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Perceiving page

Now in my Perceiving function, I'd like to look further into type and relate it to some of my studies in literature and aesthetics. 

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BUT WHAT ABOUT AESTHETICS?

            As mentioned earlier, there are many groups opposed to employing Jungian typology or the MBTI because they fear it may encourage people to see other human beings in terms of stereotypes.  Many people also do not like the idea of thinking of themselves as falling neatly into categories; they feel human beings are much more complex than belonging to one of only sixteen types.   At this point it might be worthwhile to remind them that this is “theory” and not a practical resource meant for application in the classroom or anywhere else.  As Dr. Mamchur and others have said, typology is a tool, something that can aid us in finding a starting point where we may begin to conceive of the diversity of personality in human beings.   The MBTI categories are acknowledged as very broad designations and only indicate patterns of preferences in how we perceive the world and judge situations in order to make decisions.   

The artists themselves are the most resistant to applying any kind of a science or system in relation to creativity and especially the arts.  I would agree that the artist needs absolute freedom when approaching her work and is doomed if she tries to hitch her artistic skills to a framework as she begins to create.  Aesthetics and the creative process, by the nature of their being, cannot accept any limiting or overlaying guidelines.  As Collingwood puts it, how can a writer know what she’s going to write until she’s written it?   It is the quintessential organic process and the artist only finds out what she is going to create as she is in the throes of creating it. 

Personally, I’ve struggled with the idea that typology might be a better way to look at personalities.  I have felt myself go through distinct stages.  First, being very curious about the qualities of the four preferences, pairs and sixteen types and have delighted in class when we point out examples of “acting our type”.  Second, I felt myself enter a “fatigue” stage, where I became tired of thinking of people along the lines of type and wanted to go back to my old, more “natural” way of seeing people.  Third, after two years of not working with type and deciding to enroll in this course which would be fully dedicated to type, I felt both intrigued and cautious – intrigued because I had done a lot more fiction writing in the meantime and wanted to improve my ability to create literary characters, but cautious because I had become much more aware of the organic nature of writing and had settled on my own method of writing, which I realized had been evolving ever since childhood.  Lastly, the stage which I am in now (!) seems to be more in harmony with Hegelian logic:  thesis + antithesis = synthesis.  That is, I see the value of type plus its negative aspects or limitations and yet I can use it as a tool along with my other tools, so that I take from type what I want and use it to help my writing in the way I choose.  

Mainly the benefit I gain from using typology in writing is not in the creative process, but in the editing process.  After I have been free to let my imagination roam and begun to gather ideas, after I’ve scratched out a first draft and played with the characters and conflicts until something begins to coalesce, and not until I’ve got a solid piece of work – then I am able to isolate my characters and compare their behavior to the established behavior patterns of the functions.  I remind myself that some characters are hard to type and not all will need to fit into the sixteen types.   But perhaps typology is most helpful in the editing stage when I look at two characters who are in conflict.  Often it is when functions are opposed that more of their differences can be brought out in high relief.  Knowing what their shadows will be in crisis also helps determine their behavior at the climax.    

Finally, I feel that learning about type helps me most as a writer in terms of self-development.   Being more aware of my own type can direct me to focus on my weaker areas.  For example, as a dominant N, I know that I should make a conscious effort to take the time to add enough detail to my writing, especially to take care about writing in more scenic time or including more sensuous description.  This has often been mentioned in feedback from other writers, and knowing now about my type, this makes perfect sense.   

There is one area of type I’ve been saving for last and that is the Shadow.  But before I cover that area, I’d like to return to the idea of aesthetics in more detail.  Many thinkers have written about this subject as it relates to the functions, in particular thinking and feeling, and I would like to bring them into the discussion now.     (Barber, April 2005)

 Aesthetics

Art is often defined simply as “expression”.  Lyas (103) qualifies that by emphasizing it is the degree of expression.  Within that, there are two kinds of expression, ordinary and artistic.   The latter must have two qualities to render it art.  First, “sufficiency”, wherein the work has a greater intensity and range than the ordinary, and second, a “necessity”.  It is not just the sound of birds singing that makes music, but a complex kind of making of sounds.   And in this, the artist’s personality comes through. (98-102).

Art is expression then, but we must also understand how it is expressed.  And we might add that art is powerful because of the expressive significance of representation. (56). 

All of these ideas come under the umbrella term aesthetics.  A somewhat slippery word, it refers to a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature and perception of what is beautiful, and includes taste or the appreciation of beauty.  Here we are most concerned with aestheticism, the idea that beauty may be the basic principle from which all other principles, especially moral principles, are derived. 

Abbs (3) states that the aesthetic is a mode of intelligence.  Just as a deductive method of conceptual thinking is developed through logic, mathematics, dialectical and analytical philosophy, the aesthetic uses not concepts but “percepts” of sensory experience.  The arts become symbolic forms for what they wish to communicate.  There is a continuum here, a sliding scale between sensation and feeling, of sensory experience and sensibility.  When we touch an object, we have a perceptual experience, while to be touched is to be moved emotionally.  We can say then that the aesthetic includes both the perceptual and the affective.  Growing in aesthetic intelligence therefore deals with the development of sensation and feeling into what adds up to be a whole greater than its parts, a “sensibility”. (4).

The point we are leading up to is that aesthetic intelligence, when defined in this way, is particular to the arts.  It is true, that although there can be feelings of beauty in response to a scientific discovery or a mathematical proof, what I want to focus on, here and in this thesis, is a method of responding that is inherent in human life and one that can only be accessed through senses and feelings.   It is not so much the actual sensation that is valued but the apprehension that derives from it. (6).  Therefore, returning to Abbs’s (7) definition, the artist can be said to be a “perceptual philosopher”, one who seeks through the symbolic ordering of her sensations a means to gain understanding of the human experience.

It was Kant who put aesthetics at the center of philosophy. (Scruton 26).  In the Critique of Judgment, Kant places the aesthetic experience in a similar category as the religious experience by suggesting it is the former and not the latter that is the archetype of revelation.  Specifically, what he is saying is that the aesthetic experience is able to reveal the sense of the world.  How does this happen?  Simply, in the presence of beauty an individual senses the purposiveness and intelligibility in the things around him.  This beauty may be highly subjective to the individual or it may be his recognition of what is beautiful based on what has been culturally transmitted to him. 

Either way, when we apprehend the sublime, we feel as though we can see beyond the world to something overwhelming, ineffable and yet strangely grounded.  Scruton (26) states that formerly it was the traditional concern of theology to provide a greater meaning of the world, but even before Kant, this faculty which has beauty as its goal, was the same thing as aesthetic contemplation.  Scruton further states that human beings have always had “intimations of the transcendental”, either personal or cultural, as a quality of being human.   None of this can be argued fully with reason.   Language has its limits here.  As we try to grope our way between thought and emotion we become intuitive rather than rational or analytical.  This is because we are able to grasp the idea of the transcendental without being able to verbalize it.  Ultimately we know nothing of the transcendental.  But we feel it and it is in this feeling of beauty that we sense truth. (26). 

To take this idea further, we could say that when we become aware of the beauty in a literary work, its content begins to feel true.  And simultaneously, as we start to become conscious of the literary “world” presented to us, certain truths about that world begin to emerge.  We might even believe that these truths make perfect sense, within that world.  This is remarkably so in the case of inspired religious texts, where apprehension of these works’ beauty, and therefore feelings of truth, inexplicably begins to intimate at meaning.

This may seem to be a non sequitur where beautiful but different works of art both present the “truth” despite the contradictory nature of their content.  Murdoch (8) explains that unlike philosophy and science, literature asks us “to submit oneself to criteria outside oneself; (the author) tries to say something that is impersonally true”.  I feel the answer lies somehow closer to Aristotle’s concept, that just as we learn to value individuals within their qualitatively distinct situations, we must also consider works of literature within the contexts of their unique “worlds” and therefore examine the truth found therein.  Therefore, there may be no absolute truths to be found in any one work of literature in relation to the “real” world; too much depends upon the circumstances presented in the story and also on the life, experiences and views of the reader, or, even more specifically, what that reader believes to be true, both subjectively as well as culturally, religiously, etc.  Even scientific truths have been proven false since the time they were included in classical works.   What we can say with some certainty is that taken collectively, there are “norms” of morality that emerge from a survey of the literary canon, which may point at “general truths”. 

Returning now to Kant’s third Critique, we see the significance of the shift from religion to philosophy, specifically Christianity to the Enlightenment, which was to bring ethics and aesthetics to the forefront.  Echoing the Copernican revolution in science, Kant believes the mind gives structure to the world and not the other way round.  What occurs, he says, is that we struggle to organize the bombardment of random stimuli into perceived objects, which is done by our imagination.  The creation of conceptual categories is done through understanding.  (Lyas 25).  What we have when the mind plays back and forth between imagination and understanding is aesthetic delight or rapture. (31).  This takes place in a state of disinterestedness, when there is no personal motivation for assigning value.   (28).  It is often called an aesthetic attitude, or a possession of a psychic distance, that allows the mind to roam with controlled imagination.  The freedom that ensues releases us from the numbness of our daily lives. (31).

This is why we are so attracted to art and why it is so powerful to us. (19).  We stand in awe before representation and tend to cherish those works by gifted artists who are able to capture a part of life and truth. (38).

Through its unique blend of form and content, then, art can remind us of our humanity in new and fresh ways and confirm our connectedness to others.  It says a great deal about the permanence of values and conceptions of human nature that startles us when we realize we can still understand Homer and Aeschylus.   Literature is the main vehicle, as it was in Homer’s time, for this wide-ranging understanding.  We would not want to be cut off from this vast encyclopedia of the past, in terms of its art, history or moral viewpoints.  (Murdoch 25). 

Magic Eye  -- What do you see in the picture?

Collingwood and The Principles of Art 

Collingwood (15) goes to great lengths to define what art is not, and why.  Art, he tells us, is not craft, mainly because it cannot have an end in mind when the artist is at the beginning.  How does the author know what a story is about until she has written it?  Art is not representational, in that it does not copy another work of art or real life situations.  Imitation is impossible in storytelling anyway because if the writer changes one thing it becomes a completely different work of art.  A true imitation would be the identical story.  Further, an author trying to recreate a “real” event from life would find it impossible to include every visual detail, every personality trait and point of view without sacrificing the “story”.

            Plato believed all art was representational and therefore too removed from reality to convey the truth.  But Collingwood disagrees; he says art may be representational but what makes it a work of art proper is another thing – what is missing is the emotional aspect, as we shall see.  We might, however, acknowledge that Plato was on to something, and although he did not have the concept of aesthetics in his day, he criticized art in a way that echoes the public’s view of art, which tends to see art as mere entertainment or distraction.  It is well known that Plato banished the poets from his ideal republic because he objected to the emotion that was stimulated by art, which in his view clouded the rational mind.  What may have been further behind this is that in Plato’s era there was a shift in ancient Greece’s values.  As Greece began to dominate the region in ideologies, religion, philosophy, politics and economics, the religious-based art of pre-Socratic times began to evolve from what Collingwood terms “magical art”, or art with a purpose, to one of a more trivial nature, “amusement art”.  Whereas in the earlier times people used art to instill religious values, good behavior and noble deeds, now people were attending theatre performances to be entertained and to let off tensions through tragedy or comedy. 

Aristotle, on the other hand, defended Greek drama as being useful, and maintained that by arousing dangerous emotions in a controlled setting, the play was facilitating “catharsis”, or release of pent up emotions, which served a purpose in society.  Plato might have disagreed, saying the opposite is more likely to occur just as we see in our own times with “copycat” crimes.  The teenage boys who gunned down their fellow students at Columbine had supposedly just watched an extreme example of glorified violence in The Matrix.

Art then for the ancient Greeks was “craft”, created with an end in mind.  The aim was to entertain the masses and Plato objected most to its irrational, trivial nature.  Plato wrote the Republic to warn of the dangers facing a society that is given over more and more to amusement, and also to the citizens who feel because there is less meaning in life they must reach out for distractions.  He went as far as to say that the percentage of a society’s citizens who pursue pleasure is directly related to the health of its civilization.

If this conception of art is accurate, we may well ask what this bodes for our times.  Plato’s solution was to remove art in order to promote truth and rationality in the ideal republic.  We must hold close to Aristotle’s view of ethics to find more appreciation of the arts in terms of its virtue, justice, pleasure, honor and the “good” it can bring.

            Before we move on, however, one last but important distinction must be made here between Plato’s condemnation of amusement art and the perfect refutation of that view in the example of hybridization in Shakespeare.  Here we find the answer to Plato’s blanket dismissal.  Keenly aware that his livelihood depended on enthralling the masses, Shakespeare nonetheless applied his unique abilities to raising art above amusement to “art proper”, by adding emotional complexity and rational contemplation on multiple levels of understanding.  His plays appealed to the groundlings up to the royal boxes and here we have proof that art can be many things at once.

            Returning to our definition of art, which Collingwood has labeled not as craft, magic or amusement, we must now ask, what is “art proper”?  Genuine art, Collingwood tell us, is about expressing emotion.   The act of expressing it, in the process of making the work, is an exploration of the artist’s emotion.  It cannot be crafted because the artist does not yet know what the emotion is because she has not yet expressed it.  Along with this is the idea that it cannot be technique; if a writer describes an emotion, it is no longer expressed.  The beginning writer is exhorted:  Show!  Don’t tell.  Many authors have slipped in their art because they were lazy or somehow believed the “message” would not get through.  This is the case at the end of Crime and Punishment, when Dostoyevsky cannot refrain from resorting to direct statements about the character’s situation and the implications for humanity.  Ironically, he must have felt the whole novel previous to this did not say the same thing and the poet in Dostoyevsky yielded to the philosopher.  (Cutler 3).  As a result, the astute reader feels hit over the head with the redundancy and the imaginative aesthetic experience is greatly diminished.              Coleridge may have said it best when he claimed to identify a poet by the fact that as the poet was expressing his emotions he was enabling us to express our own.

            It may be the case that not all artists are willing to do the hard labor that is required to create art proper.  For it is true that it is much more difficult to read, and therefore write, literature proper.   Non-fiction not only tells us what to think, it tells us how to think about its subject.  All the hard work is done for us in reading non-fiction.  It is presented in a clear, rational, journalistic style and leaves no doubt to meaning – that is, what it means to the author.  The authorial voice is firmly in place.  If we choose, we never have to search for our own meaning.   But, we can relax; just accept what we read as the truth.  Somebody else’s truth.

            In sharp contrast, literature that challenges us to find out who we are and what we think helps us in the world.  This is the essence of the aesthetic experience.  Put simply, good art is good for us.

Putting Feeling to Work in Aesthetics 

Perhaps we need to go a bit deeper beyond the meaning of art proper to the artist.  Who must the artist be in order to produce a significant work of art?  Collingwood (279) cites the necessity of deep and powerful emotions, and Coleridge describes the poet as someone who must feel deeply before he can think deeply.  But the artist is not the “genius” of the Romantic era who is endowed with special powers, or Plato’s concept of the “mad” or irrational poet who serves as a conduit of the gods.  Collingwood (119) says the artist is one who solves the problem of how to express emotion and thereby leads the reader to his own expression.

In The Principles of Art, Collingwood painstakingly outlines his theory of the role emotions play in our aesthetic response.    He suggests that phenomenon bombard us with stimuli which reach us through the senses.  Each “sensum” we receive comes with an emotional charge, which are inseparable at the psychical level, below our awareness.  As our attention shifts and we notice a particular sensum-emotion, we become conscious of receiving it.  For example, waves of sound move into our ear as mere “noise”, simultaneously high-pitched and tense, a sensum and an emotion.  When we become conscious of it, our field of awareness splits into hearing the sound, noticing it and then naming it as “high-pitched and tense” as we seek to dominate it as an idea in our imagination.    Our attention now focuses on this one thing in exclusion to others.   Here in the conscious imagination we decide what we feel about it, then begin to make connections or relations with other ideas.   It now moves into the realm of the intellect.

But this is not all of it.  When a writer creates a story, it may only exist in her mind.  (Collingwood 131).  If she puts it down on paper, it is only black symbols on a white page, or groups of letters strung across paper.  The artist’s goal is to bring the story into existence as she feels and sees in her head.  The words on the page are at this point only the means by which the reader, if he reads intelligently, can reconstruct for himself the story that existed in the author’s mind at the time of writing.  (139).  For it is true that unless the reader begins to “hear” the words, even silently inside his head, take them as his own, respond to the rhyme and rhythm, pattern and intonation, as well as falling in with the author’s particular use of language and begin to recognize the effect of this language to reproduce emotion, then the work will remain nothing but ink prints on white paper.

However, if the author has through symbol, language and sound put an emotional experience in motion, and if the reader’s imagination is able to fill in all the spaces around these symbols to flesh out the experience, then the mind’s eye of the reader begins to see a whole world there, which adds up to much more that ink or words. 

It is these very areas of indeterminacy that are the most fundamental elements of aesthetic response.   The gaps invite engagement and participation. (Iser).  But again, we have to make the effort.  If the author evokes enough vivid points of reference, say, in describing the rumbling of canons along a gutted road, cries coming from the trees and smoke reddening an already bloody sunset, then a powerful emotional response begins to coalesce, as well as a fuller picture of a “world” beyond what we are told.  This is how we can feel we have been present at the Battle of Borodino; the experience of reading War and Peace is that immediate.  Tolstoy has provided the first part; that of translating his own aesthetic experience into words that would make a sensum-emotional impression upon our consciousness so that we as readers could imaginatively reconstruct it in our own minds.  This is not to say that we focus only on the sensuous part and put our imagination to work; we are able to find impressions because we are utilizing our imaginative powers to discover what the author would like to reveal.  Collingwood (151) describes this as an “imaginary experience of total activity which we find (in the work of art) because (the artist) had put it there”.  “The work of art proper is a total activity which the person enjoying it apprehends, or is conscious of by the use of his imagination”.

The artist is not aiming to produce a preconceived emotional effect in the reader; the author is exploring her own emotions (122).  The only aim at the beginning of creating a work is to discover emotions in herself as related to a subject, characters, or situation, etc., that she was previously unaware of.   By sharing with the reader the process by which she discovered them she enables the reader to a) witness the discovery, and b) enable the reader to make a similar discovery in himself.  Again, this is not done by direct statements in literature or by telling the reader what to think.  This is key to understanding how ethics and aesthetics are united in art.

Truth in the Artist

            It is often said that a writer writes because she must.  Something within her compels her to write a certain story.  She is in need of exploring a particular set of circumstances, and of all the possibilities, she has chosen this one.  Collingwood (287) says that “each (work of art) is created to express an emotion arising within (the artist) at that point in his life and no other…and if the generative act which produces that utterance is an act of consciousness, and hence an act of thought, it follows that this utterance, so far from being indifferent to the distinction between truth and falsehood, is necessarily an attempt to state the truth.  So far as the utterance is a good work of art, it is a true utterance; its artistic merit and its truth are the same thing.”

            It is precisely in this struggle to discover and convey deep, authentic emotion that leads to creating significant art, and holds the potential of being called “good” art.  Collingwood (291) says, “the artist is a person who comes to know himself, to know his emotion…this knowing of himself is a making of himself.”  In other words, the work that she creates at this particular time is personally true for this artist. 

To define a thing implies there could be a good thing of that kind (280).  “To call things (such as art) good and bad is to imply success and failure.”  For Collingwood, it follows then that a work of art may be either good or bad, but a bad work of art might be due to an unsuccessful attempt at becoming conscious of a given emotion.  If this fault lies within the artist, it could be construed in a number of ways.  The writer may weakly express an emotion, as we’ve said, and just “tell it”.  Or, she could avoid it altogether, misread it, or blunder through it.  But in the way it relates to our problem, it seems to be a case of disguising it from herself.   This might be caused by denying to herself that it exists, or that it is not her own emotion but coming from something else.  Collingwood (282) says this choice occurs in the level of awareness just before consciousness  -- earlier would be too soon for awareness; later would be to tell oneself a lie, since if she were conscious of the truth she could not deceive herself about it.  Therefore, it is on the border of the psychical level and conscious level.   “It is the malperformance of the act which converts what is merely psychical (impression) into what is conscious (idea)” which leads to a ‘corruption of consciousness’”.

            Often this very corruption of consciousness, caused by a failure to express an emotion, is what prevents the writer from realizing whether the emotion has been expressed or not.  It is a veritable circle – a bad artist is a bad judge of her own art (283).  But Collingwood generously states that no one’s consciousness is completely corrupted – it is often partial or temporary – and that is why at other times the writer is able to judge the success of her own work and realize when it is not working.  In fact, most experienced authors are constantly on guard to eliminate these corruptions.  What is of danger, as we have implied above, is when instead of expressing emotions, the artist disowns them or intentionally avoids facing the truth of them.  If the author wishes to remain ignorant of emotions that terrify or disgust, for example, then this is not only bad art but damaging art. (284).  How this occurs we shall show in later sections.

The Good in the Artist

If the artist has two goals, first to become more in touch with a greater range and depth of emotions (imagination), and secondly, to improve her ability to express those emotions through her art (skills), then how might she go about this?  If “good” art is expressing emotions successfully, then does it follow that a “good” writer would be more successful at discovering emotions within herself?   How would someone improve their ability to discover emotions?  I think we might say it comes back to the idea of being attentive to the emotional truth within oneself and working hard to avoid a corruption of consciousness.  But we are still too limited in ourselves and our lives to have experiences which might lead to discovering a greater range and depth of emotion.  Granted, some authors have made careers of going over and over the same territory, ever deepening their own understanding of their obsessions, such as Fitzgerald and Munro.  But even they had to have exposure to other forms of these experiences and emotions in order to grow.  The obvious answer here is to read other successful literature.   One of the main ways that literature is unique, as Aristotle says, is that it ushers us into a larger life; without it we have not lived enough to escape the confines of our parochial existence.  (Nussbaum 47).   Also, because we engage with literature in a disinterested manner, we are able to get close enough to watch and begin to understand the “other”.  There is irony here; while recognizing the strangeness of others, literature invites us to withhold judgment until we have discerned the separate and qualitative uniqueness of other beings.   After we have opened ourselves up, we have a chance to see ourselves in them.  It allows us to perceive beyond ourselves.  “Then the ‘otherness’ which enters into us makes us ‘other’”.   (Steiner 188).  The challenge is to let go ourselves in order to become something better, as writers, readers or human beings.

As the author becomes more adept at determining the truth in emotions, she more easily discerns what is “good” art.  But how is the artist to find what is good in herself?  There is no formula for developing the virtues of being a writer, but the artist can subject herself to self-examination to determine the truthfulness of her consciousness.  And yet writing is such a solitary act.  A writer needs readers, but even then there is little direct response in the same way that an actor has an audience.  For writers it is important to have the feedback of other writers, for support as well as criticism.  The literary critic comes too late for the author; it is during the process of writing that a response is needed.  The place where much valuable collaboration occurs is in the creative writing classroom.

The Author’s “True” Personality  (The Only Author We Can Really Know)

In literature, the identification of the “posited” author is most critical to student learning.  By “posited” I mean not a character in the story who might seem to represent the author’s viewpoint, or even the narrator, who appears to be leading the reader through the story and pointing at things to notice.   Nor do I mean the historical author, the man Melville or the woman Virginia Woolf.  We can know little about what they as people really thought about “savages” sailing on whaling boats or how lonely professor’s wives felt.  Precisely then, the posited author is the controlling intelligence of the story, the emotional-thinking being who created the story in her imagination through an emotional discovery and decided this result was what best expressed meaning for her.   Shakespeare could have had a bit of Edmund in him, or saw himself as King Lear in his own life, but he is not saying, “I am an existentialist”, or, “Kings should rule until their death”, as his overall message to the reader.  These ideas may be imagined by the reader because Shakespeare’s characters felt them from their position in their “worlds”.  But Shakespeare as posited author had a much more complex intention in mind for us as readers.  The effect in the last scene in King Lear when the beaten king carries on stage the lifeless body of his daughter is impossible to render in words.  The audience is left to work through issues of being and existence raised to new levels of consciousness.  

            Devereaux (7) says, “Our access to the posited author is secured through the act of interpretation… As readers, however, the primary object of our attention is not the pages – the ink on paper – but the story.  To make sense of such judgments we must consider the narrative from the standpoint of the reader.  Seen from that standpoint, the posited author becomes intelligible.  We read under the concept of literary purposiveness”.   Therefore, “we can dispute whether The Merchant of Venice criticizes, endorses, or merely investigates the idea of moral payment embodied in Shylock’s “pound of flesh”.  The evidence for our judgments about the posited author will consist in texts and the reading of texts.”   In the end, moral judgments about the literary work itself are not determining who the real life person was, but in interpreting the emotional viewpoint of the posited author.

            When students learn about their own authorial voice as posited author they see their vision from a distance.  Beyond this, they recognize the quality of their own aesthetic experience as writers.   They begin to engage with truth in emotion and the ideas in stories and gain experience and maturity as writers and as persons.  The focus moves towards elucidating their understanding of humanity and existence.  That life is not rational becomes clear and soon they grasp that some truths just cannot be learned through rational methods.  Heidegger states that there is a fundamental way of being that is not cognitive.  In fact, it is the mirror image of Descartes’s famous phrase, “cogito sum ergo”.  It comes down to “being” instead of “knowing”, and not the reverse.  What we see at the end of King Lear is about “being” in the world.  (Pike 26).  We see the same thing in our experience of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land”.  There is a resistance to having it explained by another reader because we just want to “be” in the experience.  The poem eludes explication anyway, and any attempt will fail to capture its entirety.  It is best left as art to express its own meaning.

Knowledge in Art

            Knowledge in art, Collingwood (289) tells us, is knowledge of the individual.  Because the writer or thoughtful reader has developed the habits of mind that allow her to think and feel for herself, she automatically weighs the quality of her own aesthetic experience while engaging with the art and compares the author’s ethics with her own personal ethics.

            Because literature does not tell us directly what to think and feel, the reader is imagining what the author’s words mean through a unique way of experiencing.  Each reader has his own memories, way of assigning emotion to sensum, making intellectual associations and in the end, his overall reactions will be specific.  And here is the great paradox of literature: it is both specific and universal.   No one reader’s interpretation of a novel will be identical to another reader’s, nor to the writer’s.  One example of this is how different the picture we have in our head of a novel is compared to the film version we view in the theatre.  We are shocked to “see” how the director or producers have portrayed the characters, setting, etc.  It just doesn’t match how we have envisioned it.  And yet, how could it?  Imagination varies between individuals. 

On another level, we are also in the habit of judging the author’s moral sensibility.  When concepts don’t match our own, flags come up, which say, this doesn’t make sense to my worldview; or, it is unjust or plain wrong.  If enough flags are lifted, we begin to doubt the narrator; when there seems to be no purpose to have an unreliable narrator, we call the posited author into question.  Because we are thinking and feeling for ourselves, and therefore using our “moral imagination” as Nussbaum (162) calls it, we move into a more critical stance.

            I must clarify here the difference between a character who is immoral and the faulty consciousness of the author.  As mentioned before, authors often use “evil” characters for a purpose; they have a role to play in driving the plot forward.  Iago, for instance, the most cunning of villains, teaches us about the folly of pride and gullibility by the way he manipulates Othello.  Shakespeare as posited author is not condoning people who train on other people’s weaknesses to advance their own designs.  On the other hand, had Shakespeare made Iago a general after Othello’s death and celebrated his triumph, we as sharp readers would shake our heads in confusion.   This ending would not fit our picture of the cosmos and our moral imaginations cannot resolve the intentions behind such an outcome.

            In summarizing our point for this section then, we might say that an interpretation of the actual Othello will be slightly different for each person, depending on who they are, their circumstances in life and so on, but the overall experience could be said to be universal due to the play’s archetypes and themes.  In this way, the knowledge we acquire after spending time with literature is both specific for the individual as well as universal in terms of humanity and existence.  The aesthetic experience, therefore, as a matter of course, delivers us into a moral universe where ethics emerge as a natural part of engaging with the art.

Ethics and Aesthetics as One in Literature

            In this essay I have assumed there is an interplay between reading and writing and have written elsewhere about why literature matters more to students who are creative writers (Barber 2004).  I would now like to emphasize that the same interplay exists between ethics and aesthetics at the deepest level of reading and writing.

            Writers and readers have a moral responsibility to use the aesthetic experience to verify ethics.  Only a deep and prolonged engagement with art will yield emotional truths and therefore confirm or deny the moral health of each posited writer the reader encounters.  In Heidegger’s words, “Art is truth setting itself to work.”

            Students need to be encouraged to develop the habit of engaging with literature, not only because they need to discern what is quality art but also to exercise their moral imaginations.  For we have recognized the dangers of a corrupt consciousness that senses the truth but turns away from it, denies it and eventually represses it.  The corrupt consciousness prefers fantasies because it cannot dominate the impression and shrinks from the effort.  But the feeling from which attention is distracted does not disappear; it infects the imagination to the extent that the idea must be blamed on others, cast off or suppressed.  Collingwood (217-220) condemns the condition of a corrupt consciousness not only as an untruth but as an example of evil.    The mind that refuses to face down this evil has delivered itself into the power of its feelings.

            What happens when a person, a society or even a whole civilization prefers fantasies?  Or, specifically, prefers the fantasies promoted by newspapers, television newscasters or even government propaganda departments?  Taylor’s (9) third “malaise” suggests the outcome:  a loss of freedom.  When people choose the pleasures of staying home, watching trivial entertainment and enjoying “the satisfactions of private life, as long as the government of the day produces the means to these satisfactions…” the future may hold a new kind of tyranny where leaders appear “mild and paternalistic” but in fact hide a “soft” despotism over which people will have little control.  Contrasted with recent political events in the world, Taylor’s prediction appears prescient.

            However, Taylor (32) is not a pessimist, and he believes the remedy for the malaises is to be found in art and what is most basic to human life: its fundamentally dialogical character.  “When we come to understand what it is to define ourselves… we see that we take as background some sense of what is significant.”  In the shadow of the malaises, I believe the art of teaching now demands a more active pursuit of the virtues  -- more courage to resist instrumental reasoning, more honouring the slow process of emerging consciousness, more justice and perhaps more righteous indignation.  For it is true that the teacher is an artist with an ethical awareness, whose business is nothing less than to teach artistic excellence as well as the meaning of life.     (excerpt from Barber, Susan. “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Literature” Dec.2004)

Perceiving versus Judging  (Or, is this an example of a high-end Perceiver?!) 

• The subcortical modes combine to form a three stage mental ‘pump.’
• Exhorter strategy provides the drive, imagination, and energy.
• Contributor mode controls, decides, and optimizes.
• Facilitator thought adjusts, blends and fine-tunes.

• P/J is a secondary division that involves practical thought.
• Exhorter strategy emphasizes Perceiving—when living with experiences.
• Contributor thought emphasizes Judging—when working with experiences.