An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

through motives and developments suggests more craft and concentration

on materials than overwhelming feeling. Even if Beethoven was in the grip of

some singular passion, do we need to recreate that very passion ourselves in

order to understand the work? Do we not instead understand the sonata by

following the development? And if all these questions arise with Beethoven,

do they not arise even more forcefully with such more cerebral artists as

Pierre Boulez or Anthony Caro or Jorge-Luis Borges?

Physiognomic similarity theories

Troubled by these kinds of worries, a number of theorists of expression in the

latter half of the twentieth century have developed radically nonpsychody-

namic or nonpsychological theories of expression. These latter theories are

often inspired by Wittgenstein’s remark inPhilosophical Investigations, that

one“might speak of a‘primary’and‘secondary’sense of a word.”^68 For

example, knowing the primary senses offatandlean, we might feel strongly

inclined to say that Wednesday is fat and Tuesday is lean rather than vice

versa.^69 Here the wordsfatandleanare used against the background of their

primary sense in a secondary,descriptivesense that is not metaphorical.^70 Just

so, when we describe the face of a basset hound as sad or the babbling of a

brook as joyful we are usingsadandjoyfuldescriptively, in secondary senses,

in order to pick out a surface orphysiognomicsimilarity between this dog’s

face (compared to other dogs’faces) or this brook (compared to more languid

ones), without any emotion or feeling occurring in either the dog or the

brook. Aphysiognomic similaritytheory of expression seems to account espe-

cially well for the use of emotion terms to describe the comparative contours

of themes and developments in works of music, and Peter Kivy^71 and Stephen

Davies^72 have worked out this view in detail with special reference to music.

Alan Tormey, one of the earliest developers of this view, summarizes it aptly

in claiming that

statements attributing expressive (or physiognomic) properties to works of

art should be construed as statements about the works themselves; the

(^68) Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, part 2, p. 216e.
(^69) Ibid. (^70) Ibid.
(^71) Peter Kivy,The Chorded Shell: Reflections of Musical Expression(Princeton University Press, 1980).
(^72) Stephen Davies,Musical Meaning and Expression(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
98 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art