2023-03-29 18:09:28 by ambuda-bot
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THE PROBLEM
11
The aesthetic mode of criticism situates the work of art in an ineffable;
the very word 'aesthetic' betrays the analogical origin of its arguments.
By reducing the artistic experience to sensation, in fact to one sense,
the sense of sight, and considering the whole experience in terms of
categories borrowed from vision-imagination-Croce is led, necessarily
to determine art in non-denotative terms, or better, in anti-denotative
terms. Not only is the visual experience more direct in relation to its
objects, less mediated by a distinctive symbolism ('aesthetic"), but the
materials of visual art are not themselves immediately intelligible objects,
but rather colors, lines, shapes, which do not so much express as combine
to produce impressions and identifications.
It is otherwise with verbal art. Its materials are symbols, whose
nature is intelligibility. The word itself is a convention. Such art exists
at the level of propositions, references, judgements. Attempts to provide
it with objects as ineffable as those of visual art overlook the very mode
of existence of verbal art, for whatever impression is derived from verbal
art is a secondary function of its sustained use of words. The objects it
imitates, unlike those of sight, are already conceptualized-events,
characters, general types, moral ideas. Verbal art does not have access
even to the immediate objects of the sense of sound, which have been
in principle pre-empted by music or song. Its very being is determined
as a mode of reason: mediacy of symbol, ideality of object. It depends
directly on memory and experience even to be understood as art; these
are not functions superadded to the artistic experience to provide
perspective.
Currently the Crocean style of criticism has come to be regarded as
outmoded in the West and is now largely restricted to book and enter-
tainment reviews. In serious criticism, the Freudians have appropriated
the psyche for their own purposes, and the study of poetry has largely
returned to the Aristotelian concern with the poem, the ergon-a
formalist criticism which in its interest often parallels that of the classical
Indian poeticians, and certainly provides a more congenial platform
from which to study them than does the Crocean doctrine we have been
discussing. That 'aesthetic' view of art is of interest here only because
it appears to dominate much of the historicizing on Indian poetics and
because, most emphatically, it was not shared by the classical Indian
writers themselves who conceived no broader problem than the differ-
entiability (višeşana) of poetry itself as a genre. They were exclusively
* Cf. R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature (Harcourt Brace and World
11
The aesthetic mode of criticism situates the work of art in an ineffable;
the very word 'aesthetic' betrays the analogical origin of its arguments.
By reducing the artistic experience to sensation, in fact to one sense,
the sense of sight, and considering the whole experience in terms of
categories borrowed from vision-imagination-Croce is led, necessarily
to determine art in non-denotative terms, or better, in anti-denotative
terms. Not only is the visual experience more direct in relation to its
objects, less mediated by a distinctive symbolism ('aesthetic"), but the
materials of visual art are not themselves immediately intelligible objects,
but rather colors, lines, shapes, which do not so much express as combine
to produce impressions and identifications.
It is otherwise with verbal art. Its materials are symbols, whose
nature is intelligibility. The word itself is a convention. Such art exists
at the level of propositions, references, judgements. Attempts to provide
it with objects as ineffable as those of visual art overlook the very mode
of existence of verbal art, for whatever impression is derived from verbal
art is a secondary function of its sustained use of words. The objects it
imitates, unlike those of sight, are already conceptualized-events,
characters, general types, moral ideas. Verbal art does not have access
even to the immediate objects of the sense of sound, which have been
in principle pre-empted by music or song. Its very being is determined
as a mode of reason: mediacy of symbol, ideality of object. It depends
directly on memory and experience even to be understood as art; these
are not functions superadded to the artistic experience to provide
perspective.
Currently the Crocean style of criticism has come to be regarded as
outmoded in the West and is now largely restricted to book and enter-
tainment reviews. In serious criticism, the Freudians have appropriated
the psyche for their own purposes, and the study of poetry has largely
returned to the Aristotelian concern with the poem, the ergon-a
formalist criticism which in its interest often parallels that of the classical
Indian poeticians, and certainly provides a more congenial platform
from which to study them than does the Crocean doctrine we have been
discussing. That 'aesthetic' view of art is of interest here only because
it appears to dominate much of the historicizing on Indian poetics and
because, most emphatically, it was not shared by the classical Indian
writers themselves who conceived no broader problem than the differ-
entiability (višeşana) of poetry itself as a genre. They were exclusively
* Cf. R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature (Harcourt Brace and World