the audience drops out. Emotion terms are about the work and its subject
matter, and comparisons and contrasts among works can aptly be noted by
deploying an emotion vocabulary metaphorically.
In a similar spirit, Monroe Beardsley argues that expression in the arts is a
function of“human regional qualities”that are“emergent in”a work.^76
Given that these qualities areinthe work, we do not need to talk about a
composer’s or painter’s or writer’s emotion; “expresses dignity,” for
example, can be adequately replaced by“has dignity.”^77 Expressive works
of music are instances of processes of development that are of interest in
themselves, not as symbols for something else,^78 certainly not primarily as
evidence about composers’states of mind.
Tormey, Goodman, Beardsley, and others are surely right to emphasize
that works of art are produced through detailed and attentive working and
reworking of materials in an expressive medium, not simply via an upsurge
of powerful emotion. Collingwood too, after all, distinguishes the expression
of emotion from its betrayal, and Dewey distinguishes it from brute dis-
charge. A coherent expression of melancholy, say, in relation to a subject
matter will not exist in a work unless its maker has made apt use of the
expressive possibilities that are available in the medium and through its
history of use. These expressive possibilities are not determined by either
decisions or feelings in individual minds alone. The processes that give rise to
successfully expressive works are more than internal psychodynamic pro-
cesses; they involve using historically afforded expressive possibilities in
media.
It is doubtful, however, whether expressive qualities in works of art can be
regarded as wholly“secondary”and independent of human mental states. As
Guy Sircello observes,“what all anthropomorphic predicates [such as“sad,”
“joyful,”etc.] ultimately relate to are human emotions, feelings, attitudes,
moods, and personal trait;...[they] finally relate to various forms of the
‘inner lives’of human beings.”^79 That is to say, there would be no point or
possibility of describing works of art in anthropomorphic, expressive terms(^76) Beardsley,Aesthetics, p. 328. (^77) Ibid., p. 332. (^78) Ibid., p. 338.
(^79) Guy Sircello,Mind and Art: An Essay on the Varieties of Expression(Princeton University Press,
1972), p. 39. See also Scruton,Art and Expression, p. 38: in comparison to the use of emotion
terms to describe emergent perceptual properties,“the use to refer to an emotional state is
primary,”and the former use would not be intelligible without the latter.
100 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art