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
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.
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.
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.
Hall's Analysis of Aesthetic Value
Southern
Journal of Philosophy* Fall, 1966
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.
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.
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.
is that Hall makes morality a subordinate note in the aesthetic emotion
that contains it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
ness; second, the problem of uniqueness; third, the nature of critical
canons; and finally, aesthetic greatness as contrasted to excellence.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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
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,
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.
Thus it seems that we must say that the spectator has the emotion,
while
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.
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-
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-
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.
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-
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.
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
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
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-
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
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.
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)