sometimes seem as though we may never“really know”the“full meaning”
of any work of art, even of any human utterance or act. But we should, again,
reject the Cartesian picture of meaning as consisting in a discrete, preformed,
articulated intention in the mind of the maker that is waiting there for us to
grasp it, if only we deploy the proper tools. Instead the meaning that a work
has–and that an interpretation may capture–is a matter of the multiple,
complex reasons–expressive, affective, psychological, social, and economic,
among others–that may reasonably be taken to have entered into its
production. It is true that what may reasonably be taken to be reasons that
are effective in the production of a work may change somewhat, as there are
changes inourconceptions of what it is worthwhile to be interested in and of
what counts as a reason for what. But while there are changes here, and as a
result of them new critical readings may always be in order, these changes
are not absolute and abrupt. There is enough continuity so that works of art
remain, as Dewey puts it,“means by which we enter, through imagination
and the emotions they invoke, into other forms of relationship and partici-
pation than our own.”^55 To understand art critically is to explore it imagina-
tively, guided by a range of relevant comparisons and conceptions of rational
action and focused on how a work presents its subject matter as a focus for
thought and emotion. When we thus explore works imaginatively, we can
understand them anew, more deeply, and yet in coherent elaboration of our
prior understandings, as the complex results of overdetermined human
action that they are.(^55) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 333.
166 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art