The same statement applies to the conception of merely fine or final arts and works of art. In point of fact, the things designated by the phrase to fall under three cap¬ tions. There are activities and receptivities to which the name of “self-expression” is often applied as a eulogistic qualification, in which one indulges himself by giving free outward exhibition to his own states without reference to the conditions upon which intelligible communication depends — an act also sometimes known as “expression of emotion,” which is then set up for definition of all fine art. It is easy to dispose of this art by calling it a prod¬ uct of egotism due to balked activity in other occupa¬ tions. But this treatment misses a more significant point. For all art is a process of making the world a different place in which to live, and involves a phase of protest and of compensatory response. Such art as there is in these manifestations lies in this factor. It is owing to frustra¬ tion in communication of meanings that the protest be¬ comes arbitrary and the compensatory response wilfully eccentric.
In addition to this type — and frequently mingled with it — -there is experimentation in new modes or craftsman¬ ship, cases where the seemingly bizarre and over-indi¬ vidualistic character of the products is due to discontent with existing technique, and is associated with an attempt to find new modes of language. It is aside from the point either to greet these manifestations as if they constituted art for the first time in human history, or to condemn them as not art because of their violent departures from received canons and methods. Some movement in this direction has always been a condition of growth of new forms, a condition of salvation from that mortal arrest and decay called academic art.
Then there is that which in quantity bulks most largely as fine art: the production of buildings in the name of the art of architecture; of pictures in the name of the art of painting; of novels, dramas, etc., in the name of literary art; a production which in reality is largely a form of commercialized industry in production of a class of com¬ modities that find their sale among well-to-do persons desirous of maintaining a conventionally approved status. As the first two modes carry to disproportionate excess that factor of particularity, contingency and difference which is indispensable in all art, deliberately flaunting avoid¬ ance of the repetitions and order of nature; so this mode celebrates the regular and finished. It is reminiscent rather than commemorative of the meanings of experi¬ enced things. Its products remind their owner of things pleasant in memory though hard in direct-undergoing, and remind others that their owner has achieved an economic standard which makes possible cultivation and decoration of leisure.
Obviously no one of these classes of activity and prod¬ uct or all of them put together, mark off anything that can be called distinctively fine art. They share their qualities and defects with many other acts and objects. But, fortunately, there may be mixed with any one of them, and, still more fortunately, there may occur with¬ out mixture, process and product that are characteristi¬ cally excellent. This occurs when activity is productive of an object that affords continuously renewed delight.
This condition requires that the object be, with its suc¬ cessive consequences, indefinitely instrumental to new satisfying events. For otherwise the object is quickly exhausted and satiety sets in. Anyone who reflects upon the commonplace that a measure of artistic products is their capacity to attract and retain observation with satisfaction under whatever conditions they are ap¬ proached, while things of less quality soon lose capacity to hold attention becoming indifferent or repellent upon subsequent approach, has a sure demonstration that a genuinely esthetic object is not exclusively consummatory but is casually productive as well. A consummatory object that is not also instrumental turns in time to the dust and ashes of boredom. The “eternal” quality of great art is its renewed instrumentality for further con¬ summatory experiences.
When this fact is noted, it is also seen that limitation of fineness of art to paintings, statues, poems, songs and symphonies is conventional, or even verbal. Any activity that is productive of objects whose perception is an im¬ mediate good, and whose operation is a continual source of enjoyable perception of other events exhibits fineness of art. There are acts of all kinds that directly refresh and enlarge the spirit and that are instrumental to the production of new objects and dispositions which are in turn productive of further refinements and replenish¬ ments. Frequently moralists make the acts they find excellent or virtuous wholly final, and treat art and affection as mere means. Estheticians reverse the per¬ formance, and see in good acts means to an ulterior exter¬ nal happiness, while esthetic appreciation is called a good in itself, or that strange thing an end in itself. But on both sides it is true that in being preeminently fructify¬ ing the things designated means are immediate satis¬ factions. They are their own excuses for being just because they are charged with an office in quickening apprehension, enlarging the horizon of vision, refining discrimination, creating standards of appreciation which are confirmed and deepened by further experiences. It would almost seem when their non-instrumental character is insisted upon as if what was meant were an indefinitely expansive and radiating instrumental efficacy.
The source of the error lies in the habit of calling by the name of means things that are not means at all; things that are only external and accidental antecedents of the happening of something else. Similarly things are called ends that are not ends save accidentally, since they are not fulfilments, consummatory, of means, but merely last terms closing a process. Thus it is often said that a laborer’s toil is the means of his livelihood, although except in the most tenuous and arbitrary way it bears no relation¬ ship to his real living. Even his wage is hardly an end or consequence of his labor. He might — and frequently does — equally well or ill — perform any one of a hundred other tasks as a condition of receiving payment. The prevailing conception of instrumentality is profoundly vitiated by the habit of applying it to cases like the above, where, instead of an operation of means, there is an en¬ forced necessity of doing one thing as a coerced anteced¬ ent of the occurrence of another thing which is wanted.
Means are always at least causal conditions; but causal conditions are means only when they possess an added qualification; that, namely, of being freely used, because of perceived connection with chosen consequences. To entertain, choose and accomplish anything as an end or consequence is to be committed to a like love and care for whatever events and acts are its means. Similarly, consequences, ends, are at least effects; but effects are not ends unless thought has perceived and freely chosen the conditions and processes that are their conditions. The notion that means are menial, instrumentalities servile, is more than a degradation of means to the rank of coer¬ cive and external necessities. It renders all things upon which the name of end is bestowed accompaniments of privilege, while the name of utility becomes an apologetic justification for things that are not portions of a good and reasonable life. Livelihood is at present not so much the consequence of a wage-earner’s labor as it is the effect of other causes forming the economic regime, labor being merely an accidental appendage of these other causes.
Paints and skill in manipulative arrangement are means of a picture as end, because the picture is their assemblage and organization. Tones and susceptibility of the ear when properly interacting are the means of music, because they constitute, make, are, music. A disposition of vir¬ tue is a means to a certain quality of happiness because it is a constituent of that good, while such happiness is means in turn to virtue, as the sustaining of good in being. Flour, water, yeast are means of bread because they are ingredients of bread; while bread is a factor in life, not just to it. A good political constitution, honest policesystem, and competent judiciary, are means of the pros¬ perous life of the community because they are integrated portions of that life. Science is an instrumentality of and for art because it is the intelligent factor in art. The trite saying that a hand is not a hand except as an organ of the living body — except as a working coordinated part of a balanced system of activities — applies untritely to all things that are means. The connection of meansconsequences is never one of bare succession in time, such that the element that is means is past and gone when the end is instituted. An active process is strung out tem¬ porarily, but there is a deposit at each stage and point entering cumulatively and constitutively into the outcome. A genuine instrumentality for is always an organ of an end. It confers continued efficacy upon the object in which it is embodied.
The traditional separation between some things as mere means and others as mere ends is a reflection of the insu¬ lated existence of working and leisure classes, of produc¬ tion that is not also consummatory, and consummation that is not productive. This division is not a merely social phenomenon. It embodies a perpetuation upon the human plane of a division between need and satisfac¬ tion belonging to brute life. And this separation ex¬ presses in turn the mechanically external relationship that exists in nature between situations of disturbed equilibrium, of stress, and strain, and achieved equi¬ librium. For in nature, outside of man, except when events eventuate in “development” or “evolution” (in which a cumulative carrying forward of consequences of past histories in new efficiencies occurs) antecedent events are external transitive conditions of the occurrence of an event having immediate and static qualities. To animals to whom acts have no meaning, the change in the environ¬ ment required to satisfy needs has no significance on its own account; such change is a mere incident of ego-cen¬ tric satisfactions. This physically external relationship of antecedents and consequents is perpetuated; it con¬ tinues to hold true of human industry wherever labor and its materials and products are externally enforced necessi¬ ties for securing a living. Because Greek industry was so largely upon this plane of servile labor, all industrial activity was regarded by Greek thought as a mere means, an extraneous necessity. Hence satisfactions due to it were conceived to be the ends or goods of purely animal nature in isolation. With respect to a truly human and rational life, they were not ends or goods at all, but merely "means,” that is to say, external conditions that were antecedently enforced requisites of the life conducted and enjoyed by free men, especially by those devoted to the acme of freedom, pure thinking. As Aristotle asserted, drawing a just conclusion from the assumed premises, there are classes of men who are necessary materials of society but who are not integral parts of it. And he summed up the whole theory of the external and coerced relationship of means and ends when he said in this very connection that: "When there is one thing that is means and another thing that is end, there is nothing common between them, except in so far as the one, the means, pro¬ duces, and the other, the end, receives the product.”
It would thus seem almost self-evident that the distinc¬ tion between the instrumental and the final adopted in philosophic tradition as a solving word presents in truth a problem, a problem so deep-seated and far-reaching that it may be said to be the problem of experience. For all the intelligent activities of men, no matter whether expressed in science, fine arts, or social relationships, have for their task the conversion of causal bonds, relations of succession, into a connection of means-consequence, into meanings. When the task is achieved the result is art: and in art everything is common between means and ends. Whenever so-called means remain external and servile, and so-called ends are enjoyed objects whose further causative status is unperceived, ignored or denied, the situation is proof positive of limitations of art. Such a situation consists of affairs in which the problem has not been solved; namely that of converting physical and brute relationships into connections of meanings characteristic of the possibilities of nature.
Tt goes without saying that man, begins as_JL.part of physical and animal nature. Jn as far as he re.acts_.,ta physical things on a strictly physical level, he is pulled and pushed about, overwhelmed, broken to pieces, lifted on the crest of the wave of things, like anything else. His contacts, his sufferings and doings, are matters of direct interaction only. He is in a “state of nature.” As an animal, even upon the brute level, he manages to subor¬ dinate some physical things to his needs, converting them into materials sustaining life and growth. But in so far things that serve as material of satisfaction and the acts that procure and utilize them are not objects, or thingswith-meanings. That appetite as such is blind, is notori¬ ous; it may push us into a comfortable result instead of into disaster; but we are pushed just the same. When appetite is perceived in its meanings, in the consequences it jnduces, and these consequences are experimented.
with in reflective imagination, some being seen to be consistent with one another, and hence capable of co-exist= ence and of serially ordered achievement, others being incompatible, forbidding conjunction at one time, and getting in one another’s wav serially— when this estate is attained, we live on the human plane, responding to things in their meanings. A relationship of cause- effect has been transformed into one of means-consequence. Then consequences belong integrally to the conditions which may produce them, and the latter possess character and distinction. The meaning of causal conditions is carried over also into the consequence, so that the lat¬ ter is no longer a mere end, a last and closing term of arrest. It is marked out in perception, distinguished by the efficacy of the conditions which have entered into it. Its value as fulfilling and consummatory is measurable by subsequent fulfillments and frustrations to which it is contributory in virtue of the causal means which compose it.
Thus to be conscious of meanings or to have an idea, marks a fruition, an enjoyed or suffered arrest of the flux of events. But there are all kinds of ways of perceiving meanings, all kinds of ideas. Meaning may be deter¬ mined in terms of consequences hastily snatched at and torn loose from their connections; then is prevented the formation of wider and more enduring ideas. Or, we may be aware of meanings, may achieve ideas, that unite wide and enduring scope with richness of distinctions. The latter sort of consciousness is more than a passing and superficial consummation or end: it takes up into itself meanings covering stretches of existence wrought into consistency. It marks the conclusion of long con¬ tinued endeavor; of patient and indefatigable search and test. The idea is, in short, art and a work of art. As a work of art, it directly liberates subsequent action and makes it more fruitful in a creation of more meanings and more perceptions.
It is the part of wisdom to recognize how sparse and insecure are such accomplishments in comparison with experience in which physical and animal nature largely have their way. Our liberal and rich ideas, our adequate appreciations, due to productive art are hemmed in by an unconquered domain in which we are everywhere exposed to the incidence of unknown forces and hurried fatally to unforeseen consequences. Here indeed we live ser¬ vilely, menially, mechanically; and we so live as much when forces blindly lead to us ends that are liked as when we are caught in conditions and ends against which we blindly rebel. To call satisfactions which happen in this blind way “ends” in a eulogistic sense, as did classic thought, is to proclaim in effect our servile submission to accident. We may indeed enjoy the goods the gods of for¬ tune send us, but we should recognize them for what they are, not asserting them to be good and righteous alto¬ gether. For, since they have not been achieved by any art involving deliberate selection and arrangement of forces, we do not know with what they are charged. It is an old true tale that the god of fortune is capricious, and delights to destroy his darlings after having made them drunk with prosperity. The goods of art are not the less good in their goodness than the gifts of nature; while in addition they are such as to bring with themselves open-eyed confidence. They are fruits of means con¬ sciously employed fulfillments whose further consequences are secured by conscious control of the causal conditions which enter into them. Art is the sole alternative to luck; and divorce from each other of the meaning and value of instrumentalities and ends is the essence of luck. The esoteric character of culture and the supernatural quality of religion are both expressions of the divorce.
The modern mind has formally abjured belief in natural teleology because it found Greek and medieval teleol¬ ogy juvenile and superstitious. Yet facts have a way of compelling recognition of themselves. There is little scientific writing which does not introduce at some point or other the idea of tendency. The idea of tendency unites in itself exclusion of prior design and inclusion of movement in a particular direction, a direction that may be either furthered or counteracted and frustrated, but which is intrinsic. Direction involves a limiting position, a point or goal of culminating stoppage, as well as an initial starting point. To assert a tendency and to be fore-conscious of a possible terminus of movement are two names of the same fact. Such a consciousness may be fatalistic; a sense of inevitable march toward impend¬ ing doom. But it may also contain a perception of mean¬ ings such as flexibly directs a forward movement. The end is then an end-in-view and is in constant and cumu¬ lative reenactment at each stage of forward movement. It is no longer a terminal point, external to the conditions that have led up to it; it is the continually developing meaning of present tendencies — the very things which as directed we call “means.” The process is art and its product, no matter at what stage it be taken, is a work of art.
To a person building a house, the end-in- view is not just a remote and final goal to be hit upon after a suffi¬ ciently great number of coerced motions have been duly performed. The end-in-view is a plan which is contem¬ poraneously operative in selecting and arranging materials.
The latter, brick, stone, wood and mortar, are means only as the end-in- view is actually incarnate in them, in forming them. Literally, they are the end in its present stage of realization. The end-in-view is present at each stage of the process; it is present as the meaning of the materials used and acts done; without its informing presence, the latter are in no sense “means;” they are merely extrinsic causal conditions. The statement is generic; it applies equally at every stage. The house itself, when building is complete, is “end” in no exclusive sense. It marks the conclusion of the organization of certain materials and events into effective means; but these material and events still exist in causal interaction with other things. New consequences are foreseen; new purposes, ends-in-view, are entertained; they are embodied in the coordination of the thing built, now reduced to material, although significant material, along with other materials, and thus transmuted into means. The case is still clearer, when instead of considering a process subject to as many rigid external conditions as is the building of a house, we take for illus¬ tration a flexibly and freely moving process, such as paint¬ ing a picture or thinking out a scientific process, when these operations are carried on artistically. Every process of free art proves that the difference between means and end is analytic, formal, not material and chronologic.
What has been said enables us to re-define the distinc¬ tion drawn between the artistic, as objectively productive, and the esthetic. Both involve a perception of meanings in which the instrumental and the consummatory pecu¬ liarly intersect. In esthetic perceptions an object inter¬ penetrated with meanings is given; it may be taken for granted; it invites and awaits the act of appropriative enjoyment. In the esthetic object tendencies are sensed as brought to frui tion; in it is embodied a means-consequence relationship, as the past work of his hands was surveyed by the Lord and pronounced good. This good differs from those gratifications to which the name sensual rather than sensuous is given, since the former are pleas¬ ing endings that occur in ways not informed with the meaning of materials and acts integrated into them. In appreciative possession, perception goes out to tendencies which have been brought to happy fruition in such a way as to release and arouse.
Artistic sense on the other hand grasps tendencies as possibilities; the invitation of these possibilities to per¬ ception is more urgent and compelling than that of the given already achieved. While the means-consequence relationship is directly sensed, felt, in both appreciation and artistic production, in the former the scale descends upon the side of the attained; in the latter there pre¬ dominates the invitation of an existent consummation to bring into existence further perceptions. Art in being, the active productive process, may thus be defined as an esthetic perception together with an operative perception of the efficiencies of the esthetic object. In many persons with respect to most kinds of enjoyed perceptions, the sense of possibilities, the arousal or excitation attendant upon appreciation of poetry, music, painting, architecture or landscape remains diffuse and inchoate; it takes effect only in direct and undefined channels. The enjoyed perception of a visual scene is in any case a function of that scene in its total connections, but it does not link up adequately. In some happily constituted persons, this effect is adequately coordinated with other endow¬ ments and habits; it becomes an integral part of craft, taking effect in the creation of a new object of appreciation. The integration is, however, progressive and ex¬ perimental, not momentarily accomplished. Thus every creative effort is temporal, subject to risk and deflection.
In that sense the difference between the diffuse and post¬ poned change of action due in an ordinary person to release of energies by an esthetic object, and the special and axial direction of subsequent action in a gifted person is, after all, a matter of degree.
Without a sense of moving tendencies which are opera¬ tive in conjunction with a state of fruition, there is appetitive gratification, but nothing that may be termed appreciation. Sense of moving tendencies supplies thrill, stimulation, excitation; sense of completion, con¬ summation, affords composure, form, measure, composi¬ tion. Emphasize the latter, and appreciation is of the classic type. This type fits conditions where production is professionalized among technical craftsmen, as among the Greeks; it is adapted to a contemplative enjoyment of the achievements of past ages or remote places, where conditions forbid urge to emulation or productive activ¬ ity of a similar kind. Any work of art that persistently retains its power to generate enjoyed perception or appreciation becomes in time classic.
In so-called romantic art, the sense of tendencies opera¬ tive beyond the limits of consummation is in excess; a lively sense of unrealized potentialities attaches to the object; but it is employed to enhance immediate appre¬ ciation, not to promote further productive achievement. Whatever is peculiarly romantic excites a feeling that the possibilities suggested go beyond not merely actual pres¬ ent realization, but are beyond effective attainment in any experience. In so far intentionally romantic art is wilful, and in so far not art. Excited and uneasy percep¬ tual enjoyment is made ultimate, and the work of art is accommodated to production of these feelings. The sense of unachieved possibilities is employed as a compensatory equivalent for endeavor in achievement. Thus when the romantic spirit invades philosophy the possibilities present in imaginative sentiment are declared to be the real, although “transcendental,” substance of Being itself. In complete art, appreciation follows the object and moves with it to its completion; romanticism reverses the process and degrades the object to an occasion for arous¬ ing a predetermined type of appreciation. In classicism, objective achievement is primary, and appreciation not only conforms to the object, but the object is employed to compose sentiment and give it distinction. Its vice, as an ’ism, is that it turns the mind to what is given; the given is taken as if it were eternal and wholly separate from generation and movement. Art free from subjec¬ tion to any “ism” has movement, creation, as well as order, finality.
To institute a difference of kind between useful and fine arts is, therefore, absurd, since art involves a peculiar interpenetration of means and ends. Many things are termed useful for reasons of social status, implying dep¬ recation and contempt. Things are sometimes said to belong to the menial arts merely because they are cheap and used familiarly by common people. These things of daily use for ordinary ends may survive in later periods, or be transported to another culture, as from Japan and China to America, and being rare and sought by con¬ noisseurs, rank forthwith as works of fine art. Other things may be called fine because their manner of use is decorative or socially ostentatious. It is tempting to make a distinction of degree and say that a thing belongs to the sphere of use when perception of its meaning is incidental to something else; and that a thing belongs to fine art when its other uses are subordinate to its use in perception. The distinction has a rough practical value, but cannot be pressed too far. For in production of a painting or a poem, as well as in making a vase or a tem¬ ple, a perception is also employed as means for something beyond itself. Moreover, the perception of urns, pots and pans as commodities may be intrinsically enjoyable, although these things are primarily perceived with refer¬ ence to some use to which they are put. The only basic distinction is that between bad art and good art, and this distinction, between things that meet the require¬ ments of art and those that do not, applies equally to things of use and of beauty. Capacity to offer to per¬ ception meaning in which fruition and efficacy interpene¬ trate is met by different products in various degrees of fulness; it may be missed altogether by pans and poems alike. The difference between the ugliness of a mechani¬ cally conceived and executed utensil and of a meretricious and pretentious painting is one only of content or material; in form, both are articles, and bad articles.
Thinking is pre-eminently an art; knowledge and propo¬ sitions which are the products of thinking, are works of art, as much so as statuary and symphonies. Every successive stage of thinking is a conclusion in which the meaning of what has produced it is condensed; and it is no sooner stated than it is a light radiating to other things — unless it be a fog which obscures them. The anteced¬ ents of a conclusion are as causal and existential as those of a building. They are not logical or dialectical, or an affair of ideas. While a conclusion follows from ante¬ cedents, it does not follow from “premises,” in the strict, formal sense. Premises are the analysis of a conclu¬ sion into its logically justifying grounds; there are no premises till there is a conclusion. Conclusion and premise are reached by a procedure comparable to the use of boards and nails in making a box; or of paint and canvas in making a picture. If defective materials are employed or if they are put together carelessly and awk¬ wardly, the result is defective. In some cases the result is called unworthy, in others, ugly; in others, inept; in others, wasteful, inefficient, and in still others untrue, false. But in each case, the condemnatory adjective refers to the resulting work judged in the light of its method of production. Scientific method or the art of constructing true perceptions is ascertained in the course of experience to occupy a privileged position in under¬ taking other arts. But this unique position only places it the more securely as an art; it does not set its product, knowledge, apart from other works of art.
The existential origin of valid cognitive perceptions is sometimes recognized in form and denied in substance; the name “psychological” is given to the events which generate valid beliefs. Then a sharp distinction is made between genesis as psychological and validity as logical. Of course lexicographic names are of no special moment; if any one wishes to call the efficient causes of knowledge and truth psychological, he is entitled to do so — provided the actual traits of these causative events are recognized.