Memoire Online - Poetry and Its Valuating Subject: How Much Knowledge of Art can Aesthetic Experience Yield

Poetry and Its Valuating Subject: How Much Knowledge of Art can Aesthetic Experience Yield?

LIST OF CONTENTS

AN OVERVIEW		3
THE NATURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE Reactive Nature and Justification Non-Propositional Nature	4 5	4
INTERPRETING POETRY Characteristics of Poetry Authoritative Sources Formal Understanding	6 7 7	6
VALIDITY OF KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS Constraints in Interpretation	10	9
CONCLUSION		11
BIBLIOGRAPHY		12

AN OVERVIEW

This question subsumes in advance the notion that art, or poetry in this case, engenders an aesthetic experience. While debate is rife by presuming as such - with adversary and major theorists like Collingwood who conceives of art as a language and not an emotion - this remains as my choice of direction for the rest of this paper, partly because an account similar to that of Collingwood's would draw little distinction between poetry and scientific writing which many may find hard to resonate with. The very fact that art rarely conveys pronounced propositions that can be arrived at in the same way as everyone often turns us to question what aesthetic experience can offer if it is to be distinguished from commonplace experience. For the same reason, aesthetic experience lacks the qualities for justification. Can aesthetic experience then be validated the same way as propositional knowledge? This will be addressed in the first section of this paper.

Trying to arrive at an umbrella account for aesthetic experience that could hold truth for all possible art forms before ascribing it to poetry could be risking its accuracy for simplicity. Hence, focusing specifically on the relation between poetry and the aesthetic experience it evokes is a preferred course for this paper. How much aesthetic knowledge a study on aesthetic experience could yield for us would be substantiated by the limitations and resolutions that arise from elucidative accounts of aesthetic experience, constraints in interpretation and reader-author standpoints that have emerged over the recent years in popular literary criticisms. This will be discussed along with the validity of knowledge claims of aesthetic experience.

THE NATURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Clarifying the key characteristics of aesthetic experience obtainable from poetry is pivotal in our understanding of the possibility of how and what types of knowledge may be acquired. I shall also discuss the implications of these characteristics illustrate how justification can be carried out.

Reactive Nature and Justification

If we could clearly define the aesthetic experience we know by its own characteristics that in turn give it a functional objectivity which we can use to identify art or speak with absolute certainty about a work of art, there is a fair chance that we have constructed knowledge in the classical, propositional sense. I may then be justified in believing that p in order for that belief to constitute knowledge, where p stands for any proposition about aesthetic experience. This type of knowledge, in its strongest sense of being absolute, could well apply to every work of art of at least a particular field, or even render itself as a basis upon which other definitive claims of art could be derived from. Still, however close we might be to an idealistic vision like this - with identifiable characteristics of aesthetic experience that are plausible for at least some instances - many would agree that we cannot willingly produce an aesthetic experience, be it by making a mark on paper or imagining a painting regardless of any definitive characteristics to begin with. Aesthetic experience always presupposes a work to which we respond to and is never created ex nihilo. This already suggests a marked difference between the acquisition of aesthetic experience and that of propositional knowledge. For unlike a passive approach we take in the analysis of propositional knowledge, artists seem typically to attend to or seek to embody their own feelings about a subject matter or experience in their forms and representations, and `therein inviting us to partake in both those feelings and their expressive clarification in the work' as phrased by Richard Eldridge. This is to say that aesthetic experience is contained within the active engagement of both the artist and the recipient. This distinction justifiably narrows down the tools for justification to authoritative testimony and sensory perception, for the subjectivity of it can only be rationalized in the hope of agreement among readers.

Poetry rarely sets out to present and support facts the way a factual report does. It could however be appreciated as a consciously formed document conveying general beliefs about a subject matter. For instance, Philip Levine's They Lion They Grow appears to suggest amongst the ambiguity and tone something about the relationship between human and nature. Even though the poem commits more to the metaphorical presentation that are highly descriptive, lines such as «Out of the gray hills / Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,» seems to hint at a cause for what we might identify as a disharmony between human and nature. We can thus extract a claim that the ramifications of industrialisation harmed nature by `efferent reading'^1(*). We may be justified in sharing this belief given prior understanding of how industrialisation has led to environmental problems, and might even be tempted to render this as knowledge claimed from the poem. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the main concern of the poem was not to present or argue about such claims. Does justification of any sort pertaining to `trivial' propositions like the above has any bearing upon the aesthetic experience we can arrive at? If it does not alter the poet's intention to express rather than argue, we might be left to conclude that aesthetic experience does not offer us debatable claims about what is mentioned in the poem like how we ponder over results and experimental procedures from a scientific writing. In other words, aesthetic experience harbours no agenda to tell us anything. As Noël Carroll puts it, "art and knowledge are...at best, occasions for activating antecedently possessed knowledge." It follows that poetry only presents what we already know and believe.

INTERPRETING POETRY

While I have established above that the verity of subject matter in poetry has no bearing on aesthetic experience, it is not to say that no content or beliefs are needed at all, for it makes no sense to say that poetry engenders an aesthetic experience by virtue of its status as poetry instead of what it expresses and how. The content of a poem plays an ancillary role in the understanding of the concept of aesthetic experience. In the following section, I shall highlight some of the ways to understanding poetry.

The principal formal means that poetry employs to create its particular cadences is the measure of the poetic line, which achieves its effect by recurrence and reappearance of notable features in the language time and again.^2(*) For instance, repetitive, truncated phrasings could impress a sense of tedium and exasperation upon the reader. The expansive nature of words allows also the use of metaphors to convey sometimes more than one meaning that is applicable. Poetry then invites its readers not only to interpret what is presented, but also how it is presented, paying attention to the tone, the stresses and the meter it conforms to.

Reader-author Standpoints

Reader-author standpoints offer a more intrinsic look at the relation between poetry and its reader in the determination of meaning, as opposed to a study on general characteristics of aesthetic experience. While they move literary theories to vary vastly in their presumptions and the emphasis they put on the roles of the text, author and the reader, they do share some common concerns such as the interaction between a reader and the poem and the effects they have on each other. They often attempt to elucidate the role of the author, the reader and the text, as well as the reader's response to a text. Although we may not rank one approach to interpreting poetry over another, reader-author standpoints enhances our understanding of the poem by breaking down the process of interpreting poetry into more comprehensible events in the very least.

Formal Understanding

Formalist-aesthetic theories tend to dwell on why certain elements are presented and in their relation to one and other as a way of inviting imaginative exploration of the work, and considers authorial intent and historical significance to be of marginal relevance. Advocates like Beardsley holds the view that the practice of making works of art is significantly informed, perhaps even controlled, by an intention to afford aesthetic experience^3(*). Poetry is then conceived by him as composed of emergent regional properties that words make up, which can be likened to the way words are read - not singularly one after the other, but rather in the context of whole thoughts, where we attend to the function of the word in expressing that thought. The acquisition of an aesthetic experience would as a result require nothing more than formal analysis, for aesthetic experience is conceived as a capacity innate to the work itself, and so forth gives the work its artistic qualities. Stevan Harnad shares a similar view in saying `once created, a work of art is what it is, and the artist ... is not an absolute authority'^4(*) though his theory hinges also on the readers' ability to conjure a resemblance from how the poem is presented. Does this entail that if we possessed a list of formal elements, then we would have rules for crafting successful poems? Apparently this is not so. Widely accepted and as Arnold Isenberg cogently argued, similar elements can function very differently in different works. For instance, in Robert Frost's Fire and Ice, ice is equated with hate.^5(*) This would differ from other connotative uses of the same theme, as in another poem of Robert Frost An Old Man's Winter Night, where `icicles' and `snow' share meaning with `nothingness' in the winter setting. While close formal reading attends aptly to the interrelations of elements in the work, it can devolve into the overvaluing of some favored mode of decorum, without sufficient feel for history or meaning, partly because requiring poets to focus on form and arrangement by theory also places the fulfillment of the task of producing pleasure over the pursue of striking meaning and insight and `something closer to transformation'^6(*).

Nonetheless, consider reading a medieval religious poem: we will recognize inter alia that it is replete with symbolism which we understand only imperfectly and which has lost its original emotional impact and that it was intended for us in a social context that has vanished. It is obvious then that the downsides of formal understanding cannot be neglected, for dismissing historical significance might in effect discard groundlessly what could be the actual meaning of a poem. As such, on top of the analysis of formal elements, it makes sense to take into consideration also how the poem may partake of the spirit of its times

VALIDITY OF KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS

We have seen earlier how the reactive nature of aesthetic experience cannot be justified in the classical way. Without the propositional content used to legitimize the standard analysis of knowledge, it seems that knowledge claims about aesthetic experience will never have the same kind of validity. Wittgenstein however notes that,

`every process of understanding takes place against the background of a culturally ingrained pre-understanding ... The interpretative task consists in incorporating the others interpretation of the situation into ones own... this does not mean that interpretation must lead in every case to a stable and unambiguously differentiated assignment.'^7(*)

If aesthetic experience is contained within the active engagement of both the artist and the recipient, it could be sufficient to validate knowledge claims on a reader-by-reader basis, i.e. without having to enforce the same for all readers. In the last section of this paper, I shall illustrate possible validity issues based on the process of knowledge construction discussed earlier.

Constraints in Interpretation

As I have stated earlier, our understanding of what a poem attempts to convey to us plays an ancillary role in the understanding of the concept of aesthetic experience. At bottom, poetry being composed of words ensues that it be subjectable to the limitations of language. These involve either the limited capacity of language to communicate or an ineradicable ambiguity. For instance, the Inadequacy Thesis holds that language is inadequate to capture, portray, or do justice to, the quality and intensity of inner life^8(*). It also provides that the vividness of a sensation, an emotion or even an observation cannot be communicated through description, exemplified in Winifred Novottny's example that `one might go on forever and still fail ... to put into language all that the flower is in its own particular qualities.' Wittgenstein also makes a valid point in saying that certain words can be used both transitively and intransitively which gives rise to starkly different meanings of the word. For instance,

the `transitive' use of `peculiar' would be `This soap has a peculiar smell - the smell of ground ivy leaves'; an example of the `intransitive' use would be `This soap has a peculiar smell.' In the second case, `peculiar' is not used to introduce a comparison but more or less like `striking' or `out of the ordinary'.^9(*)

If language as a medium is inherently incapable of bringing across clearly what the poet intends to express, the extent of understanding on the part of the reader risk being delimited, and the knowledge he or she can construct may well be invalid. The Inadequacy Thesis seems to regard only the literal and propositional use of language when it arrived at the perceived inadequacy. It is worth noting however, that poetry more often than not optimises the connotative use of words and metaphors to express feelings about a subject matter. From a formalistic analysis of poetry, one may also reside in the assumption that the choice of word used and its function in a poem should contribute to the poem as a bigger entity. While a word used may have starkly different meanings, we should assure ourselves of the fact that it did not appear by chance, and ambiguity of the term adds to the wholeness of the poem.

CONCLUSION

Underlined in the fact that aesthetic experience is only obtainable when given a work to which we may respond to, aesthetic experience cannot be independent of what a poem attempts to express through its content. It follows as shown that the way we understand a poem cannot be overlooked when validating knowledge claims about aesthetic experience. While the formalist account discussed is not without its downsides, it is highly useful in marginalizing the disparity of responses and interpretations we may arrive at for the same poem. This carefully sidesteps the subjective nature of aesthetic responses and allows us discuss the validity of knowledge claims based on the characteristics of aesthetic experience alone. It is worth noting that while we have seen that no rigorous justifications seems applicable, the approach undertaken in justifying knowledge claims about aesthetic experience relies heavily on widely accepted beliefs, and through Richard Eldridge's words, "through arriving at a more transparent, shared culture, in which [the understanding of art] is clearer than it is now", and this should be realised in «the hope of agreement"^10(*).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gladdys Westbrook Church. «The Significance of Louise Rosenblatt on the Field of Teaching Literature»

* ³ This does not exclude other intentions such as winning renown and making money.