This sadness in this piece of music, that is to say, is not a property whose
presence can be verified by a sensibility-independent test in the absence of
hearing (actual or imaginative). There is no sensibility-independent deductive
or inductive route from formal elements to the determination of expressive
and affective significance. Seeing the sadness in a piece of music is less like
verifying the truth of a proposition through a scientific procedure than it is
like seeing an aspect of aGestaltfigure.^39 As Isenberg puts it,“the critic’s
meaningis‘filled in,’‘rounded out,’or‘completed’by the act of perception”^40
in a way that is quite different from testing to see whether a hypothesis that
formal element X causes experience Y is true. To see formal element Xas
havingexpressive or affective significance is an act of imaginative perception.
Elucidatory-critical understanding both proceeds from and appeals to
imaginative exploration of the work as a singular whole. This is what makes
it natural to speak of criticalunderstandingof a work as opposed to critical
explanationor criticalscience.Nehamas and Felski on what calls for elucidatory interpretation
If, however, sensibility and imagination play central roles in elucidatory
critical understanding and there is no such thing as a strict science of
criticism, what exactlyarewe doing when we attend carefully to the formal
intricacies and presentational densities of a particular work? One way to
answer this question – a way that drifts mistakenly toward a critical
scientism–is to argue as follows:- Artistic beauty or artistic value strikes us immediately in perception.
- Interpretation (a) takes time and (b) aims at yielding verdicts or evaluations.
Therefore 3. Artistic beauty or artistic value cannot be the proper object of
artistic interpretation.
In an academic culture in which science and its claims to sensibility-
independent objectivity are pre-eminent, many working critics are
tempted to accept this argument and to think of meaning (perhaps
(^39) Both Scruton and Isenberg make this comparison. See Scruton,Art and Imagination,
pp. 107–08, and Isenberg,“Critical Communication,”inPhilosophy of Art, ed. Neill and
Ridley, p. 372.
(^40) Isenberg,“Critical Communication,”p. 367.
160 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art