle pitch differences. Neither of these tests seems, on evidence thus far col-lected, to indicate very strongly that the musical object, apart from its subject, can properly be called "sad." On the contrary, such evidence as is available indicates that there is, in such an attribution, a pathetic fallacy, and that we should properly hesitate before alleging of a given piece of (say) Chinese music that it is sad, since it all sounds sad to most of us unsophisticated Westerners. If the claim is extended across cultural boundaries (and we wish, at least, to speak significantly about all music, as when we say that all music has some rhythmic-tempic character or other), it simply is not yet evidentially supported. And the burden of proof seems to lie upon those who claim the cross-cultural community. If it were possible for Tomas to spell out the status of heard sadness specifically enough to enable us to find physical correlates for it (as we do for heard pitch or for seen red-ness),16 his case would be much stronger. One useful meaning for "objective" is "varies consistently with some physically measurable correlates." Unfortunately, however, it is difficult to decide what kinds of correlation we should look for. Shall we look to harmonic mode? Tempo? Rhythm? But we already have "experts" demonstrably able to discriminate in these realms much more accurately than the rest of us, yet we do not say that such people are experts in discriminating sadness.!? Shall we look to some complex of physical qualities which can be correlated with phenomenal

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 161 sadness? Perhaps so, yet I wonder whether, having done so, we should be content to say even of people who could demonstrably discriminate these complexes that they were "sadness-experts," as we unhesitatingly say of a man that he is a "pitch-expert" or a "hue-expert." Further, we now know that it is possible, within reasonably broad limits, to train sensory acuity, and we have techniques for accomplishing this. We can teach people to see color and hear harmony more subtly than they could before. If Tomas' analogy holds, it would be interesting to learn how we should go about teaching someone to hear sadness more accurately than he did before. I can well imagine that a Trobriander could learn to distinguish slow Western music from fast, minor from major, and the like; he might also learn to use the word "sad" to describe (say) slow music in a minor key. It would not follow that he had discriminated any sadness "in" the music, but merely that he had learned the English language and a certain psychological fact about the people who use it, namely that the emotion sadness (with which the Trobriander may be presumed to be acquainted) is believed by English-speaking people to have some kind of relevance (causal, structural-iconic, or other) to certain kinds of music. 18 Within a given culture-pattern, on the other hand, there seems to be a good deal more to be said for Tomas' claim. Probably on the basis of considerable common conditioning, most of us find certain pieces of music and certain kinds of music sad, and other pieces and other kinds gay. If the option be forced, most of us will call the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro "gay, ," and the Eroica's Funeral March "sad." We shall pronounce them such even though we actually feel sad while listening to the Mozart and gay while listening to the Beethoven. And-albeit with overtones of metaphor-we might even say of a man within our culture who reversed these adjectives that he is "deaf" to the actual characteristics of the musical object. But I, at least, would hesitate to say this of a representative of some other culture who pronounced the Figaro "morbid," although I should not hesitate to pronounce him "color-blind" if he failed to see the red seven on the green

162 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART field. His way of interpreting music would seem to me to be excessively odd, and would interest me. I should confess surprise, but I should not be inclined to say that I am actually hearing the gaiety which is there, while he is projecting the morbidity which isn't.20 pretat, then, cen we saye, onsis terily hope plausible retica- the evidence, and with hope for theoretical advancement? Is the sadness "in" the music? In Sense A, I think not, because although sadness is a quality of the phenomenal object, it is not strictly comparable with pitch, loudness, etc. Discriminations need to be made among the phenomenal qualities which will attribute some (like pitch and loudness) primarily to the phenomenal object, and others (like sadness and familiarity) primarily to the phenomenal subject. In Sense B the sadness is not in the music; I doubt that any other qualities are either. In Sense C, I also doubt, pending evidence of the sort requested above, that the sadness is in the music. In Sense D, as it stands, the answer is an unequivocal No; but refinement may make it plausible. In Sense E I believe, but shall not here argue, that the answer is Yes. I conclude that Mr. Tomas' thesis may be interpreted in either of two ways. As an analytic claim that phenomena are phenomena and that the sadness appears to be in the music, the thesis is clear and true. As an empirical allegation of the "proper" location of the sadness, the thesis is open to various interpretations, none of which is yet borne out by any important body of evidence; if true, this claim would be of considerably greater interest and importance. NOTES 1 We must note and avoid a familiar ambiguity in the very word "appear": to say that the music "appears" sad is to suggest, in some contexts, that the music is not "really" sad, since it is said merely to "appear" to be so. In the present technical sense of "appear," this suggestion must be ruled irrelevant. 2 As I shall indicate below the problem can be conceived in more empirical terms, and when it is so conceived, Tomas' solution is less satisfactory.

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 163 3 "If taken literally, the notion that music can embody or contain an emotion is psychological nonsense. Emotions can only be located inside the individual who has them. They do not lie outside the living organism." Carroll C. Pratt, Music as the Language of Emotion (The Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., 1952), p. 6. The word "sadness" will not be analyzed here, since Mr. Bouwsma, in the paper cited by Tomas, has already wittily accomplished this. It is at least possible that "sadness" in "The sadness is in the music" is simply a different word (or meaning) from "sadness" in "I feel sadness over the loss of my beloved." See Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1946), p. 97. 4 Although, of course, both qualities might be understood disposi-tionally. Without a dispositional theory, I see no way to get the color of the apple, the sneeziness of a feather, and the drunkenness of Santayana's whisky into the same respective locations in their respective objects. 5 This is a deliberate oversimplification, and will be refined below. "Cause" is to be understood in the sense of "occasion." 6 My suggested Sense E is consistent with the Pratt-Langer position referred to by Tomas; that position will be an empirical explanation of Sense E. But how can it be made consistent with Tomas' own position (unless Tomas is withholding some special definition of "emotion")? See note 3 above, and also: "Objects of art, whether regarded as independent physical events or as dependent perceptual data, cannot themselves embody emotion. The emotions do not exist 'out there' in visual or auditory forms." Pratt, op. cit., p. 10. 7 "Untrustworthy," of course, only for the purpose of constructing a theory about what is "objectively" in the environment, although these very perceptions may well be the most trustworthy for the purpose of understanding the attitudes and even the behavior of the individual. 8 Cf. Hartshorne, op. cit. by Tomas, p. 187: "... in all sense experi-ence, the sensory material intuited is only partially determined by the external stimulus." It is worth noting that a Deweyan "contextualist" might claim to avoid the two-term paradox at the outset, by taking as primary some category like "situation" or "context," and thus avoiding the cate-gorial polarity of "subject" and "object," each of these latter being defined in terms of the more fundamental category. For such a contextualist, the sadness will be as "fused" in the music as the sweetness in the lemonade, and the phenomenal occurrence of the sadness, like that of the sweetness, will be explicable only in terms of the interrelations between "subject" and "object." But see Hartshorne, pp. 18n., 174-75. * Hartshorne, op. cit., p. 203, calls these respectively "content forms" and "awareness forms."

164 CONCEPT OF EXPRESSION IN ART 10 Robert Sears ("Experimental Studies of Projection: I. Attribution of Traits," The Journal of Social Psychology, 1936, No. 7, reprinted in Tomkins (ed.), Contemporary Psychopathology, Harvard, Cambridge: 1946, p. 561), cites the following definition from Healy, Bronner and Bowers: "a defensive process under sway of the pleasure principle whereby the Ego thrusts forth on the external world unconscious wishes and ideas which, if allowed to penetrate into con-sciousness, would be painful to the Ego." 11 Henry A. Murray, "The Effect of Fear Upon Estimates of the Maliciousness of Other Personalities," The Journal of Social Psy-chology, 1933, No. 3, reprinted in Tomkins, Contemporary Psycho-pathology, p. 547. The problem, of course, is to determine what "objective evidence" is, and how much of it is "sufficient." 12 A third answer, clearly inapplicable to the aesthetic situation, will not be discussed. This is the pragmatic answer. The pink elephant isn't "there" on the ceiling, because we can't feed peanuts to him. But we can't feed peanuts to a painted elephant either, even though he is "there" phenomenally in a sense in which the hallucinated elephant is not "there" • namely, according to both of the criteria to be considered in the text. 13 An interesting exception is the butterfly on Rorschach card #5, which is almost universally "recognized," rather than "projected." It is worth noting that a failure to project on Rorschach (as in the response "I see an inkblot") is as revelatory as is any projection. 14 To affirm "quick solemnity" to be a contradiction is to come very near to such question-begging. 15 The assertion of the consensus test of "objectivity," for example, implies the peculiar consequence that a mass hallucination is logically impossible. 16 Note that there is here no question of confusion between phenomenal and physical objects. Changes in the former are simply observed to correlate with (what are believed to be) changes in the latter. 17 I dare say that those whom we today recognize as "experts" in eneral musical disrimination, the rites themselves, are the misist But see Hartshorne, pp. 120 ff., for the contrary claim. 18 It is, of course, easy to teach a color-blind person that objects have different colors, which he cannot see. How would we go about teaching him that musical objects have different degrees of sadness, which he cannot hear? 19 I am by no means claiming that such "discoveries" are definitive of musical value, or even in any aesthetically interesting sense relevant to the music. For all my argument here, Hanslick may be perfectly correct. 20 Note once again: I freely admit the logical possibility that our views may be consistent. As Tomas points out, my exotic friend may be hearing different phenomenal music. His heard music may "really"

DOUGLAS N. MORGAN 165 be sad, and mine "really" gay. But, as I have already argued, this fact is of no particular theoretical interest. As theorists, our problem is to describe the music (or the experience) in general, not to exchange gossip about idiosyncratic introspective peculiarities. That such a difference as the example suggests is generic rather than idiosyncratic remains for Tomas to demonstrate.