An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

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critic does, according to Isenberg, is give us“directions for perceiving”; the
critic“guides us in the discrimination of details, the organization of parts,
the grouping of discrete objects into patterns”and so“gets us to see”for
ourselves how the elements work (or fail to work) within a particular overall
arrangement.^34
It is, therefore, a mistake to draw up an inventory of formal elements–
words and phrases, plastic forms, motives and modulations, or lines and
colors–that always have the same meaning and value in any work. It is
tempting nonetheless to try to do so, for if we possessed such an inventory,
then we would have rules for making meaningful and successful art and
rules for the critical deciphering of meaning and value. Some philosophers,
in the grip of an obsession with rules and rule-determined objectivity, have
tried to produce such an inventory. In theRepublic, for example, Socrates
claims that the Ionian mode in music is inherently“soft,”“relaxed,”and
suitable for drinking, and he argues that all works in this mode should be
banned from the education of the warrior guardians, who must instead be
exposed only to the“violent”and“willing”Dorian and Phrygian modes.^35
Here Socrates seems significantly to underestimate the ingenuity of com-
posers in using formal elements–such as melodic organization within a
mode–in a variety of ways, with quite different meanings and effects, when
combined with other elements such as rhythm, harmony, orchestration, and
dynamics. Instead of rules for deciphering meaning or determining value,
what we need and can receive from apt elucidatory-critical attention to a
work is, in Dewey’s phrase,“the reeducation of perception of works of art,”
where the critic’s insights into elements and their arrangement function for
us as“an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and
hear.”^36 Michael Baxandall notes similarly that when he as a critic offers a
description of a picture as having a“firm design,”for example, then he is
using concepts
not informatively but demonstratively...to point to an aspect of its interest as
I see it. The act is one of demonstration: with“design”I direct attention to
one element in the picture and with“firm”I propose a characterization of it.

(^34) Arnold Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” Philosophical Review 57 ( July 1949),
pp. 330–44; reprinted inPhilosophy of Art, ed. Neill and Ridley, pp. 363–73 at p. 367.
(^35) Plato,Republic, trans. Grube, 3983–3993, pp. 399–400.
(^36) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 324.
158 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

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