Everett Wesley Hall

1901-1960

Everett W. Hall: A Brief Memoir
By Thomas H. Thompson

Everett Hall came to philosophy by way of religion and geology. According to my recollection of an anecdote, he was about to be ordained when he balked at signing the Articles of Faith, even though the bishop encouraged him to do so in spite of reservations about their content. He did not sign. Hall was a deeply-principled person then and remained so throughout his academic career. A course in geology found Hall fascinated with its systems of classification and taxonomy. This experience, he said, led him to philosophy.

Hall�s approach was focused on epistemology, even though he carried that interest into problems of metaethics and of aesthetics. In epistemology, he was a dogged realist in spite of the fact that he found his convictions difficult to express in the analytic style of Rudolph Carnap and the ideal-language positivists. In two papers in Mind on the extra-linguistic reference of language, he found himself insisting that percepts and related nouns somehow reached out and literally grasped the object. Brentano was apparently an influence in this respect. He was interested as well in the proper interpretation of "fact" and in "normative fact." Hall was unique in insisting that there were objects of normative statements�even when the objects "oughted" did not exist in the usual sense. He even suggested in outline a symbolic logic for those "oughted" objects. For Hall, "oughting to exist," was a category of existence in a special sense, a sense which did not appeal to his philosophical peers.

Unlike some other analytic philosophers who dealt with philosophical problems instance by instance, Hall needed to develop a systematic philosophy akin to that of the classical pre-analytic philosophers. And that system was based on philosophical categories resulting in what Hall termed "categorial analysis."

The most complete showing of what categorial analysis means for Hall is probably his magnum opus, What is Value? This central work was followed by Our Knowledge of Fact and Value and then by Philosophical Systems. Hall completed a full outline for a work on aesthetic value, but the book was never written.

Hall as teacher contributed mightily to the core curriculum program at the University of Iowa by developing a set of syllabi and source materials for a course called "The History of Ideas." That effort showed Hall to be something of a polymath. The course comprised text and source materials for legal and political ideas, ethical ideas, scientific ideas and even economic and social ideas. As graduate assistant in that course, I experienced a rich education.

Hall, as human being, was a kindly and patient mentor, respected and admired by the graduate students with whom he worked. I found him one of the most intelligent and learned men I ever encountered.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

What is Value? New York: Humanities Press. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1952.
Modern Science and Human Values. Princeton:D. van Norstrand Company. 1956.
Philosophical Systems Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1960.
Our Knowledge of Fact and Value Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. 1961
Categorial Analysis: Selected Essays of Everett W. Hall on Philosophy


ARTICLES

"Some Meanings of Meaning in Dewey's Experience and Nature." Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXV. No. 7. (1928). 169-81.

"The Meaning of Meaning in Hollingworth's Psychology of Thought." Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXV. No. 15. (1928). 393-403.

"Of What Use Are Whitehead's Eternal Objects?" Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXII. No. 2. (1930). 29-44.

"F. H. Bradley on Idea as Image and as Meaning." Monist. Vol. XL. No. 4. (Oct. 1930). 598-620.

"Bernard Bosanquet on the Psychical and Logical Idea." Monist XLI. No. 1 (Jan. 1931). 91-116.

"Relevance and Scientific Method." Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXIX. No. 20. (Sept. 1932) 533-42

"Continuity and Identity." Monist. Vol. XLII. No. 4. (Oct. 1932) 533-63.

"Greek Philosophy." The National Encyclopedia. Colliers. (1932).

"Numerical and Qualitative Identity." Monist. Vol. XLIII. No. 1 (Jan. 1933)

"Focalized Identity." Monist Vol. XLIII. No. 2. (July 1933). 203-19.

"Time and Causality." Philosophical Review. Vol. XLIII. No. 4. (July 1934). 333-50.

"Of What Use is Metaphysics?" Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXXVI. No. 9. (April 1936). 236-45.

"The Arbitrary in Ethics." Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXXVI. No. 14. (July 1939). 379-85.

"A Realistic Theory of Distortion." Philosophical Review. Vol. XLVIII. No. 5. (Sept. 1939). 525-31.

"Is Philosophy a Science?" Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXXIX. No. 5. (Feb. 1942) 113-118.

"Some Dangers in the Use of Symbolic Logic in Psychology." Psychological Review. Vol. 49. No. 2. (March 1942) 142-169.

"Metaphysics." in Twentieth Century Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library. 1943.

"To Strengthen, Not to Compromise." Social Science. Vol. 18. No. 2. (April 1943). 61-67.

"An Ethics for Today." American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Vol. II. No. 4. (July 1943) 433-52.

"Perception as Fact and as Knowledge." Philosophical Review. Vol. LII. No. 5 (Sept. 1943). 468-89.

"The Extra-Linguistic Reference of Language." "The Object Language." MIND. Vol. LIII. N.S. No. 207. (Jul. 1943). 230-46; "II Designation of the Object Language." MIND. Vol. LIII N.S. No. 209. (Jan. 1944). 25-47.

"The Social Function of a State University." in Wartime Approaches to Liberal Education University of Iowa Publications. New Series. No. 1312 (June 1943). 26-28.

"The Philosophy of G. E. Moore." Philosophical Review Vol. LIII. No. 1. (Jan. 1944) 62-68.

"Psychology and Philosophy after the War." Journal of Higher Education. Vol. XV. No. 2. (Feb. 1944). 79-82.

"Government and the People." in Effective Living. East Lansing. Michigan. Michigan State College. 1947.

"Substance." Colliers Encyclopedia. 1949.

"On the Nature of the Predicate 'Verified'." Philosophy of Science. Vol. XIV. No. 2. (April 1947). 123-31.

"A Categorial Analysis of Value." Philosophy of Science. Vol. LVIII. No. 1. (Oct. 1947) 51-56.

"The Metaphysics of Logic." Philosophical Review Vol.LVIII. No. 1. (Jan. 1949). 16-25.

"Introduction to the History of Ideas at Iowa." in Humanities in General Education. ed. E. J. McGrath. William C. Brown Company. Dubuque. 1949. "The 'Proof' of Utility in Bentham and Mill." Ethics. Vol. LX. No. 1. (Oct. 1949). 1-18.

"On Describing Describing." MIND Vol. LXII. N.S. No. 247. (July 1953) 375-78.

"Practical Reason(s) and the Deadlock in Ethics." MIND. Vol. LXIV. N.S. No.235 (July 1955). 319-32.

"Ghosts and Categorial Mistakes." Philosophical Studies. Vol. VII. Nos. 1-2. (Jan-Feb 1956) 1-6.

"Further Words on 'Ought'." Philosophical Studies. Vol. VII. No. 5. (Oct. 1956) 74-78.

"Logical Subjects and Physical Objects." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Vol. XVII. No. 4. (June 1957) 478-82.

"Justice as Fairness: A Modernized Version of the Social Contract." Journal of Philosophy Vol. LIV. No. 22. (Oct 1957) 662-70.

"What Is It a Philosopher Does." Lectures in the Humanities: Thirteenth Series. University of North Carolina Bulletin. Vol. XXXVII. No. 4. (Nov. 1957) 5-18.

"Hochberg on What Is 'Fitting' for Ewing and Hall." MIND. Vol. LXVII. N.S. No. 265. (Jan 1958) 104-106.

"Existential Normatives." Journal of Philosophy. Vol. LV. No. 2. (Jan 1958) 75-77.

"The Adequacy of a Neurological Theory of Perception." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Vol. XX. No. 1. (Sept 1959) 75-84.

"Speculation on a Logical Lapse of Kurt Baier." Philosophical Studies. Vol. XI. Nos. 1-2 (Jan-Feb 1960) 7-10.

"Philosophy as Categorial Analysis." Basis of the Contemporary Philosophy: Essays in Philosophical Analysis. Vol. 5. edited by Seizi Uyeda. Waseda U. Press. Tokyo (1960)

"Some Fundamentals of Ethics." Hospital Administration Vol. V. No. 2. (Spring 1960) 22-33.

"My Possession of My Experience." Philosophical Studies Vol. XIII. No. 4. (June 1962) 59-62.

OF RELATED INTEREST

Southern Journal of Philosophy, festschrift edition including essays by Wilfrid Sellars, Charles Baylis, Romane Clark, John Dreher, E. M. Adams, Thomas Thompson, Paul Welsh, Henry W. Johnson Jr., and Curtis Booth.

Carnap, Rudolf, �Hall and Bergmann on Semantics,� Mind, N.S. 54 (1945): 148-155.

Hochberg, H. "'Fitting' as a Semantical Predicate." Mind Vol. LXV. 1956. pp.530-533.

Sellars, Wilfrid, �The Intentional Realism of Everett Hall,� in Philosophical Perspectives by Wilfrid Sellars, (Springfield 1967): 209-228, originally published in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 4 (1966).



MEMORIAL TO EVERETT HALL (1960)
by M. T. Van Hecke, Richard P. Calhoon, E. M. Adams

The sudden death of Everett Wesley Hall, Kenan Professor and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy in the University of North Carolina, on June 17, 1960, at the age of fifty-nine, was a profound loss to the Department of Philosophy, to the University, and to the world of scholarship. He was at the peak of his powers and attainments. He never knew decline. His whole life was one of steady progress toward higher achievements, with the final decade the period of greatest fruition. During the last months he seemed to intimate friends to feel that he had reached his goal, that he was at the moment of fulfillment, that he had completed what he had worked from the beginning to accomplish. He seemed to feel a quiet but deep satisfaction. He was what Aristotle would have called a happy man.

Everett was the youngest of six children of the Reverend Walter A. Hall, a Methodist minister, and Mathilda Carhart Hall. He was born on April 24, 1901, in Janesville, Wisconsin. After attending the public schools of Fond du Lac, he entered Lawrence College in Appleton, where he obtained the A.B. degree (summa cum laude) in 1923 and the M.A. degree in 1925. He received the Ph.D degree with a major in philosophy and a minor in psychology from Cornell University in 1929, where he had been a Sage Fellow in Philosophy in 1923-24 and again in 1928-1929. In the interim years, he was a pastor of a Methodist church in northern Wisconsin for one year (1924-1925), his original intention having been to follow his father in the Methodist ministry. The following year he returned to his alma mater where he remained as Instructor in Philosophy and Psychology for three years (1925-28). During the summers of 1927 and 1928 he was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Chicago.

On August 26, 1924, he married Charlotte Braatz, whom he had met as a student at Lawrence College.

Everett and Charlotte Hall (1959)

She was a constant source of strength and happiness for him through the years. Three sons were born to them: David, in 1931, who holds the A.B. degree from the University of Iowa and the M.A. degree in Library Science from the University of North Carolina and is now a librarian Science from the University of North Carolina and is now a librarian in the Milwaukee Public Library; Donald, in 1935, who holds the B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina and is now an advanced graduate student in zoology at the University of Michigan; and Richard, in 1937, who holds the B.A. degree from Oberlin and is now doing graduate work in philosophy at Princeton.

After receiving the Ph.D. degree, Dr. Hall taught in several universities. He was Instructor in Philosophy, University of Chicago, 1929-31; Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, 1931-33; Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University, 1933-41; Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Department, The State University of Iowa, 1941-1952; and Kenan Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Department, University of North Carolina, 1952 until his death. He held visiting appointments at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 1937, at Northwestern University in the summer of 1956, and at the University of of Southern California in the summer of 1958. During 1958-59, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in Philosophy at Kyoto University, Japan.

Dr. Hall was a member of Phi Beta Kappa (to which he was elected as a junior in college), Tau Kappa Alpha, the Iowa Philosophical Society, the North Carolina Philosophical Society, the Southern Society for Philosophy of Psychology, the American Philosophical Association, the Mind Association, and the Aristotelian Society. He served one term as President of the North Carolina Philosophical Society, one term on the Council of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and in the American Philosophical Association he was at various times Secretary-Treasurer of the Pacific Division, chairman of the Committee on Philosophy in Higher Education in the Western Division, a member of the Executive Committee of the Eastern Division and a member of the Publication committee.

He always took an active part in the life of his university. At Chapel Hill he served on more than a score of boards and committees, chairing a number of them. His sound judgment and good sense were respected by his colleagues.

His activities were not restricted to the academic world. Wherever he lived, he found a place in a local church. He had the gift of an excellent voice, and he enjoyed music. He gave generously of his time and his talent to his church choir. In Chapel Hill, he was a leader in the life of the Community Church. At Iowa, during and after World War II, he participated in and moderated a radio round-table discussion on the background of the public problems of the day. He loved sailing and was a master of the art. As Commodore of the Ephrim Yacht Club, Ephrim, Wisconsin, where he spent many summers, he enjoyed teaching young people how to sail. He had a sensitive social conscience, which at times spurred him into action. But philosophy was his cause and he never allowed anything else seriously to distract him from his main purpose.

Dr. Hall was both an exciting teacher and an original philosopher. The classroom was always a challenge to him. He enjoyed teaching and was stimulated by it. His own deep concern and enthusiasm animated the class. There were lively exchanges as he and his students probed together. He would not tolerate loose thinking. It had to be relevant and to the point. but a new idea excited him and he would develop its significance and implications with a sparkling delight. His Socratic probing awakened students from their dogmatic slumbers and opened up for them a new, fascinating field of inquiry and dimension of life.

He was the author of four books and more than forty articles, and was the Editor of the Science Source Book Series for the Harvard University Press. His chief contributions are in the fields of value theory, epistemology, and philosophic method.

No one has dealt with the problem of value with greater clarity and deeper understanding. In Modern Science and Human Values (Van Norstrand, 1956), he traces the development of the separation of fact and value in modern thought from the Middle ages to the present in what is one of the most penetrating analyses of our culture ever written. In What is Value (Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Humanities Press, 1952), he uses the new techniques of linguistic analysis to clarify and to argue for an original form of value realism. It has been widely praised as a model for philosophical analysis. It combines the clarity and rigor of a linguistic analyst and the insight of a profound metaphysician. In the forthcoming book, Epistemology of Fact and Value (to be published by the University of North Carolina Press. 1961) which he had just completed at the time of his death, Dr. Hall argues for an intentionalistic empiricism in the realms of both fact and value. It opens up a way of avoiding the subjectivism and skepticism which have plagued the modern mind in both areas. There three books constitute the most thorough, comprehensive, and perceptive study ever made by one man in the field of value theory.

AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD HALL


Richard Hall

It is not unusual while researching an historical figure to reach an impasse concerning a seemingly trivial fact. Such was the case in regard to Hall's place of birth (Janesville, Wisconsin). But just as the dark began to fall on any prospect discovering where Hall was born, I was informed by Claire Miller and Geoff Sayre-McCord of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that Everett Hall had a living son who in fact was a philosopher himself! He had just retired and moved to Ohio where his wife continues to teach. I was provided his email address and attempted to contact Richard Hall, Everett's philosopher son. As things would unfold, I experienced the delight that only an historian can feel in learning facts from a dependable source; facts which one day might be forgotten and which have the potential for illuminating a critical period in American philosophy; facts which coming from the source are just "matter of factish," but facts which illuminate and put into perspective details of complex events. As it turned out, Richard Hall had an interesting story of his own and some of it is not only worth the telling here but is important for getting a picture of our primary subject.

Richard Hall was born in 1937 and in his youth acquired an interest in physics. Like Carnap, he was less than happy with the required lab work and was brought to philosophy by a persistent interest in theory and the opportunity to pursue theory, more or less, without inhibition. While an undergraduate at Oberlin, he studied under Roger Buck (a philosopher whose work on causation came to be internationally recognized) about whom he had high praise. Following his stay at Oberlin, Richard moved on to Princeton to do graduate work. There he discovered Paul Benacerraf, who became famous for discouraging any attempt at defining numbers, as well as other Princeton luminaries such as Carl Hempel and Hilary Putnam. His dissertation was in philosophy of mathematics, wherein he took a sympathetic view of the empirical treatment of mathematics. One might gather that, being in philosophy, Richard would have learned a good deal of the inner goings having to do with university politics. Everett Hall had had a rather a "complex" relation to Gustav Bergmann - a philosopher Hall was responsible for bringing to the University of Iowa during the early years of its then small graduate department in philosophy. But Richard was unfamiliar with most of the details.

At home, Richard said, his father never spoke of his professional life at the university; not even over the supper table. The fact is that there were problems in Hall's relationship to Bergmann. Everett saw fit to depart for North Carolina in 1952. Aside from the relationship between Hall and Bergmann as colleagues, these two enjoyed a philosophical interaction, one that will surely pique the curiosity of any future historian of American philosophy. This is evident to anyone who has read the works of both philosophers. At the University of North Carolina, Hall would come to enjoy the company of E. M. Adams and would continue to work productively to the end. Richard mentioned a portrait of Hall that hangs in the seminar room of the philosophy department of the University of North Carolina, and for those of you who happened to be there it is surely worth the viewing. I am going to forego mention here of facts that are brought out in the Memorial included on this web page, such as Everett's magnificent voice. It might be added, however, that, according to Richard, his father performed the bass solo in Mozart's Requiem as well as Handel's Messiah. In addition, he had a love of sailing that he passed on to his children and others besides. Richard remarks that his father was a very hard worker. This is, I think, particularly evident in What is Value? where the lighter style that we find in other works, such as Philosophical Systems is absent. It should, also, be mentioned that Hall had an enormous social conscience which led him, like so many young intellectuals of the thirties, to socialism. Even though Everett was soft spoken about matters of religion (serving, briefly, as a minister), upon his arrival at North Carolina he was so impresssed by the strong "civil rights and integrationist principles" of the Community Church in Chapel Hill that he and the family joined in 1952. This was at a time when courage was required to stand up for such beliefs.

Although, at the time of his death, he had already been diagnosed as having a cardiac condition, his death came suddenly. His wife would pass away in 1985. Finally, a word or two of my own.

There are two legacies that Everett has left us. First, there is the legacy of his philosophy which will, most likely, either be rediscovered or "passed over in silence." One finds the impress of his conceptualizations in many places, such as Fodor's notion of a "language of thought," which I believe Hall's work anticipates in a significant way. There is also his "intentional realism," which will not go away, but will exercise some continued influence, simply because it expresses a fundamental position that must be included in any complete examination of the subject (as Sellars would, I believe, attest). But there is another legacy, one which by articulating shows the cards of one historian who would like to keep such things as close to his heart as possible.

For a period, roughly, between 1941 (the year of Hall's arrival at the University of Iowa), and 1974 American philosophy can be viewed as a tale of two schools of philosophy. One, was that of Wittgenstein's and work leading up to and including the Philosophical Investigations; the other was that of radical realism - the idea that philosophy has little to do with how we "do things with words," but rather what words we are to use in resolving ontological  issues. In this writer's opinion, the first school, was best represented during many of these years by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago; the other came to be identified with the University of Iowa. The former was preoccupied with language; the latter with the "world." Everett Hall was a realist in philosophy. His presence would define the character of the University of Iowa for years to come. Gustav Bergmann, notwithstanding his feuds with Hall, would take up realism, becoming perhaps the most radical realist of the period - firmly grounded in the Viennese "Act" tradition in philosophy of mind and what he professed to be "the metaphysics of logical positivism." Everett Hall is representative of American culture at its finest. The more we learn about him the more he will be missed, even by those who never knew him.



AN ESSAY BY THOMAS H. THOMPSON

Hist-Analytic is most pleased to include this essay on an unpublished manuscript on aesthetics by Thomas H. Thompson without whom this webpage devoted to Hall would not have been possible. If one "clicks" his name just beneath the photo, below, which upon request he generously provided, an interesting description of an important period in American intellectual history from his unique perspective should appear. The Southern Journal of Philosophy has been very accommodating in seeing to it that the following philosophically significant document is included in this website. Thompson's appreciation of Hall's philosophy is evident as he carefully maneuvers through issues of considerable delicacy unfolding a view of aesthetics that is as novel as it is deep.


Thomas H. Thompson

Hall's Analysis of Aesthetic Value
Southern Journal of Philosophy* Fall, 1966

The reader of Everett Hall's published works will find only a few skimpy references to aesthetics.1 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 of Hall's aesthetics derives must needs be unpublished manuscript material.2 Fortunately, for our expository purpose in this paper, the notes are not casual jottings. The notebooks for a proposed book on aesthetics, when transcribed, run to some thirty closely-typed pages, essentially complete, and outlined with painstaking attention to the inter-relations of basic and subordinate emphases.
    While the main purpose of this essay is to present Hall's aesthetics in enough detail to make its basic blueprint visible, still we should remind ourselves that Everett Hall is, first and foremost, a systematic philosopher. The axiological parent of the notebooks that comprise the intended An Analysis of Aesthetic Value is What is Value? And the epistemological cousin is Our Knowledge of Fact and Value .The offspring, aesthetics, reveals its metaphysical genealogy in practically every detail of its philosophical anatomy. Though it is just possible that Hall's work in aesthetics could be made to stand alone, it could only be forced to do so by the inclusion of much that would come very close to repetition of relevant portions of the two basic works just mentioned. At any rate, the summary I am about to give will not make the attempt to transform Hall's aesthetics into a self-sufficient entity. What I shall describe will presume an acquaintance with the basic framework of Hall's axiology.
    Even so, it may not be amiss to lay down in advance the guidelines of Hall's systematic orientation as these relate to his aesthetics. The brevity of the memorandum I am about to offer, I should add, makes for a kind of dogmatic certainty with respect to these matters which is badly out of keeping with the spirit of the system as a whole.
    The basic form of value-judgment in aesthetics as in ethics is deontological and singular. Aesthetic value-predicates when they occur in ordinary talk are translatable into clearer normative equivalents which exclude such apparent predication of alleged aesthetic qualities. Aesthetic value-judgments, moreover, do not participate in creating aesthetic value; they discover it or pick it out as ways in which certain facts are - or could be - exemplified. Standing behind our talk about art is aesthetic emotions, which themselves "talk" about aesthetic value out there in the world. But aesthetic value is not "there" in the way that the facts which aesthetic judgments and their objects intend to refer to and embrace, respectively, are there. Thus there can be aesthetic value when the fitting factual circumstances fail in part or as a whole to be actually exemplified.
    Everything summarized so far could just as well be applied to ethics as to aesthetics. The differences between the two forms of value emerge when the analysis is under way in depth. Indeed, the fact that so much can be said that refers indifferently either to ethics or aesthetics is an important and characteristic feature of Hall's axiology. What remains to be done to distinguish

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aesthetic experiences from generic valuation is chiefly to inspect the finer structure of the emotions that assert aesthetic objects to be valuable with the aim in view of capturing, via multiple distinctions, the nature of the particular variety of emotion that functions in aesthetic experience. It goes without saying that the "inspection" of emotions just mentioned is part of a categorical rather than an empirical analysis, although, in the nature of the case, there is somewhat more reliance on a kind of introspectionistic, structural psychology than is typical for Hall's philosophizing.
    Once the discussion of the nature and structure of emotions is refined sufficiently to exhibit the design of aesthetic experience, the question of the nature of the referent of such experience presents itself. Hall is no agnostic with respect to aesthetic objects, though, as we shall see, he admits that they are peculiar - even anomalous - existences. When they do literally exist, they embrace the mental and the material in a queer way. And, if this were not oddity enough, they are somehow "there" when they (or parts of them) fail to exist at all. Finally, we encounter questions that come to the aesthetician largely from the activity of art critics. Treated in the notebooks under the heading of "Aesthetic Excellence" are aesthetically directed versions of Hall's criticism of the value-predicative approach as well as a coherence theory of the legitimacy of aesthetic judgments. In what follows, our attention will be directed only upon a few major emphases having to do with aesthetic value "laws" and the relation of the aesthetic to the non-aesthetic, particularly the moral.

I
Aesthetic Emotions. The aesthetic experience is to be analyzed by analyzing the design of the emotions that enter into creation and appreciation of art is for Hall a redundancy. Commonsense finds emotions of some sort a factor inherent to art. The problem for the analytic aesthetician is that of peeling away the various and sundry sorts of emotion until that species which characterizes aesthetic experience stands revealed 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 built up of several percepts). In the sense under examination, an emotion is complex if it contains emotions as parts of the main emotion. By identifying the aesthetic emotion as already complex, Hall, in effect, has disposed of the formalist contention that the aesthetic emotion is an indivisibly simple feeling peculiarly aimed toward works of art. Though there are relatively simple emotions - likes, dislikes, or indifferences - toward sensory patterns, these emotions are not generally regarded as all that may be involved in a full-fledged aesthetic experience. Moreover, such simple likes or dislikes are rarely stable enough to allow them to carry the epistemological significance which Hall's whole value-system assigns to emotions. Now, if it be granted that aesthetic emotions are analyzable as complex, there is the point that any emotion at all is complex in being a perceptual aggregate; this has no direct aesthetic relevance. And an emotion may be complex by way of ambivalence, as when one loves and hates the same person (though not in the same respect) or when one is both amused and irritated at the antics of a child.
    We begin to close in on the kind of emotion necessary for the occurrence of aesthetic experience when we observe that some complex emotions have other emotions as objects of intention or reference. The emotion serving as the object of the main emotion may either be enclosed within, or fall outside, the main emotion. I feel disgust toward my fear of appearing on the stage. Or

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I may be irritated with someone's feeling of sympathy toward my feeling of stage fright. It is important here that the fact that emotions have causes not be confused with the reference of such emotions. Someone's anxiously expressed concern may cause me to be irritated, but my irritation additionally intends as its semantical object the very sympathy felt by the other.
    These distinctions are then marked by some special terminology. A secondary emotion is an emotion having another emotion as its object (e.g. my disgust at my stage fright). The secondary emotion's object is an "object emotion" (my fright). That part of the secondary emotion not composed of the object-emotion is an "emotively-directed" emotion (my disgust). Thus a 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 aesthetic in character. Some additional distinctions are required. On Hall's analysis, this differentiation is supplied by the discrimination of a form of secondary emotion, illustrated by cases wherein the secondary emotion encloses the object-emotion within itself. Now the secondary emotion may be called a "distancing emotion," e.g., my feeling of sympathy. While guilt about my irritation is plainly a complex emotion, emotions of this kind should be sharply distinguished from ambivalent emotions, which, in terms of our example, would be my simultaneous irritation at and gratitude for the sympathy felt by another for my stage fright. Put abstractly, then, a distancing emotion is a compound of an emotively-directed emotion and its self-contained object emotion, while a merely ambivalent emotion is a complex emotion that contains two opposing emotions both directed toward the object of the complex emotion.
    The manner of inclusion of the object-emotion in the distancing emotion is crucial for the aesthetic system being developed. There are two ways in which this inclusion can be accomplished. First, the object-emotion of a distancing emotion may be felt simply as privately mine, as in the case of my feeling of disgust for my stage fright. But, second, the object-emotion of a distancing emotion - term it the distanced emotion - may be "shared" with others. That is, it may be "shared" with others. That is, it may be felt to be qualitatively similar to another's emotion, as in mutual sorrow. And, whether or not it happens to be felt as qualitatively similar to another's emotion it still may be "shared" in the sense that emotively directed sympathy may be directed to sorrow of someone over the death of another about whom I also feel sorry. It is rather important to note here that the "sharing" of emotion that may take place with the distancing emotion does not involve some direct awareness of, or comparison between the emotions of other people and my own. To "share" in the present sense is merely to feel a qualitative or intentional likeness. If, by chance, the emotions mutually felt should happen to be precisely similar, this would not fill the bill. This would be the case, for example, if you and I were both to experience emotions of repulsion only numerically different in response to Elvis Presley but I am unaware that you exist.
    As we would expect from Bullough's classical account of the matter, a distanced emotion is different from its non-distanced counterpart in that the tendency toward overt action is much diminished; seen from within, the volitional component of the emotion feels less compelling. This comes about by means of the inhibitions supplied by the distancing emotion's somatic component. The stronger this component is in relation to the strength of the somatic factor of the distanced emotion, the greater is the distancing effect. Or, to

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pick up the previous example, the greater the intensity of my disgust at my reprehensible stage fright, the less I am inclined obviously to tremble before my audience. It should be pointed out that a distanced emotion may, though highly distanced, still be a powerful and intense feeling. What is reduced by distancing is the readiness to engage in overt action, not the confused perception of large muscular involvement which gives the emotion its tone or flavor. Though I still may be very jittery I am not as likely, thanks to my intense disgust, to give myself away before the audience.
    As the choice of example so far illustrates, not all distancing emotions are aesthetic emotions, but aesthetic emotions are always distancing. What more do we require to qualify a distancing emotion as an instance of aesthetic experience? Here commonsense in aesthetic matters seems to demand that the aesthetic emotion be doubly intentional. It is reflexive upon the distanced emotion and yet, at the same time, it grasps an external thing. We say that the artist has technical skill, but lacks feeling. Or we say of some unaesthetic appreciator that he fails to grasp the feeling of the artist. Clearly, this suggests that the object of an aesthetic emotion 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. It would seem odd indeed to maintain that complete aesthetic experiences could be had by sharing the feelings of artists without any references to physical surfaces. Thus it seems that we must find the final differentia of aesthetic emotions in the requirement that this emotion be distanced emotion whose object-emotion is felt to stand in a "relation" of appropriateness to the sensory surface of some physical thing. In order to mark the difference between this peculiar type of distancing and psychic distancing in general, it may be termed "aesthetic distancing."
    The sensory surfaces just mentioned are not, strictly, parts of aesthetic experience, but objects of aesthetic experience (the intentional parts of the aesthetic emotion are perceptions). While in the simplest cases of aesthesis the surfaces are just the superfices of physical objects, more often the surfaces are just the superfices of physical objects, more often the surface is complex - as in the case of representational art. In the more complex cases, there are always to be found not just one, but several aesthetic surfaces juxtaposed. There is in poetry, for example, the primary surface of the perceived sound, but in addition a secondary surface composed of the imagined things and events. The objects or events represented are taken, somehow to exemplify the very properties exhibited by the primary surface. The complexity of surface of representational graphic art is similar, though as representation approaches illusionism, the complexity tends to fade away.
    For Hall there is no distinguished group of emotions that is especially suitable for aesthetic distancing. Any may serve; in works of art that are designed for narrow and highly-sophisticated audiences, the object-emotions may themselves be secondary or even distancing emotions. But, notably, it is in the character of the object-emotions that we can begin to analyze the relations of the moral to the aesthetic. More often than not the object-emotions are morally flavored emotions - but only "flavored," since the tendency toward action that would qualify them are robustly moral is inhibited by the inclusion of the object-emotion in the distancing emotion. Not that non-moral object-emotion are never to be found in art (we can hardly exclude Voltaire and Gilbert and Sullivan); humor may be central. But even here some element of parody or irony almost inevitably reintroduces a tincture of moralism. What is clear, incomplete as this analysis is,

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is that Hall makes morality a subordinate note in the aesthetic emotion that contains it.
    The common pattern of aesthetic emotions is importantly differentiated, finally, into the feelings appropriately had by the artist and by the spectator. But it should be added that this differentiation is not complete, since aesthetic emotions can occur when there is no artist (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 we can say that the spectator's experience differs from the artist's in that it typically shows less sensitivity to the materials and to the difficulutlties of manipulating them, as well as less ego-involvement. Appreciation also involves an admiration for the technical skill of the artist, not just as isolated technical tricks, but as enabling the artist to organize the sensory surfaces in a way appropriate to the feeling expressed through them. And, finally, the spectator comes to art with a sense of discovery which stands in contrast to the artist's creativity. The artist's experience - which, be it noted, is not continually aesthetic - has more of what is less in the spectator's appreciative experience. Thus the artist has more sense of the materials and their possibilities, more ego-involvement, and so on. But the artist, additionally, is imbued with the sense of a public as potential appreciators of his work and this moves him to work up the object-emotions into the sharable form. The awareness 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 double object of the distancing emotion when aesthetic - that blend of the mental and physical words composed of an aesthetic surface and the distanced object-emotion of an aesthetic emotion.

II

Aesthetic Objects. The basic problem of this section is the mode of being of the Janus-faced object which is the referent of aesthetic emotion; it looks toward the spectator's (or the artist's) emotion on the one hand, and, on the other hand, toward the sensory surface. How can these be merged? For plainly physical things and their properties do not experience emotions; we cannot literally mean that "the music is sad." In order to avoid pathetic fallacies, we should not say that any distanced emotion is "in" a sensory surface. Only human beings, commonsensically, can entertain emotions. Even if the bare logical possibility of floating, disembodied emotions were brought in to unite with physical surfaces, we would get no help since the occurrence of the artist's or the spectator's aesthetic experience would require that the emotions be drawn into that experience. The dualism would be unresolved. Nor does nature contain aesthetically-distanced emotions; we can appreciate natural surfaces aesthetically without the necessity of anthropomorphizing. Nor can we locate the aesthetically distanced emotion in the performers of works of art. Not merely do some arts require no performance, but performers are able to realize works of art very competently without feeling distanced emotions. Finally, we cannot constitute the aesthetic object by blending the artist's distanced emotions with the aesthetic surface he creates, for the obvious reason that works of art whose authors are deceased suffer no diminution of their possible inclusion in aesthetic objects.
    Thus it seems that we must say that the spectator has the emotion, while

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    the surface to which it is appropriate stands ineluctably outside him. Were one to argue that the spectator's experience contains the surface as well as the emotion, making the entire aesthetic object internal to his experience, Hall's intentionalism with respect to percepts would have to be abandoned as would the commonsensical conviction that different appreciators can view the same aesthetic 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 the aesthetic object?
    This question, as it turns out, has no single answer, rather an ensemble of suggested answers. The first suggestion is that the ontological unity of aesthetic objects be given up in favor of a distinction between the "work of art" and an aesthetic object proper. The words "work of art" seem to function typically in common usage as a name for the physical product of artistic skill (no doubt with an aura of favorable evaluation as well). Ignoring the associated positive valuation, then, works of art usually denote physical things or physical events - paintings or statues, musical or theoretical performances. As noted already, this reference is not exclusively physical; in the case of the literary work of art, e.g., reference may also occur to secondary surfaces which are the creatively imagined events. Ignoring such secondary intentions, the primary reference to physical things or events poses no problem of unity, since the painting or the statue has the unity of a particular (it can be weighed and crated) and the instance of performance, though hardly weighable, can be located in space and time. The point of distinguishing the work of art now appears in the admonition that the work of art not be confused with the aesthetic object proper. The best way to justify this terminology is to point out that there may be aesthetic objects when there are no works of art, as in aesthetic experience of nature. And, when works of art are associated with aesthetic experience, they are never the total referent of the emotion, but only a portion thereof. There is no doubt that this distinction involves a clarification, not just an outright reflection, of commonsense talk about art. But the decision to split the object of aesthetic reference derives from commonsense, Hall argues, since commonsense rejects its own unclarities when these are made manifest. It follows from this distinction, then, that one 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 opposition with several familiar points of view about aesthetic objects. Hall denies any position that would analyze the aesthetic object. Hall denies any position that would analyze the aesthetic object as a symbol of some kind. Though symbols occur within the aesthetic object, both as associated with secondary aesthetic surfaces and in the distanced emotion, nevertheless the aesthetic object qua aesthetic is an object of intention, not itself intentional.
    Now should it be said that "Art is expression." Such a phrase is highly misleading, since Hall would claim that we should say not that the work of art expresses the emotion, but rather that the distancing emotion feels the object emotion's appropriateness to the sensory superfices 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 refer to or intend the object-emotion of the aesthetic emotion; obviously, then, it cannot say about the object of the object-emotion what the object-emotion says.
    Nor is the relation of appropriateness between emotion and surface typically one of structural isomorphism. Though it may be so on occasion, when it does occur 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 of emotion. It is the case, rather, that the aesthetic object embraces or contains the distanced emotion, the communicability being covered under the presumption of shared emotion which underlies the object's being the enduring subject of several different aesthetic experiences.
    In what ways may an aesthetic object fail to exist? The answer to this question sheds considerable light on the detail of Hall's version of the peculiar character of the aesthetic object as a value, not just as an existent. As we have said, the aesthetic experience has an aesthetic object as its intention. The sheer remarking of this intentionality of the emotion's reference to the surface is one kind of answer to the question of the ontological unity of the object. It is a unity in the sense that the two aspects melt together to make up a single value. But the value-unity just referred to does not, typically or necessarily, also constitute an existential unity. As readers 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 (non-assertively) intend existence. Does this imply that aesthetic value is to be found in the valuableness of a unified existent object? It does not, The aesthetic object is a single value, which, if it happens to exist, is not a singly existent thing.
    There are, therefore, two ways in which aesthetic objects may fail to exist. One is when the aesthetic surface does not exist - as in a merely projected work of art. Another is when the appropriately distanced object-emotion does not exist. The work of art may be there, but the aesthetic object may be absent if no aesthetically distanced emotions are occurring which envelop the superfices of the object. Or an emotion appropriate to the work of art may occur but fail to be aesthetically distanced, again preventing the realization of an aesthetic object.
    Certain apparent anomalies that are characteristic of Hall's general position in value theory must be kept in mind as we review his aesthetics. Particularly is this true with respect to the aesthetic object. Since this object is a value, and not just a particular existent thing, an appreciator may legitimately value an aesthetic object which - as we have seen above - fails to exist. And, moreover, there may be such a value without any experience of it. That this need not clutter Hall's account with Meinongian possibilities is shown (though not with perfect accuracy) in the paradigm of the 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." This fits with commonsense in its consideration of a work of art not yet physically realized - at that moment it would be appropriate that it exist. Or in considering an undiscovered, and thereby unappreciated work of art, it would be appropriate that aesthetic emotions not yet in existence would, if they were to exist, constitute, with it, an aesthetic object. But the best illustration is in the reference of art critics to actual works of art that would be more appropriate - aesthetically better - if they were (though they are in fact not) different in this or that respect.
    Hall next suggests a classification of aesthetic objects intended to show the fruitful applicability of his analysis to the major kinds of art. The simplest aesthetic objects are those which have no secondary aesthetic surfaces and in which the object-emotions are simple (though distanced) likes or dislikes for the qualities and relations of the surface. Some recent abstract painting may serve as an example. At a half-step remove from this pattern, the sincerity of the artist's use of physical materials is sensed as appropriate by the object-

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emotion, with the sensory surface accentuating rather than softening this emphasis. Distancing is here shown by comparing a feeling for the artist's sincerity in the use of his materials with sheer admiration for his technical skill in manipulating them. A full step away from the simplest aesthetic objects is taken when secondary surfaces enter the aesthetic object, as in physically representational art. Again, something more than sheer skill in imitation is called for if the experience is to be aesthetic. This something more is very often the human emotions suggested by the represented content. Culturally symbolic art forms a fourth classification, recognizable from the disparity of primary and secondary aesthetic surfaces and also from the fading importance of the secondary surface. In culturally symbolic art, the primary surface functions mainly to bring up, without clearly focusing, a mass of attitudes associated in the culture with the symbols, e.g., the Lamb in early Christian painting. Distancing is relabeled in this genre by the need to observe appropriateness of the symbol and the symbolized subject to the object-emotions. Hence, the fat, smiling Buddha as fitting Eastern religions of serenity and contentment as contrasted to the lean, agonized Christ as befitting Western religious attitudes. A fifth class of aesthetic objects is titled "subjective art." This category is marked by the tendency to present the secondary surface of dreams or fantasy from which it derives. Surrealistic art is the leading example, and it should be noted that distancing is especially difficult to maintain; the appreciator tends either to overdistance, in the case of more subtle surrealistic art, and hence to remain unaesthetic, or else he recognizes the import of the represented experience and underdistances by simply re-experiencing the content, again non-aesthetically. It must be a rare viewer who does not violently underdistance the moment in Dali's surrealistic movie when the slightly stylized eyeball is slit with the razor. The sixth and final, class is metaphorical art. Hall intends "metaphorical" to function here as a broadly descriptive term embracing more than just the arts of literature. Whenever there is a common pattern embodied in different sensory materials, and when the primary surface functions to produce, imaginatively, the various secondary surfaces, all the surfaces functioning not only to elicit but also to distance the emotion, the art is metaphorical.

III

Aesthetic Excellence. Hall devotes a fair amount of space in the notebooks to the justification of his choice of the term "excellence" as the preferred way of referring to the value of a work of art as a component of an aesthetic object. This analysis is not summarized here since it follows along the same lines as the parallel analysis of apparently predicative value terms in What Is Value? Suffice it to say that the conclusion is that aesthetic value is not a zero-level property or relation, nor is it one of higher degree. Instead we see once more, by a sort of dovetailing of categorial analyses, that aesthetic valuation refers to the appropriate combination of the components of an aesthetic object. It is just this appropriateness which is aesthetic excellence.
    Nor will the summary of this section concern itself with the "verification" or "justification" of aesthetic value judgments. Readers of Our Knowledge of Fact and Value will recollect that Hall develops and defends a coherence theory of justification for value assertions in general; this analysis is taken over without substantial modification from earlier treatment.
    We will, however, attend to four emphases 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 the relative status of aesthetic and moral values. How deeply does the close relation between these two forms of value penetrate? The answer, though given somewhat 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 whose existence is intentionally asserted - is the same whether the value be aesthetic or moral. The difference between aesthetic and moral value is found in the characteristics of "oughted" facts. The moral ought, roughly speaking, is analyzed as a fitness of voluntary actions to situations. The aesthetic ought is a fitness of sensory surfaces to certain emotions.
    From this treatment of the relation of the moral and the aesthetic it is plain that Hall's essentialism brings him into serious conflict with those aestheticians and critics who stress the uniqueness of aesthetic value. Croce, for example, contends that aesthetic apprehension is of a bare particular thing, which individual thing, it is implied, cannot legitimately be made the object of any generalized judgment whatever. The linguistic informalists, for quite different reasons, place an equal stress on the uniqueness of works of art. Hall, for his part, freely admits that any factual complex is unique, and, hence, the complex of superficial external facts that are the objects of aesthetic emotions as well as the actually occurring emotions themselves are unique - in the sense that they are unrepeatable clusters of occurents. But this uniqueness cannot be definitive of aesthetic excellence, for the reasons that both excellent and poor words are similarly unique. But uniqueness, in spite of its incapacity to constitute aesthetic worth, may still be a necessary condition for it. What is appropriate in the aesthetic object is always that such-and-such distanced emotions together with such-and-such aesthetic surfaces actually occur - in their unique, unrepetitive total.
    Thus Hall does, in one sense, admit the uniqueness of aesthetic objects. The question remains, does this admission of uniqueness pose an irresoluble problem for a position which purports to give an account of the generalized characteristics of aesthetic value? Hall believes that his brand of essentialism has to concede no more difficulty with uniqueness than with any other concept. The analysis begins by locating the trouble in the very concept of a concept. Already this is of something not unique, and ironically it seems to let uniqueness escape in the very attempt to grasp hold of it. But the same can be said of any concept whatever. As an abstraction, it refers to, without simultaneously being a case of, what it is about. The concept, orange, is not orange-colored, but is, rather, quite immune to any predication of color. Is there something unique about the concept of uniqueness? While orange subsumes an indefinitely large class of particular oranges and is hence conceptualizable, to speak of uniqueness being instantiated seems odd. The oddness of speaking of particular case of the universal, uniqueness, may seem to be that each uniqueness just is itself and not another thing. But Hall now claims that such talk about the uniqueness of uniqueness is thoroughly confused. Taken seriously it would trivialize the predication of uniqueness. If to say "Picassos are unique" is but to say "Picassos are Picassos," we fall into a redundancy hardly intended by the ascribing of uniqueness to an individual. Something is being characterized in some way when it is said to be unique - even if uniqueness can be predicated of every individual. Hall's positive suggestion is that the uniqueness of the concept, uniqueness, rests upon three peculiarities.

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First, uniqueness is a species of "whole-property," but, secondly, it is a "whole-property" of the special sort that characterizes the whole by virtue of all its properties, i.e., uniqueness is not itself a first-order property to be listed along with an inventory of the other properties of the whole. Finally, the whole-property which is uniqueness characterizes the whole merely by the whole's having of the properties it has and not with respect to the character of the several properties that are had by the whole.
    We now turn to the problem of canons in criticism, a discussion which presupposes the successes of Hall's analysis of uniqueness. If there are general canons of some sort, there must be some common aspects of aesthetic objects to be judged, a possibility which the strongest sense of uniqueness, here rejected, would foreclose entirely.
    The words "norm," "standard," "evaluate," and their cognates are often used in ways that do not genuinely involve normativity at all, but their use does result in a confusion that Hall wishes to clear away before he turns to canons proper. In their most basic form, standards function as technical tools of classification - subsuming less complex classes under broader species or declaring individuals to be members of a given class. One may want, for example, to establish that a given color is cerise, or one may want to know whether this bull is an Angus. As illustrations of the definition of a class, there is no normativity involved. However, the use of such phrases as a "good specimen of," and "better and poorer cases of" seem to carry with them a specious normative element. That this is specious can be shown by remarking that the basis of such talk rests upon the empirical facts of certain continuities in nature. There are ranges of similar properties that diverge from one another by degrees - as in color spectra. There is also independent variation of the properties that taken together define a "natural class." A "good" cerise, for example, may be one that lies near the center of various possible variations. That such items - those placeable in the center of divergence that still allows class membership - are normatively good is clearly not necessary (unless some gratuitous assumptions about the evil of privation are covertly slipped in). The problems involved in applying standards or norms in the sense just exhibited are not peculiarly aesthetic problems; they arise whenever concepts of any sort are applied to the empirical world. Hall contends that a good deal of the talk by linguistic informalists concerning the uniqueness of art versus the difficulty of establishing norms, or of defining the art-object, can be classified as above.
    It does not follow that there is no possibility of genuinely normative standards or canons of aesthetics. If there are, Hall believes they must be generalized from experience of individual cases. Their form would be a hybrid of the descriptive and the valuative, i.e., they would set forth the more-or-less regular association of certain other properties with aesthetic excellence. And it should be said that the basic use of such canons would not be to regulate the production of works of art nor to determine the aesthetic judgment in individual instances of aesthetic experience. They would be like the laws of natural science in being theoretical or cognitive. But they would also be like legal laws in their normativity as whole expressions (although they would be unlike legal laws in that aesthetic "laws" become normative by derivation from individual cases, to from being imposed on cases). Finally, even though no worthwhile canons might be establishable (because, perhaps, of the extreme complexity of the task), it must be observed that the possible failure to set up canons of artistic excellence leaves intact the determination of probabilities of aesthetic excel-

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lence based on coherence patterns of justification similar to those sketched out in Our Knowledge of Fact and Value.
    We conclude the summary of this section with a mention of the handling given to the traditional distinction between sublime versus the beautiful - in Hallian terms the distinction between aesthetic greatness and aesthetic excellence. There is a place for greatness in connection with the kinds of emotions that enter the aesthetic object. Great works are those that involve the most powerful and profound of human emotions, those typically called forth by moral conflicts of Promethian dimension. The question to be faced is whether greatness, in this sense, is or is not germanely related to aesthetic excellence as such. For Hall, the answer is that they are not related, in one clear sense. A "thin" aesthetic object can be excellent without any qualification stemming from its lack of calling upon Promethean emotions. And an aesthetic object may be as "thick" as one pleases without, merely by virtue of its moral profundity, being aesthetically excellent. But there is a sense in which greatness and excellence have to be considered mutually. This is because great works of art are extremely difficult to distance aesthetically, and it is likewise highly difficult to create an aesthetic surface which stimulates the appropriate emotions but yet keeps their occurrence controlled within the terminal framework of an aesthetic object. Thus it is perfectly legitimate for the artist to have moral goals in addition to his aesthetic goals, provided only that the moral message does not burst the boundaries of the aesthetic object, a consequence which would destroy aesthetic appropriateness (though it might preserve a practical or a moral appropriateness). What this requires is that the artist constantly maintain aesthetic distancing of the moral content he wishes to express aesthetically, while at the same time maintaining sincerity as well, never assuming a moralistic pose for the sake of aesthetic effect. Difficult as it is to unit great themes with aesthetic distancing, if and when this is accomplished, the result, paradoxically, is that very often a deeper moral impact is achieved when it is not directly sought, when, i.e., the aesthetic contains the moral. And, as a complementary paradox, the greater aesthetic excellence is very often attained when the distanced emotions are dangerously close to being underdistanced emotions are dangerously close to being underdistanced and hence not aesthetic at all.

IV


    I should like now to revert to the point at which I began the summary of an Analysis of Aesthetics just concluded. How does the aesthetics relate to the published works that comprise Hall's philosophical system? The claim that Hall's aesthetics is part and parcel of his basic value theory there has been, I believe, amply vindicated by what we have just reviewed. But there is a sense in which the aesthetics has a kind of double relation to the system as a whole. In the first place, it is a categorial "deduction" from the axiology and ontology of What is Value? supplemented by epistemological footings given to that axiology by Our Knowledge of Fact and Value. By terming the aesthetics a "deduction," I simply wish to stress that instead of beginning there from a system which just might possibly not link itself smoothly and seamlessly to the already outlined portions of the system, Hall proceeds, rather, from generic insight to the more detailed structure of a special form of value, and he is borne along by the categorial impetus antecedently furnished by his published system. Some evidence of the stress on system almost to the exclusion of examples comes from the very character of the hand-written notebooks on aesthetics themselves. Not only are they constructed in a very rigid form of numerical headings and subheadings (which incidentally must be adapted straight from Wittgenstein's

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Tractatus), but even a cursory examination makes it clear that this is an essay in meta-aesthetics, for the examples that are supplied are quite undeveloped. Quite often, gaps are left for the inclusion of examples; some of these have been penciled in as afterthoughts - others are lacking entirely. Perhaps I give too much significance to the form of the notebooks, and it is true they were left unfinished. Nonetheless I suspect that their form reveals more than simply a method of outlining, but serves to buttress the contention that the essence of aesthetics for Hall is to be found as part of the structure of a world of value that is monistic rather than pluralistic.
    But, in the second place, it is probably quite misleading and even unfair to claim as I just did that Hall has simply produced an aesthetics by spinning out the consequences of already established, not specifically aesthetic, categorial commitments. For I think that Hall could very justly claim that he was sensitive at every point precisely to the main structural components of everyday talk about the arts, and that his aesthetics is no automatic grinding out of an aesthetic result from previous categories already coded in the Hallian manner, but represents, rather, a genuinely fresh examination of commonsense talking about the arts.
    We must say, apparently, that both relations are essential to what Hall intended to be about philosophically. The aesthetics reflects Hall's prior systematic commitments and at the same time reflects the basic categories that aesthetic commonsense reveals when philosophically clarified. It is perhaps a just measure of Hall's philosophical originality that his critics would find him vulnerable to attack if the one side of this double relation of aesthetics to system and to commonsense were exploited to the virtual exclusion of the other.
    The linguistic informalist is likely to find in Hall's aesthetic system just an emptily general account of legitimate family resemblances hypostatized into mythical essential characteristics - a kind of necrophilic philosophical aviary where, unfortunately, there are no living birds, but only a neat classification of stuffed dodoes. Hall's reply, if I may make it cryptically brief, would be simply to insist upon the equally important linkage of his system to the living language of aesthetic experience, while at the same time contending that his informalist critics are as much involved in categorial assumptions as he himself is but that they perversely insist on muffing these commitments by tedious attention to philological detail, rather than the structural requirements of commonsense talk. Thus, though we miss in Hall's later published writings the stiff, formal, almost pedantic style and the studied arrays of footnotes and find him writing in an easy-going lecture style, even doing penance by voicing (mock?) horror at the "barbaric" nomenclature of technical philosophy, still the notebooks seem to reveal that he was continuing doggedly to build his system in the philosophical, though not in the literary, style of What is Value?. He has surrendered nothing to Oxford and has adapted a few devices from overseas merely for purposes of expository convenience, trying to be better understood by the relatively small group who read his earlier works without grasping, as clearly as he had hoped, the central emphases of what he had tried to say.
    I want now to examine, and all too briefly considering the depth of the problem of the problem for Hall's system, a matter that is both central within Hall's aesthetic and which is likewise related to the claims of possible competitive systems. This problem is the status of appropriateness as an aesthetic category. I experience something aesthetically appropriate - let it be a melody in the minor. According to Hall, what is taking place is that I am feeling that another 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 flatting of the third (plus a large number of other factual characteristics of the auditory experience which fit precisely just that sadness I feel). If now the performer makes a mistake by failing to flat the third, the jolt I experience is a sense that the fitness joining my feeling and the musical surface has been threatened or dissipated. I am seated in Chartres awaiting the arrival of a solemn ecclesiastical procession, and I am startled and shocked to find my sense of religious-aesthetic awe upset by the appearance of Gypsy Rose Lee and her uninhibited colleagues instead, behaving in a way much more appropriate to the aisles of Minsky's. Or I simply discover that my Martini has too much Vermouth; it would be more appropriate were it dryer. Or, when I see a Scotsmman in his appropriate national costume on the streets of my Midwestern town I can't help being a bit shocked; it just does seem inappropriate for men not to wear trousers. I trust that the question I wish to raise about appropriateness is evident already. Is the sense of fitness I do undoubtedly feel linking my emotions to certain aesthetic surfaces more than conventional Let us put aside the question whether the examples I have adduced are purely aesthetic; they have at least a tinge of the aesthetic about them. If what I have in mind could be made to challenge Hall's system it would have the effect of trivializing the notion of appropriateness. It would not deny that the appropriateness would not be felt, but it would reduce the occurrence of certain emotions, and their reference, in addition, to aesthetic surfaces, to facts whose explanation was exhausted by a biographical account of the observer's psychological history together with an emphasis on current cultural modes and manners. I repeat, emotions would refer and appropriateness would be felt, but a realistic axiology of aesthetics would gain no support from those facts. Put otherwise, is a polka inherently inappropriate somehow to my feeling of melancholy and dirge inherently fitting, or is this felt appropriateness merely the parroting by my emotions of certain (largely unconscious) cultural prejudices that they have absorbed in the course of their aesthetic education? It should be noted that if appropriateness could be trivialized in the manner just suggested, then a coherence-theory of the legitimacy of such feelings of appropriateness would likewise be trivialized. Such patterns could be made out, perhaps, as Hall suggests, but the ultimate form of the coherence of feeling would derive, like appropriateness itself, from the contingent facts of a given culture's patterns could be made out, perhaps as Hall suggests, but the ultimate form of the coherences of feeling would derive, like appropriateness itself, from the contingent facts of a given culture's patterns of aesthetic prejudice or the fact that between cultures certain similarities of aesthetic prejudice would obtain. The present questioning of the status of appropriateness is not just a retread of the familiar complaint about the variability of value judgments, temporally or geographically; it would apply in force even if value judgments exhibited a greater uniformity than they in fact seem to do. What the objection would insist is that the result of Hall's analysis of aesthetics is a phenomenology of value which would support, not value-realism, but a form of scepticism about the possibility of feelings' revealing much more than how feelings are shaped by this or that set of variable circumstances. Is it inconceivable that I might not find myself feeling that a striptease is appropriate to a place of worship? If some form of fertility religion had replaced the austerity of Christianity in the early years of the Roman Empire, then my emotions might find appropriateness where, as it is, they are likely to feel conventional shock.
    What reply can a defender of Hall's system make to a line of criticism like that above? The obvious reply is that common 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 realism while clarifying its details. But this defense is a rather unfortunate one in that by descending so precipitately to the bed-rock of the system, we cut off the critic by an appeal to mystical insight into the real intentions of common sense - an appeal which, while it may be unanswerable, silences without enlightening. What is to prevent this fellow from excommunicating his opposition in turn by competing insight into the clarified intentions of common sense?
    It is possible, I believe, to avoid the stultification of the categoriocentric predicament by trying to reply to the sceptical critic by working within a somewhat higher stratum of the system. The element of conventionality in our judgments of appropriateness could be freely admitted but the objector informed that he had failed to make a number of crucial distinctions. Particularly he might be admonished to distinguish between the way in which a particular feeling of appropriateness was causally generated in a cultural and psychological setting and the abstracted feeling of appropriateness itself. If the scales fall away, and the objector is pacified by this distinction between cause and essence or nature, the task is done. And it could be insisted that aesthetic appropriateness is prone to merge almost insensibly into practical appropriateness, losing its distanced, hence, its aesthetic quality. Finally, only when the enjoyment of an intrinsic sort can it be genuinely aesthetic; this would exclude such obviously extrinsic appropriateness as that between a cause and its effect. But I am not sure that these distinctions will discourage the sceptic, for he can be interpreted as urging, in effect, that there are no isolated or abstractable intrinsic appropriateness. He may insist that the valuative, not just the causal, nature of every felt appropriateness is inextricably mingled with the accidents of a cultural environment in which the emotions have, by imitation, been taught to speak.
   It is by no means clear, then, that the distinction that can be made within Hall's aesthetics will suffice to dispose of the objector we have conjured up. And the reliance on the forms of commonsense aesthetic talk probably will not convince the objector if the distinctions generated as a higher level within the system could not succeed in convincing him that he had indeed been guilty of confusing aesthetic appropriateness with another thing. We are pushed back to the anchor in commonsense; but it may well seem to someone not antecedently operating within Hall's categorial system that commonsense has been tortured into producing "forms" which are not clearly there. To him it will seem that, in spite of Hall's insistence, often reiterated, that he is a simon-pure empiricist, the idea of appropriateness carries something of the odor of a regulative, aprioristic principle as well as functioning as an innocently descriptive category. How shall we go about asking commonsense to referee the argument of conventionalism versus aesthetic realism? If it is answered that we clarify the confusions of commonsense on this point in order to expose its essential objectivism, the suspicions of apriorism are simply shifted to the process of clarification itself. What is required to silence the critic is an Anselmian ontological arguments for the intrinsic nature of appropriateness. This is, naturally, not forthcoming. In the very nature of Hall's system, the foundations stand on categorially uncertain ground.
    I want to conclude by saying something about the value of Hall's system of aesthetics as it relates to the present philosophical scene. It is certainly no secret among professional philosophers that aesthetics is the step-child of the discipline. Not only is philosophical

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aesthetics young in years compared to the grander career of epistemology and logic, but its development at the hands of those few professionals who have found it a worthwhile enterprise and those border-line professionals whose major occupation is that of dilettante or critic of the arts, has all too often been "dreary" or philosophically quite primitive. Hall's aesthetics, in contrast, has the very considerable virtue of forthrightly asking the question, "What is aesthetic value?" and giving it an answer that connects it in a systematic way with a general, clearly articulated theory of value and fact. In this sense, Hall's aesthetics, like his value theory generally, is almost a pioneer work. Aside from the merits of Hall's constructive answers to the questions he raises, and I believe these merits are considerable, the questions themselves are the sort that philosophical aestheticians have not asked themselves clearly enough in the classical sources of aesthetic theory. It is just possible that Hall's systematic treatment of the subject may help to advance aesthetics from its poor-relation status nearer to philosophical respectability.

*Hist-Analytic would like to thank the editor, Nancy Simco, of the Southern Journal of Philosophy for her generosity in support of this project.

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

2There 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 an informal outline sketched in 1952 in connection with the present author's dissertation.




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thomas Thompson and Richard Hall have been the most helpful in bringing together materials for this project, but without Claire Miller and Geoff Sayre of the University of North Carolina the project would have stumbled in the early going. Without Nancy Simco's understanding and appreciation of the importance of this project Thompson's essay would not have appeared here. Thanks go not only to Simco for permission but to the Southern Journal for its decision to devote an entire issue (1966) to Hall's work. In addition, Katie Salzman of Southern Illinois University, where many manuscripts by and about Hall are receiving a good home, was particularly helpful in searching for documents. Among the authors of the Memorial essay, E. M. Adams should be mentioned. At the Archives a the University of N. Carolina are additional documents within the Adam's file in Special Collections pertinent to Hall's life and work. I would like to extend a special thanks to members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Iowa for their encouragement. Richard Fumerton, an Iowa epistemologist, was of assistance and the archived material of Gustav Bergmann at that University's Special Collections department has also been of value. Finally, I would like to thank Thoemmes Press which has invited me to write an entry on Everett Hall for the Dictionary of American Philosophy. On successive occasions they have accepted with alacrity the suggestion that Hall is a significant American philosopher and increased the words to be allotted to the entry. For this and other things, many thanks! - Steve Bayne (Hist-Analytic List Manager)

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