SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Hall's Analysis of Aesthetic ValueTHOMAS THOMPSON

State College of Iowa

FALL, 1966

The reader of Everett Hall's pub­lished works will find only a few skimpyreferences to aesthetics.' And these re­marks, in their context, are but inciden­tal to getting on with matters of broad­er import in the ontology and epistemol­ogy of value. The sources, therefore,from which the present account ofHall's aesthetics derives must needs beunpublished manuscript material.' For­tunately, for our expository purpose inthis paper, the notes are not casual jot­tings. The notebooks for a proposedbook on aesthetics, when transcribed,run to some thirty closely-typed pages,essentially complete, and outlined withpainstaking attention to the inter-rela­tion of basic and subordinate emphases.

While the main purpose of this essayis to present Hall's aesthetics in enoughdetail to make its basic blueprint visible,still we should remind ourselves thatEverett Hall is, first and foremost, asystematic philosopher. The axiologicalparent of the notebooks that comprisethe intended An Analysis of AestheticValue is What Is Value? And the epis­temological cousin is Our Knowledge ofFact and Value. The offspring, aesthet­ics, reveals its metaphysical geneaologyin practically every detail of its philo­sophical anatomy. Though it is justpossible that Hall's work in aestheticscould be made to stand alone, it couldonly be forced to do so by the inclusionof much that would come very close torepetition of relevant portions of thetwo basic works just mentioned. At anyrate, the summary I am about to givewill not make the attempt to transformHall's aesthetics into a self-sufficiententity. What I shall describe will pre­sume an acquaintance with the basicframework of Hall's axiology.

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Even so, it may not be amiss to laydown in advance the guidelines ofHall's systematic orientation as theserelate to his aesthetics. The brevity ofthe memorandum I am about to offer,I should add, makes for a kind of dog­matic certainty with respect to thesematters which is badly out of keepingwith the spirit of the system as a whole.

The. basic form of the value-judg­ment in aesthetics as in ethics is de­ontological and singular. Aestheticvalue-predicates when they occur in or­dinary talk are translatable into clearernormative equivalents which excludesuch apparent predication of allegedaesthetic qualities. Aesthetic value­judgments, moreover, do not partici­pate in creating aesthetic value; theydiscover it or pick it out as ways inwhich certain facts are-s-or could be­exemplified. Standing behind our talkabout art is aesthetic experience, or,rather, aesthetic emotions, which them­selves "talk" about aesthetic value outthere in the world. But aesthetic valueis not "there" in the way that the factswhich aesthetic judgments and theirobjects intend to refer to and embrace,respectively, are there. Thus there canbe aesthetic value when the fitting fac­tual circumstances fail in part or as awhole to be actually exemplified.

Everything summarized so far couldjust as well be applied to ethics as toaesthetics. The differences between thetwo forms of value emerge when theanalysis is under way in depth. Indeed,the fact that so much can be saidthat refers indifferently either to ethicsor aesthetics is an important and char­acteristic feature of Hall's axiology.What remains to be done to distinguish

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aesthetic experience from generic valu­ation is chiefly to inspect the finer struc­ture of the emotions that assert aes­thetic objects to be valuable with theaim in view of capturing, via multipledistinctions, the nature of the particularvariety of emotion that functions inaesthetic experience. It goes withoutsaying that the "inspection" of emotionsjust mentioned is part of a categorialrather than an empirical analysis, al­though, in the nature of the case, thereis somewhat more reliance on a kind ofintrospectionistic, structural psychologythan is typical for Hall's philosophizing.

Once the discussion of the natureand structure of emotions is refinedsufficiently to exhibit the design ofaesthetic experience, the question ofthe nature of the referent of suchexperience presents itself. Hall is noagnostic with respect to aesthetic ob­jects, though, as we shall see, he admitsthat they are peculiar-s-even anomalous-existences. When they do literally ex­ist, they embrace the mental and thematerial in a queer way. And, if thiswere not oddity enough, they are some­how "there" when they (or parts ofthem) fail to exist at all. Finally, weencounter questions that come to theaesthetician largely from the activityof art critics. Treated in the notebooksunder the heading of "Aesthetic Ex­cellence" are aesthetically directed ver­sions of Hall's criticism of the value­predicative approach as well as a co­herence theory of the legitimacy of aes­thetic judgments. In what follows, ourattention will be directed only upon afew major emphases having to do withaesthetic value "laws" and the rela­tion of the aesthetic to the non-aesthetic,particularly the moral.

I

Aesthetic Emotions. That aesthetic ex­perience is to be analyzed by analyzingthe design of the emotions that enterinto creation and appreciation of art is,for Hall, almost a redundancy. Com-

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monsense finds emotions of some sorta factor inherent to art. The problemfor the analytic aesthetician is that ofpeeling away the various and sundrysorts of emotion until that specieswhichcharacterizes aesthetic experience standsrevealed before us.

The investigation begins with com­plex emotions (although it should be re­called that any emotion whatever is"complex" in the sense that it is builtup of several percepts). In the senseunder examination, an emotion is com­plex if it contains emotions as parts ofthe main emotion. By identifying theaesthetic emotion as already complex,Hall, in effect, has disposed of the for­malist contention that the aestheticemotion is an indivisibly simple feelingpeculiarly aimed toward works of art.Though there are relatively simple emo­tions-likes, dislikes, or indifferences-­toward sensory patterns, these emotionsare not generally regarded as all thatmay be involved in a full-fledged aes­thetic experience. Moreover, such sim­ple likes or dislikes are rarely stableenough to allow them to carry the epis­temological significance which Hall'swhole value-system assigns to emotions.Now, if it be granted that aesthetic emo­tions are analyzable as complex, thereis the point that any emotion at all iscomplex in being a perceptual aggre­gate; this has no direct aesthetic rele­vance. And an emotion may be com­plex by way of ambivalence, as whenone loves and hates the same person(though not in the same respect) orwhen one is both amused and irritatedat the antics of a child.

We begin to close in on the kind ofemotion necessary for the occurrence ofaesthetic experience when we observethat some complex emotions have otheremotions as objects of intention or ref­erence. The emotion serving as theobject of the main emotion may eitherbe enclosed within, or fall outside, themain emotion. I feel disgust towardmy fear of appearing on the stage. Or

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I may be irritated with someone's feel­ing of sympathy toward my feeling ofstage fright. It is important here thatthe fact that emotions have causes notbe confused with the reference of suchemotions. Someone's anxiously ex­pressed concern may cause me to beirritated, but my irritation additionallyintends as its semantical object the verysympathy felt by the other.

These distinctions are then markedby some special terminology. A sec­ondary emotion is an emotion havinganother emotion as its object (e.g., mydisgust at my stage fright). The sec­ondary emotion's object is an "object­emotion" (my fright). That part ofthe secondary emotion not composed ofthe object-emotion is an "emotively­directed" emotion (my disgust). Thusa secondary emotion is composed of(at least) two emotions: It is an emo­tively-directed emotion having an ob­ject emotion as its intention.

As the examples above suggest, sec­ondary emotions need not be aestheticin character. Some additional distinc­tions are required. On Hall's analysis,this differentiation is supplied by thediscrimination of a form of secondaryemotion, illustrated by cases whereinthe secondary emotion encloses the ob­ject-emotion within itself. Now the sec­ondary emotion may be called a "dis­tancing emotion," e.g., my feeling ofguilt over my irritation at someone'ssympathy. While guilt about my irri­tation is plainly a complex emotion,emotions of this kind should be sharplydistinguished from ambivalent emo­tions, which, in terms of our example,would be my simultaneous irritation atand gratitude for the sympathy felt byanother for my stage fright. Put ab­stractly, then, a distancing emotion is acompound of an emotively-directedemotion and its self-contained object­emotion, while a merely ambivalentemotion is a complex emotion thatcontains two opposing emotions bothdirected toward the object of the com­plex emotion.

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The manner of inclusion of the ob­ject-emotion in the distancing emotionis crucial for the aesthetic system beingdeveloped. There are two ways inwhich this inclusion can be accomp­lished. First, the object-emotion of adistancing emotion may be felt simplyas privately mine, as in the case of myfeeling of disgust for my stage fright.But, second, the object-emotion of adistancing emotion-term it the dis­tanced emotion-may be "shared" withothers. That is, it may be felt to bequalitatively similar to another's emo­tion, as in mutual sorrow. And, whetheror not it happens to be felt as qualita­tively similar to another's emotion, itstill may be "shared" in the sense thatemotively directed sympathy may bedirected to the sorrow of someone overthe death of another about whom I alsofeel sorry. It is rather important tonote here that the "sharing" of emotionthat may take place with a distancingemotion does not involve some directawareness of, or comparison between,the emotions of other people and myown. To "share" in the present senseis merely to feel a qualitative or inten­tional likeness. If, by chance, the emo­tions mutually felt should happen to beprecisely similar, this would not fillthe bill. This would be the case, forexample, if you and I were both toexperience emotions of repulsion onlynumerically different in response toElvis Presley but I am unaware thatyou exist.

As we would expect from Bullough'sclassical account of the matter, a dis­tanced emotion is different from itsnon-distanced counterpart in that thetendency toward overt action is muchdiminished; seen from within, the vo­litional component of the emotion feelsless compelling. This comes about bymeans of the inhibitions supplied by thedistancing emotion's somatic compon­ent. The stronger this component is inrelation to the strength of the somaticfactor of the distanced emotion, thegreater is the distancing effect. Or, to

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pick up the previous example, the great­er the intensity of my disgust at myreprehensible stage fright, the less Iam inclined obviously to tremble beforemy audience. It should be pointed outthat a distanced emotion may, thoughhighly distanced, still be a powerful andintense feeling. What is reduced by dis­tancing is the readiness to engage inovert action, not the confused percep­tion of large muscular involvementwhich gives the emotion its tone orflavor. Though I still may be very jit­tery I am not as likely, thanks to myintense disgust, to give myself awaybefore the audience.

As the choice of example so far illus­trates, not all distancing emotions areaesthetic emotions, but aesthetic emo­tions are always distancing. What moredo we require to qualify a distancingemotion as an instance of aesthetic ex­perience? Here commonsense in aes­thetic matters seems to demand that theaesthetic emotion be doubly intentional.It is reflexive upon the distanced emo­tion and yet, at the same time, it graspsan external thing. We say that theartist has technical skill, but lacks feel­ing. Or we say of some anaestheticappreciator that he fails to grasp thefeeling of the artist. Clearly, this sug­gests that the object of an aestheticemotion either is or includes a feeling.But, on the other hand, aesthetic emo­tions seem to be directed, intentionally,toward physical objects, or rather to­ward their superficial properties. Itwould seem odd indeed to maintain thatcomplete aesthetic experiences could behad by sharing the feelings of artistswithout any references to physical sur­faces. Thus it seems that we must findthe final differentia of aesthetic emo­tions in the requirement that this emo­tion be a distanced emotion whose ob­ject-emotion is felt to stand in a"relation" of appropriateness to thesensory surface of some physical thing.In order to mark the difference be­tween this peculiar type of distancing

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and psychic distancing in general, itmay be termed "aesthetic distancing."

The sensory surfaces just mentionedare not, strictly, parts of aesthetic ex­perience, but objects of aesthetic ex­perience (the intentional parts of theaesthetic emotion are perceptions) .While in the simplest cases of aesthesis,the surfaces are just the superfices ofphysical objects, more often the sur­face is complex-as in the case of rep­resentational art. In the more complexcases, there are always to be found notjust one, but several aesthetic surfacesjuxtaposed. There is in poetry, for ex­ample, the primary surface of the per­ceived sounds, but in addition a sec­ondary surface composed of the imag­ined things and events. The objects orevents represented are taken, somehow,to exemplify the very properties ex­hibited by the primary surface. Thecomplexity of surface of representa­tional graphic art is similar, though asrepresentation approaches illusionism,the complexity tends to fade away.

For Hall there is no distinguishedgroup of emotions that is especiallysuitable for aesthetic distancing. Anymay serve; in works of art that are de­signed for narrow and highly-sophisti­cated audiences, the object-emotionsmay themselves be secondary or evendistancing emotions. But, notably, itis in the character of the object-emo­tions that we can begin to analyze therelations of the moral to the aesthetic.More often than not the object-emo­tions are morally-flavored emotions­but only "flavored," since the tendencytoward action that would qualify themas robustly moral is inhibited by the in­clusion of the object-emotion in the dis­tancing emotion. Not that non-moralobject-emotions are never to be foundin art (we can hardly exclude Voltaireand Gilbert and Sullivan) ; humor maybe central. But even here some elementof parody or irony almost inevitably re­introduces a tincture of moralism. Whatis clear, incomplete as this analysis is,

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is that Hall makes morality a subordi­nate note in the aesthetic emotion thatcontains it.

The common pattern of aestheticemotions is importantly differentiated,finally, into the feelings appropriatelyhad by the artist and by the spectator.But it should be added that this differ­entiation is not complete, since aestheticemotions can occur when there is noartist (in aesthetic experience of na­ture), and even when an aesthetic ob­ject is man-made, the feelings approp­riate to it are, to a degree, "shared"between artist and spectator. But wecan say that the spectator's experiencediffers from the artist's in that it typi­cally shows less sensitivity to the mate­rials and to the difficulties of manipu­lating them, as well as less ego-involve­ment. Appreciation also involves anadmiration for the technical skill of theartist, not just as isolated technicaltricks, but as enabling the artist to or­ganize the sensory surfaces in a wayappropriate to the feeling expressedthrough them. And, finally, the spec­tator comes to art with a sense ofdiscovery which stands in contrast tothe artist's creativity. The artist's ex­perience--which, be it noted, is notcontinually aesthetic-has more of whatis less in the spectator's appreciativeexperience. Thus the artist has moresense of the materials and their possi­bilities, more ego-involvement, and soon. But the artist, additionally, is im­bued with the sense of a public as po­tential appreciators of his work andthis moves him to work up the object­emotions into shareable form. Theawareness of, and motivation to com­municate with, a public is not a -"pure"aesthetic consciousness. It may deteri­orate rather easily into sheer exhibi­tionism or an attempt at self-ingratia­tion.

Hall's analysis now moves in the di­rection of a narrowing of attention.We proceed from the analysis of aes­thetic emotion to the nature of the

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double object of the distancing emotionwhen aesthetic-that blend of the men­tal and physical worlds composed of anaesthetic surface and the distanced ob­ject-emotion of an aesthetic emotion.

II

Aesthetic Objects. The basic problemof this section is the mode of being ofthe Janus-faced object which is thereferent of aesthetic emotion; it lookstoward the spectator's (or the artist's)emotion on the one hand, and, on theother hand, toward the sensory surface.How can these be merged? For plainlyphysical things and their properties donot experience emotions; we cannotliterally mean that "the music is sad."In order to avoid pathetic fallacies, weshould not say that any distanced emo­tion is "in" a sensory surface. Onlyhuman beings, commonsensically, canentertain emotions. Even if the barelogical possiblity of floating, disem­bodied emotions were brought in tounite with physical surfaces, we wouldget no help since the occurrence of theartist's or the spectator's aesthetic ex­perience would require that the emo­tions be drawn into that experience.The dualism would be unresolved. Nordoes nature contain aesthetically-dis­tanced emotions; we can appreciatenatural surfaces aesthetically withoutthe necessity of anthorpomorphizing.Nor can we locate the aesthetically dis­tanced emotion in the performers ofworks of art. Not merely do some artsrequire no performance, but performersare able to realize works of art verycompetently without feeling distancedemotions. Finally, we cannot constitutethe aesthetic object by blending theartist's distanced emotions with the aes­thetic surface he creates, for the obvi­ous reason that works of art whoseauthors are deceased suffer no diminu­tion of their possible inclusion in aes­thetic objects.

Thus it seems that we must say thatthe spectator has the emotion, while

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the surface to which it is apprqpriatestands ineluctably outside him. Wereone to argue that the spectator's experi­ence contains the surface as well as theemotion, making the entire aestheticobject internal to his experience, Hall'sintentionalism with respect to perceptswould have to be abandoned as wouldthe commonsensical conviction that dif­ferent appreciators can view the sameaesthetic object, not just similar ones.This is too dear a price for value real­ism to pay, hence the question becomes:What sort of unity can be given to theaesthetic object?

This question, as it turns out, hasno single answer, rather an ensembleof suggested answers. The first sug­gestion is that the ontological unity ofaesthetic objects be given up in favorof a distinction between the "work ofart" and an aesthetic object proper.The words "work of art" seem to func­tion typically in common usage as aname for the physical product of ar­tistic skill (no doubt with an aura offavorable evaluation as well). Ignoringthe associated positive valuation, then,works of art usually denote physicalthings or physical events-paintings orstatues, musical or theatrical perform­ances. As noted already, this referenceis not exclusively physical; in the caseof the literary work of art, e.g., refer­ence may also occur to secondary sur­faces which are the creatively imag­ined events. Ignoring such secondaryintentions, the primary reference tophysical things or events poses no prob­lem of unity, since the painting or thestatue has the unity of a particular (itcan be weighed and crated) and the in­stance of a performance, though hard­ly weighable, can be located in spaceand time. The point of distinguishingthe work of art now appears in theadmonition that the work of art notbe confused with the aesthetic objectproper. The best way to justify thisterminology is to point out that theremay be aesthetic objects when there areno works of art, as in aesthetic exper-

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ience of nature. And, when works ofart are associated with aesthetic experi­ence, they are never the total referentof the emotion, but only a portion there­of. There is no doubt that this dis­tinction involves a clarification, not justan outright reflection, of commonsensetalk about art. But the decision to splitthe object of aesthetic reference derivesfrom commonsense, Hall argues, sincecommonsense rejects its own unclaritieswhen these are made manifest. It fol­lows from this distinction, then, thatone can judge the technical skill ex­hibited by a work of art but that it,alone, cannot be judged aesthetically

Hall's account of the aesthetic ob­ject so far brings him into oppositionwith several familiar points of viewabout aesthetic objects. Hall denies anyposition that would analyze the aes­thetic object as a symbol of some kind.Though symbols occur within the aes­thetic object, both as associated withsecondary aesthetic surfaces and in thedistanced emotion, nevertheless the aes­thetic object qua aesthetic is an objectof intention, not itself intentional.

Nor should it be said that "Art isexpression." Such a phrase is highlymisleading, since Hall would claim thatwe should say not that the work of artexpresses the emotion, but rather thatthe distancing emotion feels the object­emotion's appropriateness to the sensorysuperfices of the physical work of art.

Nor is the relation between the emo­tion and the work of art one of trans­lation. The work of art does not referto or intend the object-emotion of theaesthetic emotion; obviously, then, itcannot say about the object of the ob­ject-emotion what the object-emotionsays.

Nor is the relation of appropriatenessbetween emotion and surface typicallyone of structural isomorphism. Thoughit may be so on occasion, when it doesoccur it is not essential.

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Neither can we say that "Art is com­munication," implying that the aes­thetic object is essentially a carrier ofemotion. It is the case, rather, that theaesthetic object embraces or containsthe distanced emotion, the communica­bility being covered under the presump­tion of shared emotion which underliesthe object's being the enduring subjectof several different aesthetic experiences.

In what ways may an aesthetic ob­ject fail to exist? The answer to thisquestion sheds considerable light on thedetail of Hall's version of the peculiarcharacter of the aesthetic object as avalue, not just as an existent. As wehave said, the aesthetic experience hasan aesthetic object as its intention. Thesheer remarking of this intentionalityof the emotion's reference to the surfaceis one kind of answer to the question ofthe ontological unity of the object. Itis a unity in the sense that the two as­pects melt together to make up a singlevalue. But the value-unity just referredto does not, typically or necessarily, alsoconstitute an existential unity. Asreaders of What Is Value? will recall,value and existence are not symmetric­ally related: To be is not to be valu­able, but to be valuable is to (non­assertively) intend existence. Does thisimply that aesthetic value is to befound in the valuableness of a unifiedexistent object? It does not. The aes­thetic object is a single value, which,if it happens to exist, is not a singlyexistent thing.

There are, therefore, two ways inwhich aesthetic objects may fail to ex­ist. One is when the aesthetic surfacedoes not exist-as in a merely projectedwork of art. Another is when the ap­propriately distanced object-emotiondoes not exist. The work of art maybe there, but the aesthetic object maybe absent if no aesthetically distancedemotions are occurring which envelopthe superfices of the object. Or an emo­tion appropriate to the work of art mayoccur but fail to be aesthetically dis-

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tanced, again preventing the realiza­tion of an aesthetic object.

Certain apparent anomalies that arecharacteristic of Hall's general positionin value theory must be kept in mindas we review his aesthetics. Particularlyis this true with respect to the aestheticobject. Since this object is a value, andnot just a particular existent thing, anappreciator may legitimately value anaesthetic object which-as we have seenabove--fails to exist. And, moreover,there may be such a value without anyexperience of it. That this need notclutter Hall's account with Meinongianpossibilities is shown (though not withperfect accuracy) in the paradigm ofthe aesthetic value-judgment as follows:"It is (or would be) aesthetically ap­propriate to have (were there to be)such-and-such aesthetic surface as re­lated to such-and-such emotions." Thisfits with commonsense in its consider­ation of a work of art not yet physicallyrealized-at that moment it would beappropriate that it exist. Or in consid­ering an undiscovered, and thereby un­appreciated work of art, it would beappropriate that aesthetic emotions notyet in existence would, if they were toexist, constitute, with it, an aestheticobject. But the best illustration is inthe reference of art critics to actualworks of art that would be more ap­propriate--aesthetically better-if theywere (though they are in fact not) dif­ferent in this or that respect.

Hall next suggests a classification ofaesthetic objects intended to show thefruitful applicability of his analysis tothe major kinds of art. The simplestaesthetic objects are those which haveno secondary aesthetic surfaces and inwhich the object-emotions are simple(though distanced) likes or dislikes forthe qualities and relations of the sur­face. Some recent abstract paintingmay serve as an example At a half-stepremove from this pattern, the sincerityof the artist's use of physical materialsis sensed as appropriate by the object-

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emotions, with the sensory surface ac­centuating rather than softening thisemphasis. Distancing is here shown bycomparing a feeling for the artist's sin­cerity in the use of his materials withsheer admiration for his technical skillin manipulating them. A full step awayfrom the simplest aesthetic objects istaken when secondary surfaces enterthe aesthetic object, as in physically rep­resentational art. Again, somethingmore than sheer skill in imitation iscalled for if the experience is to beaesthetic. This something more is veryoften the human emotions suggested bythe represented content. Culturallysymbolic art forms a fourth classifica­tion, recognizable from the disparity ofprimary and secondary aesthetic sur­faces and also from the fading impor­tance of the secondary surface. Inculturally symbolic art, the primary sur­face functions mainly to bring up, with­out clearly focusing, a mass of atti­tudes associated in the culture withthe symbols, e.g., the Lamb in earlyChristian painting. Distancing is re­vealed in this genre by the need toobserve appropriateness of the symboland the symbolized subject to the ob­ject-emotions. Hence, the fat, smilingBuddha as fitting Eastern religions ofserenity and contentment as contrastedto the lean, agonized Christ as befittingWestern religious attitudes. A fifth classof aesthetic objects is titled "subjectiveart." This category is marked by thetendency to present the secondary sur­face of dreams or fantasy from whichit derives. Surrealistic art is the lead­ing example, and it should be notedthat distancing is especially difficult tomaintain; the appreciator tends eitherto overdistance, in the case of moresubtle surrealistic art, and hence to re­main anaesthetic, or else he recognizesthe import of the represented experi­ence and underdistances by simply re­experiencing the content, again non­aesthetically. It must be a rare viewerwho does not violently underdistancethe moment in Dali's surrealistic movie

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when the slightly stylized eyeball is slitwith the razor. The sixth, and final,class is metaphorical art. Hall intends"metaphorical" to function here as abroadly descriptive term embracingmore than just the arts of literature.Whenever there is a common patternembodied in different sensory materials,and when the primary surface functionsto produce, imaginatively, the varioussecondary surfaces, all the surfaces func­tioning not only to elicit but also todistance the emotion, the art is meta­phorical.

III

Aesthetic Excellence. Hall devotes afair amount of space in the notebooksto the justification of his choice of theterm "excellence" as the preferred wayof referring to the value of a work ofart as a component of an aesthetic ob­ject. This analysis is not summarizedhere since it follows along the same linesas the parallel analysis of apparentlypredicative value terms in What IsValue? Suffice it to say that the con­clusion is that aesthetic value is not azero-level property or relation, nor is itone of higher degree. Instead we seeonce more, by a sort of dovetailing ofcategorial analyses, that aesthetic valu­ation refers to the appropriate combina­tion of the components of an aestheticobject. It is just this appropriatenesswhich is aesthetic excellence.

Nor will the summary of this sectionconcern itself with the "verification" or"justification" of aesthetic value judg­ments. Readers of Our Knowledge ofFact and Value will recollect that Halldevelops and defends a coherence theoryof justification for value assertions ingeneral; this analysis is taken over with­out substantial modification from theearlier treatment.

We will, however, attend to fouremphases which are centrally impor­tant for the analysis of aesthetic excel­lence. These are, first, the relation be­tween aesthetic and moral appropriate-

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ness; second, the problem of unique­ness; third, the nature of critical canons;and, finally, aesthetic greatness as con­trasted to excellence.

Let us ask, then, how Hall views therelative status of aesthetic and moralvalues. How deeply does the close re­lation between these two forms of valuepenetrate? The answer, though givensomewhat diffidently, is that, structur­ally at least, the two are essentially iden­tical. The general character of ap­propriateness - the oughting-to-be-ex­emplified of a complex of facts whoseexistence is intentionally asserted-isthe same whether the value be aestheticor moral. The difference between aes­thetic and moral value is found in thecharacteristics of "oughted" facts. Themoral ought, roughly speaking, is ana­lyzed as a fitness of voluntary actions tosituations. The aesthetic ought is a fit­ness of sensory surfaces to certain emo­tions.

From this treatment of the relationof the moral and the aesthetic it is plainthat Hall's essentialism brings him intoserious conflict with those aestheticiansand critics who stress the uniqueness ofaesthetic value. Croce, for example,contends that aesthetic apprehension isof a bare particular thing, which indi­vidual thing, it is implied, cannot legiti­mately be made the object of anygeneralized judgment whatever. Thelinguistic informalists, for quite differ­ent reasons, place an equal stress on theuniqueness of works of art. Hall, forhis part, freely admits that any factualcomplex is unique, and, hence, the com­plex of superficial external facts thatare the objects of aesthetic emotions aswell as the actually occurring emotionsthemselves are unique - in the sensethat they are unrepeatable clusters ofoccurrents. But this uniqueness cannotbe definitive of aesthetic excellence, forthe reason that both excellent and poorworks are similarly unique. But unique­ness, in spite of its incapacity to consti­tute aesthetic worth, may still be a nee-

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essary condition for it. What is appro­priate in the aesthetic object is alwaysthat such-and-such distanced emotionstogether with such-and-such aestheticsurfaces actually occur-in their unique,unrepetitive total.

Thus Hall does, in one sense, admitthe uniqueness of aesthetic objects. Thequestion remains, does this admission ofuniqueness pose an irresolvable problemfor a position which purports to give anaccount of the generalized characteris­tics of aesthetic value? Hall believes thathis brand of essentialism has to concedeno more difficulty with uniqueness thanwith any other concept. The analysisbegins by locating the trouble in thevery concept of a concept. Already thisis of something not unique, and iron­ically it seems to let uniqueness escapein the very attempt to grasp hold of it.But the same can be said of any con­cept whatever. As an abstraction, itrefers to, without simultaneously beinga case of, what it is about. The con­cept, orange, is not orange-colored, butis, rather, quite immune to any predi­cation of color. Is there somethingunique about the concept of unique­ness? While orange subsumes an indef­initely large class of particular orangesand is hence conceptualizable, to speakof uniqueness being instantiated seemsodd. The oddness of speaking of a par­ticular case of the universal, uniqueness,may seem to be that each uniquenessjust is itself and not another thing. ButHall now claims that such talk aboutthe uniqueness of uniqueness is thor­oughly confused. Taken seriously itwould trivialize the predication ofuniqueness. If to say "Picassos areunique" is but to say "Picassos arePicassos," we fall into a redundancyhardly intended by the ascribing ofuniqueness to an individual. Somethingis being characterized in some way whenit is said to be unique-even if unique­ness can be predicated of every individ­ual. Hall's positive suggestion is thatthe uniqueness of the concept, unique­ness, rests upon three peculiarities.

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First, uniqueness is a species of "whole­property," but, secondly, it is a "whole­property" of the special sort that char­acterizes the whole by virtue of all itsproperties, i.e., uniqueness is not itselfa first-order property to be listed alongwith an inventory of the other proper­ties of the whole. Finally, the whole­property which is uniqueness charac­terizes the whole merely by the whole'shaving of the properties it has and notwith respect to the character of theseveral properties that are had by thewhole.

We now tum to the problem of can­ons in criticism, a discussion which pre­supposes the success of Hall's analysisof uniqueness. If there are generalcanons of some sort, there must besome common aspects of aesthetic ob­jects to be judged, a possibility whichthe strongest sense of uniqueness, hererejected, would foreclose entirely.

The words "norm," "standard,""evaluate," and their cognates are oftenused in ways that do not genuinely in­volve normativity at all, but their usedoes result in a confusion that Hallwishes to clear away before he turns tocanons proper. In their most basic form,standards function as technical tools ofclassification-subsuming less complexclasses under broader species or declar­ing individuals to be members of agiven class. One may want, for exam­ple, to establish that a given color iscerise, or one may want to know wheth­er this bull is an Angus. As illustrationsof the definition of a class, there is nonormativity involved. However, the useof such phrases as "a good specimenof," and "better and poorer cases of'seem to carry with them a speciousnormative element. That this is spe­cious can be shown by remarking thatthe basis of such talk rests upon theempirical facts of certain continuitiesin nature. There are ranges of similarproperties that diverge from one an­other by degrees--as in color spectra.There is also independent variation of

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the properties that taken together de­fine a "natural class." A "good" cerise,for example, may be one that lies nearthe center of various possible varia­tions. That such items-those placeablein the center of divergence that stillallows class membership-are norma­tively good is clearly not necessary (un­less some gratuitous assumptions aboutthe evil of privation are covertly slippedin). The problems involved in apply­ing standards or norms in the sense justexhibited are not peculiarly aestheticproblems; they arise whenever conceptsof any sort are applied to the empiricalworld. Hall contends that a good dealof the talk by linguistic informalistsconcerning the uniqueness of art versusthe difficulty of establishing norms, orof defining the art-object, can be clari­fied as above.

It does not follow that there is nopossibilityof genuinely normative stand­ards or canons of aesthetics. If thereare, Hall believes they must be gen­eralized from experience of individualcases. Their form would be a hybridof the descriptive and the valuative, i.e.,they would set forth the more-or-lessregular association of certain otherproperties with aesthetic excellence.And it should be said that the basicuse of such canons would not be to reg­ulate the production of works of artnor to determine the aesthetic judg­ment in individual instances of aestheticexperience. They would be like thelaws of natural science in being theo­retical or cognitive. But they wouldalso be like legal laws in their norma­tivity as whole expressions (althoughthey would be unlike legal laws in thataesthetic "laws" become normative byderivation from individual cases, notfrom being imposed on cases). Finally,even though no worthwhile canonsmight be establishable (because, per­haps, of the extreme complexity of thetask), it must be observed that the pos­sible failure to set up canons of artisticexcellence leaves intact the determina­tion of probabilities of aesthetic excel-

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lence based on coherence-patterns ofjustification similar to those sketchedout in OUT Knowledge of Fact andValue.

We conclude the summary of thissection with a mention of the handlinggiven to the traditional distinction be­tween sublime versus the beautiful­in Hallian terms the distinction betweenaesthetic greatness and aesthetic excel­lence. There is a place for greatness inconnection with the kinds of emotionsthat enter the aesthetic object. Greatworks are those that involve the mostpowerful and profound of human emo­tions, those typically called forth bymoral conflicts of Promethean dimen­sion. The question to be faced is wheth­er greatness, in this sense, is or is notgermanely related to aesthetic excel­lence as such. For Hall, the answer isthat they are not related, in one clearsense. A "thin" aesthetic object canbe excellent without any qualificationstemming from its lack of calling uponPromethean emotions. And an aestheticobject may be as "thick" as one pleaseswithout, merely by virtue of its moralprofundity, being aesthetically excel­lent. But there is a sense in whichgreatness and excellence have to beconsidered mutually. This is becausegreat works of art are extremely diffi­cult to distance aesthetically, and it islikewise highly difficult to create anaesthetic surface which stimulates theappropriate emotions but yet keeps theiroccurrence controlled within the termi­nal framework of an aesthetic object.Thus it is perfectly legitimate for theartist to have moral goals in additionto his aesthetic goals, provided only thatthe moral message does not burst theboundaries of the aesthetic object, aconsequence which would destroy aes­thetic appropriateness (though it mightpreserve a practical or a moral appro­priateness). What this requires is thatthe artist constantly maintain aestheticdistancing of the moral content hewishes to express aesthetically, while atthe same time maintaining sincerity as

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well, never assuming a moralistic posefor the sake of aesthetic effect. Difficultas it is to unite great themes with aes­thetic distancing, if and when this isaccomplished, the result, paradoxically,is that very often a deeper moral im­pact is achieved when it is not directlysought, when, i.e., the aesthetic containsthe moral. And, as a complementaryparadox, the greater aesthetic excel­lence is very often attained when thedistanced emotions are dangerously closeto being underdistanced and hence notaesthetic at all.

IV

I should like now to revert to thepoint at which I began the summaryof An Analysis of Aesthetics just con­cluded. How does the aesthetics relateto the published works that compriseHall's philosophical system? The claimthat Hall's aesthetics is part and parcelof his basic value theory has been, Ibelieve, amply vindicated by what wehave just reviewed. But there is a sensein which the aesthetics has a kind ofdouble relation to the system as awhole. In the first place, it is a cate­gorial "deduction" from the axiologyand ontology of What Is Value? sup­plemented by the epistemological foot­ings given to that axiology by OUT

Knowledge of Fact and Value. Byterming the aesthetics a "deduction,"I simply wish to stress that instead ofbeginning there from a system whichjust might possibly not link itselfsmoothly and seamlessly to the alreadyoutlined portions of the system, Hallproceeds, rather, from generic insightto the more detailed structure of a spe­cial form of value, and he is borne alongby the categorial impetus antecedentlyfurnished by his published system. Someevidence of the stress on system almostto the exclusion of examples comes fromthe very character of the hand-writtennotebooks on aesthetics themselves. Notonly are they constructed in a very rigidform of numerical headings and sub­headings (which incidentally must beadapted straight from Wittgenstein's

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Tractatusy, but even a cursory exam­ination makes it clear that this is anessay in meta-aesthetics, for the exam­ples that are supplied are quite unde­veloped. Quite often, gaps are left forthe inclusion of examples; some of thesehave been pencilled in as afterthoughts~thers are lacking entirely. PerhapsI give too much significance to the formof the notebooks, and it is true that theywere left unfinished. Nonetheless Isuspect that their form reveals morethan simply a method of outlining, butserves to buttress the contention thatthe essence of aesthetics for Hall is to befound as part of the structure of a worldof value that is monistic rather thanpluralistic.

But, in the second place, it is prob­ably quite misleading and even unfairto claim as I just did that Hall hassimply produced an aesthetics by spin­ning out the consequences of alreadyestablished, not specifically aesthetic,categorial commitments. For I thinkthat Hall could very justly claim thathe was sensitive at every point preciselyto the main structural components ofeveryday talk about the arts, and thathis aesthetics is no automatic grindingout of an aesthetic result from previouscategories already coded in the Hallianmanner, but represents, rather, a gen­uinely fresh examination of common­sense talking about the arts.

We must say, apparently, that bothrelations are essential to what Hall in­tended to be about philosophically. Theaesthetics reflects Hall's prior systema­tic commitments and at the same timereflects the basic categories that aes­thetic commonsense reveals when philo­sophically clarified. It is perhaps a justmeasure of Hall's philosophical origin­ality that his critics would find himvulnerable to attack if the one side ofthis double relation of aesthetics to sys­tem and to commonsense were ex­ploited to the virtual exclusion of theother.

The linguistic informalist is likely

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to find in Hall's aesthetic system justan emptily general account of legitimatefamily resemblances hypostatized intomythical essential characteristics - akind of necrophilic philosophical aviarywhere, unfortunately, there are no liv­ing birds but only a neat classificationof stuffed dodoes. Hall's reply, if I maymake it cryptically brief, would be sim­ply to insist upon the equally importantlinkage of his system to the living lan­guage of aesthetic experience, while atthe same time contending that his in­formalist critics are as much involvedin categorial assumptions as he himselfis but that they perversely insist on muff­ling these commitments by tedious at­tention to the philological detail, ratherthan the structural requirements of com­monsense talk. Thus, though we miss inHall's later published writings the stiff,formal, almost pedantic style and thestudied arrays of footnotes and find himwriting in an easy-going lecture style,even doing penance by voicing (mock?)horror at the "barbaric" nomenclatureof technical philosophy, still the note­books seem to reveal that he was con­tinuing doggedly to build his system inthe philosophical, though not in theliterary, style of What Is Value? Hehas surrendered nothing to Oxford andhas adapted a few devices from overseasmerely for purposes of expository con­venience, trying to be better understoodby the relatively small group who readhis earlier works without grasping, asclearly as he had hoped, the centralemphases of what he had tried to say.

I want now to examine, and all toobriefly considering the depth of theproblem for Hall's system, a matterthat is both central within Hall's aes­thetics and which is likewise related tothe claims of possible competitive sys­tems. This problem is the status ofappropriateness as an aesthetic cate­gory. I experience something aesthetic­ally appropriate-let it be a melody inthe minor. According to Hall, what istaking place is that I am feeling thatanother feeling fits the sensory surface

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of the sounds, that my sadness or grav­ity is appropriate to just those sounds,distinguished from others by the flattingof the third (plus a large number ofother factual characteristics of the audi­tory experience which fit precisely justthat sadness I feel). If now the per­former makes a mistake by failing toflat the third, the jolt I experience isa sense that the fitness joining my feel­ing and the musical surface has beenthreatened or dissipated. I am seatedin Chartres awaiting the arrival of asolemn ecclesiastical procession, and Iam startled and shocked to find mysense of religious-aesthetic awe upsetby the appearance of Gypsy Rose Leeand her uninhibited colleagues instead,behaving in a way much more appro­priate to the aisles of Minsky's. Or Isimply discover that my Martini hastoo much Vermouth; it would be moreappropriate were it dryer. Or, when Isee a Scotsman in his appropriate na­tional costume on the streets of my mid­dlewestern town I can't help being a bitshocked; it just does seem inappropriatefor men not to wear trousers. I trustthat the question I wish to raise aboutappropriateness is evident already. Isthe sense of fitness I do undoubtedlyfeel linking my emotions to certain aes­thetic surfaces more than conventional?Let us put aside the question whetherthe examples I have adduced are purelyaesthetic; they have at least a tinge ofthe aesthetic about them. If what Ihave in mind could be made to chal­lenge Hall's system it would have theeffect of trivializing the notion of ap­propriateness. It would not deny thatthe appropriateness would not be felt,but it would reduce the occurrence ofcertain emotions, and their reference, inaddition, to aesthetic surfaces, to factswhose explanation was exhausted bya biographical account of the ob­server's psychological history togetherwith an emphasis on current culturalmodes and manners. I repeat, emotionswould refer and appropriatenesseswould be felt, but a realistic axiology

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of aesthetics would gain no supportfrom these facts. Put otherwise, is apolka inherently inappropriate some­how to my feeling of melancholy anda dirge inherently fitting, or is this feltappropriateness merely the parroting bymy emotions of certain (largely uncon­scious) cultural prejudices that theyhave absorbed in the course of their aes­thetic education? It should be notedthat if appropriateness could be trivial.ized in the manner just suggested, thena coherence-theory of the legitimacyof such feelings of appropriatenesswould likewise be trivialized. Such pat­terns could be made out, perhaps, asHall suggests, but the ultimate form ofthe coherences of feeling would derive,like appropriateness itself, from the con­tingent facts of a given culture's pat­terns of aesthetic prejudice or the factthat between cultures certain similaritiesof aesthetic prejudice would obtain.The present questioning of the statusof appropriateness is not just a retreadof the familiar complaint about thevariability of value judgments, tempo­rally or geographically; it would applyin force even if value judgments ex­hibited a greater uniformity than theyin fact seem to do. What the objectionwould insist is that the result of Hall'sanalysis of aesthetics is a phenomenol­ogy of value which would support, notvalue-realism, but a form of scepticismabout the possibility of feelings' reveal­ing much more than how feelings areshaped by this or that set of variablecircumstances. Is it inconceivable thatI might not find myself feeling that astriptease is appropriate to a place ofworship? If some form of fertility re­ligion had replaced the austerity ofChristianity in the early years of theRoman Empire, then my emotionsmight find appropriateness where, as itis, they are likely to feel conventionalshock.

What reply can the defender of Hall'ssystem make to a line of criticism likethat above? The obvious reply is thatcommon sense is objectivist and real-

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istic in its appraisals of aesthetic value,not sceptical, hence any acceptable sys­tem must build on this naive realismwhile clarifying its details. But this de­fense is a rather unfortunate one in thatby descending so precipitately to thebed-rock of the system, we cut off thecritic by an appeal to mystical insightinto the real intentions of commonsense---an appeal which, while it maybe unanswerable, silences without en­lightening. What is to prevent this fel­low from excommunicating his oppo­sition in turn by a competing insightinto the clarified intentions of commonsense?

I t is possible, I believe, to avoid thestultification of the categoriocentric pre­dicament by trying to reply to the scep­tical critic by working within a some­what higher stratum of the system. Theelement of conventionality in our judg­ments of appropriateness could be free­ly admitted, but the objector informedthat he had failed to make a numberof crucial distinctions. Particularly hemight be admonished to distinguish be­tween the way in which a particularfeeling of appropriateness was causallygenerated in a cultural and psycho­logical setting and the abstracted feelingof appropriateness itself. If the scalesfall away, and the objector is pacifiedby this distinction between cause andessence or nature, the task is done. Andit could be insisted that aesthetic ap­propriateness is prone to merge almostinsensibly into practical appropriate­ness, losing its distanced, hence, its aes­thetic quality. Finally, only when theenjoyment of a surface by some emo­tion is enjoyment of an intrinsic sortcan it be genuinely aesthetic; this wouldexclude such obviously extrinsic appro­priatenesses as that between a causeand its effect. But I am not sure thatthese distinctions will discourage thesceptic, for he can be interpreted asurging, in effect, that there are no iso­latedly or abstractable intrinsic appro­priatenesses. He may insist that thevaluative, not just the causal, nature

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of every felt appropriateness is inex­tricably mingled with the accidents ofa cultural environment in which theemotions have, by imitation, been taughtto speak.

I t is by no means clear, then, that thedistinctions that can be made withinHall's aesthetics will suffice to dispose ofthe objector we have conjured up. Andthe reliance on the forms of common­sense aesthetic talk probably will notconvince the objector if the distinctionsgenerated at a higher level within thesystem could not succeed in convincinghim that he had indeed been guilty ofconfusing aesthetic appropriateness withanother thing. Weare pushed back tothe anchor in commonsense; but it maywell seem to someone not antecedentlyoperating within Hall's categorial sys­tem that commonsense has been tor­tured into producing "forms" which arenot clearly there. To him it will seemthat, in spite of Hall's insistence, oftenreiterated, that he is a simon-pure em­piricist, the idea of appropriateness car­ries something of the odor of a regula­tive, aprioristic principle as well asfunctioning as an innocently descriptivecategory. How shall we go about askingcommonsense to referee the argumentof conventionalism versus aesthetic real­ism? If it is answered that we clarifythe confusions of commonsense on thispoint in order to expose its essentialobjectivism, the suspicions of apriorismare simply shifted to the process of clar­ification itself. What is required to si­lence the critic is an Anselmian onto­logical argument for the intrinsic natureof appropriateness. This is, naturally,not forthcoming. In the very nature ofHall's system, the foundations stand oncategorially uncertain ground.

I want to conclude by saying some­things about the value of Hall's systemof aesthetics as it relates to the presentphilosophical scene. It is certainly nosecret among professional philosophersthat aesthetics is the step-child of thediscipline. Not only is philosophical

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aesthetics young in years compared tothe grander career of epistemology andlogic, but its development at the handsof those few professionals who havefound it a worthwhile enterprise andthose border-line professionals whosemajor oscupation is that of dilettanteor critic of the arts, has all too oftenbeen "dreary" or philosophically quiteprimitive. Hall's aesthetics, in con­trast, has the very considerable virtueof forthrightly asking the question,"What is aesthetic value?" and givingit an answer that connects it in a sys­tematic way with a general, clearly ar-

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ticulated theory of value and fact. Inthis sense, Hall's aesthetics, like hisvalue theory generally, is almost a pi­oneer work. Aside from the merits ofHall's constructive answers to the ques­tions he raises, and I believe these meritsare considerable, the questions them­selves are the sort that philosophicalaestheticians have not asked themselvesclearly enough in the classical sourcesof aesthetic theory. It is just possiblethat Hall's systematic treatment of thesubject may help to advance aestheticsfrom its poor-relation status nearer tophilosophical respectability.

1 See, e.g., What Is ValuI?, pp. 183-184 and Our Knouiledge of Fact and ValuI, p. 195, p.197.

I There are three notebooks, written, apparently, during the period of Everett Hall's lecture­ship at Kyoto University. To my knowledge his only other manuscript in aesthetics is aninformal outline sketched in 1952 in connection with the present author's dissertation.

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