between Hegel and Danto on what is expressed and to a more plausible
account of why artistic expression matters for us. Human life is lived in
relation to modifiable routines of practice that are afforded by culture. Any
culture, that is to say, presents a tangled ensemble of ways of working,
eating, playing, reproducing, dwelling, and so on. There is no distinctively
human action without engaging in the routines that compose such an
ensemble. No one comesab novosimply to work, eat, play, reproduce, and
dwell as a distinctively human agent altogether on one’s own.
In coming to engage with such an ensemble of routines, anyone will have
attitudes and emotions about whether what one does oneself is done fluently,
expressively, and aptly, both for oneself and in the eyes of others. One will
feel that one has made a suitable home or not, found suitable work or not,
enjoyed this meal or not, and so on. Attitudes and emotions toward the
affairs of life can run from pride, enjoyment, delight, and self-respect, on
the one hand, to shame, guilt, self-abasement, and resentment, on the other,
with infinite shades of variation. As Robinson puts it,“emotions,”or at least
typical ones in ordinary life,“are ways of focusingattentionon those things
that are important to our wants, goals, and interests.”^117 In addition, how-
ever, emotions can be initially solicited by abstract motives or contours,
pictorial or musical, and such abstract motives and contours can themselves
become objects of reflective attention and intricate development.
It is easy and frequently reasonable just to get on with the business at
hand rather than to dwell in attitudes and emotions. Perhaps one simply
must work in order to earn a wage; perhaps possibilities of pride, delight, and
enjoyment are vanishingly slim, so that it would be better not to dwell on
their absence; perhaps it is simply best not to make too great a show of one’s
feelings.
Yet the attitudes and emotions that we continue to have persist, and they
bespeak certain possibilities of change and development. With shame in
being stuck in this way of work or family life or consumption comes at least
the bare aspiration or sense that it might be otherwise. With pride, enjoy-
ment, delight, and self-respect comes a wish to continue or further one’s
routes of engagement in practice. When, then, Emerson writes that in works
of genius we recognize our own thoughts returning with a certain alienated
majesty, he can be construed as suggesting that the office of art is to bring
(^117) Robinson,Deeper than Reason, p. 126.
Expression 111