Imagination and Aesthetic Value

British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 46, No. 3, July 2006 © British Society of Aesthetics; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]:10.1093/aesthj/ayl002

© British Society of Aesthetics 2006 248

IMAGINATION AND AESTHETIC VALUE Anthony Savile

One issue for theory is to account convincingly for the value of art and the sig-nifi cance of its specifi cally aesthetic character. Appeal to imagination, understood along Kantian lines as functioning to construct ‘ a second nature from the mate-rial supplied by actual nature ’ , generates suggestive answers to both aspects of the task. The second nature that the artist inventively constructs in fi ne representa-tion is one in which themes central to the inner life are revealed in ways as unestranging to us as their nature permits; then, in their aesthetic realization we take them into ourselves directly in experience, with concomitant affect. Thereby the values they convey are liable either to become our own or else to modify established ones. Whether they do so stably or not may depend on our having achieved a fi rmly enough rooted sense of self. Imagination has traditi-onally been seen as contributing aesthetically to that too in the elaboration of the sublime, as much within the realm of art as in nature itself. Forms of art resisting such modes of refl ection will need to look to theory to put something no less vital in their place.

I n § 46 of Art and its Objects Richard Wollheim contended that the unity of the arts is accounted for by their being created under the concept art. His idea must apply in the fi rst instance to individual works of art and not to the gen-eral forms that art takes since only the individual productions of a mind can be introduced under this concept or that. However, the broad forms of art such as fi gurative painting, dance, sculpture, and so on, all belong within the unity of the arts just because individual items produced under the concept art are produced as instances of fi gurative painting, dance, and the rest. In this respect the arts of our own time may be supposed to be no different from the others, belonging to the overall unity, if they do, by virtue of the intentions of their practitioners, specifi cally to create their works as works of art.

Cursorily understood, Wollheim’s suggestion might just seem to be that we have to do with a necessary condition on something being a work of art or belonging to a type of art, but if that were all, the condition would risk being undemanding as well as questionably restrictive. While it would in all likeli-hood exclude plenty of exotic and primitive artefacts that we have become used to speaking of as pagan art or peasant art, it might be supposed to let in the daubings of the child who exhorts his mother to admire his pretty art, or the installations of today’s unrefl ectively ambitious student, intent on little

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more than that his installations be accorded entry to the artworld. (Both child and student think of what they do under the title ‘ art ’ , but that is clearly not going to be enough to satisfy Wollheim: in thinking of what they make as art they must conceive of it aright as well. As he thinks of it, maybe neither of them create what he does under the concept art , even if both think of what they do under that label. The cursory reading confuses the lexicographic and a posteriori with the conceptual and a priori .)

Clearly, as the concept art under which things are produced is taken in a more replete fashion the initial understanding of Wollheim’s condition yields to something more demanding. While it will exclude marginal cases, those of the child and the student, it need not ban the peasant or the pagan, for while they may not have commanded the language in the way of child and student, they may have gained suffi cient mastery of the concept to make what they do under it. The issue will naturally turn on just what is needed to replace the bare demand that the artist, the maker, think of his work under the title ‘ art ’ and thereby make it true that in doing so he is thinking of it under the con-cept art.

Apart from assimilating the practice, and hence the concept, of art with a form of life, conceived of in Wittgensteinian terms (§ 45 ), Wollheim does not explicitly tell us. However, one specifi c observation he makes is highly sug-gestive. He notes that there are certain psychic drives, such as the reparative drive and the desire to establish whole objects, without which the general forms that art takes, as well as its value, would scarcely be comprehensible ( ibid. § 46 ). It is not diffi cult to put these thoughts together. Someone who makes what he does under the concept art must have a conception of what he does or makes as being of a general kind instances of which have the potential to provide deep psychological benefi t both to himself and to his public (the concept art under which he works being the concept of a public institution): to himself, one assumes, in the making of it; to his public, through the appreciation that results from close and sensitive attention to what he comes to make.

Taking conformity to this normative demand to be properly internal to the concept and recognizing it as a practical intentional matter, we can see that the artist will have the view that it is a goal that can be satisfi ed through work in the general form he adopts, and also that he will need to have at least a broad view about how, within that form, it might be achieved. These are require-ments that will follow from the artist’s bare intention to make what he does as art (now more repletely understood). They will be the requirements at work in guiding the rationality of decisions that the artist makes about when the work in hand is ready to be passed on to others; alternatively, when what he is about needs further adjustment before leaving the studio; whether it needs to be temporally suspended in favour of something else; or else, in the worst

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250 IMAGINATION AND AESTHETIC VALUE

of cases, scrapped altogether, abandoned. Neither the child nor the student has these same demands to contend with. The child’s mother is an indulgent par-ent, and for the student, admission to and acceptance by the art world of today is an unpredictably hit-and-miss affair. Seen from Wollheim’s point of view, child and student alike can be expected to have a defi cient grasp of the com-mitments that allegiance to the concept art brings with it.

It is surely an interesting challenge to ask whether, sticking to this high level of generality, there is anything substantial to be said about the nature of the drives or goods that the familiar forms of art are well suited to answer to, and also about the means available to them to achieve that end. Here I think that there is much to be learnt by stepping back briefl y from the contemporary scene and refl ecting on what two major thinkers, Kant and Schiller, had to tell us in their aesthetical writings. Putting it in a nutshell, the view they espoused was that through fi rst their potential for beauty and then for sublimity, the arts prepare us to fi nd in the world objects that are worthy of love and of esteem. In either case the arts, in particular the representational arts, are apt to lay down those fundamental attitudinal responses in the psyche through the ex ercise of imagination they demand of the spectator, and as means to that end they fi x those responses there largely through the aesthetic pleasure and delight to which they properly give rise. Some detail will make this highly condensed thought clearer, in particular some detail about the rather idiosyn-cratic use of the term ‘ imagination ’ that is so central to Kant’s own theorizing about this topic.

Although Kant defi nes imagination conventionally enough in terms of a power to think of objects in their absence ( Critique of Pure Reason , B 151 ), it is notable that imagination is crucially at work in his picture of the construction of any worldly experience out of the fl ow of sensory stimulus ( scilicet ‘ the man-ifold of intuition ’ ) that we are exposed to and which at an early stage we almost automatically and unrefl ectively process through the forms of intuition that are Space and Time. Imagination is at work even in such seemingly elementary cases as experiencing the object in front of me as a table. For the character of my perception as of a table is imbued with thought about past experiences of that same thing from different points of view, with categorical and hypothetical assumptions about the way in which I can treat it and about the uses to which I am likely to put it, all of these being considerations lying at a some distance from my immediately ongoing fl ow of sensory input (narrowly conceived).

If imagination is at work in the construction of banal everyday experience, as Kant understands that, in our aesthetic experience it is doubly so. As he put it, imagination ‘ enables us to construct a second nature out of the material made available by actual nature ’ ( Critique of Judgement § 49 ); or again, as a pro-duct of the imagination, beauty is seen as ‘ giving a veritable extension, not, of course, to our knowledge of objects of nature, but to our conception of

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nature itself — nature as mere mechanism being enlarged to the conception of nature as art ’ ( ibid ., § 23 ). So, in the aesthetic case, the ways in which we view and represent objects of actual nature — itself in part the constructive work of the imagination — through a further operation of imagination, acquire a more ample character, one through which Kant sees them as acquiring a signifi -cance for us which, as elements of mere mechanical nature, they did not have and could not previously have had.

By way of example, recall Dante fi nding himself lost in the dark wood at the beginning of Inferno (Canto 1 , 1 – 6 ). His actual situation on that Thursday in early April 1300 , is little more than that of a man, himself, surrounded by trees and, owing to bad light, unable to see any clear pathway forward. That is something that he is aware of to be sure, but not all: his psychological situ-ation, his deep sense of sin, and the imminence of Easter Day, all colour his perception of the wood reinforcing its harshness and making him view its darkness as fearful, so much so that even to recall it at the start of the poem brings back the dread of the original moment. As he draws on imagination and views the wood through concepts that draw on his own psychic history, Dante’s experience of his situation is altered and enlarged. The wood is seen as dreadful and, in Kantian terms acquires a second nature for him, distinct from the actual nature in which he fi nds himself.

In this example, of course, we are far away from the cases that centrally occupy us here. First, it is to be understood as an instance of imagination at work in nature, not in art (even though the example happens to be taken from art — but nothing hinges on that); secondly, it is not an instance of imagina-tion’s contribution to the beauty or the sublimity of the scene; and thirdly, the experiential signifi cance that the wood takes on in Dante’s story is scarcely one that could reasonably be attributed to the wood tout court . It is specifi cally a projection of Dante’s inner life, not one that enjoys greater objectivity than that (unless we think of Dante as Everyman in mid-life, and of the dark wood as apt hypothetically to evoke terror in us were we in his position, just as it actually did in him).

A different example takes us closer to the goal. Towards the end of Paradiso , and just one week later, Dante is granted vision of his beloved’s face (Canto 27 , 88 – 106 ). He refl ects:

the baits that nature and art use to capture first the eyes, and then the mind, by means of the human body [ carne umana ] and pictures of it, were as nothing compared with the divine delight that infused me as I turned to her radiant face — as she noticed my desire, she so smiled that her face was as God’s own joy.

The thought that Dante brings to bear on his experience of Beatrice’s face and smile saturates his perceptual experience of her, and the result of

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imagination’s work being so intensely joyful, we surely have report of an exemplary case of beauty.

While we still have to do with an element of nature, this time in paradise, the work of imagination (that is, thought-saturated experience) results here in beauty, which Kant sees as second nature that affects us with irresistible joy. Moreover, since the experience is one that anyone can be expected to share, it is not just that Beatrice’s face strikes Dante as so beautiful — though of course it does — but it can be said to be beautiful simpliciter . It is not a long step from the natural case to artistic ones. The crucial difference consists in the fact that in the natural case the perceiver exercises imagination himself calling up the concepts whose application to what he experiences gives it its lived signifi -cance for him. In the case of art, by contrast, the representations that are on display are themselves displayed as ‘ second nature ’ , that is, second nature is presented as if it were actual nature. 1 Thus the spectator is presented with a view of some topic or theme as already imbued with signifi cance, one which in the case of beautiful art moves him to adjust his ways of thinking about and responding in feeling to that theme as it (potentially) occurs in life itself.

At this point we touch on a way in which the arts have their peculiar po-tential to speak to the psychic drives we saw Wollheim alluding to, or in the language of an earlier day, to answer to deep spiritual needs. If the beautiful artistic treatment of some topic or theme presents it as a source of joy, then as Kant puts it, it prepares the spectator to love things in nature (even nature it-self ) independently of any considerations of self-interest ( Critique of Judgement § 42 ). 2 I take it as uncontroversial that this is one capacity on which we gener-ally depend in coming to fi nd worthwhile signifi cance in our lives, one which, in Hegel’s words, allows us to ‘ strip the world of its infl exible foreignness ’ (Introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics ), What does demand comment is how our aesthetic experience is peculiarly apt to meet this need.

So far the claim has merely been that the artist’s deployment of imagination in representations of beauty enables him to present the world in various ways as endowed with signifi cance. That of itself says nothing about how the world is for us once we leave the work of art behind and return to the everyday. The

1 In the natural case nature is treated as art, being imaginatively viewed with concepts of our choosing; in the artistic case, Kant insists ( Critique of Judgement §45) ‘ Nature is beautiful because it looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature ’ . I suppose it looks like nature in that the ‘ secondary ’ aspect of it must seem quite unforced, objective, to be effective. The signifi cance we are offered by the work needs to pass as actual nature, not as an imposition of our own upon it (abstracting here, of course, from all considerations of Kant’s own form of idealism).

2 The thought is not new with Kant. In the New Essays Leibniz remarks: ‘ Cicero says somewhere that if we could only see the beauty of virtue we would love it ardently ’ ( NE , ii.xxi).

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work of art can have a deep sense for us only if it exercises its force when we are no longer in its presence, if it modifi es our dispositions to think, to feel, and ultimately to act. This, I think, is what is liable to happen as we experi-ence the ‘ second nature ’ that the artist offers us with marked pleasure (viz. see it as beautiful), for then we take it into ourselves, and do so centrally, not just peripherally. Thus we fi nd it active, directly or indirectly, in the view we come to of the world beyond the work itself. Nowhere has this idea been better and more forcefully expressed than by Schiller in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind , where, exhorting the young poet, he writes:

The seriousness of your principles will make them [your readers] flee from you, yet in play they will find them tolerable; their taste is more modest than their heart, and it is here that you should strive to lay hold of the timid fugitives. In vain will you lay siege to their maxims, in vain reprove their deeds, but in their hours of leisure you may try your forming hand upon them. As you remove caprice, frivolity and coarseness from their pleasures, so will you, unnoticed, banish them from their actions, and ultimately from their very dispositions. Wherever you find them, surround them with noble, great and inspirited forms; beguile them with images of excellence until reality is vanquished by semblance, and nature by art. (Letter IX ad finem )

For both Kant and Schiller the sublime is understood in discernible parallel to the beautiful. Imagination is central in both cases, only whereas the beauti-ful is seen as the output of imagination in co-operation with understanding, the sublime arises out of its antithetical relation to reason. Then, the spiritual need which it addresses is that of anchoring respect, esteem and awe in us for that mightiness of which it makes us aware. For neither thinker, though, is the esteem and awe in question, as might appear on a superfi cial view of the matter, a response directed at the overwhelming forces of nature; rather, its proper internal object is what they saw as the mighty potential in our own humanity to rise above those forces. For Kant it is manifest in the deployment of ideas of reason, which extend our powers of thought beyond anything that natural experience can throw up; for Schiller it is so primarily through the tragic hero’s ability to transcend nature by freely accepting his own destruc-tion with calm dignity (notably exemplifi ed by Laocoön in his encounter with Juno’s vengeful sea monsters). 3

3 See his comments in On the Pathetic on Virgil’s ‘ Diffugimus visu exsangues, illi agmine certo/ Laocoonta petunt ’ ( Aeneid 2 .212 – 213): ‘ Now the mighty is also presented as terrifying, and the merely contemplatively sublime transformed into the pathetic. We see it in real confl ict with human powerlessness. Whether it is Laocoön or ourselves, the difference of effect is merely a matter of degree. The urgency of sympathy arouses our instinct of self-preservation: the monsters are unleashed upon … us, and all fl ight is vain ’ .

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What interests me here, however, is not the rich detail of their handling of the matter, but the quite general idea the two thinkers share that the sublime complements the beautiful by aesthetically fi xing in us a psychologically fundamental attitude to the self, one which encourages us to discover a value to our generic humanity — to humanity in our persons, as Kant might put it — even as we are aware of our insignifi cance as items of actual nature and even though few of us will think of ourselves as equipped with the heroic virtues of the leading fi gures of Schillerian drama. As before, the imagination of the artist offers the spectator a view of a human drama. As spectators we both sympathize and empathize, and in the pleasure we take in the work establish (reinforce, fi x) an esteem for the human potential that the artist lays out for us, esteem that carries over in our understanding of ourselves in our moral lives beyond the play (Goethe’s Egmont , say) or the statue ( Laocoön ) or the picture (Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas ) or the opera ( Götterdämmerung ).

If the line of thought I have been pursuing is not wholly mistaken, the centrality of the domain of the sublime to late eighteenth-century aesthetic theory must be sustained by the thought that it answers to a psychological and spiritual need no less deep than that to which beauty is a response, only differ-ent from it. Kant is somewhat less forthcoming here than Schiller, since he regards the sublime as of decidedly secondary importance alongside the beau-tiful. He does, however, see its close connection with our valuing the sort of moral beings we are, and given that he views morality as our essential fi nal end, it is clear that this aspect of our aesthetic experience can for him play a signifi cant role in our achievement of it, namely by forging attachment to it, at least as a realizable ideal.

Schiller’s view is rather different: beauty can reconcile us to our place as creatures of nature by effectively endowing it with rational signifi cance — something without which we would sacrifi ce our humanity. But in the ab-sence of the sublime, it would cause us to lose sight of our human dignity.

Through the relaxing effect of continual delight (in beauty) we would forfeit all firmness of character, and indissolubly bound to this fortuitous form of existence lose sight of our true homeland. Only when the sublime is coupled with the beautiful and our receptivity to both developed in equal degree can we be fully citizens of nature (without being her slaves) yet without sacrificing our rightful place in the intelligible world. (from On the Sublime )

Unlike Kant, Schiller is convinced that beauty needs to be tempered by the sublime, or at least that without openness to the sublime engagement with beauty carries with it considerable risk of enervation. However, that view of his seems to be structured around a starkly dualistic picture of our psychology, dividing our nature between the sensory and the rational, and partitioning

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aesthetic goods between them. For him, it is not that the beautiful and the sublime are not independent of one another, but we do need openness to both if we are to be whole men.

There is, I think, an alternative view that neither thinker quite engages with, but which answers better the question why those two aesthetic values should once have been pre-eminent and gone so closely hand in hand. It is that when we think of the deep appeal of the beautiful in terms of the way in which it prepares us to love elements in the world around us and external to ourselves, it may occur to us that that attitude stands little chance of becoming properly fi xed in a psychological economy that is deeply uncertain of its own worth. That is, it is diffi cult to see how someone with little sense of their own human value could fi nd settled solace, comfort or grace in the second nature that is offered them through beauty in the arts. To make the thought graphic, refl ect what would be the result of an internalized self-loathing that could be encouraged by avid reading of the last Book of Gulliver’s Travels . Were we to internalize the Houyhnhnms’ view of humanity as Lemuel Gulliver eventually came to do, we would surely swiftly lose all interest in any second naturely attachment that we were offered by the arts. And if the artist were to internal-ize such a picture of himself, then it is hard to see how the arts could continue to offer us even that. (Here, I am put in mind of some of the painting of Francis Bacon, though other modern examples surely abound.) The very speculative upshot I offer, then, is that Schiller and Kant are right to think of the beautiful and the sublime as going hand in hand, but that neither of them saw that there is a kind of loose interdependence between them. Moreover, the interdependence is likely to be bi-directional: the sense of self around which the sublime was felt to revolve could hardly fi nd sustenance except in relation to a well-internalized, rich second nature, as fostered by a cultivated openness to beauty.

All this, you might say, is interesting enough, but surely only as history. The arts of our own day have long abandoned concern with beauty, and as for the sublime, the word has almost but disappeared from our active vocabulary, at least as bearing any serious evaluative weight. ( ‘ Your ice-cream last night was just too sublime ’ may pass muster, but rarely anything of much greater weight.) There are a number of things to say about such a response. The fi rst is that I am not arguing that these are values which any art of high seriousness has to make its own. As I said, the excursus was indeed historical. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a rejection as marked as that which we have seen in the last century has to be explained. One explanation lies ready to hand, but is insuf-fi cient. That is that the beautiful and the sublime came to be identifi ed with inadequate conceptions of those values, so the beautiful came to be equated with the pretty and the sentimental, and the sublime with the merely edifying, the portentous, or something of that sort. The confusion of a concept of

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something with a defective conception of that same something is frequent enough, but if that was what explanation came to rest on the natural expecta-tion would be for artists to fi nd a more satisfactory conception, not to aban-don the search altogether. So that popular explanation falls short. About alternatives I shall not speculate.

A second thing to say is that there is a very suggestive parallel between what lies at the heart of the historical refl ections and the two psychoanalytic, spe-cifi cally Kleinian, drives that Wollheim talks of: the drive to constitute whole objects and the drive for reparation. As I see it, it comes to this: in the eyes of Kant and Schiller the beautiful was largely concerned with fi nding human sig-nifi cance in the surrounding world, making it a proper object of love, while the focus of the sublime was more directly with the inner self, the search for some understanding of our humanity that compels from us esteem, honour, and respect. And here we are surely within shouting distance of the concerns that Wollheim mentions, since the search for whole objects is in large part a search for unfracturedness in the world that impinges on us, and that for reparation allied to formation of an unfragmented self-image, in the ab-sence of which the formation of whole objects beyond the self must itself be diffi cult of achievement. (I presume that there is two-way interdepend-ence here, much as I suggested there is between the beautiful and the sublime of the eighteenth century.)

So what the Kantian and the Kleinian both see as a fundamental task of the arts is the formation of images of signifi cance, images which as they are inter-nalized enable us better to lead our lives. Both recognize that there is an inner and outer aspect to the task, and it seems an entirely reasonable hypothesis that any fruitful elucidation of the concept art should make essential allusion to it. A consequence would be that an experimental art which found the general form in which it operated unfi tted to contribute to that goal would soon enough struggle to maintain its right to the title ‘ art ’ , or maintain it only at the cost of abandoning its own pretension to belong to the unity of art as histori cally established.

It is worth emphasizing that it is not open to today’s theorist to say that these may have been issues for the artist of the past, but which are no longer of concern to us today. The reason is simple: while we may inherit much of the signifi cance of the world from our forebears, it is a task for each genera-tion actively to make its own the values that its past brings it face to face with. Since the generic way our aesthetic experience operates is relatively fi rmly fi xed, and the general psychological needs to which it speaks remain likewise relatively constant from one generation to the next, there is every reason to suppose that today’s artist (no matter when today happens to be) is bound to conceive of his activity as continuous with that of his predecessors. What may change, of course, is the way in which the unity is preserved.

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Any experimental art — any art at all in fact — comes with a surrounding theory, and any artistic theory makes its philosophical assumptions, often without recognizing that it is making them. Those assumptions can easily enough come to guide the artist in what he does, and, if wrong-headed, are liable to import unsustainable tensions into his work. Three in particular seem worth mentioning.

First there persists in certain quarters a conception of the attention that the artist demands of his public that essentially consists in some form of contempla-tive detachment — the descendant of Shaftesbury’s and then, in a different way, Kant’s, insistence on the central importance of disinterestedness in the exercise of taste. What this stands at odds with can be the kind of internalization of the signifi cance that is offered the spectator as it makes its effect on him, as he fully appropriates it. So there can be a danger that the artist, operating in the light of a conception of the ideal spectator as the detached viewer, making it cor respondingly diffi cult for himself to address effectively those psychic drives that the arts are so well placed to respond to, but which depend on over-coming detachment, not exploiting it.

Secondly, a recurring thought has been that the artist has an access and sensitivity to the real which is liable to be obscured from the rest of us by the associations and presumptions with which we overlay it in the course of our daily lives. 4 In the grip of some such thought as this it is easy to see how the quest for aesthetic purity can leach signifi cance from the images that are con-structed, that being seen as impure conceptual accretion on what is the peculiarly limpid proper province of the aesthetic. Viewed from the stand-point of the present discussion this could only be to see the artist as imposing restrictions on himself which make the concept of art under which he oper-ates increasingly tenuous. Purity of this sort is pursued at the cost of depth.

Then, thirdly, the values that the forms embraced and explored by the art of the past have allowed it to establish and cultivate should not be undermined by the insight that they are ineliminably relative values, relative, that is, to human beings and their inner needs. To the philosophically unwary, that admission can come as an avowal that they are values that are not worth having or are, in some measure, mere options. Anyone drawn to that stance would fi nd it diffi cult indeed to commit himself to the creation of art under the con-cept art as I have been recommending that it be understood.

It may be objected that the general tenor of my remarks fundamentally underestimates the revolution that the arts have undergone in the last century, particularly in their more recent manifestations. Have not the aims and

4 Examples of the idea are provided by Paul Valéry in his eulogy of Berthe Morissot (in vol. 2 of the Pléaide edition of his works) and by Ortega y Gasset’s essay on Stendhal in his Estudios sobre el Amor (Austral: Madrid, 1984 ), p. 94 .

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preoccupations of its practitioners diverged so radically from those of their predecessors that there is something ridiculous about wanting to apply to them canons of judgment that fi tted more traditional work so well but against which they have now so determinedly turned?

The answer to that question should be apparent. It is that as long as we are expected to appreciate and assess what contemporary art offers us as art , it is excluded on a priori grounds that concerns of the sort I have been occupied with are ones that the artist can renounce. Any assessment of his forms of work that severs them from potential engagement with those concerns will be an assessment that judges them in other than artistic terms altogether. It must be a kind of illusion to think that the artist’s freedom to make what he likes and as he likes it is the same thing as his freedom to make what he likes and as he likes it as art. The one freedom we may not want to gainsay him; the other we are quite impotent to grant. 5

Still, someone might suspect that we now doing nothing more than trivially quarrelling about words. Does it really matter whether you and I disagree about how the word ‘ art ’ is best used? Here the reply must be that the dis-agreement, if there is one, is about the nature of what the term ‘ art ’ properly applies to and not at all about the choice of words to apply to it. The question is, as we saw at the start, conceptual, not lexicographic. Given that that is the core of the matter, it is anything but a trivial demand that we resist misappro-priation of the word ‘ art ’ by activities which it can not properly fi t. This is important not just for the sake of getting things right, but also because, with mooted revisions of the concept before us, we risk making it impossible both to understand the art of the past as it demands to be understood and, also, when the time comes, to fi nd ways of seeing any unity between it and what we may, with hard labour and not a little luck, be able to produce as art in the future.

Anthony Savile, Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, Strand, London WC 2 R 2 LS, UK. Email: [email protected]

5 Although if the freedom is granted and then enjoyed, there may come a moment at which it becomes proper to consider whether he who enjoys it is still an artist in anything but name.

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Imagination and Aesthetic Value