between means and ends. Much of labor is itself uninteresting, mechanical,
and spiritually deadening, and the laborer has no way of seeing a meaningful
connection between what he is doing and what the ultimate product will be–
the way a craftsman making a chair can be guided at every step by a vivid
realization of its relation to his goal. The means of life lose their satisfaction
when the end-in-view is entirely distant and remote–the Saturday night
binge, the retirement at sixty-five. But the ends, too, lose their value by the
separation. The binge only becomes a wild release, followed by headache and
remorse. The retirement brings unutterable boredom and a sense of
uselessness. If some of the satisfyingness of the end could be brought into the
means, and the means at every stage felt as carrying the significance of the
end, we should have in life something more of the quality of aesthetic
experience itself. Meanwhile, such experience holds before us a clue to what
life can be like in its greatest richness and joy.^80Original arrangement, freely achieved through shaping imagination and
presenting a subject matter as a focus for thought distinctively fused to
emotional attitude and the exploration of materials, remains a central aim
of artistic making and a principal means for producing such clues to fully
human life.
(^80) Beardsley,Aesthetics, pp. 575–76.
Originality and imagination 141