Excerpted from Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism by Monroe C. Beardsley. Copyright © 1981 by Monroe C. Beardsley. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
The things that naturally come to mind when we think of works of art are the products of deliberate human activity, sometimes long and arduous—think of the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Wozzeck, and the Cathedral at Chartres. To put it another way, these things were intended by someone, and no doubt they are largely what they were intended to be by those who made them.
The artist’s intention is a series of psychological states or events in his mind: what he wanted to do, how he imagined or projected the work before he began to make it and while he was in the process of making it. Something was going on in Chaucer’s mind when he was planning The Canterbury Tales and in Beethoven’s mind when he was considering various possible melodies for the choral finale of his D Minor Symphony (No. 9). And these happenings were no doubt among the factors that caused those works to come into being. One of the questions we can ask about any work, but probably not with much hope of a conclusive answer, is: What was its cause? And of course a good deal of writing about works of art consists in describing the historical situation, the social, economic and political conditions, under which they were produced—including the domestic affairs and physical health of the artist—in an attempt to explain, if possible, why they were created, and why they turned out the way they did.
Let us not stop to discuss the general metaphysical problems that might be raised at this point. Can a work of art be accounted for as the effect of some set of antecedent conditions? Philosophers who believe in freedom of the will, in the sense in which this theory denies that all psychological events are causally determined, would, I suppose, argue that there is an element of spontaneity, or indeterminism, in the creative act, and therefore that even in principle it is impossible to explain any work of art in sociological, historical, or psychological terms. Other philosophers—and I believe them to be sound—cannot see why Tristan and Isolde, the Hermes of Praxiteles, Swan Lake or the Pyramids are necessarily different in this respect from, say, Hurricane Hazel of 1954, the Second Punic War, the outcome of this year’s World Series, or the first hydrogen bomb explosion. Like Tristan and Isolde, hurricanes and wars are extremely complicated, and to give a complete account of all their causal factors might not be practically feasible, but there seems to be no good reason for saying that it is in principle impossible.
Those who practice what they call “historical criticism” or “sociological criticism” of the arts are engaged in the same explanatory enterprise. And though I think there are good reasons to be doubtful of many explanations of particular works of art, or of general movements such as Romanticism, Impressionism, or the Baroque, this is presumably due to the complexity of the thing to be explained and to the scarcity of available evidence. It is a great field for half-baked speculation, which can often not be disproved and is thus allowed to stand. And perhaps this is why more critics concern themselves, not with the remoter antecedents of the work, but with its proximate or immediate cause in the mind of the artist. These are the critics who are fond of inquiring after the artist’s intention. …
Two sets of problems appear when we consider the connection between the aesthetic object and the artist’s intention. One set of problems concerns the role of intention in evaluating the object. … The other concerns the role of intention in describing and interpreting the object: These we shall consider here. It is the simple thesis of this section that we must distinguish between the aesthetic object and the intention in the mind of its creator.
When you state the distinction that way, it seems harmless enough, and perfectly acceptable. Yet there are some rather serious and interesting difficulties about it, and we shall have to look into them. First, however, it is worth noting that even critics who would perhaps grant the distinction verbally are quite often not able to see the implications of it, both in their critical theory and in their critical practice. Here is part of a paragraph, for example, from a literary critic who generally blurs the distinction in his writing. He is discussing André Malraux’s novel La Condition Humaine:
The handling of this huge and complicated subject must have given the author a good deal of trouble. He evidently sat down like an engineer to the problem of designing a structure that would meet a new set of conditions; and an occasional clumsiness of mechanics appears. The device of presenting in dramatic scenes the exposition of political events, to which we owe Garin in Les Conquerants and his eternal dispatches, here appears as a series of conversations so exhaustive and so perfectly to the point in their function of political analysis as—in spite of the author’s efforts to particularize the characters—occasionally to lack plausibility.
The clauses in italics are about the novel, the rest are about the novelist; and the paragraph passes from one to the other as though there were no change of subject. But, not to be invidious, we must add that equally good examples of the shift back and forth could be found in numerous critics of all the arts.
The consequences that follow from making a distinction between aesthetic objects and artists’ intentions are very important, but they are not all obvious, because they depend upon a general principle of philosophy that is often not kept steadily in mind. If two things are distinct, that is, if they are indeed two, and not one thing under two names (like the Vice President of the United States and the Presiding Officer of the Senate), then the evidence for the existence and nature of one cannot be exactly the same as the evidence for the existence and nature of the other. Any evidence, for example, that the Vice President is tall will automatically be evidence that the Presiding Officer of the Senate is tall, and vice versa. But evidence that the Vice President is tall will have no bearing on the height of the President.
This point is obscured where the two things, though distinct, are causally connected, as are presumably the intention and the aesthetic object. For if Jones, Sr., is the father of Jones, Jr., then any evidence about the height of either of them will be indirect evidence about the height of the other, in virtue of certain laws of genetics, according to which the tallness of the father at least affects the probability that the son will be tall, though it does not, of course, render it certain.
Thus, in the case of aesthetic object and intention, we have direct evidence of each: We discover the nature of the object by looking, listening, reading, etc., and we discover the intention by biographical inquiry, through letters, diaries, workbooks—or, if the artist is alive, by asking him. But also what we learn about the nature of the object itself is indirect evidence of what the artist intended it to be, and what we learn about the artist’s intention is indirect evidence of what the object became. Thus, when we are concerned with the object itself, we should distinguish between internal and external evidence of its nature. Internal evidence is evidence from direct inspection of the object; external evidence is evidence from the psychological and social background of the object, from which we may infer something about the object itself.
Where internal and external evidence go hand in hand—for example, the painter writes in an exhibition catalogue that his painting is balanced in a precise and complicated way, and we go to the painting and see that it is so balanced—there is no problem. But where internal and external evidence conflict, as when a painter tells us one thing and our eyes tell us another, there is a problem, for we must decide between them. The problem is how to make this decision. If we consider the “real” painting to be that which the painter projected in his mind, we shall go at it one way; if we consider the “real” painting to be the one that is before us, open to public observation, we shall go at it another way.
We generally do not hesitate between these alternatives. As long as we stick to the simplest descriptive level, we are in no doubt; if a sculptor tells us that his statue was intended to be smooth and blue, but our senses tell us it is rough and pink, we go by our senses. We might, however, be puzzled by more subtle qualities of the statue. Suppose the sculptor tells us his statue was intended to be graceful and airy. We might look at it carefully and long, and not find it so. If the sculptor insists, we will give it a second look. But if we still cannot see those qualities, we conclude that they are not there; it would not occur to us to say they must be there, merely because the sculptor is convinced that he has put them there. Yet it is well known that our perceptions can be influenced by what we expect or hope to see, and especially by what we may be socially stigmatized for not seeing. Though no doubt the sculptor cannot talk us into perceiving red as blue, if his words have prestige—if we are already disposed to regard his intention as a final court of appeal—his words may be able to make us see grace where we would otherwise not see it, or a greater airiness than we would otherwise see. If this works on everyone, then everyone will see these qualities in the statue, and for all practical purposes they will be in the statue. Thus the intention, or the announcement of it, actually brings something to pass; what the statue is cannot be distinguished from what it is intended to be. So the argument might go.
But it is precisely this argument that presents a strong reason for not making intention the final court of appeal. Suppose there is an experimental physicist who becomes so emotionally involved in any hypothesis that he cannot help seeing the outcome of his experiments as confirming the hypotheses: He even sees red litmus paper as blue if that is predicted from his hypothesis. No doubt his prospects for a scientific future are dim, but if he is handy around a laboratory, we can still find a way to use him. Let him test other people’s hypotheses by performing the experiments called for, but don’t tell him until afterward what the hypothesis is. The scientist is wholly imaginary, but the principle is sound. And we shall adopt an analogous rule: If a quality can be seen in a statue only by someone who already believes that it was intended by the sculptor to be there, then that quality is not in the statue at all. For what can be seen only by one who expects and hopes to see it is what we would call illusory by ordinary standards—like the strange woman in the crowd who momentarily looks like your wife.
When it comes to interpreting the statue, the situation is more complicated. Suppose the sculptor says his statue symbolizes Human Destiny. It is a large, twisted, cruller-shaped object of polished teak, mounted at an oblique angle to the floor. We look at it, and see in it no such symbolic meaning, even after we have the hint. Should we say that we have simply missed the symbolism, but that it must be there, since what a statue symbolizes is precisely what its maker makes it symbolize? Or should we say, in the spirit of Alice confronting the extreme semantical conventionalism of Humpty Dumpty, that the question is whether that object can be made to mean Human Destiny? If we take the former course, we are in effect saying that the nature of the object, as far as its meaning goes, cannot be distinguished from the artist’s intention; if we take the latter course, we are saying it can. But the former course leads in the end to the wildest absurdity: Anyone can make anything symbolize anything just by saying it does, for another sculptor could copy the same object and label it “Spirit of Palm Beach, 1938.”…
This distinction may seem oversubtle, but we shall find it of the highest importance, especially for those arts in which the distinction between object and intention seems most difficult, that is, the verbal arts. In literature, the distinction is most often erased by a principle that is explicitly defended by many critics, and tacitly assumed by many more: Since a poem, in a sense, is what it means, to discover what the poem means is to discover what the poet meant. This principle implies that the dramatic speaker, the “I” in the poem, is always the author of the poem, so that any evidence about the nature of either of them is automatically evidence about the other. In
When I consider how my light is spent,
[Sonnet Number 19]
we have [John] Milton talking about his blindness, a fragment of autobiography. The problems involved in this notion are many and interesting, but we shall have set them aside. … At present we are concerned only with the possibility of the distinction between what words mean and what people mean.
Suppose someone utters a sentence. We can ask two questions: (1) What does the speaker mean? (2) What does the sentence mean? Now, if the speaker is awake and competent, no doubt the answers to these two questions will turn out to be the same. And for practical purposes, on occasions when we are not interested in the sentence except as a clue to what is going on in the mind of the speaker, we do not bother to distinguish the two questions. But suppose someone utters a particularly confused sentence that we can’t puzzle out at all—he is trying to explain income tax exemptions, or the theory of games and economic behavior, and is doing a bad job. We ask him what he meant, and after a while he tells us in different words. Now we can reply, “Maybe that’s what you meant but it’s not what you said,” that is, it’s not what the sentence meant. And here we clearly make the distinction.
For what the sentence means depends not on the whim of the individual, and his mental vagaries, but upon public conventions of usage that are tied up with habit patterns in the whole speaking community. It is perhaps easy to see this in the case of an ambiguous sentence. A man says, “I like my secretary better than my wife”; we raise our eyebrows, and inquire: “Do you mean that you like her better than you like your wife?” And he replies, “No, you misunderstand me; I mean I like her better than my wife does.” Now, in one sense he has cleared up the misunderstanding, he has told us what he meant. Since what he meant is still not what the first sentence succeeded in meaning, he hasn’t made the original sentence any less ambiguous than it was; he has merely substituted for it a better, because unambiguous, one.
Now let us apply this distinction to a specific problem in literary criticism. On the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, A. E. Housman published his poem “1887.” The poem refers to celebrations going on all over England. “From Clee to Heaven the beacon burns,” because “God has saved the Queen.” It recalls that there were many lads who went off to fight for the Empire, who “shared the work with God,” but “themselves they could not save,” and ends with the words,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen.1
Frank Harris quoted the last stanza to Housman, in a bitterly sarcastic tone, and praised the poem highly: “You have poked fun at the whole thing and made splendid mockery of it.” But this reading of the poem, especially coming from a radical like Harris, made Housman angry:
I never intended to poke fun, as you call it, at patriotism, and I can find nothing in the sentiment to make mockery of: I meant it sincerely; if Englishmen breed as good men as their fathers, then God will save the Queen. I can only reject and resent your—your truculent praise.2
We may put the question, then, in this form: Is Housman’s poem, and particularly its last stanza, ironic? The issue can be made fairly sharp. There are two choices: (1) We can say that the meaning of the poem, including its irony or lack of it, is precisely what the author intended it to be. Then any evidence of the intention will automatically be evidence of what the poem is: The poem is ironic if Housman says so. He is the last court of appeal, for it is his poem. (2) Or we can distinguish between the meaning of the poem and the author’s intention. Of course, we must admit that in many cases an author may be a good reader of his own poem, and he may help us to see things in it that we have overlooked. But at the same time, he is not necessarily the best reader of his poem, and indeed he misconstrues it when, as perhaps in Housman’s case, his unconscious guides his pen more than his consciousness can admit. And if his report of what the poem is intended to mean conflicts with the evidence of the poem itself, we cannot allow him to make the poem mean what he wants it to mean, just by fiat. So in this case we would have the poem read by competent critics, and if they found irony in it, we should conclude that it is ironical, no matter what Housman says.
1From “1887,” from The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman. Copyright, 1940, by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Copyright, 1936, by Barclays Bank, Ltd. By permission of the publishers. Canadian clearance by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Trustees of the Estate of the late A. E. Housman, and Messrs. Jonathan Cape Ltd., publishers of A. E. Housman’s Collected Poems.
2Frank Harris, Latest Contemporary Portraits, New York: Macaulay, 1927, p. 280.