care only or centrally about well-being (eudaimonia) and its achievement or
inhibition.^64 We have a greater sense than Aristotle that any achievement of
well-being is fragile, uncertain, and housed within social structures in which
that achievement is not readily open to everyone. We think that the struggle
to achieve well-being, reciprocity, and expressive freedom^65 never quite
comes to an unambiguously successful end.
Artistic making and the“working through”of emotion
Yet we continue to pity the pitiable, fear the fearful, and admire the admir-
able in life and in art, and in successful art the nature of these objects of
emotion is worked through and clarified. This is the difference, in the end,
between the story of Lambert Strether, on the one hand, and the greeting
card and the skit with Larry the Lobster, on the other. Soliciting and working
through emotional response occur as well in media of art that are not
narrative. Recall Cohen’s observation that it is“thesameachievement when
we (i) appreciate a fictional narrative by identifying with its characters,
(ii) appreciate a work, narrative or not, fictional or not, by identifying with
its artist, where this requires imagining oneself to be making those marks, or
writing those words, or sounding that music.”We can identify with the
patient, attentive rendering and faithfulness to an object that are present
in a Cézanne still life or landscape, and we can feel the emotions of stillness,
attentiveness, and success in rendering that we imagine to inhabit Cézanne’s
own working of his materials. We can experience the shifts of space and the
relations of abstract form to human figure that we may suppose to have
occupied Anthony Caro’s attention in forming his sculptures. These sculp-
tures have what Michael Fried usefully describes as a syntax^66 – a structure
that shapes an order of experience and that invites and sustains attention
and emotion in relation to one’s embodied self. William Rubin notes that“In
Caro’s work, scale is not just a matter of internal aesthetic relations, but is
fixed by the height of the human being and relates to his size in a literal
way...Caro’s works are fixed in rapport to the height of the eye and the
(^64) See Eldridge,“How can Tragedy Matter for Us?,”and also Chapter 2 above.
(^65) See Chapter 1 above.
(^66) See Michael Fried,“Anthony Caro’s Table Sculptures, 1966–77,”in M. Fried,Art and
Objecthood: Essays and Reviews(University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 202–09.
Art and emotion 221