According to Croce, an artistic representation is a reflection of the cosmos: «Each part of it throbs with the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life of each part. A true artistic representation is at the same time itself and the universe, the universe as individual form, and the individual form as universe. Every accent of the poet, as well as every creature of his imagination, encloses the entire destiny of mankind, with all its hopes, its illusions, its pains, its joys, its grandeur, and its misery, the entire drama of reality, incessantly becoming and growing out of itself, in suffering and pleasure.»‘ Croce’s words effectively translate the vague emotion many of us have felt at the reading of a poem, but they don’t explain it.
In other words, Croce does not accompany his observation with a theoretical framework that would account for it. Similarly, when he states that «to give an artistic form to an emotive content is to imprint it with totality, to lend it cosmic inspiration,» 2 he is again insisting on the need for a rigorous foundation (on which to base the equation artistic form = totality), but without providing us with the philosophical tools necessary to establish the connection he proposes. To say that artistic form stems from the lyrical intuition of feeling does not amount to much more than asserting that every emotive intuition becomes lyrical when it takes the form of art, thereby assuming the character of totality—all aesthetic reflection thus dwindles to suggestive verbalism, or to charming tautologies involving phenomena that are, however, never explained.
Croce is not the only one to dwell on the conditions of aesthetic pleasure without trying to explain their mechanism. Dewey does the same thing when he speaks of «this sense of the including whole implicit in ordinary experiences,» a sense which, as he further notes, the Symbolists have turned into the main object of their art: About every explicit and focal object there is a recession into the implicit which is not intellectually grasped. In reflection we call it dim and vague. But Dewey is perfectly aware of the fact that the «dim and the «vague» of a primary experience—which always preede the categorical rigidity imposed on us by reflection—are aspects of its global nature.
«At twilight, dusk is a delightful quality of the whole world. It is its appropriate manifestation. It becomes a specialized and obnoxious trait only when it prevents distinct perception of some particular thing we desire to discern.» If reflection forces us to choose and focus on just a few elements of a given situation, «the undefined pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of which we are focally aware, making them a whole.
Reflection does not generate but, rather, is generated by this original pervasiveness within which it exercises its selectivity. According to Dewey, the very essence of art lies precisely in its capacity to evoke and emphasize «this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, allinclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live»‘— hence the religious emotion inspired in us by aesthetic contemplation.
This sense of totality is as strongly registered in Dewey as it is in Croce, even though in a different philosophical context, and constitutes one of the most interesting features of an aesthetics which, given its naturalist foundations, could at first sight seem rigidly positivistic. In fact, Dewey’s naturalism and his positivism share the same romantic origins, which might well explain why all his analyses, no matter how scientific, always culminate in a moment of intense emotion before the mystery of the cosmos (it is no coincidence that his organicism, though marked by Darwin, stems more or less consciously from Coleridge and Hegel).’
This is probably why, on the threshold of the cosmic mystery, Dewey seems to be afraid of taking the last step that would allow him to dissect this experience of the indefinite into its psychological coordinates and declares his failure. «I can see no psychological ground for such properties of an experience save that, somehow, the work of art operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole that accompanies every normal experience.»‘ Such a surrender is all the more unjustifiable in that Dewey’s philosophy already contains the premises for such a clarification, and that these very premises are reiterated in Art as Experience, hardly a hundred pages before the cited passages. Dewey offers us a transactional conception of knowledge that becomes particularly suggestive when set side by side with his definition of the aesthetic object.
The work of art, for him, is the fruit of a process of organization whereby personal experiences, facts, values, meanings are incorporated into a particular material and become one with it, or, as Baratono would say, «assimilated» to it. (In other words, art is the «capacity to work a vague idea and emotion over into terms of some definite medium.»)6 The expressiveness of a work of art depends on the existence of «meanings and values extracted from prior experiences and founded in such a way that they fuse with the qualities directly presented in the work of art.»‘ In other words, components of our experiences must fuse with the qualities of the poem or the painting to cease being extraneous objects.
Thus, «the expressiveness of the object of art is due to the fact that it presents a thorough and complete interpenetration of the materials of undergoing and of action, the latter including a reorganization of matter brought with us from past experience .. . The expressiveness of the object is the report and celebration of the complete fusion of what we undergo and what our activity of attentive perception brings into what we receive by means of the senses.» Consequently, «to have form . . . marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.»‘
If this is still not a clear psychological explanation of what infuses the aesthetic experience with the sense of a totality, it certainly is its philosophical premise. So much so that this and other texts by Dewey are responsible for the emergence of a psychological methodology—called «transactional»—according to which knowledge is a difficult process of transaction, of negotiation: in answer to a given stimulus, the subject incorporates the memory of past perceptions into the current one and, by so doing, gives form to the experience in progress—an experience that is not only the recording of a Gestalt already existing as an autonomous configuration of reality (or, for that matter, a subjective positing of the object), but that is also the result of our active participation in better vet, the world that results from this active participation.»‘ Thus, lie experience of totality (the experience of the aesthetic moment as an openness of knowledge) could very well lend itself to a psychological explanation, the absence of which makes Croce’s accounts, and in part Dewey’s, somewhat suspect.
From a psychological standpoint, this question involves the very conditions of knowledge. and not just the aesthetic experience— unless, of course. we see it as the liminal condition of all knowledge, its primary and essential phase, which is quite plausible but not exactly pertinent at this stage of our investigation. For the time being, our investigation will be limited to the process of transaction between a perceiving subject and an aesthetic stimulus. To make things even clearer, we are going to focus our analysis on the subject’s reaction to language. Language is not an organization of natural stimuli, like a beam of photons; it is an organization of stimuli realized by man, and, as such, an artifact, like any other art form. No need, therefore, to identify art with language in order to pursue an analogy that would allow us to apply to one what we have said about the other.
As the linguists have clearly understood,» language is not one means of communication among others, but rather «the basis of all communication,»or, even better, «language really is the foundation of culture. In relation to language, other systems of symbols are concomitant or derivative.»
An analysis of the reader’s reaction to three propositions will show us whether the way he responds to an ordinary linguistic stimulus is in any way different from the way he responds to a more particular stimulus generally defined as aesthetic.» If these two different uses of language provoke two different types of reactions, then we should be able to distinguish the characteristics of aesthetic language.
Analysis of Three Propositions
How does one bring the memory of past experiences to bear on a present experience? And how can this same process be translated into an act of communication between a verbal message and its recipient?’3
As we all know, a linguistic message
