actual] with fresh meanings,”^78 especially meanings in relation to the inter-
ests and emotions of human subjects. This is what Coleridge meant in
describing secondary imagination (beyond mere free association) as esem-
plastic and devoted tomaking: it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,in order to
recreatesomething that is whole andvital. In doing this, it participates in
somethinglikethe emergence of subjecthood and self-awareness out of mere
sensory awareness. This claim captures our sense that successful creative
artists seem to revert to what Freud calls the material of“primary process”–
the material of the less structured associations of childhood and the
unconscious–while somehow managing to come away from this reversion
with a newly formed product. They seem to redirect or refocus our capacities
of attention as subjects, teaching us to see thisasthat, and thus to contribute
to the free making of culture, in the hope that it will be a more fit home for
the further exercise of human powers.
Such free makings–the esemplastic arrangement of materials so as to
present a subject matter as a focus for thought and emotional attitude–are
specifically situated, socially and historically. They are typically in one way or
another incomplete, one-sided, sectarian, and imperfect. But it seems hard to
believe that they will not continue nonetheless to be of essential human
interest.“We shall not cease from exploration,”^79 T. S. Eliot wrote, in the
effort freely to achieve a fully meaningful human culture, beyond coercion
and the drudgeries of repetition. Original achievements of the arrangement
of materials to form a whole, presenting a subject matter as a focus for
thought distinctively fused to emotional attitude and the exploration of
materials, continue to be possible and valuable. As Monroe Beardsley sums
up the importance of art,In aesthetic experience we have experience in which means and ends are so
closely interrelated that we feel no separation between them. One thing leads
to the next and finds its place in it; the end is immanent in the beginning and
the beginning is carried up into the end. Such experience allows the least
emptiness, monotony, frustration, lack of fulfillment, and despair–the
qualities that cripple much of human life. One of the things that trouble us in
our society is, according to some philosophers, the wide gap that often exists(^78) Ibid., p. 355.
(^79) T. S. Eliot,“Little Gidding,”inFour Quartets, reprinted inThe Norton Anthology of English
Literature, ed. Abrams et al., vol. II, p. 2197.
140 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art