Patricia Carpenter The widely ranging and lively responses to the opening papers of the colloquium are gratifying and somewhat surprising: gratifYing, especially because of the interest in confronting problems (in spite of difficulties in communication upon which we all agree) in an area where there is as yet no clearly formulated set of questions nor even a common applicable lan- guage; surprising, I found, because of the quickness with which were attributed to me positions that are not my own. Read into the text were, on the one hand, value judgments I had taken care to avoid, and on the other, outworn historical views I had not considered to be still at issue. I want to speak to these two points-the normative and historical issues -because they bring to attention what seems to me a primary concern of a project such as this: our presuppositions. The purpose, as I see it, in drawing together assumptions that are (or have been) made is to be able then to question their meaning (not value) and to explore more fundamental structures that support them. For example, my restriction of the term 'artwork' to the narrow modern sense of "an aestheti- cally isolated, secularly created object" was not a devaluation of other productions, but an attempt to bring into focus one kind ofform. Any specific manner of forming raises interesting technical questions, as well as questions of meaning. Although here I was interested chiefly in technical matters (the first step), I believe that the relation between the two dimensions can be explicated, that we can move from facts to phenomena to meanings. Mr. Arnheim, for example, not only sketched a framework for the technical means of form by which isolation is accomplished-a polarity between balance and continuity, structure and delimitation, simultaneity as structural and successiveness as discontinuous-but also indicated significant issues involved in the isolation of an object for sheer contemplation.! On my own view, the separation of artworld from lived world is a distortion of the function of making. But what is the significance of this distortion? 2 Or again, to take as an example a set of norms which have applied to the music of one era is not to affirm those norms for all music. All of us are engaged in questioning 18th-century ideals of form based on the presupposi- tion that classic triadic tonality is the natural (or common-sense) way of hearing. But why was there such exaggerated emphasis at that time on the exploitation of these few principles of "good" or "easy" form? Mr. Berleant, for example, reverses my procedure when he suggests that I have associated a piece of music with music taken as object "because only when it is an object does music have a clearly articulated structure." Rather, I have held that the exploitation of such structural attributes fashions a piece of music that invites us to experience it as object, that music is thus stylized toward objectness. I do, of course, maintain that what Mr. Treitler formulates as my second thesis follows from the first: if it is possible to isolate a certain kind of per- ceptual form, then a certain mode of perception can be read back from that 116 kind of form. This rests on what I take to be the unity of the aesthetic situation-of creative process, artwork, and aesthetic experience. For pur- poses of analysis we can fragment our view of the work, looking at it from the side of creator and constructed form, or of spectator and experienced form. We can emphasize the "givens" of the work from two directions: on the hinter side, its possibilities are determined by the physical properties of the matter from which it starts (such as, in music, features of the specific system in which it is written); on the hither side, the work must fit the laws of the imagination by which and for which it is made. We can emphasize, that is to say, either the division or unity of the arts. But underlying a certain mode of form structure as well, I should say, the total experiential situation. 3 This situation is not constant, but historical. The attempt to read that total situation from one aspect (say, "form") is not to read from some hypothetical world-view to the particular. The respondents expressed a proper con- temporary horror of the 19th-century notion of Weltanschauungen, but surely the Hegelian idealism of which this is an aspect is no longer a threat to contemporary thought, which has been engaged for more than half a century in translating those facts validly represented in that notion-i.e., facts of style -into the more palatable contemporary terms of "experience." (For example, certain factors of the experienced world-ways of experiencing time and space, views of causality, matters of distance-can be isolated as stylistic features.) Although Western history is, to a striking degree, an accumulated history, a history of generative ideas and their dialectic or of technical problems and their solutions and failures, I myself cannot construe it as continuous narrative except as a narrative of one such idea or problem, selected and isolated-as, for example, the problem of the "spatialization" of form. Misreadings such as the foregoing seem to me to have stemmed from the purpose of the paper. I was not attempting, in an essay of this size, either to do history or to present a critical evaluation of the notion of the artwork. I was attempting to apply a method of analysis that consists primarily in going behind assumptions that we hold. I applied this method to a way of conceiv- ing form which seems clearly to be a predominating (but not sole) ideal during a span of our musical tradition-a prevailing norm or goal of form, a set of presuppositions about form. I described the essential nature of this kind o(form as perceptual form, something primarily to be listened to, i.e., an object; specifically, as temporal object, i.e., an object that includes time in its essential being; and ultimately, as work of art, something created and experienced as an aesthetic (perceptible) whole, i.e., an object perceived for its own sake. This kind of form seems to me to presuppose a visual or spatial- ized model, a fact apparently agreed upon by most of the respondents. Mr. Berleant, for example, puts very well what I took as the basic fact for this paper; " ... our understanding of music has, I think, long been impeded by 117 the tendency to assimilate it to the other more familiar and readily verbalized arts, just as our understanding of art in general has been sorely handicapped by our propensity to explain it in the light of concepts and objects of a wholly different and foreign sort." The various respondents took issue not so much with that fact itself-that our language (and hence mode of conceptualiza- tion) has tended to spatialize and objectify time-as with my "eager accept- ance" of that fact. I still follow here Mr. Berleant, who takes double issue with the consequent "distortion" of the temporal process, as misrepresenting musical perception and reflecting the unfortunate influence of the historical tendency to associate visual perception with cognitive apprehension. I think he describes the distortion accurately. I neither defend nor condemn it, but take it as my point of departure, in order to explore, explicate, question its meaning. To take such a distortion as object for investigation requires a fundamental assumption that I do make: we constitute-and in so doing, stylize-our world. In other words, I have turned around the question of style, asking first about stylization in general, then about particular styles. At issue here is the distinction generally drawn between perception and conception. I do not want to confuse "a way of conceiving form" (which in this case I have characterized as modeled on visual perception) with "our conceptions of form." Form, I should say, (along with Mr. Hall) is a way of experiencing, not a structure of thought-and perception itself stylizes.4 The distortion toward visualization has characterized a certain mode of constituting-that is, of perceiving, feeling, imagining, conceiving, structur- ing, experiencing-the world, and hence music. Again, today we are generally engaged in questioning the assumptions underlying this style of experience (what Whitehead, for example, has called "the bifurcation of man and nature" or Gilbert Ryle, "the official doctrine of Descartes' myth, the ghost in the machine"). One of the basic presuppositions of this mode of constitu- tion, stated with especial force by Bergson, is the identification of spatializa- tion and conceptualization, an assumption which seems to underly Mr. Berleant's argument as his basic distinction between "the full perceptual experience of music and the concepts and linguistic medium through which that experience is codified and explained." I believe that this fragmentation of consciousness is itself one element of style in the prevailing materialistic mode of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Whereas Mr. Berleant wants to sharpen the contrast in regard to music, I want to emphasize the unity of the cognitive experience, including music. The totality of the perceptual situation that so strikingly characterizes the comprehension of aesthetic form holds for perception in general. It is no longer possible strictly to separate knowledge taken in through the senses from the conceptual and imaginative faculties of the mind that receives it.5 But Mr. Berleant and I both maintain that the consequences of stylizing perception toward vision are more striking in music-a nonvisual, nonverbal art-than in other arts. 118 The confusion of normative and historical issues was most apparent in regard to the contrast I drew between ars or techne and the modern notion of "Art." To map the development of this notion in relation to music would be to write some other article. But let me answer briefly to Mr. Treitler's reformulation of my "historical thesis," which he says implies that before the Renaissance music was random or arbitrary in its form and nonexpressive in its content, and that musical practice had no pragmatic basis. This "general and oversimplified view" of medieval musical theory and practice is one of Mr. Treitler's especial concerns, but it does not follow from my own. One can maintain, I think, both that a distinction must be made between experienced meaning and talking about experience, and also that there is a significant relation between any experience and the framework in which it is conceptualized. It is important, I believe, to attempt to understand the way the world is experienced in any era in terms of its own available concepts. The contrast between ars and Art in the narrow sense (if! were to attempt to translate it into conceptual terms of the medieval era) is not the distinction between theory and practice (theoria I interpreted as a means of detachment for, not a mode of being of, music), nor even that between intelligible and sensible form; it would be akin, rather, to the distinction prevailing between accidental and substantial form. I located, during the 16th century, the appearance of a self-conscious notion of autonomous form and a concern for a new kind of expressivity. Although there is some theoretical treatment of beginnings and endings in to the whole composition in the generation of Gafurius and Aron, I know of no concern with an aesthetic whole, in regard to music, before this. (Mr. Treitler places at about the same time the beginning of a similar self-conscious concern to shape historical time as temporal object. Vasari's Lives, for example, first appeared in 1550.) But the care I have taken not to read back the notion of 'artwork' into an era when it was not viable implies neither randomness of form nor non- expressivity for the music of that era. "Well-craftedness," for example, so well demonstrated in Mr. Treitler's analysis of Landino's song, is the essential ingredient of techne. It is also, of course, a fundamental ingredient of the modern notion of Art, but there are other more essential ones which the older notion does not include. I) The work of art is self-subsistent, like a thing. In regard to music, this requires the notated work, or what I would call the musical composition. 2) Unlike the mere thing-matter existing in some shape in the physical realm, the artwork is also artifact-shaped by man, existing as purposive product in the realm of human design. 3) Unlike the artifact, the artwork is not a thing, but exists onry in the realm of the human spirit, as object in relation to experiencing subject. It is perceptual form or "appear- ance," a stylistically-made image. 4) The work of art is an object experienced as aesthetic, with the power to seize the spectator and isolate the transaction between subject and object. It is aesthetically as well as perceptually isolated, perceptual form perceived for its own sake, i.e., without purpose. It exists in a realm of its own. 119 Differences such as these in the conception of the nature of music can be read, I think, in technical changes in the phenomenon music-for example, in new techniques for stylizing form toward self-subsistence and a new rhetorical or dramatic model of expression, which founds the self-significance of music. I would say that against a basic disposition of the Western habit of thought, the different ingredients of the idea of the artwork appear at different times and in different stages of development-as historical pheno- menon, as transition or preparation, as self-conscious concept, as prevailing norm. In my own terms, I would express what happens during the 16th century (which I take as watershed between medieval and modern) as a change in the substance and function of music. The stuff of music changes from vox (sound produced by the natural instrument, hence essentially including words) to sonus (sound produced by artificial instruments), with a concomitant em- phasis on the purely perceptual qualities of sound, and ultimately, in the 19th century, on the autonomous expressivity of music: music means itself. The function of music thus becomes, during those three centuries, expression. It seems to me that Mr. Treitler's consideration of Landino's song, disregarding as it does the text, which is an essential, not arbitrary, part of the structure, is a distortion of its "form" into the contemporary mode of perception per se. At issue here is my own especial concern: emphasis on form as experienced form and aesthetic form as the total, concrete form of this individual work, here and now, distinguished from the musical composition as presented for analysis, or from any abstracted feature of structure, such as structural skeleton. This distinction was made explicit in several responses, for much of the discussion turned on various senses of the ambiguous word 'object' and the admittedly difficult concepts of aesthetic form, aesthetic object, and work of art. Like 'form,' 'object' is a correlative term. Just as considerations of form can be fruitful only if the level of that which is formed is specified (form in relation to stuff or matter or to content or meaning), so also 'object' is always related to a subject in a specific way and is not clear unless that rela- tion is clear. The distinctions between physical, perceptual, and aesthetic dimensions of 'object' should have been more strongly contrasted. Let me then gloss my statement that curren.t controversies concerning musical form reflect in a specialized way currently changing conceptions of both 'form' and 'object.' Two directions in contemporary thought have provided the context for the paper: a broadening of the concept of 'object' that lessens the distinction between subject and object, i.e., between knower and known; and a broadening of the concept of 'knowledge' that lessens the distinctions between various modes of knowledge, i.e., sensation, perception, conceptuali- zation, imagination. 6 . I have not used 'object' here in the narrow sense of "something visible or tangible, any material thing" (Webster). An object is that which rises up before, against, in correlation to a subject; 'thing' I have restricted to 120 Even in the narrowest sense, then, I should say that a ifperceived, is an object.7 Music only makes more striking a problem that arises in respect of all perception-the relation between experienced object and physical correlate. Mr. Cone points directly to the difficulty: where, how, does the composition endure? One can move from here toward the ontological status of the musical work or toward the experiential status of the musical object; surely these are two sides-'-distinguishable sides-of the same problem.8 I have taken 'object' in a broader sense, however, which has been developed especially by Edmund Husserl and the phenomenologists. An object is the content of an act of consciousness (which is an act of intentional. ity) and is always the correlate of the action of consciousness that intends it. Such an act will be a structure of subjective components, but it is essentially consciousness-of something and thus also always has an objective side. On this view, an act of consciousness and its object are inseparable-subjective and objective aspects of the same situation-and arise together in experience. Subject and object no longer refer to two different kinds of things, but to two different sorts of meanings offered to the understanding. Knowledge then, in its broadest sense, is that primary activity of consciousness (consciousness-of) by which arise both self and world; it can be perceiving, thinking, recalling, imagining. All intend the world in a different manner; all are possible positions to take toward the object. In considering music as object the question is: how is the musical object intended? It is intended in the mode of the imagination-as imaginative form, an image-and as created form-a stylistically-made image. On my view then, music, like any other act of the imagination, is one way among many by which man constitutes his world. In this line of thought I see the issues at stake regarding the musical object as twofold: the incorporeality of the musical object (including the problems of "unreal" and "ideal" objects) and the extent to which it is an object of immediate, not mediate, knowledge (including the problems of intuitive knowledge in general). When I contrast musical object to process, I emphasize its being as an other; when I speak of its "thingly" quality, I emphasize the reality of the musical stuff.9 A melody, for example, is not created ex nihilo. On both these counts I stand opposed to the still-influential Romantic exaggeration of Hegel's view that "music has no genuine objectivity, but is one with subjectivity." NOTES 1 Arnheim lays a sound basis for comprehensive analysis with his distinction between shape and form: "The words 'shape' and 'form' are often used as though they meant the same thing . . . . Actually there is a useful difference of meaning between the two terms. The preceding chapter dealt with shape-that is, with the spatial aspects of appearance. But no visual pattern is only itself. It always represents something beyond its own individual existence-which is like saying that all shape is the form of some content." Art and visual perception: a psychology of the creative trye (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), p. 82. 121 The passage ftom Walter Pater, for example, was cited not so matter to be affirmed or denied, but rather as a matter of fact, as marking the limits beyond which the kind of musical form under question can no longer be conceived. He speaks within a tradition that assumed music to be a kind of rhetorical expression and that modeled musical form on well-made rhetorical discourse, calculated to arouse the affections. In the 19th century music, as a language, was asked to do something it had never been put to before: to express without benefit of, yet more fully than, words. Explicitly, Pater (like Hanslick) spoke against the narrow view within this tradition (that of the 18th-century Enlightenment), which could complain against nonverbal music, "Sonata, what do you want of me?" Nevertheless, when probed, Pater's theory (like that of Hans lick) proves to be another theory of expressionism, in which the greatness of art lies in the greatness of its expression. This is brought to light in an analysis by Albert Hofstadter, which is briefly as follows. All art, according to Pater, strives toward a certain condition of being, of which music is the paradigm: in art the form (or mode of handling the material, which is specific to each art) becomes an end in itself. Art transmutes matter into aesthetic substance: the condition of aesthetic form is that all matter be absorbed into the form, which is central. The elements are "musicalized." (In music, according to Pater, there is no distinction of ends from means, ofform from matter, of subject from expression.) The theory breaks down when in regard to literature (in his essay on "Style" in Appreciations) Pater grounds the greatness of art in its matter (which he interprets here as the thought or idea expressed, the "import"). Now matter and content, says Hofstadter, are different conceptions, both related to the same form differently. The identity ofform and can only occur in matter. If we extend the concept of matter to mean not just the subject matter, but all material, then we see that form in a concrete sense is what is made of this material, according to a certain way of handling it. Then form applies to all (great) art and is not just a principle of abstract (or "musical") art. Pater's ambiguous use of 'matter' to mean either represented subject or expressive content reveals that he has conceived of a form that, although it absorbs matter, expresses content, and stands in relation to content, there- fore, as vehicle to meaning. "Pater did not persist throughout in seeing matter as musical; he suffered from a lack of concreteness in form. In its failure to absorb expressive content lies the failure as an aesthetic theory." Unpublished Lectures in philosophical aesthetics VIII and IX. 3 The paradigm for analysis of the artwork within the total context of its world is Martin Heidegger's example of the Greek temple in "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" in Holzwege (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1950), pp. 7-68, tr. by Albert Hofstadter as "Origin of the work of art" in Philosophies of art and beauty, ed. Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York, 1964), pp. 649-701. See also: Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in aesthetics, selected and tr. by Wade Baskin (New York, 1964) and the works of George Poulet, especially those two that deal with the dimen- sions oftime and space: La distance intCrieure (Paris, 1952), tr. as The interior distance, by Elliott Coleman, (Baltimore, 1959) and Etudes sur Ie temps humain (Paris, 1950), tr. by Coleman as Studies in human time (Baltimore, 1956). 4 "Perception already stylizes. A woman passing by is not first and foremost a corporeal contour for me, a colored mannequin, or a spectacle; she is an individual, sentimental, sexual expression. She is a certain manner of being flesh which is given entirely in her walk or even in the simple shock of her heel on the ground-as the tension of the bow is present in each fiber of wood-a very noticeable variation of the norm of walking, looking, touching, and speaking that I possess in my self-awareness because I am incarnate. If! am also a painter, what will be transmitted to the canvas will no longer be ... just 'a woman' ••• but also the emblem of a way of inhabiting the world ..• in short, the emblem of a certain relationship to being." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect language and the voices of silence" in Signs (Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 54, tr. by Richard C. McCleary from Signes (Paris, 1960). 5 The following studies are interesting in this regard: Rudolph Arnheim, in "Gestalt psychology and artistic form" (Aspects qfform: a symposium onform in nature and art, ed. Lancelot Law Whyte [London, 1951], pp. 196-208), maintains that everyday vision initiates and anticipates the duel of the artist with the image and that visual form is a basic means of understanding the environment. Hence the aesthetic significance 122 of a particular form is determined not only by the actual structure of the image of an external object, but also by the formative processes of perception, the need 'of the organism for compre- hension, and the personal temperament and tensions of the perceiver. This theme runs through all of Arnheim's work. See especially his "Perceptual abstraction and art" in Toward a psychology of art: collected essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966) pp. 27-50 (reprinted from Psychological Review, 1947). The prevalence of abstractness in children's drawings and primitive representations (for example, a circle representing a head) presents a problem as long as perception is considered as passive registration of the retinal image, and abstraction as an intellectual elaboration of perceptual raw material, requiring therefore a higher level of mental development. Gestalt research shows structural whole-qualities like roundness to be not secondary, but primary perceptual phenomena. Arnheim suggests that perception consists in the application of perceptual categories, evoked by the structure of the configuration, to the stimulus material. If this is so, he says, the elementary processes of perception, far from being mere passive registration, are creative acts of grasping structure acts of insight, of understanding, and the distinction between percept and concept would seem to disappear. The perceptual categories are not intellectual distillates, but rather spontaneous forms of sensory perception, discovered in and applied to any object that fits them. Abstraction thus starts at the most elementary level of cognition: the acquisition of sensory data. James J. Gibson, in "Pictures, perspective, and perception" in Daedelus (Winter, 1960), pp. 216-227, presents a clear statement, from the point of view of an experimental psycholo- gist, of current confusions, and hence issues, concerning perception, focused on visual percep- tion, pictorial communication, and pictorial art. By "seeing" Gibson means not the special process of considering one's sensation or the special act of seeing in perspective, but under- standing-the having and achieving of knowledge about the world. However, visual perceiving often does not feel like knowing, but rather like an immediate acquaintance or a direct contact. What then is to be said about this difference between immediate and mediated perception? Helmut Reinold, in "The problem of musical hearing" (Reflections on art, ed. and tr. by Suzanne Langer [Baltimore, 1958], pp. 262-297, from Archivfiir Musikwissenschaft [AfMW]) maintains that today the barriers between intellect and sense are breaking down and that musical hearing is the model for perception as "true-taking," as the apprehension of that which is true from the very center of the integral individual being, i.e., something entirely subjective, yet none the less true. Invaluable material may be found in ,Vision and value, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York, vol. 1 1965, Vol. 2 1966). The relation between perceptual and conceptual whole can be explored rather than simply denied-in regard to music or to perception in general, say, of a ball or a head or a house. We effectively perceive the roundness of the ball or head or "the rest" of the house. Perception is more than the apprehension of a single aspect; it is, rather, an integration of many profiles. Perceptual isolation raises such questions as: how do we perceive a unit? how do we perceive a shape? but also: how do we perceive "something" ? The role of schemata in the comprehen- sion of musical form has been taken for granted in some cases (such as "sonata" or "fugue"), but quite unexplored in a more general sense. (In this regard it is helpful to bear in mind the distinction between 'form' in the broad sense and the narrower sense of 'formal types'. See Franz Brenn, Form in der Musik [Freiburg, 1953] and articles on "Form" in MGG and The Harvard Dictionary.) Work in other fields might illuminate this: The Neo-Kantians, especially Ernst Cassirer, have demonstrated the conceptual schemata that are brought to bear upon experience, stressing the intellectual aspect of ordering percep- tions by showing that concepts are ideal categories to which things are roughly expected to conform. Jean Piaget has described the importance of schemata in the learning process of the child. This is discussed by Irving M. Copi in "The growth of concepts" (Language, thought, and 123 culture, ed. Paul Henle [Ann Arbor, 1958]), especially as it bears on the use of the terms 'concrete' and 'abstract.' See also Heinz Werner, A comparative study of mental development (New York, 1948), passim, and Arnheim, "Perceptual abstraction and art," supra. A current view of the notion of "set" or "expectation," formulated as the "hypothesis theory" by Jerome S. Bruner and L. Postman, holds that all cognitive processes, whether they take the form of perceiving, thinking, or recalling, represent hypotheses which the organism sets up or that are evoked by the particular situation-hypotheses (in perception at least) which are largely in the background and usually unconscious. See Floyd H. Allport, Theories of perception and the concept of structure (New York, 1955), Chapters 15 and 17, for discussion and bibliography. Bruner, in "On perceptual readiness" (Readings in perception, ed. David C. Beardslee and Michael Wertheimer [Princeton, 1958], reprinted from Psychological Review, 1957), briefly reviews the problem and develops the thesis that perception involves an act of categorization, discussing the use of cues in inferring the categorial identity of a per- ceived object. E. H. Gombrich, in Art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation (Pantheon, 1956), makes much of the notion of schema from the point of view of the artist: he interprets it in the medieval sense of simile or exemplar, the pre-existing blank or formulary upon which distinctive features are entered. J. A. Fodor, in a provocative article, "Could there be a theory ofperception?" (Journal of Philosophy 63:369-380, 1966), focuses his question on Gilbert Ryle's discussion of perception (in The concept ofmind [New York, 1949]), especially the problem of how we recognize a tune. 6 Broadening of the conception of 'object' is seen today in many areas of thought. Briefly, it might be said to stem from two fundamental points made against Hume's idea of the total field of consciousness as a sum or aggregate of elements all independent of and intrinsically unrelationed to one another: 1. A questioning of the line of demarcation between physical and psychological phenomena. See especially Franz Brentano, Psychologie von empirischen Standpunkt, 1874 (the crucial chapter, tr. by D. B. Terrell as "The distinction between mental and physical phenomena," is reprinted in Realism and the background of phenomenology, ed. Roderick M. Chisholm [Glencoe, Illinois, 1960]); and Ernst Mach, Die AnalYse der Empfindungen (Jena, 1922), according to whom the difference between the physical and the psychological is not founded upon the nature of the materials concerned, but depends entirely upon the point of view from which the materials are viewed, i.e., upon the interest of the observer pursuing it in a certain direction. 2. The analysis, by Henri Bergson and WilliamJ ames, of the organization of consciousness as a thoroughgoing interpenetration and intrinsic interconnection of all mental states. For Bergson, an object is a center for the gathering up and dispersing of energy which constitutes an action (see especially Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience [Paris, 1889] tr. by F. L. Pogson as Time andfree will [London, 1910]). For James, as far as sense-perception is concerned, the facts to start from are not "simple sensations" independent of and separable from one another, but rather "sensible totals," "concreted objects" vaguely continuous with the rest of the world. (The principles of psychology [New York, 1891]). Aron Gurwitsch, in The field of consciousness (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1964), reviews the changing notions of 'object' and 'consciousness,' especially as they bear on his demonstration of a convergence between the general orientation of phenomenology and that of Gestalt theory. (Original French version: ThBorie du champ de la conscience [Paris, 1957]). Carried into the field of aesthetics, contemporary views of 'object' and 'form' tend to undercut the traditional distinction between creator and spectator in relation to art and to bypass predicaments concerning the nature of the "aesthetic" object-predicaments usually precipitated by the "musical" object, as, for example, in Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York, 1958), pp. 51£r., or Stephen C. Pepper, The basis of criticism in the arts (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 154ff. Instead of beginning with the question: does one start with experience or object, one begins with the unity of object and experience; in the phenomenological approach 124 the two are given together. But both artist and spectator make the aesthetic judgment in respect of the work, which is therefore central. Along this line of thought, I suggest two works: Eugene F. Kaelin, in An existentialist aesthetic (Madison, Wis., 1962), examines the theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, concluding that both have gone down complementary blind alleys as a result of their initial standpoints: Sartre begs the question of perceptual knowledge with his distinction between perception and imagination; Merleau-Ponty's weakness lies in his distinction between primary and secondary expression. Kaelin's study makes clear (although this is not his thesis) that the central problem in contemporary aesthetics is the relation of imagination, perception, and cognition, on the one hand, and of expression, meaning, and communication, on the other-i.e., the relation of art and knowledge. Albert Hofstadter, in Truth and art (New York and London, 1964), maintains that the ultimate aim of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline is to think the truth of art. He evaluates recent philosophies of art (especially as they bear on art as knowledge) and develops a com- prehensive theory of truth, which is applied to art as a special kind of language: the essence of art, he holds, is the articulation of human being and, ultimately, of the truth of human being, i.e., spiritual truth. In developing this essential function of art (to show the forms of human concern so that we can know them for what they are), he provides the ground for understanding the history of the arts as "a marvelous, unendingly interesting revelation of the possibilities of human existence" (p. 211). 7 John Cage's characterization of objects as "occasions for experience" is apparently borrowed from Alfred North Whitehead, who stresses the process-nature of experience. To be an actual entity, Whitehead holds, is to be an occasion of experience, which is not an undifferentiated flow but rather a transition from one occasion to another. "An occasion of experience, as an activity, is analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode is analysable into the total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which the special activity is concerned .... Thus subject and object are relative terms." (Adventures if ideas [New York, 1933], p. 178.) See also Concepts if nature (Cambridge, Mass., 1920), Chapter 7. John Dewey, in Art as experience (New York, 1934), emphasizes the on-goingness of the aesthetic experience. "An experience" is unified by a single quality which pervades it and also has form because there is dynamic organization, i.e., it takes time to complete, has growth, inception, development, fulfilment. For applications of these theories (stressing process) to music, see the following: Donald Sherburne, in "Meaning and music" (Journal if Aesthetics and Art Criticism [JAAC] 24: 393-400, 1966), analyzes the power of music in terms of Whitehead's theory of perception. Robert Erikson, in "Time-relations" (Journal if Music Theory 7: 174-193, 1963), takes as a starting point for his analysis Whitehead's "What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation." In the 18th century, Erikson concludes, time could apparently be separated from the events which took place in it. Time, for us, is unitary with events, whether in science, in art, or in ordinary life. William R. Huchinson, in "Aesthetics and musical theory: an aspect of their juncture" (JAAC 24:393-400, 1966), applies Dewey's notion of an experience to an analysis of the last movement of Brahm's Symphony No.4. Problems of musical objectivity are discussed: by H. H. Drager in "The concept of tonal body" (tr. from AfA1W 1952) in Langer, op. cit., pp. 174-185 (a comment on Handschin's Der Toncharakter). 8 The distinction between the musical composition and individual experiences of the work is extensively explored by Roman Ingarden in "Das Musikwerk" in Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst (Tiibingen, 1962). 125 9 Fundamental to the relation of artwork and thing, and indeed, to the conception of the artwork itself, is Heidegger's essay, "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes." He considers three traditional meanings of 'thing' and concludes that the work of art is not a thing, but an event: the happening of truth (i.e., the unconcealIIient of the essence of things) and thereby, the erection of a world. This is the 'work' of art, the setting-into-work of truth. By the "thingly" character of the musical work I mean that feature of the work which Heidegger opposes to world as "earth." ' Hofstadter (Truth and art), in his own development of Heidegger's crucial point, the relation of truth and art, finds Heidegger's notion of beauty as pure shining inadequate because it does not do justice to the central phenomenon of rightness and necessity in the concept of truth. See especially pp. 197ff. on the mutual adequateness of work of art as "thing" to "concept", in the sense of spiritualized will. The character of "thingliness" is especially important in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. See in Being and TWthingness (Eng. tr. by Hazel Barnes [New York, 1956]), the section on "Quality, and quantity, potentiality, instrumentality": "The fluidity, the tepidity, the bluish color, the undulating restlessness of the water in a pool are given at one stroke, each quality through the others; and it is this total interpenetration which we call the this. This fact is clearly shown by the experiences of painters, especially of Cezanne .•.. It is the form which is color and light. If the painter wants to vary anyone of these factors, the others change as well, not because they are linked by some sort oflaw but becau,se at bottom they are one and the same being." In N ausee, striking contrast is drawn between the massive viscosity of the existing world ("the sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain sounded in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with signs ••. ") and the haunting melody which, like the circle, is not absurd, does not exist, but is. 126