To the Rescue of Art by Rudolf Arnheim, R. Arnheim

From the Publisher

Never before published essays by the widely admired psychologist of art. Arnheim spiritedly asserts art's fundamental achievements.
Rudolf Arnheim has spent a lifetime analyzing the basic psychological principles that make works of visual art meaningful, stirring, indispensable, and lasting. But recent fashionable attitudes and theories about art, he argues, are undermining the foundation of artistic achievement itself.
The essays collected in this volume are written in his familiar, careful, and solidly supported manner, but under present circumstances they amount to a call to arms. Included is a series of miniature monographs on a variety of great works of art. In other essays, Arnheim uncovers enlightening perspectives in the art of the blind, in architectural space, in caricature, and in the work of psychotics and autistic children. He also presents new scientific aspects on the psychology of art and widens our range of vision by connecting art with language, literature, and religion.

Library Journal

This book comprises 25 essays written mostly in the 1980s. Many have never been published; others were reworked or spliced together from previously published articles. The topics covered are quite diverse, although they are mainly centered around the author's specialty--the psychology of art. Here the reader can find insightful investigations into the problems of perception, conceptualization, and epistemology as they relate to visual arts, music, and the written word; the arts of the mentally and perceptually impaired; gestalt psychology; and the religious nature/function of art. As such, this volume is not as polemical as the title suggests. Rather, the essays attempt to demonstrate, positively, how the arts provide meaning for human beings by helping them to sort out satisfactorily the perceptual/conceptual problems we encounter in everyday life. The author is truly at his best when he is exploring these problems in light of their philosophical ramifications. As a whole the book is well written and will complement well Arnheim's other seminal works on the psychology of art. Highly recommended.-- David B. Hegeman, Kings Coll . Lib . , Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.

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To the Rescue of Art

University of California Press

Kinship can make for trouble. This is true for the relations between the various disciplines of knowledge, such as the sciences. It is also true for the present interaction between psychology and philosophy, about which I wish to register a complaint in the following. To be sure, if one prefers to cling strictly to one's own specialty, one need not worry about contradictions between neighboring occupations. That, however, is a convenience one cannot afford if one is convinced, as I am, that one's own field of work and philosophy are inseparable.

For my purpose, philosophy is not a self-contained discipline; it is the crowning superstructure of efforts in the various fields of study to advance to ultimate principles. It is those principles on which the work of philosophy is based. And just as philosophy is threatened with sterility when it fails to replenish its resources from pertinent areas of knowledge, work in any specialty may succumb to narrow drudgery when it no longer focuses on the larger objectives that are the territory of the philosopher.

This symbiotic relationship seems to me particularly indispensable for psychology. Philosophy must refer to othersciences, such as physics or biology, when required by its particular tasks to do so. Psychology, however, is always involved in this symbiosis because philosophy deals with the mind and the mind is the subject of psychology.

Conversely, in my own work on the psychology of art, I find it hard to decide where, for example, my study of the artist's dealing with the world of reality trespasses on epistemology as a chapter of philosophy. Or, to pick another example, where does an investigation of the artist's moral

Derived from "In Favor of Confrontation," Salmagundi , no.67 (Summer 1985), pp. 129–134, and from "The Vanishing World and Köhler's Inkwell," in The Legacy of Solomon Asch , edited by Irvin Rock (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1990).

obligations become simply an application of philosophical ethics? Similarly, my analyses of thinking turn without warning into matters of logic. Thus, by its own intrinsic dynamics, my work moves from specific observations to ever more general propositions and hence into a precinct of thought whose present rules of the game may not suit mine.

Empirical investigations in the natural sciences as well as in the humanities rely on certain axioms without which they lose their meaning. Their principal axiom affirms that the target of any acceptable inquiry is a set of objective facts that the researcher undertakes to verify and to explain. The indispensable assumption is that there exists a final truth about, say, the universe or a work of art. Regardless of whether researchers rely on quantitative methods of measurement and proof or on qualitative analysis, they are faced with the task of searching the objective facts by means of their own particular perspectives and resources.

It may seem that the artist is exempt from this commitment because there are as many ways of representing a fact of human experience truthfully as there are artists. Actually, however, the artist is no less obliged to do justice to the facts than is the scientist, except that the artist's own view of the subject is included in the conception to be represented. The arts, taken altogether, offer infinitely many aspects of the same truths, complementing rather than contradicting one another. Although the validity of an artist's worldview can be argued only in its own terms, it can, and must, be argued.

In practice, the commitment to this basic axiom is hardly in doubt. No science is conceivable without the assumption that facts exist objectively. What we cannot be sure of is whether our best description of a fact is correct and whether it is in our power to attain correctness. No honest scientist would have the courage to publish and teach were he not convinced that he was conveying the best approximation to the truth available to him. Nor is the situation different in the arts. I have yet to see an art historian offering an interpretation of a work of art without the conviction that what he is telling is objectively correct or at least deserving to be so considered. And any painter, sculptor, or instructor of architectural design criticizes the products of his students with the certainty of a person who is applying valid criteria with professional expertise.

So complex, however, is our present civilization that this indispensable foundation of our professional ethics is overlaid with a theory of knowledge that asserts the very opposite—namely, that there is no such thing as objective truth. This theory originates from philosophy, whose practice seems to preclude just such an assumption. Is it not true that philosophers are as obstinately convinced of the validity of their theories as are their

colleagues in the sciences and the arts? In fact, those who hold that there is no objective truth are among the most obstinate defenders of their own convictions.

I recently opened a book on philosophy and the mirror of nature, whose ideas I take to be symptomatic of today's philosophy, and I read that "the notion of 'accurate representation' is simply an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us to do what we want to do" (Rorty, 1979). Further on, the book says that "we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation." And the upshot: "Once conversation replaces confrontation, the notion of the mind as a Mirror of Nature can be discarded." When I, an outsider, alight on the scene of today's philosophy and read such statements, I am seized by the suspicion that the work crew charged with erecting the edifice of our principles is infiltrated by termites. To judge by the standards in any field of research and education I am acquainted with, anyone who replaced confrontation with conversation in the manner recommended in the preceding quotations would deserve to be chased from his job for behavior unbecoming a seeker of the truth. And as for the doubts about the mirror of nature, I can do no better than quote Elsa Morante in her novel L'isola di Arturo . "I am reminded," she says, "of the fairy tale about the hatter who wept and laughed always at the wrong occasion because he had been made to observe reality only through the images of a bewitched mirror."

The approach illustrated by the aforementioned terrifying quotations has spread, like a cloud of poison gas, from philosophy through our intellectual world and, as I indicated, has even enveloped the theoretical thinking of many people who in practice do not doubt the validity of their own work. Perhaps it has aroused some sympathy in a population that has come to distrust the reliability of its political leaders. The young, in particular, are readily captured by an attitude in support of their skepticism.

But how did this pathology get into philosophy? If I am not mistaken, this view acquired its destructive power from the fusion of two influential trains of thought. One is the insistence of the British empiricists on accepting the reality of nothing but the most immediate and tangible evidence of the senses, which, for example, leads David Hume to say about necessity that it is "nothing but an internal impression of the mind or a determination to carry our thoughts from one object to another." And further: "The efficacy and energy of causes is neither placed in the causes themselves, nor in the Deity, nor in the concurrence of these two principles, but belongs entirely to the soul, which considers the union of two or

more objects in all past instances" (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature , part 3, sect. 14).

The other ingredient of this toxic philosophical concoction derives from the Continent and from an entirely different frame of mind. It claims the privilege of powerful individuals, and more broadly of human beings in general, to mold the world according to their own wishes and needs. The most eloquent promoter of this claim is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche, who in Der Wille zur Macht has a section on the will to power as cognition [Erkenntnis ]. There, inveighing against "causalism," he asserts that "truth," which he puts in quotes, is not "something that exists and is to be found and discovered but something to be created, something that provides a name for a process or rather for a will to overpower, which is actually endless" (The Will to Power , book 3, para. 552).

Evidently, this blend of a cognitive insistence on subjective perception as the sole generator of connection and interaction and the moral license to willful interpretation has had an irresistible influence on the mood of our time. In the art world, which concerns me particularly, it has led to a radical neglect of objective standards in at least two ways. First, an awareness is lacking that art fulfills particular functions for the human mind and thereby is distinguished from other occupations. Second, a widespread belief holds that the criteria by which one determines, intuitively or explicitly, whether a given work deserves to be held in aesthetic and social esteem no longer exist.

One can hardly blame an artist for proclaiming that art is anything he chooses to call art if the very people who are supposed to supply the standards by which to judge what is and is not art assert that there are no such objective criteria. This leads to a widespread agreement that anything goes, be it art or not, cheap or rare, profound or superficial, mechanical or creative. Undoubtedly, changes and innovations are taking place in artistic practice. But precisely for this reason, it is incumbent on us to recall the unique qualifications by which the arts promote the common good. Rather than indulging in the easy pleasures of relativism and answering with a superior smile when students ask what is meant by art, we should come forward and confront the issue.

Reference

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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