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Preface, or, Disclaimer, 10 years on…
This is the full (and even humiliating) text of an essay i wrote in 1997 based almost entirely on my reading of Ayn Rand’s work on aesthetics, The Romantic Manifesto. This was first put online at a Geocities site we (Steve Clarian and i) called Apollo’s Soapbox. It formed, along with my Concretizationism: The Esthetics of Consistency and Clarian’s Perceptionism: The Ergonomics of Art, something like the seed of a fairly complete aesthetic system.
But the style is more than a little ‘crypto-platonist,’ if you will; i had never, at the time, formally studied college-level writing, logic or philosophy—and it shows. Bad ideas, annoying pseudo-Randian style and poorly formulated arguments abound (along with a peculiarly internet-kook-ish propensity to use italics, and some anomalous spellings). Yet for all that, there is a kernel in the work that still forms the basis of my thinking on the subject today.
We eventually took these works down from Apollo’s Soapbox, along with numerous other essays, with the idea that they would form the basis of a book-length work on the subject. The ca. 300 page first draft was compiled, but little work was done on a re-write, mainly because we became aware of some of the many problems with the work. The references to "other essays on this web page" you’ll find are artifacts from Apollo’s Soapbox, and may or may not apply here.
But i place it here for posterity, or for old-time’s sake, or, to be frank, because this (and the other essays i will place back online soon) were available for Randites to read for several years, they contained a few genuinely original ideas, and i now see bastardized versions of those ideas from time to time from Randites who were active at the time (with no credit, of course). So i’m putting them back up for my own bloody-minded pleasure.
Esthetic concepts are extremely complex in nature. They require, for their identification, very long chains of high level abstractions. It is therefore necessary to use great care in the formation of these concepts. Even the slightest logical misstep can have far-reaching consequences and therefore one must be entirely certain to begin the investigation of esthetics from the most fundamental principles and to follow the chain of abstraction without allowing the development of any gaps or ’chinks’ in the line of reasoning.
If one wishes to study any field of knowledge, one should first define it. This is accomplished by answering two essential questions which serve the purpose of differentiation and integration of the body of knowledge in question. In other words, one must establish the context of one’s knowledge into which to fit the new information.
The first question is: ’What is the nature of the existents (entities, attributes or actions) which are under investigation?’; this does not mean: ’What are all the characteristics of these existents?’ (if one knew that, there would be no need of further study)—it means: ’What are the defining characteristics of these existents as a group?’. In other words before studying some type of thing, one must first establish some means of differentiating those particular things from all other things.
The second question to be asked is: ’In what way does this information (information about this class of existents) fit into the totality of knowledge?’, i.e., ’How does it relate logically to, and therefore, how can it be integrated into, the rest of one’s knowledge and ideas?’. This means answering both ’How does the information fit into broader fields of knowledge?’, and ’How does it sub-divide into narrower, specialized fields?’.
This procedure applies to any field of study—including esthetics—and therefore the first step an esthetician must take is to define that which he studies—which is art. (This means more than just the act of giving it a name (’art’), however. He must identify the essential, defining characteristics of art.)
The first step in defining art is to realize that art is an invention of Man and as such it can only be properly defined in that context, i.e. to define it, one must understand its purpose.
The concept ’purpose’ presupposes the concept ’need’ and a need does not arise out of nothing. A need arises out of a particular kind of relationship between a living being and reality. This means that the first step towards an aesthetic theory is to answer the question: ’From what facts of reality does the human need for art arise?’.
The first steps toward the answer to this question is to be found in the study of Psycho-Epistemology. (’Psycho-Epistemology’ is a word coined by Rand. She defines it as the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.)
Psycho-Epistemological Premises
The human mind has only one fundamental purpose—to keep the human alive. The continuation of human life, like that of all life forms, is not automatically given by reality but is, by its nature, conditional—that is, requires the fulfillment of certain conditions.
Most forms of life act on the basis of instincts. Even those animals which are capable of learning do so, not volitionally, but automatically and are capable only of making concrete observations about those concretes with which they are faced. The fundamental means of fulfilling the conditions of life are not, however, hard-wired into Man in the form of instincts—the fundamental means of fulfilling the conditions of life—for man—is thinking, i.e., the use of his conceptual faculty—and the use of his conceptual faculty is not instinctive, but volitional. Man must volitionally learn how to think.
The continuation of man’s life requires of his mind two separate but related forms of action: identification (what is there) and evaluation (what does it mean to me, i.e., in what way does it relate to the conditions for life which I must fulfill).
The first form of action—identification—is the case by case application of the Law of Identity. For a thing to exist in any sense, it must exist as something; it must possess some traits which differentiate it from the rest of existence—existence is identity as Rand put it. The concept ’Identity’ is an axiomatic concept, i.e. an "identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., [cannot be] reduced to other facts…" (Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, italics mine) This means that in order to define ’identification’, one must be satisfied—and that it is not a case of circular logic—to define it simply as the mental application of the Law of Identity to some existent.
One can, however, describe the process of identification. The mind identifies through its two most fundamental types of action—differentiation and integration. Let me point out the difference between the two: Differentiation and integration are the fundamental psychological actions of consciousness; identification is the fundamental psycho-epistemological purpose of those actions.
The manner in which the mind automatically turns sensory data into perceptual data is the most basic example of identification. First, raw sensory information (which, in and of itself, merely represents the awareness that a thing is—not what it is) is integrated into a unit; then that unit is differentiated from the rest of the perceptual field to create (epistemologically, not metaphysically) a perceptual unit—the awareness of an existent (a particular existent).
The second form of mental action required of Man’s mind by his nature is evaluation. After learning the nature (identity) of the objects and events which surround him, he must be able to decide what practical meaning this information has for him—he must be able to evaluate that which he identifies.
The important thing to understand (in this specific context) about evaluations is that they are abstractions, not concretes. Evaluations do result from a particular way of regarding something but evaluations themselves are always abstractions. There is no such thing as a ’good in itself’ which can be identified as such through only perceptual means. There can be no such thing as an evaluation of a non-entity, i.e., the act of evaluation is logically dependent on, and comes after, identification. (Although, in the broad sense, even evaluation is itself an act of identification—identification of a type of relationship—therefore the principle still holds that the fundamental actions of the mind, from a psycho-epistemological point of view, are differentiation and integration.)
The corollary to the principle that the purpose of the mind is to identify and to evaluate is the principle that there are two fundamental types of concepts—cognitive concepts which are abstractions of identification, i.e., they tell us what exists; and normative concepts which are abstractions of evaluation, i.e., they tell us what ought to exist.
While a complete treatment of the subject of concepts and concept-formation is well outside the scope of this work and has already been done brilliantly by Rand in her work on epistemology, a few notes on the subject are in order:
"Concepts are a mental integration of two or more units [entities which possess a commensurable characteristic] which are isolated by a process of abstraction [of that characteristic] and united by a specific definition" (Rand, Romantic Manifesto). What is important to understand for the purpose of this discussion is that a concept does not exist qua concrete—it is a mental integration; a particular way of organizing perceptual concretes themselves. only existents exist and only perception tells us what existents exist. We may create abstractions about what we observe and, using the principles of logic, may abstract farther and farther from the original concretes but ultimately everything we know is based on those concretes and our only means by which to identify them—perception. (Concepts are entities as well, which is why we can create concepts about concepts, such as the concept ’concept’. But concepts in the pure sense are not perceptually available, which is why they must be symbolized by attaching a perceptible concrete to them—a word.)
Humans are conscious entities. Although Man possesses a conceptual faculty, this is an addition to that which is the fundamental nature of consciousness—not a negation of it. "Consciousness is the faculty of… perceiving that which exists." (Rand) Humans may understand the world by means of abstractions but our only means of directly experiencing that world is through our perceptions.
As this is the single most important concept to the subject of art, allow me to explain it more thoroughly:
Man is properly defined as a rational animal but bear in mind that an entity is not only its defining characteristics but all of its characteristics, and that none of those characteristics can contradict any of the others. Man possesses a specific attribute which is the attribute of consciousness, and consciousness is an entity which possesses specific characteristics. Consciousness is, first and foremost, a process. The act of perception is the same thing as awareness, or, conversely, to be aware is to be aware of something.
Rationality, logic, concept-formation and any of the higher functions of the human mind do exist in reality, but they only exist within the context of consciousness—and consciousness is the process of perception.
Concepts do not negate concretes, they are simply the result of the human ability to selectively focus on certain attributes of perceptual reality and mentally establish epistemological categories on the basis of those attributes. Concepts may be symbolized by means of attaching a concrete (in the form of a word) to a concept which allows for mental manipulation of concepts. This is the proper function of language. Words however, while perceivable, do only that—they symbolize a concept.
If man is conscious and consciousness is the process of perception of reality, then, in order to experience his concepts as real, man must be able to perceive a translation of all of those concepts into percepts. This gives real meaning to the old adage: ’seeing is believing’ (or more accurately: ’perceiving is believing’) Not only must we believe what we see (Metaphysically, there is no choice. We cannot meaningfully question the fundamental validity of our percepts—to do so would logically require the exclusive use of concepts which were not derived from percepts—which don’t exist.) but also, and more significantly for art, in the most basic sense, we can believe only that which we see.
I will call this principle of Man’s need to directly experience the reality of the contents of his conceptual faculty ’The Perceptibility Principle’—it refers to one of humankind’s most fundamental psychological needs.
Because this principle carries with it the need to take action with regard to abstractions, there needs to be a verb which denotes this action. I will therefore define the term ’perceptualization’ as: ’The act of translating an abstraction, without contradiction, into perceptible concretes which are either the referents of, or the implications of that abstraction’.
This definition implies two different expressions of perceptualization. These are: ’reduction’ (referents of) in the case of most cognitive concepts, and ’concretization’ (implications of) in the case of normative concepts (and of a few special types of cognitive concepts).
2. The Perceptibility Principle
If perception is the base of all knowledge, then concepts which result from the integration of percepts—or from the integration of concepts which are themselves derived from percepts (which amounts to the same thing if they are integrated without contradiction)—form the fundamental chain of concepts on which all other types of concepts logically depend. These are the ’cognitive concepts’; they are, as I said before, concepts of identification.
The ultimate referents of cognitive concepts are perceptible concretes. This means that cognitive concepts are the easiest type of concept to perceptualize—one must merely follow the chain of logic backwards from the concept to its referents.
In the case of simple, first-level concepts (concepts integrated directly from concretes), the question of this sort of reduction is almost moot. The concrete reality of their referents surround us every day. More complex cognitive abstractions must be reduced to lower-level abstractions which themselves can be reduced to the level of perceptual reality. (For a much more complete treatment of man’s need of conceptual reduction and the methods of meeting this need, see Leonard Peikoff’s work, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.)
Because cognitive concepts are formed by integrating perceivable concretes (first we perceive, then we integrate), the issue of reduction of these concepts is a simple one. As long as our first-level abstractions are based on that which we perceive (this means that, for the same reason that they cannot be formed logically in the first place, such concepts as ’god’ or ’spirit’ (in the mystical sense), cannot be perceptualized), and as long as at some point we reduce our higher-level abstractions to their ultimate referents, we need not pay a great deal of continual and conscious attention to the perceptibility principle as it applies to most (but not all) cognitive concepts.
There are other types of abstractions for which the process is not so simple. Abstractions can be evaluative (or ’normative’). Abstractions can be made from combinations of normative and cognitive abstractions. Abstractions can be cognitive in nature, but be so wide in scope that their referents are impossible to perceive in their entirety.
An example of a class of cognitive concepts, to the referents of which we do not have complete perceptual access, has been identified by the psychologist Nathaniel Branden in his book ’The Psychology of Self-Esteem’. In that work, Branden describes what he calls ’The Visibility Principle’—the idea that at least part of our need for relationships with other people—friendships and even romantic love—ultimately stems from our need to bring concepts of our own character into the range of our perception. Concepts of our own personal identity, in order to be perceived as concrete entities would have to be taken outside of the context of our consciousness, i.e., would have to be contemplated from outside the perspective of our own life; thus, we must instead derive that experience through our perceptions of the reactions to our character of a consciousness similar to our own.
Branden’s ’Visibility Principle’ is one specific manifestation of the wider ’Perceptibility Principle’.
Another example is the manner in which we bring normative abstractions (and one other type of abstractions—those which Rand names ’metaphysical value-judgments’—which will be the subject of the next chapter) into our perceptual range.
We do this through the act of concretization.
Normative abstractions are logically dependent on cognitive abstractions. When one reduces a normative abstraction to its referents one reaches not concretes, but cognitive abstractions. Those cognitive abstractions can themselves be reduced to perceptual concretes, but there is no direct route by which to reduce normative abstractions to their concrete referents.
What, then, do normative concepts denote? Not things which exist, but things which might or ought to exist. In other words, if we wish to experience the reality of our normative concepts in the perceptual realm, we cannot necessarily just look around us for the right concretes, we must use those normative concepts of what ought to exist as a guide to bringing them into existence, i.e., we must create—or ’concretize’—them. This is the meaning of concretization.
Let me make an important clarification. Concretization is not the same thing as the purpose of normative concepts. The purpose of normative concepts is to form the basis of a set of principles of action, i.e., a code of morality. This being the case, normative concepts naturally carry a kind of ’potential for action’. Every person must use such normative concepts as are relevant to any given issue and decision with which he is faced. The act of employing normative concepts is not the same thing as fulfilling the need to experience those abstractions themselves as real.
Concretization of a sort can even be achieved solely in the mind for this reason, through the act of visualization. The use of imagination of the concrete results (hopefully done without contradiction) of a normative abstraction must come before one can act on that abstraction. This means that the purpose of normative abstractions can be fulfilled, to the extent which they are needed by an individual, only by the individual. By contrast, the concretization of those concepts can be fulfilled by anyone—including, but in the case where they have already been brought into existence by another, not limited to the individual who needs them.
Concretization is not an end in itself—it is a means to the end of perceptualizing a concept. Therefore, for any given normative concept which an individual needs, as long as it is available to him in concretized form, the need of concretization is fulfilled. The individual needs to concretize only those concepts for which he can find no concretization.
Just as there is a division of labor in industry, there is a similar division of labor—and for the same reason—in the realm of concretization. This is the basis of the concept of admiration. The values of character which are so fundamentally important to us—when effectively concretized in another’s person—fulfill a profound need for concretization. We can experience admiration even for a great hero of an obsolete pursuit, such as the production of carriage whips, who lived a thousand years ago. Such a person presents us with no practical value except the value of his own existence—as a concretization of some of our most important values. (This, by the way, is not exactly the same thing as Branden’s ’Visibility Principle’. That idea relates to perceptibility of cognitive abstractions of one’s own character—not to values of character per se. However, in the case of persons of self-esteem, an element of admiration will also naturally exist in a relationship.)
I will make two final notes before turning to the basis of art: meta-values.
First, a word on the subject of a concept which people both use and, almost ubiquitously, fail to understand: the concept of ’beauty’.
Beauty is the trait of a relationship between an object and an observer of that object in which the experience of the perception of that thing is that of an effective concretization of a contextually significant abstraction.
Beauty and esthetic value are not the same thing. Either can exist separately of the other. Beauty relates not to one or another specific type of abstraction, but to concretizations as such.
First, beauty is relational. Beauty is not ’in the eye of the beholder’, nor is it ’in the thing itself’, but is in the relationship between the two. This means that beauty exists, but that it only exists when that relationship exists. The same object may objectively be beautiful to one person and not to another.
Second, to be beautiful, a thing must effectively concretize an abstraction (most especially normative abstractions). For instance, in the artistic realm, an incompetent rendition of a joyous scene is not effectively beautiful—even if joyous scenes are important to you.
Third, beauty is contextual. Beauty relates to the concretization of contextually significant abstractions. A man who values excitement and challenge might look at a picture of a small hill, a rocky peak and an enormous Himalayan mountain and rightly say ’the Himalayan giant is beautiful’. The context is mountains and they are judged as beautiful on the basis of whether they fit his idea of what a mountain ought to look like (which is itself based on his love of excitement). Then the same person might look out his window at the same Himalayan mountain and at a skyscraper, and say, ’the skyscraper is beautiful’. In this case the mountain has not changed, it is the context which has changed. Now the context might be ’large things which I can see from my window’.
Similarly, one who values elegance might look at a chalk-board filled with scrawled, messy formulae and think of it as an un-beautiful thing while it is sitting in one’s neatly ordered room, yet might later come to regard it as an extremely beautiful explanation of some physical phenomenon—because of its elegance in that context.
Finally I would like to point out is that this has by no means been an exhaustive treatment of the subject of the different ways in which concepts are concretized. For instance, some very high-level composite concepts formed by abstraction from the combination of both cognitive and normative concepts such as concepts of long-range goal-setting and processes and methodology (especially psycho-epistemological methodology)—concepts which relate to the entire scope and purpose of one’s own life, i.e., to the experience of one’s own life as a whole (and which we might call ’Tactical Concepts’) cannot be concretized in the normal sense (again because one cannot step outside of the context of one’s own existence), and are therefore concretized through one of the ubiquitous forms of human action—recreation. It is no accident that the word is ’re-creation’. Other animals ’play’ in a purely physical sense; only humans engage in—and need—some form of (specifically) purposeful recreation.
The special type of concepts which lead to Man’s need for art are: meta-values.
Ethics is a branch of philosophy which is concerned with the defining and validating of principles on which to base one’s actions. These principles are logically derived from the analysis of values. "Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep."—(Rand), and are themselves derived from normative abstractions. The question must then be asked: From where do normative abstractions arise?
One of Ayn Rand’s greatest achievements is her answer to that question. Rand demonstrated that in order to derive values, one has to derive them from reality i.e., one must ask the questions: ’From where does the concept of value come?’, and, ’What facts give rise to the need of values?’. This comes from the realization that metaphysics forms the basis of ethics (and, incidentally, of all other branches of philosophy, and therefore, of the integration of all human knowledge). The special field of inquiry, which is itself not a full branch of philosophy, but which studies the relationship between two branches of philosophy—metaphysics and ethics—is called ’meta-ethics’.
Rand correctly identified the meta-ethical principle that the one fundamental fact which gives rise to the concept of value is the concept of ’life’ and specifically the conditional (i.e., non-guaranteed to continue as such) nature of life.
Rand also realized that while the concept of ’value’ derives from one single principle—that the standard of value is individual life—the answer to the question of what specific values an individual will choose as a means to fulfill the need for values, comes from a whole array of a special kind of idea, i.e., concepts which identify the answer to a special type of question. Rand identifies some of those questions:
"Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil?…"—(Rand, Romantic Manifesto). These questions are, as Rand states, metaphysical questions; and the answers to them become metaphysical abstractions.
These metaphysical abstractions are, in and of themselves, cognitive abstractions—they identify some aspect of reality—but, they are the basis of normative abstractions, i.e., they form the link between identification and evaluation.
Meta-ethics relates to the fundamental and general connection between metaphysics and the field of ethics, i.e., the method of deriving such concepts as ’good’ and ’value’ from reality—not the specific derivation of specific values. Therefore the term ’meta-ethical concepts’ would not apply to these special metaphysical abstractions.
Instead, Rand coins the term ’metaphysical value-judgments’ and suggests that while ’metaphysical value-judgments’ are not themselves normative in nature they assume the nature of value-judgments—in man’s mind—because of the fact that they are the metaphysical basis of value-judgments. Rand then goes on to make an argument for the need to concretize these abstractions on the basis of the idea that because they are such wide abstractions, metaphysical value-judgments must be concretized in order for Man to be able to experience them as real and be able to use them in the identification of values.
This is true, but limited in terms of context.
It is in this respect that the Objectivist argument needs some reformulation. I know of no reason for which a class of cognitive concepts should be thought of or experienced as—in contradiction to their nature—normative. Instead I use the term ’meta-values’. This might seem, on the surface, like pointless nit-picking, but the point is not so much in the name, but in the fact that meta-values do need to be reduced to the perceptual realm. This is the case, however, not because of a non-essential (in this context) relationship with normative abstractions, but because they themselves are abstractions—and like any other abstractions, they must be experienced on the perceptual level—they must be perceptualized.
The special nature (specifically the breadth) of meta-values does have significance, however. It results in the special means by which meta-values must be perceptualized.
4. A Refined Definition of Art
The ultimate concrete referents to meta-values are such things as: ’life’, and especially ’my life’, and ’the Universe’. Here is how meta-values are like normative abstractions: one can never perceive at once all of the concrete referents required to perceptualize concepts such as ’my life’ as such; one can never perceive ’the Universe’ as such. Therefore, in order to perceptualize meta-values, one must perceive their implications, i.e., like normative abstractions, one must concretize them.
However, for the same reasons, if one were to truly concretize meta-values, even their implications would constitute an entire universe. One cannot bring into existence an entire universe. In order to gain the experience of bringing his meta-values into the reality of his percepts, man must create a concrete entity, such as a novel or a painting, which portrays some entities which are themselves representative of the kind of existents which would exist in the universe which his meta-values imply—this is art.
In order to properly define art, one must be aware of the need which it fulfills and the context of that need. The need for art is yet another specific instance of the perceptibility principle. This brings us at last, to a specific, philosophically valid definition of art: Art is a representation of a concretization of meta-values.
Those who have read The Romantic Manifesto should be familiar with Rand’s definition of art: "Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments."
Despite appearances, my definition of art is not a refutation of Rand’s; it is a refinement of it—it places art within a wider context.
The heart of the issue in both cases is meta-values. What Rand calls; ’a selective re-creation of reality according to’, I call: ’a concretization of’.
I shall elucidate the differences between the two formulations one-by-one.
First, concretization is inherently selective. To concretize an abstraction is to concretize that abstraction—and only that abstraction. The extent to which an artist fails to concretize—and concretize consistently—is the extent to which the art he creates is bad art.
Second, one cannot literally ’re-create’ reality—ever—in any sense. What one can do is represent concretizations of abstractions of which the referents are reality, i.e., one can create representations of concretizations of meta-values. What Rand might have meant when she said that art is a re-creation of reality is that art is a concretization of meta-values; meta-values being a species of cognitive abstraction. As such, the referents to meta-values are: reality
When an artist creates works which represent entities that cannot exist in reality, or which take actions which contradict their own nature, i.e., are not within the realm of what such entities can do, that artist confesses not that what he is creating is not art, but that the meta-values which guide him are irrational ones. From Superman to Alice in Wonderland to the much more blatantly offensive example of the modern horror film, such work is not a re-creation of reality as it is, and as a rational man knows it, but is still a concretization of meta-values—irrational as they might be. It can be brilliant from a purely esthetic point of view while not being a re-creation of reality as it is (or even ought to be).
Third, art is not fundamentally about self-expression, nor is it, in fact, about any form of expression. If there is any one cognitive error which has been made most often throughout history by artists in regard to their art, it is the assumption that art is fundamentally about expression.
To express a thing is to communicate that thing and communication is the province of language—not art. While a form of communication may be a by-product of art, the purpose of art is to exist as a concretization of a particular type of abstraction. The need to perceptualize abstractions is a human need, which means: a private need of individual humans—like eating or breathing, but mental, not physical. Fundamentally, it does not matter to the observer of art what the identity is of those who created it, or what the artist thought about his work, or how he suffered—or did not suffer—for his work, etc. All of this may be interesting but is incidental to the experience of art, and is therefore incidental to the creation of art. When observing a work of art, the observer does not evaluate the artist; he evaluates the art (unless he makes a specific change of focus—one not directly entailed in the artistic experience).
It is true that the typical (and a valid) motivation for an artist is the fulfillment of an esthetic need of his own, but even in that case, his work is not expression, but concretization—only. Furthermore, the ’escapist’ type of artist seeks to concretize precisely those meta-values which he does not accept—those which, when concretized provide him with the moment’s sense of escape from the negative, unpleasant meta-values which he does accept. The Idealist artist seeks to concretize those meta-values which he thinks men should accept—he may (and probably does) accept them as well but that is incidental to the artistic process. It is for this reason that I do not define art specifically in terms of the artist’s meta-values, but simply in terms of meta-values as such.
Art is also, for the same reason, not about emotions. Art does not answer to an emotional need of man (there is, for man, only one form of strictly emotional need: the need for happiness—happiness being the natural reward for effective realization (not just concretization) of his values), but a cognitive need. For example, when a man sees a brilliantly concretized work of art, the metaphysics of which match perfectly his own, he will as a result experience a profound emotional response; but the emotional response is secondary to the purpose of the work—which is the perceptualization itself.
The artist who proceeds from the premise that the purpose of art is to evoke an emotional response will never be able to form the proper principles of concretization and will not only never be able to produce art which is effective as art, but will, incidentally, not even be able to consistently produce art which does evoke an emotional response—because emotions follow from that which is concretized, not the other way around. Emotions are an important but fundamentally incidental byproduct of art, not its purpose.
Art also does not concretize emotions. Emotions are entities which are experienced, i.e., perceived (albeit introspectively). Any form of art, with the exception of fiction, is limited in terms of what kinds of entities it can portray. Only fiction and music are capable of representing emotions. (Though any form of art is capable of implying emotion.) But to represent is not the same thing as to concretize—one represents concretes; one concretizes abstractions. Art concretizes meta-values by means of entities, some of which may, in certain circumstances, be emotions.
We have now answered the first of the two fundamental questions posed in the introduction to this essay; we have defined that which esthetics studies, i.e., we have defined art. Next we must establish the context into which we must integrate that which we learn about art.
"Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of Man, and of Man’s relationship to existence." (Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It?). In order to define that which philosophy studies, just as in the case of defining art, one must define it in context of the knowledge of the nature of the need which philosophy fulfills.
Man is properly defined as a rational animal. His primary means of survival is the use of his rational faculty. Man fulfills his physical needs through different kinds of action—he eats, sleeps, breathes, etc.—but the needs of that attribute of man which makes all of those actions possible to him within the context of reality, i.e., the needs of his rational faculty, i.e., his primary intellectual needs, are met through philosophy. Man requires an integrated view of existence, of himself, and of his relationship to existence in order to give meaning and context to his ideas and to tailor those ideas to the realities of his existence.
Any need of man’s rational faculty which applies to all men, i.e., to Man as such, is a philosophical need. Philosophization is the means by which man fulfills those needs through the identification of wide scale principles. A (particular) philosophy is the body of principles which are the result of philosophization. Philosophy (as a general field of study) is the study of those needs and the means by which to fulfill them.
As has already been established, the need of perceptualization of man’s abstractions is one of the needs of his conceptual faculty, but there is only one form of perceptualization which requires that he take action which is not directly implied by those abstractions. Cognitive abstractions must be perceptualized by means of reduction—which is a task which falls within the province of epistemology—in order to be defined. Normative abstractions are designed to be acted upon—the act of acting on a value-judgment is a kind of concretization (even though the purpose of the action is not concretization).
The form of perceptualization which must be specifically and consciously embarked upon is the creation of art.
Meta-values cannot be concretized directly but must be concretized through the medium of a representation, and the process is not a simple one. Although man is provided with an automatic means of experiencing (and implicitly evaluating) art—his perceptual faculty and his sense-of-life (A sense-of-life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics—(Rand), against which any concretization of meta-values is weighed)—he is not provided with an automatic system of principles of method and value by means of which to create art.
Esthetics is the philosophy of art. This means specifically that esthetics is the study of the principles which are the basis of esthetic values, the purpose of which is to provide the artist with methodological principles of artistic creation. Esthetic values, incidentally, are not to be confused with moral values; they are similar in that they are normative, but are not moral except in the broad sense (that they are a means to an artistic end which is itself a means to the fulfillment of a human need which is itself, therefore, a moral action).
Remember, the purpose of art is not that it be judged, but that it be experienced. This does not mean that one cannot judge art (far from it) but that judgment is a separate act, unrelated to the primary experience, i.e., man does not have a fundamental need to consciously and conceptually evaluate art, but to perceive it. Conceptual evaluation of art may serve any of several purposes: It may serve as a means of communication—for instance, in the case of a critic working for a newspaper. It may serve as a means by which one forms principles of one’s own taste in order to facilitate one’s own search for art works and styles from which one may derive consistent values. And most importantly, the evaluation, by artists, of specific art works can facilitate the integration of esthetic values in the mind of the artist. (one other specific purpose for understanding the evaluation of art will be discussed in the postscript to this essay.) But the purpose of art is to fulfill a specific need (the concretization of meta-values) and while artistic philosophy does not directly fulfill that need (it is not, itself art), it does provide man with the intellectual means by which to fulfill it—by teaching the artist how to create art.
Esthetics is a branch of philosophy, not insofar as it is a direct need of man’s rational faculty, but insofar as it is a precondition of the fulfillment of that need.
Philosophy—all philosophy—is based on the field of metaphysics. Epistemology, the purpose of which is the defining of proper methods by which to acquire and validate knowledge, is based on logic which is itself the application of metaphysical axioms to specific questions of identification. Politics is the field of ethics as applied to the questions of social structure and government, and ethics is itself based on the defining of principles of human action based on a metaphysical view of man and his relation to existence (i.e., meta-values).
Esthetics exists in a special relationship to metaphysics. Esthetics is applied metaphysics. Esthetics provides the principles by which to concretize meta-values, i.e., to create art.
6. Meta-Esthetics and the Structure of Esthetic Philosophy
Now that the subject of esthetics (art) has been defined, and esthetics as a field of study has been differentiated from the context of a larger field, (philosophy) it is now necessary to make a brief description of the field itself and how it naturally breaks up into sub-fields based on the different questions which it asks.
The meaning of the title of this essay should now be apparent. Meta-esthetics is the study of metaphysics as it applies to art qua art; that is, meta-esthetics does not study the specific relationship between meta-values and specific works of art, i.e., the operation of esthetic principles themselves, but the relationship between metaphysics and art itself. Meta-esthetics asks questions such as: ’From what facts of reality does the need for art arise?’, and ’What purpose does art serve in man’s life?’, and ’What is the nature and purpose of esthetics?’. These are the questions posed and answered in this essay, which is the reason it is titled not ’Esthetics’, but ’Meta-Esthetics’. A working, rational set of meta-esthetic principles is the precondition of a working, rational esthetic philosophy.
Meta-esthetics is not a full branch of philosophy, however. A branch of philosophy is defined as such because it fulfills a fundamental and contextually complete intellectual need of man. Man needs a view of the fundamental nature of existence and of himself (metaphysics), an understanding of his means of acquiring and validating knowledge (epistemology), a set of principles to guide his actions (ethics) and relations with others (politics) and another set of principles to guide him in the concretization of his meta-values (esthetics).
Meta-esthetics then, is not a branch of philosophy as such, but a concept which allows a selective focus on the relationship between two branches of philosophy. As any branch of philosophy depends, for its conclusions, on metaphysical premises, it is possible to abstract the relationship between that branch of philosophy and metaphysics. In the realm of ethics, this field is called meta-ethics. In esthetics, it is meta-esthetics.
Because esthetics is a branch of philosophy, and therefore pertains to one of man’s intellectual needs, it is also necessary to make a distinction between esthetics and applied esthetics. Purely esthetic principles pertain only to the concretization of meta-values. As such, esthetic principles are not derived from specific details of concrete entities, but are deduced from metaphysical abstractions.
Art is a representation of a concretization of meta-values. Esthetic principles pertain to the intellectual (abstract) element of artistic creation—specifically to the identification of the principles of concretization. Applied esthetics pertains to the creation of specific techniques for representing those concretizations in the form of real, physical, concrete objects.
There are two distinct branches of applied esthetics: psycho-esthetics and applied psycho-esthetics. Psycho-esthetics is the study of the nature of man’s consciousness from the aspect of the demands which that nature places upon art. Psycho-esthetic principles are the result of integration of both esthetic principles and information provided by the field of psychology—specifically the psychology of perception.
Applied psycho-esthetics is another word for artistic technique. I only use the term in order to underscore the fact that technical considerations must never be made in a vacuume. The proper method of doing anything can only be defined in the context of the purpose of that thing, and the purpose of artistic technique is to facilitate the portrayal of entities in a perceptually available form (see: Perceptionism: The Ergonomics of Art, on this web-page). This is why the primary method of identifying and validating any given artistic technique is by reference to psycho-esthetics. Applied psycho-esthetics is the result of the integration of knowledge from both perceptual psychology and details of the medium of any given form of art, such as the proper method of mixing particular kinds of paint in order to achieve a particular effect. Applied esthetics—both psycho-esthetics and applied psycho-esthetics—contains a major inductive element rather than only deductive.
Esthetics itself can be divided into two main branches: the first, and most important is esthetics-proper, i.e., the study of the proper means by which to concretize meta-values. The second, and derivative branch is evaluative esthetics, which, as you might guess, is concerned with the principles of evaluation of artistic works.
While discussing this subject with Steve Clarian, he pointed out that the assumption that the primary purpose of esthetics is to provide the means of evaluation of art is perhaps the reason that artists have historically not found rational means for the creation of art. Esthetics is first and foremost a tool for the creation of art. It is only after these standards have been identified that one can then use them to evaluate existing works of art—"And that is why the evaluative esthetics which have existed so far have been worthless", as Clarian says.
It is important to stress that evaluative esthetics is based on the primary principles of esthetics, which means that esthetic evaluation consists of identifying the degree to which an art work is effectively concretized—and only that. The question of the validity of the meta-values being concretized is a valid one, but not an esthetic one—it is a question of metaphysics.
I would like to bring up the concept of beauty again, but this time specifically in the context of esthetics.
Beauty pertains to effective concretizations of contextually significant abstractions. What type of abstractions are significant to any context? Abstractions of the nature of reality as such, i.e., meta-values. This is the reason for which our most intense experiences of beauty are in the realm of art. Art is experienced as beautiful when it is esthetically good, psycho- esthetically good and is specifically a concretization of our own meta-values. Since the experience of our own meta-values in the form of perceptible concretes is the need which gives rise to art, it is not an empty bromide to say that the highest purpose of art is to provide man with an experience of artistic beauty.
Artistic beauty is a kind of philosophic composite. Esthetics provides only the means to concretization—and therefore the means to evaluate only on those terms. It is a man’s personal sense-of-life which gives rise to his specific form of reaction to a well concretized work of art. Therefore, like any other form of beauty, the judgment of an art work as beautiful can only be made by the individual and for the individual. Esthetic values can be validated and separately, metaphysical principles can be validated, but the presence or non-presence of meta-values in a given individual’s mind is not directly determined by their validity—and it is only their presence which is relevant to the personal experience of beauty.
As the subject of this essay is not esthetics in general, but particularly meta-esthetics, I will not attempt a detailed analysis of esthetics-proper; but it is within the province of meta-esthetics to point the way by means of identifying the major questions of esthetics.
To do this, one must answer the most basic question of esthetics: ’What cognitive tools does an artist require in order to concretize meta-values?’.
While an artist must possess some means by which to choose a theme for his work, that is, must be able to choose and concretize some specific meta-values, this act (the act of choosing a theme) is only the preliminary act of artistic creation. It is that step which an artist takes which is antecedent (logically, not necessarily chronologically) to concretization of those meta-values, and since esthetics tells man only how to concretize, it can have nothing to say on the question of what to concretize.
Thematics, the subject of which is the question of what to concretize, is a metaphysical subject, not an esthetic one. Thematics requires the identification (and validation) of meta-values and is motivated by an understanding of the metaphysical need of art—even if only implicit, i.e., it is motivated by meta-esthetic principles.
I would like to point out in this context that it is not unreasonable to use the term ’esthetics’ in a loose way as to refer to ’stuff that relates to art’, but one must be sure to know first that ’esthetics’ does have a strict, philosophical meaning. Esthetics, properly defined, asks only one primary question and one secondary, related question.
The first question is: ’How does one concretize meta-values?’, i.e., ’What are the mental steps required in order to concretize them?’. For a rational answer to this question, see my essay "Concretizationism: The Esthetics of Consistency", elsewhere on this web-page.
The second question is the link between esthetics and applied esthetics (or more accurately, the basis of applied esthetics) ’What does the nature of man’s means of perception mean for the process of artistic creation?’. (In order to represent the concrete implications of meta-values, the artist must do so, as I mentioned earlier, by means of representing ’perceptually available’ concretes. This is the subject of psycho-esthetics and is the link between esthetics and artistic technique.) Note that this subject is logically dependent on the primary question of esthetics, but that it is of no less practical importance for the artist. For a rational answer to this question, see Steve Clarian’s essay: "Perceptionism: The Ergonomics of Art", also on this web-page.
Perceptionism and Concretizationism are separate ’isms’ insofar as they are theories which answer different questions about the creation of art. It is therefore possible to be a perceptionist and a concretizationist—or just a perceptionist but not a concretizationist (A third possibility, that of being a concretizationist but not a perceptionist would represent a series of steps, both mental and physical, which an artist could take—but would result in art of no substantial difference from any other anti-perceptionist art; and therefore would be meaningless. Perceptionism answers to a meta-esthetic need, i.e., that an art work is at least to some degree perceptionistic is prerequisite to that thing being rationally definable as art at all. Concretizationism answers to an esthetic need, i.e., before an artist can represent something, he must have something to represent). Similarly, it is possible to be a concretizationist but not a romanticist (or what one might call a ’volitionist’) and a romanticist could try, at least, to be a non-concretizationist.
The specific nature of an artist’s work is the result of the premises—explicit or implicit—which he holds; meta-esthetic, thematic, psycho-esthetic and esthetic. A concrete expression of this fact is Rand’s identification of the basic attributes of the novel. Theme, which is the meta-values, or in many cases, one step more concrete than the actual meta-values; characterization and plot, which are the entities and actions which are portrayed, which is the purely esthetic question; and that which Rand calls ’style’, which is the response of the artist to the meta-esthetic principle that artistic concretizations must be represented in the form of a concrete entity, i.e., the expression of the artist’s meta-esthetic and psycho-esthetic premises.
As an added note, I would mention that Rand thought of style as expressing the psycho-epistemology of the artist—the manner in which the artist is comfortable perceiving the world. This is in fact the case with my term psycho-esthetics. The concept of ’artistic style’, on the other hand, refers, in its standard usage, to more than just the psycho-esthetic element of art, but to the general amalgam of all of the artist’s premises. When one referes to the ’style’ of Picasso, Beethoven, Dostoyevsky or Rand, one refers not just to their manner of representation, but to the worlds which they represent. It is for this reason that, unlike Rand, I refer to ’style’ as the overall effect of an artistic work, and psycho-esthetics as the manner of representation—and by implication the probable psycho-epistemology of the artist. I would also point out that while style is often used as a more-or-less value-free term, psycho-esthetics should not be. Since the meta-esthetic need for psycho-esthetics is an objective fact and since psychology is a science of objectively verifiable facts, any art work possesses some degree of psycho-esthetic value—one can refer to an art work as psycho-esthetically good or bad as the case may be.
This is why there are so many kinds and styles of art—because of the many ways in which these different premises (those of meta-esthetics, esthetics etc.) can be mixed together. And this is why it can be so difficult to evaluate art works. This is the reason for dividing the subject into ’schools’, as it were, by isolating and conceptualizing the answers to each of the major questions of art into individual ’isms’.
Such schools as ’Fauvism’, ’Cubism’, ’Futurism’, ’Surrealism’ or ’Modernism’ (and many, many others) are defined, not by reference to a specific answer to a specific question on some one hierarchical level of abstraction, but by reference to answers to all of them at least by implication and without regard for the question of whether these answers are consistent with each other or whether they add up to any kind of whole.
Yes, one can relate the answers to these questions to one-another, but not by means of reference to esthetics. It is true that Rand’s thematic premises are consistent with her esthetic ones, but this is proved by reference to epistemology, not esthetics. The anti-concept which is ’Modernism’ is an epistemological impossibility, and an esthetic mongrel. ’Objectivism’ (as it should pertain to art) is not; because all of the ’isms’ which it subsumes (Perceptionism, Concretizationism, Romanticism) are related by the epistemological means by which they are validated (which is the epistemology of reason).
Similarly, it is possible to talk about a broad, all-inclusive school of art which one might term ’Mysticalism’. ’Art’, such as is exemplified by the work of such men as the painter Jackson Pollack, and composer John Cage, which does not seek to represent entities (Anti-Perceptionism), does not result from any process of abstraction or control on the part of the artist (Naturalism), and which makes no claims to relevance or meaning to Man (an abomination for which I know no word—except, perhaps ’Nihilism’), also is consistent with one specific epistemology—the epistemology of mysticism.
Objectivist art, i.e., rational art does not exclusively mean: ’Enormous novels with rational-philosophic themes’. It means: Perceptually available (i.e., rational) representations of logically consistent (i.e., rational) concretizations of rational meta-values. That is all. Objectivist art is art by normal humans and for normal humans. (By ’normal’ I mean: functioning in a manner consistent with one’s proper nature.)
Ayn Rand was a great artist, but a great artist, not because of some un-knowable, mystic gift, but primarily because she held the right premises. If you wish to be a part of a renaissance of artistic value, you can. The world is suffering from an esthetic vacuum, which means, there is a massive and valid market for art which speaks to the true and best spirit in men. All it takes to create such art is the integrity to learn to understand the nature and purpose of art, and the will to apply those principles as ruthlessly and consistently as possible to every sphere of the creative process. It does require thought—not mystic whim-worship—but thinking is what comes most naturally to a normal human.
If you wish to create valuable—and hence saleable—art, it is, in a sense, as Rand implied in The Romantic Manifesto, the simplest thing in the world.
Boulder, Colorado August, 1997 |
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