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ART AS COMMUNICATION

Thesis for the Degree of Ed. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSH‘Y
Howard McConeghey
1966

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ABSTRACT
ART AS COMMUNICATION

by Howard McConeghey

This thesis is a philosophical dissertation on the
requirements of an art education which would be based on a
juristic philosophy. Juristic philosophy was first ex-
pounded by John F. A. Taylor in Egg Masks of Society.1 It
is concerned with the human social condition. "What are
the conditions essential to the dignity of persons in any
form of human community? That question is the burden of
juristic philosophy."2 A juristic philosophy takes the
point of view of the implicated participant as distinguished
from that of the objective spectator. In this respect it
is closely allied to perceptual theories, and existential
beliefs in psychology as well as in existential philoso-
phical thought.

.’

 

If reality, as it is knowable to man, consists not
of isolated objects but of man's perception of them (a rela-
tionship between the object and the person) then the impor-

tance of commitment and the responsibility of the implicated

/,~M
individual become evident. Man may exist as a mere creature

—-..‘

of nature, but to be a person is to oblige oneself freely

Howard McConeghey

to respect the rights of others and to restrain the crea-
turely impulse in favor of principled community. Freedom
is the ability to choose the principled life, not the
license of impulse, indecision, or merely habitual be-
havior. It is argued here that the freedom from.tradition
in art brings an awesome responsibility for genuine intense
encounter with reality. As a mode of authentic response to
reality, art is more an affirmation of reality than it is a
communication with other men. Its purpose is the apprehen-
sion of the real, not the sharing of knowledge already
possessed. Art is simultaneously a formulation and an in-
vestigation by which the artist achieves an apprehension of
the world. Creation is a lonely enterprise which cannot be
shared. The value of the created work is that it repre-
sents an authentic response, a valid mode of encounter,
never that it depicts a part of reality, teaches a moral, or
shares a specific emotion. It is suggested that while art
demands freedom, it is only responsible freedom based upon
a genuine encounter with reality and devoid of rubric,
idealized pre-conception, or formula which can produce
meaningful works of art.

From such a philosophical standpoint, the teaching
of art is seen as necessarily a non-directive proposition.
Like achievement in art, the specific goals of education
cannot be fully determined beforehand. The control of
learning is essentially the responsibility of the student.
Rather than limiting the possibilities for growth and

genuine response to a single "right" direction, the goal of

Howard McConeghey

education must be left open to the infinite number of pos-
sibilities which personal encounter may discover. Education
must center upon the individual integrity of each child and
the development of critical awareness and concern in his
encounter with reality. This constitutes an immensely dif-
ficult but nonetheless necessary goal for the responsible
educator. Education becomes a dialogue. Its purpose is to
nurture the living spirit, a thing as various as the number
of students. No longer can education be considered a pre-
paration for life. It must be a living encounter with
relevant problems. Four requirements for creating a facili-
tating classroom atmosphere are quoted from Carl Rogers,3
and four general principles regarding art and the creation
of art are formulated as follows:

Requirements for creating a facilitating class-
room atmosphere.

1. Contact with Problems - Situations must be
presented which can be perceived by the
students as real problems relevant to his
life.

2. The Teacher's Real-ness - "Congruence" -
The teacher must feel acceptant toward his
own real feelings.

3. Acceptance and Understanding - An uncondi-
tional positive regard for every student
is important.

4. Provision of Resources - Materials and re-
sources should be made available, not forced
upon the student.

Howard McConeghry

General principles regarding art and creativity.

1. Art Means Giving Form - Art is not illus-
tration, narrative, or moralizing ideas,
but the formulation of a meaningful world.

2. Work £9; Clarity - The process of formula-
tion requires the utmost awareness and
spontaneous insight. Only where clarity is
achieved is form, and therefore meaning,
attained.

3. fig Intense (Care Enough) - To achieve under-
standing in the face of reality requires
constant diligence against delimiting ideal-
ization, sentimentality, the careless fol-
lowing of tradition and willful caprice or
negligence.

4. Never Generalize - The only reality one can
know is the reality of his direct encounter
with the world and this is always personal.

 

1John F. A. Taylor, The Masks of Socigty (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966).

2Ibid., p. iv.

 

3Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin Co., 1951), p. 286 ff.

ART AS COMMUNICATION

By
HowardiMcConeghey

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

College of Education

1966

I .- . _ T u‘
‘ I" / v :1 J, T.

Q? Copyright by .
HOWARD WALLACE MC CONEGHEY

1967

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One is indebted to so many people for his beliefs and
ideas and for their development. First of all I want to
express my gratitude to my doctoral committee for the free-
dom they have allowed me in my work and for their continuous
guidance and inspiration.

The sympathetic counsel of Dean Melby at the very
beginning of my doctoral work will always be remembered
with warm appreciation. It was Dean Melby who guided me in
the choice of philosophy as my cognate area of study, and
who recommended Dr. Taylor for membership on my committee.

Dr. Taylor has, of course, influenced my entire under-
standing of the covenants of community and has helped to
bring my own clouded and generalized thinking into focus.
It was most certainly some benevolent fate which brought
me into the sphere of this important and sympathetic in-
fluence. Our association has made my previous thinking
meaningful and has given it direction while enlarging the
horizon of my view.

Dr. Meyer has been helpful from the beginning. He has
always been available and generous with encouragement and
support during those mundane moments of discouragement or

monotony when friendly and practical advibe were needed.

ii

Of course, the whole course of my study has been shep-
herded by Dr. Stearns who has been not only a capable and
facilitating advisor, but a real friend as well as an in-
spiring example of genuine responsible teaching.

Also I want to express my gratitude to Dr. Paul Hurell
whose lectures on existentialism were a most important in-
fluence on my thinking, and whose confidence in my ability
was a real contribution to my study.

Dr. Thomas Green was also an early and a continuing
influence on my thinking during my doctoral work as evidenced
by the use of his manuscript in the body of this disserta:
tion.

In addition I want to thank Thera Stearns for reading
the manuscript of my thesis and suggesting important cor-
rections, my sister, Ruth Mahon, for invaluable suggestions
and my friend, James Chase for typing the rough draft and
its many revisions, and my typist, Mrs. Mary Ann Lance.

Besides my specific indebtedness to the people men-
tioned above and the primary influence of Dr. Taylor's
philosophy which is important enough to be given additional
emphasis here, the development of my thinking over the past
years has been influenced and shaped in important ways by
the work of Martin Buber, Carl Rogers, and Karl Jaspers
and that of Henry Schaefer-Simmern and Rudolph Arnheim.

Continuing influence from early contact with encourag-

ing individuals would include high school teachers, Mrs. Illa

iii

Mae Talley and Mrs. Mildred Cunningham, and college profes-
sors, John Horns and Felix Payant, and finally associates
in art education, Sister Magadeline Mary, IHM and Sister
Mary Corita, IHM of Immaculate Heart College, and Sister
Joan Louise, CSJ of Avila College.

To all others whose influence and assistance has been

ignored here, I want to offer my sincere gratitude.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
ACKNOWLEDGMNTS O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 ii-

LIST OF FIGURES O O O O O O O O 0 O O O O O O O O O 0 Vi
Chapter
I. WHAT IS A JURISTIC PHILOSOPHY? . . . . . . 1
11. ART AS COMMUNICATION . . . . . . . . . . . 15

III. FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY . . . . . . . . . 37
IV. COMMUNITY AND COMMUNICATION . . . . . . . . 51
V. ART AND THE HUMAN ACT . . . . . . . . . . . 69
VI. TEACHING AND MOTIVATION . . . . . . . . . . 84
VII. EVALUATION IN ART EDUCATION . . . . . . . . 105

BIBLIOGRAPHY O O O O O I O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O 122

Figures

1.

II.
III.
IV.

VI.
VII.
VIII.

LIST OF FIGURES

The invisible structure of the pictorial
field 0 O O O I O O O O O O O O O O O

The effect of the axes on a single shape
Circular stage of perceptual development

Stage of the greatest contrast of direc-
tion of lines . . . . . . . . . . . .

Stage of the acute angle . . . . . . . .
Baseline space concept . . . . . . . . .
Space concept using the acute angle .

Stage of overlapping . . . . . . . . . .

vi

Page

76
77
112

112
113

114
116

117

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS A JURISTIC PHILOSOPHY?

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the
task of teaching art in the light of a consistent and com-
patible philosophy. Any philosophy, to be compatible with
art education, must recognize that reality is not appre-
hended solely by the rational cognition of objective nature
but that an equally valid and important aspect of reality
can be known only by the sensible apprehension of what,
of all the possibilities in nature, ought to be enacted.
This is a normative apprehension of man's responsibility
in the face of indifferent nature. It concerns not only
the mechanical fact of nature but also the juristic fact
of human community.

T Not all that is real may be known by objective and
disinterested analysis which reveals only one aspect of a
situation and leaves the equally revealing aspect of the
implicated participant unseen. It seems evident, however,
that the positivistic, technical knowing gbgug reality
has received almost exclusive attention in Western civili-
zation, to the serious neglect of the juristic or normative
knowledge 9; reality.

"we in the Western world are the heirs
of four centuries of technical achievements

in power over nature and now over ourselves;

this is our greatness and, at the same time

it is also our greatest peril. We are not

in danger of repressing that technical

emphasis. . . . But rather we repress the

opposite . .1. we repress the sense of

being . . ."

A juristic philosophy recognizes that an individual
is himself a significant part of whatever he observes and
that the reality of experience depends upon personal partic-
ipation. Over 150 years ago Immanuel Kant pointed out that
there are serious limitations to cognitive reason. There
is a kind of knowledge‘ a kind with which we are all quite
familiar and, in fact;>which we are wont to consider the
only kind of true knowledge. This, of course, is objective
scientific knowledge, the knowledge of facts. It is a
technical knowledge, a knowledge of what is the case in
nature, of what will follow particular physical events, of
cause and effect. It is a knowledge, therefore, of power
and control. Since the sixteenth century Western man has
been able to achieve such great strides in his control over
nature and to attain such power for physical good and evil,
employing this kind of knowledge, that today we have come
to consider it to be the only valid knowledge. The over-
whelming advance in technical and scientific progress in
the past four hundred years has apparently convinced us
that this theoretical kind of knowledge is the sole basis

/

for our appropriation of reality.

 

1Rollo May (ed.), Existential Psychology (New York:
Random House, 1961), p. 20.

3

It remains true, nonetheless, that there is in
addition a kind of reality which no unimplicated objective
observer can experience. This mode of reality requires a
kind of knowledge which is different from the technical
theoretical knowledge of science. It requires a knowledge
of obligation, a knowledge of what ought to be the case in
human relations whether or not it actually is the case.

It is concerned not with what are the limitations and pos-
sibilities within nature, but with limits which men will
oblige themselves to maintain, limits which nature does
not dictate, which man alone prescribes.

It is solely by such creative self-imposed limita-
tion that man may achieve true human dignity. As a mere
creature of nature man has no more dignity than any natural
creature. It is only as he voluntarily obliges himself to
limits which are not set by nature, but which he creates
for himself, that man attains the dignity of a human being.
Instead of remaining a mere creature of nature, bound ex-
clusively by the requirements of nature, man may agree not
to indulge his creaturely desires and appetites, but to
limit his behavior in favor of better relations with his
fellow human beings. Nature does not demand that we re-
spect the person or the "rights" of the other fellow, and
there is no dignity either in overpowering another to ob-
tain what he has or in suffering such treatment. There is
dignity in respecting the person and the "rights" of one's
neighbor. This dignity man alone can achieve. And he can

achieve it only by an act of acceptance--by accepting the

4

other as a person of worth and dignity--by treating him,
as Kant would have it, as an end and never merely as a
means. Nature does not require it of man. Such restric-
tion of one's behavior has no basis in objective nature.
Its base lies in creative human community, and it is only
by transcending his purely creaturely being that man can
achieve such dignity. Knowledge of this kind is knowledge
of obligation, not knowledge of bare fact. For it often
happens, alas, that a person knowing his duty, fails,
in his finitude, to discharge it. The fact that one does
not do his duty in no way challenges the validity of his
obligation. If man is to have community at all, he will
have it only to the extent that he respects the humanity
of another and grants him the status of a person, not a mere
thing in nature. The extent of his community will be the
extent of those to whom he will grant this status and in
whom he will admit the possession of rights which he is
willing to respect. Such community is based upon mutual
respect and is maintained by covenant frequently informal
and unstated. The philosophy which ponders covenant is
juristic. We require no judge to question the behavior of
nature. We accept, as we must, the restrictions of nature
as we exploit her possibilities. Whatever is possible can
be done in nature, yet much of what can be done is not
possible in human community.”

This second kind of knowledge may be contrasted
more fully with the first. Rather than being objective and

scientific, it is a knowledge of commitment and partisanship;

rather than being a knowledge of facts, it is one of re-
sponsibility, of obligation. It is not a technical but a
normative knowledge, not a knowledge of what is the case,
but of what ought to obtain between persons; a knowledge
of the human potential in every man. It is not a knowledge
of cause and effect, but of the conditions of community.
It is a knowledge, therefore, not of power and control,
but of acceptance and affirmation. And it is based upon
covenant, the covenant which is established between two
persons who respect the rights of each other. This, then
is the area with which a juristic philosophy concerns it-
self. A juristic philosophy seems to be most compatible
with the concerns of art and art education. It has its
roots in Kantian idealism and is also related to existential
thought by its concern for personal commitment and authen-
ticity in man's moral engagement with the emerging realityT}
Juristic philosophy is the study of the covenants
of civilization. It is an inquiry into the phenomenon of
obligations in every detail of civilized activity, obliga-
tions which attach to persons as a condition of their mem-
bership in any form of human community. The term.juristic
philosophy was first used by John F. A. Taylor in his The
Mé§5§.2£ Society where he says, "I entitle the study of the
covenants of civilization juristic philosophy." Taylor
proposes to generalize the term juristic and use it in a
broader sense than is customary. "By juristic philoSOphy
I do not understand the enterprise of jurisprudence.", he

explains.

6

"The term jurisprudence suggests a
narrowly legal interest, a formal and caus-
istical as distinct from the broadly moral
meaning which I, in fact intend. By juris-
tic phiIOSOphy I understand, on the con-
trary, an inquiry into the phenomenon of
obligation in each of the several domains
of civilized activity." And he adds, "In
my extended usage an inquiry will be said
to be juristic if its purpose is to exhibit
the covenant of any form of human community--
the constitution of a political order, the
parliamentary law of a deliberative assembly,
the rules of exchange in a market, the method
of a science, the creed of a religion, the
conveTtion of a language or the style of an
art."

Or again, "By 'juristic philosophy' I shall understand the
general inquiry into covenants, an examination of the con-
ditions of peace under law in whatever branch of human
activity we chance to study it."2
The term "law" tends to be so strongly associated
with the more common, narrower concept of jurisprudence
that the term "principle" might better suggest the new and
broader concept intended here. In order to understand this
broad concept, it is imperative to make clear the idea that
covenants are implied in all principled activity. As Taylor
admits, the term jurisprudence suggests a narrow interest.
But juristic is intended, in this new use, to have much
broader moral meaning. It is concerned not only with the

obligations of members in the political community, but

equally with obligations of members in the scientific

community or in the religious, linguistic and artistic

 

1John F. A. Taylor, The Masks of Society (New York:
Appleton, Century, Crofts,Inc., 1966), p. 10.

2Ibid., p. 11.

 

communities. Perhaps it will be easier to understand the
basis of a juristic philosophy if the reader will notice,
along with Taylor, that all questions regarding the founda-
tion of human society are of two kinds: questions of path
and questions of covenant. Questions of path concern the
limits which nature has imposed upon human behavior. They '
are technical questions whose answers must be sought in the
domain of science. Questions of covenant are, on the other
hand, questions of obligation, which concern the limits
which men impose upon themselves. Their answers are to be
found in the domain of justice, value and personal truth.
That which makes man human rather than merely animal is

not that which nature allows, but that which man obliges
himself to do even though indifferent nature does not de-
mand it. Thus all questions which are distinctively human
fall among the questions of covenant and are juristic in
nature.

Contemporary man is accustomed to cultivate ques-
tions of path and to neglect questions of covenant. Such‘
questions do not admit of the kind of confirmation we are
accustomed to requiring of matters of fact (empirical proof).
For the juristic fact which challenges our understanding is
not the physical event but the moral engagement. Such jur-
istic covenants are the despair of our positivistic gener-
ation. They are indispensible to an understanding of the
historical structure which we occupy. They are not amen-

able to what we understand as proof. "The positive sciences

8

are therefore unequal to confering upon us an understanding
of the objective foundations of our moral community."1

"Questions of covenant require of us not an addi-
tional fact-finding but a taking of sides, a deliberate
suspension of our moral neutrality in confronting fact, an
alliance under principle."2

Juristic philosophy asks what are the rules which
belong to community itself, which are so essential that
without them there would be no community at all.

"What is the fundamental covenant of
human community in any of its forms?
Or, to put the same question in dif-

ferent words: what is essential if men are

to stand in the dignity of persons in each

other's presence?"

Taylor explains the importance of a juristic con-
cern fully at the beginning of his book. "In all settled
seasons of society the principles men live by are more
stably secured by habit than by thought. The artist's craft,
the legislator's policy, the saint's conduct - all rest im-
plicitly on principles which a critical intelligence can
discern. The discernment of these principles is essential
to our understanding of the artist, the legislator, or the
saint. Yet for the actor himself the principle is apt to
remain latent and unspoken, its presence betrayed only in

the activity over which it presides . . ."4

 

 

 

 

 

9

"A conscious preoccupation with principle is always,
in human affairs, the sign of an unsettled season. It be-
longs typically to seasons of struggle, to seasons of revo-
lution and moral crisis when the times are out of joint and
habits are confused and all men are filled with the doubts
and irresolutions of lost Eden. In general, first prin-
ciples are reflected upon only when they have been chal-
lenged. Unchallenged, they are simply illustrated in our
quiet obedience."1

"The twentieth century is an age of such moral ar-
rest. The crises of human activity have multiplied so that
there is no major sphere of human activity, no sphere in
which human community is at stake, whose foundations have
not been challenged or rudely shaken. The result is that
in our historical situation the search for principle is no
longer the exercise of an intellectual option; it has be-
come, for all men of our times, an irrepressible moral
necessity."2

The following is therefore an attempt to discover
valid principles for the practice and the teaching of art.
Science has come to regard the structure and process of the
world as problematic. It has abandoned the doctrine of
simple location. No longer is it possible to reach a logical

completion of thought by ordering our reflection upon reality

 

 

10

from any single point of view. Reality is conceived of as
space-time relations and as knowable from multiple perspec-
tives. I

In an effort to speak truly of things in such a
world, the artist must abandon his earlier concern with the
representation of solid objects as seen from a fixed posi-
tion and his former submission to ideal proportions based
upon the human figure.

Art, as an authentic human act, must respond to
man's new understanding of the world. It can no longer be
considered to be a mechanical or idealized replication of
isolated objects conceived from the view of classical
Euclidian geometry. Rather, being a sensible revelation 0f
man's implication in the reality of his total existence,
genuine art will reflect the newer reality of probability
and relativity. The task of comtemporary art is to discover
visible principles which will express this view of reality.

“T Art is a mode of response to reality. By genuine
response man reveals what is real to him, and it is only in
his authentic encounter with the world that he can achieve
such a knowledge of reality. In other words, art is not
the representation of some object or situation, real or
ideal, which could be known before the act of creating the
work of art. Rather art is an act of comprehending the
world. It is a means of making the world meaningful and,
therefore real for, oneself. Only as the work of art is
created is meaning, and thus reality, achieved. Reality

consists of the genuine encounter of a self with the objects

.J/
11 ’

of the world. Art is, therefore, not self-expression but
the expression of this encounter with the world. The self
is only one factor in the equation. The artist constantly
creates a new world for himself by continuous and intensely
passionate response to the reality he faces. He does not
reveal what he already knows but what he learns by this
artistic mode of encounter with reality. Art is an inves-
tigation of reality and at the same_time a formulation of
the real.

The crisis of art in the twentieth century consists
in the breakdown of the traditional concept of art as imi-
tation, and the failure of many to discern principled deci-
sion in the newer eXpression. "Art has relinquished its
relation to the visible world; therein lies its greatest
Challenge to our inherited concept of culture."1 Creat-
ivity, in the present historical situation, demands con-
stant inquiry and intense concern regarding what is real.
No predetermined standard concept of reality is acceptable.
What is demanded is a new way of looking at the world, a
new stance toward realityuijust as science has discovered
a new and more dynamic concept of matter and energy, so
art has discovered a new concept of space and form. Art
Tis no longer concerned with imitating objects as delimit-
ing bodies, but it explores a new relationship between

forms and space. Proportions are no longer pre-determined

 

1Alfred Neumeyer, The Seaggh for Meaning in Modern
Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., I9DIT,
pp. 3-4-

12

by the human body, but are developed out of given variable
relations which are considered for their own reality.

Works of art are no longer a reflection or idealization of
"real" objects, but they have an existence independent of
the physical measurements of objects outside themselves.
Works of art are themselves real objects. The achievement
of a meaningful structure of form, an expressive Gestalt
has taken over as acontrolling principle where the imita-
tion of an ideal once reigned. WA shift in man's world out-
look calls for a new art. If one speaks of art education
then, he must speak of "teaching." Nonetheless, the term
is used in quotation marks here, to indicate its new meaning.
The teacher, today, has no assured traditional values to
present to his student. When "the times are out of joint
and habits are confused and all men are filled with doubts
and irresolutions of lost Eden,"1 there is no ideal with
general validity which the educator may use as a model for
his students. In such a time there is nothing for him to
seek except the reality of the single individual child.
Only that influence is valid in teaching which will facili-
tate the student in becoming an authentic self. The task
of the "teacher" becomes one of developing the courage and
self-confidence required for the student to respond with
integrity and fortitude to the reality he faces. Because
the responsibility for his learning rests preponderantly

with the student (a reversal of the traditional attitude)

 

1Taylor, op, cit., p. 4.

13

the conventional approach to education is no longer valid.
A "projective" education is one which will help the student
to perceive reality with directness and integrity, not lean-
ing upon standard concepts or traditional bias, but with an
openness to his encounter with reality. We no longer be-
lieve that the development of a rational attitude is en-
couraged by exclusively rational means. Learning involves
passion as well as the intellect. Reason must always be
kept open for any eventuality, even when, at its outer
limits, it encounters anti-reason. We know that reality
includes the self which is experiencing reality. Reality
is a personal encounter with the world, not the world iso-
lated from its being apprehended.

Such a shift in man's view of reality alters the
previously held notion that art is self-expression to read,
"art is an expression of the individual's mode of encounter
with reality." Not the §2l£ is to be expressed, but reality
(which includes the self as a part of the relationship con-
stuting reality). The teacher cannot know by tradition what
this relationship ought to be for each student. Rather than
to teach Egg way to draw g3 eye, for example, the teacher
must understand not only that there is no universal way,
but also that there is no generalized eye. There is only a
particular eye seeing a specific reality and responding in
an individual way. "Projective" art will be a structure of
tensions built of relationships between forms. The gigpp
relationships between forms is never determinable g priori

but is knowable only in the process of their combination.

14 ‘ ,M

For any given work of art, that structure is right which is
the one exclusively possible expression of the specific
reality under consideration.

The teacher can help the child to understand that
for him, for each individual student, reality must be appro-
priated by direct perception; that instead of following
rubric or formula, one perception must immediately and
directly lead to further perception; that depending upon
formula can only interfere with a genuine encounter. No
lyrical interference of individual impulse or unexamined
feeling should be allowed to overwhelm the outward incident
or event. The contemporary encounter with reality would
be one characterized by intensity and awareness. One's
encounter must be serious enough to preclude the egotistical
overwhelming of nature with one's private whim, unexamined
habit, prejudice or consuming passion. One must remain a
participant in the larger force of nature not an arbitrary
ego, if he is to see the secrets of a genuine reality. It
requires a reverence for reality which cannot be satisfied
solely by the intellect, and which will not countenance the
distortion of one's encounter with reality by standard for-

mula or prescribed method.l

CHAPTER II
ART AS COMMUNICATION

Although it cannot be denied that art does in some
way communicate, it seems that unless one is careful of its
meaning, the common phrase app ig communication can be more
confusing than it is helpful. The title of this disserta-
tion "Art As Communication" has therefore been chosen for
the specific purpose of drawing attention to this danger
and of making very clear what the writer considers to be the
way in which art can be said to communicate. Unfortunately,-
the term, communication, in this positivist culture, has
come to mean the transmission of quite specific, well-de-
fined ideas, requests or information, the meaning of which
is clearly and identically understood by all parties con-
cerned. Based on the objectivist tradition that what is
external and visible is more fundamental than what is not,
such a definition of the word, communication, when trans-
lated into terms of art would suggest that art communicates
by means of imitating nature, or, at most, by portraying
some hidden, but traditionally accepted ideal beneath the
surface of nature.

Retaining such an outlook, many people expect a de-

scriptive, an anecdotal, or a didactic communication from

works of visual art. Illustration, the imitation of nature,

15

16

or symbolic idealization are still considered to be the

goals of art. When one speaks of proportion, most people
think in terms of the measurements of the human body, the
measurements of a carcass, or of some ideal ratios relating

to these measurements. The imitation of the idealized

human figure was the goal of classical figggk art. Polykleites
wrote a "canon" in which he formulated a comprehensive law

of proportions in which, "the width of the middle finger was
taken as a unit, and all other dimensions of the body were

.J

specified in terms of thisxnfixu Beauty was thought to con-
sist in the proportions of the parts of the human figure;
the relationship of finger to finger, and of all the fingers
to the palm and wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of
the forearm to the upper arm, etc. When one speaks of space,
most people think of linear perspective, a Renaissance in-
vention. If these people see an abstract painting, they ask,
"What does it mean?", that is, "What, distinct from itself,
does it refer to?"

Concomitant with this emphasis on artistic motiva-
tion as external to the individual is the exaggeration of
the importance of talent. It is said that the artist works
from inspiration, that his talent is a God-given quality.
Such a notion may be popular because it excuses those with-

out talent or inspiration from any responsibility for crea-

tive expression or even from understanding art. In addition,

 

1H.H. Powers, The Message of Greek Art (Norwood,
Massachusetts: Norwood Press, 1913).

17

this notion would seem to render the teaching of art super-
fluous since only the talented few could possibly have any
valid reason for engaging in artistic activity, and these
few work from inspiration, a source presumably far more
helpful than a mere classroom teacher can be.

A third aspect of the positivistic tradition which
is also erroneous and possibly even more dangerous, since
it deals with a technically demonstrable aspect of works
of art, is the belief that design is the end of art. Dis-
tortion, "misproportion" and the absence of linear perspec-
tive are accepted if the resulting work achieves a pleasing
design. Harmony, then, the pleasing arrangement of lines,
colors, and shapes, is taken to be the goal of art. No
doubt one of the most pernicious aspects of art education
today is the perpetuation of this half-truth and the conse-
quent obscuring of the authentic purpose of art. Design and
form are taught by rule as ends in themselves.

It is true that order is important in art, but order
is important only as a means of expressing the artist's con-
ception of the world and his relation to it, not for the
sake of harmony or enjoyment. Forms in themselves have no
value. It is what they are committed to express that is to
be valued. However, the overwhelming number of Americans
who are now teaching, or are preparing to teach in the ele-
mentary and secondary schools, have been raised in the
positivist tradition. These are the people who, "don't
know anything about art," but who presumably do know what

they like. In the positivistic preference for externals,

18

in the concern for elements rather than patterns, in the
insistence upon efficiency, present-day education has not
given this majority of teachers a meaningful concept of art.
The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that
communication in art is something quite different from il-
lustration, imitation, propaganda or pleasing design. What
art does communicate is more that anecdote, description or
symbolic moral. The thesis here presented is that art is
man's response to his contemporary situation; his communion
with reality, and that art's purpose is to achieve an ordered
and meaningful awareness of the human situation. In other
words, to achieve authentic selfhood. The viewer may gain
real insight into the nature of being human through the con-
templation of works of art: art can communicate an authentic
mode of response, but the artist's purpose must always re-
main personal--to discover his singular relationship to the
world.

Regarding the notion that art is a substitute for
nature (imitation) or that it presents an ideal reality
symbolic of a more perfect existence, it seems necessary
merely to point out that imitation gets one together only
with the memory of something else. One would enjoy a land-
scape painting not as a work of art but as a reminder of a
beautiful landscape, as a substitute. The newer thought
recognizes that the artist is a significant part of the
thing observed, that there is no such thing as an objective
view of a fixed reality. If art is to be valued at all,

its value must be inherent in the work itself, not in what

19

it causes the viewer to recall or to hope for. Society has
valued art as communication and as a means of union among
men. It is often called a universal language. No doubt
art's value to society does reside in its ability to unite
men in their common humanness. Certainly this aspect of
art needs to be considered if one is to become clearly aware
of art's role in uniting men.

In his, Wh§£_lg App, Tolstoy explained art as the
communication of emotions. He insisted that art's effect
as well as its goal is to cause the beholder to feel the
exact emotion which the artist felt at the original encounter
with reality which inspired the work of art. However, it
seems that this is not only undesirable but quite impossible.
Any man receiving another man's expression is responding not
to the original object or situation which the artist faced
but to an object or event, namely, a symbolic structure,
which has been organized in contemplation of the original
stimulus, in response to it. Therefore, this man is not
likely to have the exact emotion which the artist had in the
original encounter.

3“?” If it is true that each individual becomes a signifi-
cant part of his experienced reality, it seems obvious that
an authentic response to reality could not be identical for
two men facing the same stimulus. Each person's encounter
with reality includes not only the object encountered but
the personal encounter as well. It should be emphasized
that the two men in question here are responding to entirely

different stimuli, one to the original experience, the other

20

to the work of art. The experiencing of a work of art offers
the possibility of an esthetic response to the human expres-
sion of another person. Rather than experiencing the
artist's original emotion, the viewer may be made keenly
aware of that emotion as a possible authentic response. Thus
he may gain a deeper understanding of the possibilities for
genuinely human encounter with the world, an additional al-
ternative for men's participation in the total reality of
existence.

In the covenant of art, Taylor says, "a human being
discerns a role, a human alternative, a possibility of par-
ticipation. It is but one of the possibilities. Its educa-
tive and civilizing virtue is that it exhibits this possi-
bility, that it enlarges the range of human.alternatives by
one."1

The artist cannot reveal the world to which he re-
sponds except through a genuine personal encounter, and such
a relationship with reality is achieved only through complete
personal response. The encounter modifies the experience,
shapes it, makes it what it is.

Tolstoy, in speaking of art as communication, based
his thesis on the possibility of shared similarities. He
claimed that art is a means of union among men which is

brought about, "by joining them together in one and the same

feeling."2 Art certainly is a means of union among men.

 

1Taylor, op. cit., p. 195.

2Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude
(London: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 123.

21

However, this union is the result not of shared similarities,
but of shared possibilities of encounter. Of what value is
the sharing of similarities? It would be an exchange which
paradoxically is IN) exchange at all. It would be meaning-
less and would do nothing to promote union among men. It
would merely reflect such union as happened already to exist.
It could do no more than to recognize a kind of likeness
which is shared merely by being a common attribute of several
or many persons. (Tolstoy demanded universal appreciation.)
This kind of sharing is one which could in no case be avoided
and which requires no art for its recognition.

In reality communication in art is more an insistance
upon the authentic singularity of the individual in his en-
counter with the world. Thus what one can share is his
humanness. Authentic humanness is a uniquely individual de-
cision and act, and can, therefore, not be shared by imitaé
tion, division or joint participation. To share in the
humanity of community is, paradoxically, to act upon one's
singular decision and one's personal response. Therefore,
one shares not a precisely similar emotion but a particular
authenticity which in concrete act may be different for
each individual. It is the common bond of personal integrity
which makes community and thus communication possible. In
sharing the possibility of genuine individuality, one shares
not the exact emotion, but a similar integrity in the face
of reality. The reality of nature must be taken as common
or given. If that is shared, it is certainly not as a re-

sult of any effect or art on the part of any individual. It

22

is, or may be, shared in common by every creature which
exists as a part of nature. In other words, it is a phenom-
enon which must be responded to individually. What can be
communicated is, thus, not nature, or a duplicate emotion,
but a personal mode of response to the phenomena of reality.
The response which a work of art objectifies is a human mode
of encounter, one which is also possible for other men. The
artist's mode of response, his style of mind, is communi-
cated, and it is this which can unite men. Receiving this
communication constitutes an enlargement of one's individual
capacity for experience, because it indicates one of the
possible modes of response which are available to mankind.

"Since it is impossible for man to have
Transcendence in time as a knowable object,
identical for everybody like something in the
world, every mode of the one Truth as abso-
lute in the world can in fact only be histor-
ical: unconditional for this Existenz but,
precisely for this reason, not universally
valid. For, since it is not impossible, but
only psychologically infinitely difficult for
a man to act according to his own truth, re-
alizing at the same time the truth of others
which is not true for him, holding fast to the
relativity and particularity of all univer-
sally valid truths--since it is not impossible,
he must not shirk the highest demand of truth-
fulness which is only apparently incompatible
with that of others."

\A ,'
7".

,/ In other words, communication springs from inter-
course between persons who participate in a common world
order and who cooperate in common tasks which humanize rela-
tions between them. The other becomes real as a person by

one's being genuinely aware of himself. Communication is

 

1Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existeng, trans. William
Earle (New York: N.Y.: The Noonday Press, 1955), p. 100.

23

then, being an authentic person. Truth is individual and
the truth of each person is the truth :2; him. Yet there

is the truth of others. The world is not a public language
but a secret text which must be understood by personal exis:
tence and can be known only by each one for himself--it can
never be known for others by any person. Such a response,
which acknowledges the inescapableness of the persona11con-
tribution of the respondent and assumes its risk, is what
'Jaspers intends by an "authentic" response.

Only if a person's response is authentic is he true
to his being. Only then can he reveal the reality of being.
But he can only reveal that reality which he is, and this
he can reveal solely through genuine concern for the world
which he encounters, through reverence for, and finally,
through his unreserved response to that world. One does
not reveal the world except through his individual encounter.
One cannot communicate the authenticity of the world.' That
is beyond man's province. (In any case, one's affirmation
might be so limited as to neglect, or so self-centered as
to conceal, much which others might discern). What one can
reveal--and communicate--is a particular human response to
the world, one's personal mode of encounter. It is thus
one's own authenticity as a human being which he can com-
municate. But this cannot be achieved except by genuine
response to reality.

Here is the heart of art education and the goal of
art--the achieving of individual authenticity. It is for

this reason that design principles must not be taken as the

24

basis of art. Art education must be seen as something far
more challenging than the development of taste and the
teaching of the basic principles of design. Academic con-
cern with form or design for its own sake is not art.

It becomes merely a descipline of form without the
inherent value which could relate it to the human response.
Instead of liberating the consciousness in the contempla-
tion of reality and its meaning, such an approach to art
becomes a renunciation of personal insight and of the pos-
sibility of selfhood. The practice of art along these
lines demands, it is true, marked ability, but such practice
is based upon a merely technical concern with form rather
than upon a genuine critical encounter with reality. Such
methods may develop skill in technique but construction
becomes calculation and aspiration sinks to the level of
mere demand for making records. Art loses all principle
as a human mode of response. It cannot further the self-
hood of the individual.

"Instead of the objectivity of an emblem

of the super sensual, it has only the objec-

tive of a concrete game. The search, for a

new attachment to form finds a discipline of

form without the intrinsic va ue which could

permeate the essense of man."

Form becomes technical calculation and aspiration becomes

a mere demand for making records. There exists today a

romantic attachment to technique and mechanical form which

 

1Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden
and Cedar Paul (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc.,
1957), p. 142.

25

blocks meaning and limits self-development. Principles of
design and styles of form are taken as absolute standards.

It is important to understand that there is no such
thing as a right design or a wrong design which art students
should follow or avoid. Man no longer lives in a world
where he can decide what it is that everybody should know
or do. Art is a problem of thinking intelligent, unpreju-
diced response to the reality one faces, not one of follow-
ing rules and formulas to achieve clever technical varia-
tions. Art must be an expression of the human condition in
the contemporary world.1

There is a binding relationship between thought and
action which constitutes an essential condition of man.1
Without thought, the behavior of man would remain a mere
happening of nature. Thus man's individuality can only be
known through his deeds which constitute his authentic self.
Man as a part of nature is a creature, a given phenomenon.
This is an unavoidable situation. It is the bare thatness
which men circumstantially, without premeditation or design,
make actual. Man as a particular person is, on the other
hand, an achievement to be attained only by his individual
choice and action. It is the Egg. Nature makes each per-
son a human animal, but if he is to become an individual
self, it must be by his own doing. It is a result of what

one does, of his own deeds. The answer to the question,

 

1The main ideas in this paragraph are derived from
an unpublished manuscript by Thomas Green formerly of Mich-
igan State University.

26

"What am I?" is the same for all men. "I am a human animal."
But the question "Who am I?" can only be answered by one who
can say, "I am he who responds." (He who accepts the respon-
sibility of his actions.)

"Man's position in the universe is unique in that he,
as a responding being, becomes answerable for his actions.
This is the moral aspect of his freedom. Respondo ergo egg "
now means that I am in so far as I accept the responsibility
of my actions . . ."1

It is possible not to respond, to remain a mere
creature, for things done apart from any thought are not
human deeds. Such mere events do not constitute true re-
sponse and cannot culminate in works of art. Nor can they
promote community among men. "My sensations are real in so
far as they are responses. I reach reality, I am real, I
have reality, in so far as I respond, and in so far as my
responses become answers. I am real in so far as I am.!iph
the world and am partaking in the discussion in the world."2

The artist can therefore achieve his own authen-’
ticity by genuine response. He achieves authenticity then
not as a creature of nature, but as a human being who can
transcend the natural animal that he is; who must transcend
it to become an individual. He can reveal himself by a

human response--an affirmation of reality.

 

1F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern
Predicament (New York: Harper and Rowe, Publishers, 1958),
pp. 206-201.

2Ibid., p. 96.

 

27

This revelation, this image of himself may, finally,
alter, enlarge or divert the viewer's own response to the
world, but it can never replace or duplicate it. It adds
another object out there to be responded to and to be inte-
grated into the viewer's total environment. It enlarges
man's understanding of the nature of being human. It is
not because the artist "transmits his feelings" by means of
art, as Tolstoy supposes, but because he expresses his
particular mode of humanity that the work of art serves as
a means of union among men.

Art begins then, not, "when one person with the ob-
ject of joining another or others to himself in one and the
same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external
indications."1 Art begins rather, when a person achieves
authenticity (in the face of a real situation) through com-
plete response, and expresses his response by certain ex-
ternal indications. Although such art is a means of union
among men, and is indispensable for life and progress toward
the well-being of individuals and of humanity, as Tolstoy
says, it can hardly be for the purpose of "sharing one and
the same feeling" that the act of art occurs. Rather it is
a communion with reality, a saying of "yes" to the world,
to the reality that one has been party to constituting. It
is an affirmation of existence, the personal humanizing
achievement of an authentic relationship with reality. An

artist reveals the world to which he responds only through

 

1Tolstoy, op. cit., pp. 121-122.

28

his individual encounter. He cannot, in other words, create
the authenticity of the world. He may, however, communicate
his own authenticity (which he does create) by responding
fully and personally to the world, by affirming what he can
of the already given world. The world is there. It is
given and is not to be doubted. Only its meaning is to be
pondered, and that in relation to an individual and to man-
kind.~{

I As a result of man's transcendence of the natural
state, he must achieve authenticity--not as a thing in nature,
but as a human being-~as a thing apart from nature, a self-
conscious deliberative being with the power to choose, to
affirm and therefore to become an individual person standing
not only apart from nature but also by his choices standing
apart from other men as this individual who acts in this
unique human way. Man as an individual person can only be
known through his deeds. Man as a part of nature is an
animal. This is given; is unavoidable. It is Egg; men are.
It is their dispensation, just as the other objects in the
world are given. Man as a person, on the other hand, is an
achievement of his own thought and action. Richard E.
Sullivan, the historian, has a way of saying on occassion:
"Those social scientists can tell me what to g2; they can't
tell me what to pg!" It is only through his deeds that one
can know Egg a person is. It is his own actions which indi-
cate his thoughts. But thoughts do not appear in a vacuum.
Only by responding to reality do men think and act. It is,

finally, from the depth of the artist that the depth of the

29

work of art is derived. The aesthetitian Eugene Veron says
that medicare artists have no style for the very reason
that they are mediocrities--commonness.

One admires the genius of Rembrandt in the profound
character which he imparted to everyone who posed for him.
Thus did he react to the world around him. Other artists
painting the same portraits, responding to the same objec-
tive reality revealed lesser selves or less authentic selves
in their work. Rembrandt was an artist who could and did
respond to his world with his total person. His genius was
great. The sitters were the same who sat for lesser painters,
or who could have done so. In Rembrandt's work, depth and
greatness and human qualities can be seen which are lacking
in the portraits of his contemporaries. It is his own great-
ness and his personal richness which he has been able to ex-
press-but he could do this only by responding to the reality
of the sitter. He was able to respond more deeply because
his perception was more penetrating and concerned. He was
able to affirm more of reality, and more richly than other
artists.

It seems worthwhile to suggest that in manifesting
his own authenticity by an act of total response to reality,
Rembrandt dignified, that is, gave dignity to, his sitter.
This he did by exhibiting it in himself, by realizing his
own individuality, by expressing his personal authenticity.
The truth of his portrait is.Rembrandt's truth. The quality

of a portrait is not simply concerned with how closely it

30

resembles the sitter, but with what the artist realizes out

of the phenomenon which he faces.

\

Perhaps it would be well to indicate that while the
art of Rembrandt was meaningful in the 17th century, it would
not be relevant if produced today. It is easy to think of
art in its timelessness as having the same kind of validity
for all cultures. However, if we remain alert to the fact
that in its production a work of art results from a man's
mode of response to his contemporary world, we will see that
a response which completely expressed the sense of the times
in the seventeenth century would be an inadequate response
to our contemporary historical situation. If art must be

a responsive echo of man's awareness of himself in his par-
ticular situation, the radical changes that have taken place
in the three hundred years since Rembrandt's time would cer?
tainly demand a different, if no less human response. It

is for this reason that the imitation of the masters cannot
be a proper goal in the teaching of art.

What does this mean for the classroom teacher? How
can the teacher help the child to manifest his authenticity
in art, to respond with genuine individuality, to express
his personal truth? Certainly not by teaching rules of
design, Renaissance perspective or the "correct" proportions
of human anatomy. There are two damaging results from such
an academic approach: first it narrows the possible views of
reality for the child to one standard, externally imposed

view, secondly this method teaches the child to hold his

31

personal vision in contempt and to seek at all costs to See
in terms of the external criteria judged best by his supe-
riors. T“

If our academic formulas lead to a Renaissance con-
ception of reality which cannot be adequate for the twentieth
century and which is certainly not a natural response to the
reality which the children of today encounter, then what can
be taught at all? Most teachers know how to teach the well-
formed rules of perspective and anatomy, the principles of
color harmony and design. This is, today, the easy solution.
The path suggested here is not an easy one and its novelty
may strike some as being arbitrary. Any contribution of
value in contemporary art education must, however, suggest
a new direction. New directions are never easy. Nonethe-
less, modern art has already a tradition of more than half
a century. We can look for direction from this tradition.

5" When Cezanne, the father of modern art, said that he
wanted to realiser, that is, to "bring into being" his visual‘
apprehension of nature, he was speaking of giving fpgm to
his personal response to reality. He said, "Peindre d'aprés
nature, ce n'est pas copier l'objectif, c'est realiser des
sensations."1 Or, again, writing to his son:

"As a painter I am becoming lucid in the
presence of nature. But with me the realiza-

tion of my sensations is always hard. I can-

not reach the intensity which appears to my

senses, I have not the magnificent richness
of color that animates nature."2

 

1Elie Faure, P. Cezanne (Paris: Les Editions G. Greg
et cie., 1923), pp. 4 - .

2R. H. Wilenski, Modern French Painters (New York,
N.Y.: Reynal and Hitchcock, n.d.), p. 180.

32

At the same time he was proclaiming the twentieth century
world-view that man, by the process of perception, becomes

a part of the object perceived. Reality does not consist

of the thing-in-itself, absolute and isolated. The only
reality one can know is that of the encounter of the human
consciousness with the thing perceived. Man can know the
reality of objects only through his personal experiencing

of them which colors and therefore becomes a part of that
reality. A second aspect of Cezanne's revolutionary atti-
tude toward art as form-giving concerns the fact that in

order to realize (bring into being) one's visual apprehen-
sion of reality, it is necessary to moduler, that is, to
adjust the material perceived in such a way as to retain in
the work of art the vital intensity found in reality. This
means he wanted to give the painting a form which has vital-
ity and tension equal to, though not the same as, that created
in his intense encounter with reality. Distortion was a
necessary technique for achieving the vitality which would
equal and the unity which would make meaningful the encounter '
with reality. Form thus becomes the means to create a unity
of the total field of representation.

Charles Olson speaks of contemporary poetry as "pro-
jective" or "open" verse, or as "composition by field," thus
nmking even more intense the modern insistance on unity
through relationships. Perhaps the following suggestions
may be considered to be a contribution toward a projective
' art, or composition by field in the visual arts. They are

encompassed by a juristic philosophy.

33

Without belaboring the point, it seems clear that
there is a parallel between theories of composition by
field in the arts and cognitive,or perceptual field theories
in contemporary psychology. In addition, all these theories
are based upon the relativistic thinking of such philosophers
as Whitehead and others.

While field theories of art must avoid formula, it
is clear that projective art will be principled. In an at-
tempt to make this approach more practical for the classroom
teacher, the following four principles have been recognized.

I. ART MEANS GIVING FORM -- an understanding of
what art is will be essential to achieving it. It must be
emphasized that giving fppm to one's personal response to
reality in no way implies copying the shape of the isolated
object. Rather, it means making the object meaningful.

Form is not a replica of the physical object, but a revela-
tion of the artist's total encounter with reality. The
artist cannot represent the object-in-itself but only the
object-as-apprehended-by-him.

It may help in understanding how art means giving
form if one thinks of form as an active force. Thus one may
more easily understand the new concept and break the habit
of thinking of form as the imitation of the physical dimen-
sions of the object.

According to Charles Olson, "A poem is energy trans-
ferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several
causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over

to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all

34

points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an

energy-discharge."1

Further, Olson suggests that the poet
(and his concept can be broadened to include any artist)
must get in, at all points, ". . . energy at least the
equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first
place, yet an energy which is peculiar to [art] alone and
which will be, obviously, also different from the energy
which the [viewer], because he is a third term, will take
away."2

Art, then, is form-producing, not thing-producing.
Out of the multiplicity of possible perceptions of reality,
each individual must select and organize in order to con-
struct a credible world. These basic principles of composi-
tion by field are presented in such a manner as to demand
great exactitude from the artist while eliminating all stan-
dardized and de-personalized reaction. They are simple
enough that very young children seem to get meaning from
them, yet profound enough to be relevant to professional
artists.

II. WORK FOR CLARITY -- Clarity means, of course,

clarity of form, clarity of expression, not necessarily

‘imitative replication of the object. John Ciardi has said,

 

1Charles Olson, "Projective Verse (projectile
(percussive (prospective vs. the NON-projective," The New
Amegican Poetpy; 1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York,
N.Y.: Grove Press, Inc., 1960), p. 387.

21bid., p. 387.

35

"The Form Is The Experience."1 This might be explained by
saying that only that form or design is right for any given
work of art which is the exact revelation of the artist's
response to the reality which propelled him to create it.
Here we have no room for rubricised "public" or standard
concepts of design or form.

Obviously such clarity can only be achieved by dint
of the most intense concern.

III. BE INTENSE (CARE ENOUGH) -- Olson would say that
the care, ". . . must be so constant and so scrupulous, the
exaction must be so complete, that . . . assurance . . . is
purchased at the highest -- 40 hours a day -- price."2 And
undoubtedly complete assurance is never adhieved, even by a
genius.

There is no mystery about how young boys achieve
much skill in sand lot baseball. Ask any mother why her boy
is late for supper, where he goes after school, or why he
is rushing through his evening meal to hurry outside again.
It is usually true when a child says, "I can't draw." It
is less likely to be true, perhaps it is never true, that
a child cannot learn to draw--if he wants to as badly as
he wants to play ball. Few boys are geniuses, yet most boys

spend the time and energy required to become proficient at

 

1John Ciardi, "The Form Is The Experience," in Art
Education, Journal of the National Art Education Assn.
Vol. XIV, No. 7, 1961.

2Olson, pp; cit., p. 389.

36

playing ball. One doesn't really need special talent, but
one must pggg enough.

IV. NEVER GENERALIZE -- Stated in positive terms
this principle would read, pp specific. This does not
necessarily call for great detail in a realistic sense. It
calls for great decision regarding what it is that one wishes
to express. It seems worth remarking that less detail would
demand even greater freedom from generalization than does
excessive detail. A good example of this is Japanese Haiku
poetry. It is not the object-in-itself that one should try
to depict, but the moment created by the duration of the
authentic relationship which can be established with the
object; the unique human encounter. Since every encounter
is unique, no generality will do. An artist cannot repeat
a cliche: He must state clearly and precisely his personal

response in the presence of the world.

CHAPTER III
FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY

Two aspects of the discussion of art as communica-
tion in Chapmer II may require further consideration at this
point. First, it may be helpful to discuss more fully what
is meant by authenticity and how it relates to freedom and
individuality. Second, the necessity for freedom in art
and in the achievement of individual authenticity.

Authenticity, as here used, means the acceptance of
one's moral responsibility for personal response to the re-
ality one faces. It means a dialogue with life. It means
awareness and concern. It is that existential choice de-
manded of man if he is to transcend his creaturely nature and
become a person. This is a choice which nature does not come
mand or require; one which a man may avoid making and thereby
remain a mere creature swept along by the events in his en-
vironment, never taking a decisive, principled action. Men
may pass their lives, but it could not be called living, in
a state of apathy and indifference. To do so would be to
abandon the human possibility. It would be to be careless.
Nature is indifferent, it never enjoins one to make the
moral choice. It merely limits the possibilities from which
men may choose. Nature is without care. It does not weep

for those it kills or rejoice at the birth or development

37

38

of its creatures. Nature is not concerned about the ques-
tion of man's decision.

"Nature contains no ought, no obliga-
tion, for the reason that it leaves to its
creatures no room for disobedience to itself.
It simple ip; and they are as it would have
them be. You would injure another: there is
nothing in nature which forbids it. You would
love another: there is nothing in nature which
commands it. The stone gravitates, the streams
combine their burden of silt and salt into the
ancient sea, the trees put forth leaf and
fruit, the lamb feeds, multiplies and is fed
upon, the man lives and labors and perishes.
That is the pathos, the sufferance, of the
natural condition. But the norm which men
legislate for themselves is not their suffer-
ance. It is their act, what they have for
better or worse made for themselves, consti-
tuted within the indifference of mere nature,
which is content that they should live or die,
eat or be eaten, gain happiness or be af-
flicted, enslave themselves or make themselves
free, so long as they do each of these things
within the conditions which it disposes."1

But man is concerned. Some men do make the choice.
This is what makes the difference between man as a creature
of nature and man as a human being. This choice is what
constitutes an authentic person. It is what makes the dif-
ference between the chronological changes in nature and the
history of man's achievement through his own deeds.

"By virtue of his presence in the world
each person is a part pf nature. By virtue
of his presence in history he is apart from
nature. The first is among the circumstances
in which life is given. It is unavoidable.
It is a consequence of what men £39. The
second, however, is by no means unavoidable.
It is a consequence of what men pp. The first
is something given; the second something
achieved . . . .

Ag 3 living creature every man, being a
part of nature, is, like nature itself, amoral,
indifferent, and without purpose . . . .

 

1Taylor, The Magks of Sociepy, p. 86.

39

Considered solely as a part of nature,
man is not only amoral, but non-historical.
Just as in nature there are laws but no
duties, so also there are happenings, but
no deeds. There are occurrences but no ac-
tions. Since events in nature cannot be
seen as deeds, they cannot be seen as his-
torical. . . . men are historical beings
not by sufference of birth, nor by right of
any kind, but solely by their deeds. They
are historical beings because they are the
doers of deeds, in some sense set apart from
nature. Except for their actions, they exist
only as things in nature; and in nature there
are no actions."1

Taylor says that it is the connection of events with

meaning that is intended in describing them as historical.
"The outward event, which is seen, is the
revelation of an inward meaning, which is not

seen but imputed and reflected on. Thus the

erosion of a stone is no part of the histori-

can order; but the erosion of the Pyramid of

Chephren is the disappointment of a man's

pathetic aspiration after eternal life. . . .

behind the thing, which is the object seen in

nature, is the person, who is the subject act-

ing in history.

Implicit in this distinction between nature and his-
tory is the similar distinction between mere behavior and
action. Authentic man is the thinker of thoughts and the
doer of deeds. The behavior of nature has been labeled
mere event. It must be made clear that the actions of men
are also events. These same actions which are events can
be viewed not simply from the perspective of a disinterested

observer as an event, but also from the perspective of the

implicated participant as an intended act. According to

 

1Thomas Green, Action and Society: A Study in the
Foundatipns of Educatipp, unpublished manuscript.

2Taylor, op. cit., p. 24.

40

Taylor, the deeds of men may be submitted to questions of
ngh: questions which concern the limits nature has imposed
upon their acts. The deeds of men are susceptible to ex-
planation under general laws as natural phenomena. How-
ever, unlike the event in nature, man's deeds are also sub—
ject to questions concerning the limits which man imposes
upon himself: questions of Covenant. "All that is distincr
tively human in our lives, in language, in art, in science,
in religion, law, and logic--falls among [questions of
covenantj."1
Freedom, as well as authenticity, becomes a matter
of deciding which action to take within the limitations of
nature's possibilities and which social principles one is
willing to subscribe to. Men are themselves a part of
nature. They are subject to the necessities of nature which
shape their destinies and circumscribe their freedom. In
addition, the conditions under which man lives are differ-
ent in different cultures, locations and times. Born as
if by chance at a particular time and place, to parents
of a specific culture, men are subject to the necessities
which chance has provided. They are children of their era,
creatures of the existing culture--facts concerning which
they have had no choice. This is the very basis of moral-
individuality. Decisions must always be made within the
context of decisions already made and acts already performed.

This, too, is a condition within which life is given. The

 

1Ibid., p. 6.

41

authentic life is something achieved within the confines of
these necessities. Freedom is not only the setting of
limits which nature does not provide: it is also the appro-
priation of a culture. It should be emphasized that what
is meant by the phrase, "the appropriation of a culture" is
more than the passive inheritance of a culture. That would
be to treat the culture merely as "nature." What is here
intended is the choosing of the culture one has passively
inherited, the affirmation of its beliefs, as one's own,
freely embracing it and standing for what it represents.

"Active participation together in the group

life is the chief means of transmitting the

culture from old to young, from group to

individual. And the same participation with

its resulting transmission forms the chief

means for the develppment of individual or

specific selfhood."

While it is true that the transmission of a culture
from generation to generation is accomplished chiefly by
means of dialogue, nonetheless, the individual appropria-
tion of the culture would demand critical acceptance of,
and personal commitment to the cultural norms.

To ignore the knowledge made available by civiliza-
tion is, if not impossible, certainly not to act upon the
reality one faces. It is to remain innocent, not free but

thoughtless. Authentic freedom is, in the world today, an

awesome responsibility.

 

1William Heard Kilpatrick, Selfhopd and Civilization
(New York, N.Y.: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College,
Columbia University, reprint edition, 1947), pp. 34,35.

42

"This fragile life between birth and
death can nevertheless be a fulfillment--
if it is a dialogue. In our life and ex-
perience we are addressed; by thought and
speech and action, by producing and by in-
fluencing we are able to answer. For the
most part we do not listen to the address,
or we break into it with chatter. But if
the word comes to us and the answer pro-
ceeds from us then human life exists, though
brokenly, in the world. The kindling of
response in that 'spark' of the soul, the
blazing up of the response, which occurs
time and again, to the unexpectedly approach-
ing speech, we term responsibility. We prac-
tice responsibility for that realm of life
allotted and entrusted to us for which we
are able to respond, that is, for which we
have a relation of deeds which may count--
in all our inadequacy--as a proper response.
The extent to which a man, in the strength
of the reality of the spark, can keep a tradi-
tional bond, a law, a direction, is the extent
to which he is permitted to lean his respon-
sibility on something (more than this is not
vouchsafed to us, responsibility is not taken
off our shoulders). As we 'become free' this
leaning on something is more and more denied
to us, and our responsibility must become per-
sonal and solitary."1

Man must not only receive history as it has been
made before his birth, he must also make history.

"For the account of human history must
concern itself not simply with the necessie
ties within which men act, but with what men
realize out of the resources and prohibitions
which in their time are given to them, and
the reasons they assign to what they do or
leave undone. Men are not only the creatures
of history, but the creators of history as
well. And that is a condition not in which
life is given to the human animal, but one
which is achieved by the human being. Men
may refuse to act or, failing to understand
the conditions of their day, failing to read
the signs of the times, they may allow their
time to pass, in which case they shall remain,

 

1Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald
Gregor Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan, Paul Ltd., 1947),
pp. 92,93.

43

with respect to history, creatures swept
along by the sequence of act and consequence
without themselves ever acting.

Men are in that case non-historical; for
the historicity of men resides not in their
destiny which is given, but in their freedom
which they sieze, not in the things they suf-
fer, but in the deeds they do. Both the
powers of the natural world and the forces of
culture and society impinge upon the deeds of
men; both are inexhorably involved in their
works. Both to this extent, are of the crea-
tion, the order of nature. But insofar as men
are historical, they surpass this nature.
Their historicity is rooted not in their
creatureliness, but in the concealed possi-
bility of their deeds."1

Humanity is not nature's event but man's achieve-
ment. To be an authentic human being means to act; to make
judgements; to be partial, not indifferent; not neutral,
but partisan. It means to intend and to accept the risk of
what one does; not only to be implicated in an inexorable
process, but to implicate one's self. "A person is free
to the degree that he decides his course of action himself
and decides it not on whim or prejudice, but on the merits
of the case carefully examined."2

To be authentic, then, is to make decisions which,
expressed in actions, are revealed in the world and which,
in fact, constitute, for the individual, his world. It can
be said that nothing exists until it has entered into one's
discerning consciousness. It is at this point that free-

dom is discovered. Freedom is decision expressed in human

act. Freedom does not mean to be unbound. To be loosed

from personal commitment is to be incapable of real acts.

 

1Green, op. cit.

2Kilpatrick, op. cit., p. 178.

44

"To become free of a bond is destiny; one

carries that like a cross, not like a cockade.

Let us realize the true meaning of being free

of a bond: it means that a quite personal re-

sponsibility takes the place of one shared

with many generations. Life lived in freedom

is perspnal responsibility or it is a pathetic

farce."

Nature is not obliged. There is no agent in nature.
It conforms to certain principles which the scientist has
discovered. "But what is observed from this position of
detachment is conformity to a rule, not obedience."2 The
reasons we ilicit in trying to understand the behavior of
nature are not justifying reasons but causal principles--
emperical generalizations, not normative principles which
nature is free to choose or reject. To be free as a bird is
not to be free at all. It is to be impelled; to be swept
along by necessity and impulse. A bird is not free to
migrate, it has no choice. A plant is not free to suck up
the moisture from the earth. It does not decide to do so.
On the other hand, man's freedom consists in his ability to
choose, within the limits which indifferent nature allows,
those principles which he will obey. A man is free to for-
mulate the principles of his action and to bind himself to
obedience to those principles. Man may remain in his
natural state. He may spend his time, like a child, without

reflection. That is, sometimes believed to be the state of

the majority of men most of the time. Some men, though they

 

1Buber, op. cit., p. 92.

2Green, op, cit.

45

reflect, do not have the strength or the courage to act upon
their reason. The failure to so act, the failure to impli-
cate one's self constitutes a failure to become one's
authentic self. It is a betrayal of one's authenticity and
the denial of one's freedom.
Here the difference between child art and that of a

mature artist can be seen. The child is truly "free as a
bird." His work is admired because it is natural--and to
the extent that it is natural. The natural intuitive and
spontaneous development of the child is encouraged because“
it is believed that this is the only basis for the eventual
development of thoughtful principled action in art. It was
Freud who taught us that the instinctual, the irrational is
prior to the capacity for ordered thought. Gardner Murphy
explains that it is this irrational love which gives birth
to rational thought. ". . . love can reach out and entwine
within itself all the things, acts and relationships of this
world . . . . It can love the act of knowing and the act
of thinking. It can give rise to, or coalesce with the act
of comprehending."1

A While freedom is the basis of adult art, it is not
yet the basis of the art of young children. In fact, art
education is the process of nurturing this natural love, mak-

ing it broader and deeper as it develops and grows to "love

 

1Gardner, Murphy, Freein Intelli ence Thro h
Teaching (New York: Harper and Brothers, 19615, p. 23.

46

the very process by which it differentiates, analyzes, and

makes meaningful reality."1

If freedom is the act of formulating and choosing
the principles one will obey, it must be emphasized that
this does not necessarily imply a single or a "best" set of
principles already established and waiting to be chosen.
It is not merely a matter of looking over principles that
are available and selecting those which most please the
individual taste as one might do when choosing a new auto-
mobile. Freedom is a matter of forging meaningful principles
from one's encounter with reality. It is a matter of what
men realize out of the resources and prohibitions which are
available to them, and of the reasons they assign to what
they do or leave undone. "A person is free in the degree
that he decides his course of action himself and decides it
not on whim or prejudice but on the merits of the case care-
fully examined."2
It may be said then, that the authentic individual
is one who chooses to act in response to reality. Egg he
is is revealed by his deeds. Thus not only does man's human-
ness reside in his acts, but so does his individuality. Any
meaningful application of the term "individuality" to a man
as a human person will concern itself neither with his
numerical individuality (everything that is is numerically

unique) nor with the uniqueness of his natural characteristics.

 

1Ibid., p. 23.

2Kilpatrick, op. cit., p. 178.

47

Nor can it be said that to express the fact that one is a
member of the human species is a meaningful indication of
his moral individuality. So equally are all other human
beings members of the species--and by no choice of their
own. It is true that Johnny is an individual because of his
unique size, complexion, age and build, and because he is
a single being. Having said this one nonetheless has not
remarked in a meaningful manner regarding Johnny's moral
individuality, but only of his individuality by circumstance,
of unique attributes given to Johnny by nature or by his
environment. Only his endowment has been discussed. A
meaningful consideration of his individuality, on the other
hand, depends on what Johnny does within the limitations of
his endowment. It depends upon his choice, his decision,
his acts. It is the result of his personal history, of his
biography. Individuality is thus something achieved.
Johnny might be described as a short somebody, as blond,
stout, etc., or as the one assigned to the third seat in the
second row. To suppose that such descriptions constitute
Johnny's individuality would, however, be to ignore any
moral implications of individuality. It would be to disre-
gard Johnny's personal achievement of selfhood.
Individuality has to do not with Egg£_a person is,
but with yhp he is; and this he reveals only by his deeds.
He builds self, achieves selfhood by his personal response
to reality. Being is becoming that authentic self which only

one's deeds make one to become.

48

Thus one's individuality depends not upon the cir-
cumstance that his response must always be unique, but upon
the circumstance that it must be genuinely his response.

In principle it would be possible that more than one person
might respond in a single way to certain phenomena. In prac-
tice it may be expected that most people will respond in a
somewhat similar way to many specific situations. These,
responses can, nevertheless, be authentic aspects of each
one's individuality. Individuality thus belongs to one not
by right of birth but as a consequence of his own deeds.

The bases of both man's humanity and of his individuality

is action.

In contrast to the concept of individuality, although
frequently confused with it is the concept of the value of
the individual. Green1 insists that a rational basis for
the value of individuals can be found only in what does not
suffice to discriminate between them, only in some property
or capacity possessed by all alike, and thought to be in-
dispensable to the humanity of each. In such case the end
result would be the affirmation of the value of each indi-
vidual at the cost of the devaluation of each one's indi-
viduality.

Green examines various claims for the inherent value
of the individual and rejects them all upon these same
grounds. Even the fact that man is a thinker of thoughts

and a deer of deeds is no logical basis for the claim of his

 

1Green, op. cit.

49

intrinsic value. There seems to be no natural property in
men which is adequate to the moral belief in his intrinsic
worth. Membership in the species hpmp sapiens is a rela-
tionship acquired by the simple adventure of being born,
and it is undoubtedly true that no two are born exactly
similar. However, this is not sufficient to constitute a
reason for belief in the inherent value of the individual.
It is equally true that no two leaves of any species of
plant are exactly similar, yet we do not speak of the value
of the individual leaf. The same may be said of any animal--
the noble dog or the horse, for example, but in each case
one chooses arbitrarily which if any individual he will
cherish and value. In the order of nature the individual
man has no more value inherently than any other animal. No
law of nature requires that the individual be valued. In
fact, virtually every civilization the world has known has
chosen to consider large numbers of individual human beings
as having no value. Thus, at various times eo-called bar-
barians, non Caucasians, non Aryans, Negroes, Jews and the
members of ghettos in every generation, the legal slaves in
some, have been treated as if they had no individual worth.
While the uniqueness of each person has to do with
ghp (by his deeds) he is: has to do with his individuality,
the value of each person has no such basis. Green despairs
of finding any logical basis for the concept of the value
of the individual. He does find a clue in the Hebrew con-

cept of the chosen people. According to this concept men

50

are valuable because God has chosen to value them. It is,
an arbitrary affirmation on the part of God, an act of will.

"When there is extracted from such a
view the social principle implicit there,
what is discovered is simply this: Men are
valuable because and to the extent that
other men regard them as members of their
moral community. It is a thing not deserved
or warranted. It is something done at the
level of an avowal or an affirmation. It is
an affirmation which is not necessitated as
the end of an argument, but rather as the
beginning of a community. If it is an af-
firmation required by anything, it is required
not by the nature of men as individuals, nor
by the requirements of reason, but as the 1
necessary prerequisite for any human community."

 

CHAPTER IV

COMMUNITY AND COMMUNICATION

It was pointed out in Chapter III that the value of
the individual is a social phenomenon not directly related
to individuality. It is instead the basis for the estab-
lishment of community. One does not have value inherently.
One has value, if he has it at all, by virtue of its bestowal
by others. It is not a thing necessarily granted because it
is deserved or withheld because of individual limitations.
In some cultures, animals are granted positions of worth in
the human community, while in others intelligent, cultured,
creative individuals--members of minority groups--may be
denied value and are therefore not accepted as members of
the community. Such "valueless" individuals may be deported,
destroyed, bound in slavery, or simply ignored. When men
refuse to grant the status of person to any individual, they
thereby set the limit of their community. In such a situa-
tion any attitude toward the outsider is permissible. He
simply doesn't count. Anyone excluded from the moral com-
munity is denied value.

To be an individual means not merely to be implicated
by circumstance but to implicate one's self, to take a stand.

This, however, does not assure that one will be valued. To

be valued as a person means to be the subject of rights,

51

52

but the acknowledgement by others that one has a right is
a requisite to his having it. A right implies the duty of
others to respect it. It requires community. One's rights
depend, thus, not upon his claim to right but upon the
willingness of others to admit that claim as privileged.
Recent history has shown what happens when the claim to
rights has not been admitted as privileged. Every right
implies a duty on the part of others to allow one to exer-
cise that right, and an obligation of restraint upon their
actions. If a person has the right of ownership of his
automobile, no other, no matter how urgent his need or how
great his desire, may take it without the owner's consent.
He may, in fact, take it by stealth, but he does not, either
by taking it or by the fact that he now has it in his poses-
sion, acquire the right to it. All rights are grounded in
this reciprocity, this mutuality of persons in community.
Human community thus is based upon questions of
covenant, questions of obligation concerned not with limits
which nature imposes upon man's relationship with man, but
with limits which man imposes upon himself. Community is
not a matter of fact but a question of legitimacy. The
moral community is one to which all human beings are capable
of belonging and into which all human beings may be accepted.
Nonetheless, it is one to which one can belong only if he
consents to the restraints of community and at the same
time one to which a person may belong solely if his member-
ship is allowed by others. They may reject him arbitrarily,

just as he may refuse to join with them in community. In

53

such cases each is defining the limits of his community.
Community depends upon covenant, an agreement to which both
parties consent. This common bond, created by man, is the
very achievement of civilization. The privilege of status
is allowed only to those bound in community. By mutual
admission of rights and duties each is bound as person to
person in a relationship which nature has not demanded of
them but which they freely choose to accept.

Men institute a community not by congregating in
one place; something that sheep and wolves also do, who have
no concern regarding the value of their brothers. Such a
congregation, whether of wolves, sheep or men, does not
constitute a community.

In community men stand as persons in the presence of
each other. Here the moral situation as distinct from the
natural situation is first found. Man's act as contrasted
with nature's unreflective event is met. Thus it can be
seen that it is only in community that one may gain freedom
from the mere circumstantial events of natural existence.
Community requires a normative decision, not a descriptive
statement. One becomes not an objective observer but an
implicated participant who must appraise his action in re-
gard to the juristic covenant. One becomes implicated not
by the circumstance of proximity or birth, not by unexamined
habit, but by commitment to a principle of action.

Paradoxically, the act of affirmation which confers
value upon another, that acceptance of the other one as a

person, that openness to the institution of community, is

54

the human act by which one attains individuality. It is not
the bestowal of value upon a person by someone else by whfeh
he achieves individuality. By that act one receives value
but not necessarily moral individuality. It is the act of
bestowing value upon the other person by which he gains indi-
viduality. The dumb acceptance of value which another may
bestow upon a person, while it gives him a certain value in
the eyes of this other one, does not give the person valued
any individuality. Nor does it alone institute a community.
Community demands mutuality, but individuality does not
necessarily demand it. One may choose to value even those
who do not include him in their community. Christ did this.
By such an act a person may achieve individuality but, alone,
he cannot institute a community. To institute a community
one must also affirm the value of those who affirm it in

him and oblige himself to so limit his acts as to observe
their rights.

Membership in the moral estate of human community is
dependent upon one's willingness to observe certain rules of
order.

"For each man in community must build his

expectations upon the behavior of others

and apart from a settled order of relations

in which behavior is circumscribed, there

is no virtue in community either for keeper

or kept. As I elect to live in community

with others, I implicitly subscribe also to

being kept by others. That is the imperious

demand of society itself without which there
can be no society at all."1

 

1Taylor, op, cit., p. 90.

55

Community, in this view, is a group of persons re-
lated by a system of agreements. To be a member of the com-
munity is to be a party to agreements. If one asks why men,
not required by nature to take upon themselves the obliga-
tions of community, do, in fact, so oblige themselves, he
will see that it is only by this act of dedication to obli-
gations of their own choosing that men enact their peculiar
function as human beings. To be human, man must pursue ends
which men, not nature, have set.

Human freedom thus does not turn on the absence of
law, but upon whether the law is self-imposed. Man is able
to institute rules and to oblige himself to obey them.
Members of a community act out of respect for one another's
rights. By acknowledging rights which others hold, each
freely acts under a self-imposed restraint for the sake of
others. To act upon impulse or by reflex is not freedom,
but to choose to restrain one's actions is to act freely.

Community is not entirely obligation, nor is it en-
tirely for the sake of others. Each member has his own
rights. The obliging of one's self to respect the rights
of others is not an obligation solely for the sake of others.
It is only this binding of one's self for other's sake which
can permit that mutuality, that union of persons which con-
stitutes community. It is here that the value of the in-
dividual becomes manifest. The extent to which each member
acknowledges the rights that others hold is the extent to
which he is willing to impose upon himself a restraint--not

alone for the sake of others, but also for the sake of

56

himself in community with others. It is only by mutual re-
spect that men may be related in the dignity of persons, as
I and Ihpp, as subjects rather than objects of rights. In
the mutual relationship of community each member walks
equal under covenant. Each respects in the other a dignity,
confers upon the other a status which in nature's indiffer-
ence men do not have.

Only men can dignify human persons in community.
By their own choice in a concert of persons men can create
a human status which nature indifferently allows but which
is not given to man by nature: which man must achieve by his
own act. Man alone can institute a community in which he
gains the status and dignity of individuality, the status
of a human person instead of that of a mere creature of
nature. He becomes an authentic individual by choosing that
act of affirmation by which he at the same time gains value
in the institution of community. It comes to this: through
community mpg achieves pip individuality. Selfhood can be
achieved only in a social milieu and the surrounding cul-
ture not only enters essentially into the process of self-
actualization but also enters essentially and profoundly into
the resulting personality. Kilpatrick calls this self-acuual-
ization the "self-other process" and declares that ". . . only
by the self-other process . . . has historic man been able to
achieve his distinctly human attributes of language, critical,

thinking, sense of responsibility, conscience, and the use of

standards."1

 

1Kilpatrick, op. cit., p. 1.

57

Truly existential communication is a revelation of
selfhood while it is also a binding together of historical
men. Karl Jaspers insists that communication is so much
man's comprehensive essence that not only his selfhood but
reality, what is for any man, is also bound up with com-
munication. The being that one is is in every form commun-
ication, and reality exists for people only insofar as it
achieves communicability by becoming speech or becoming
utterable. One becomes fully conscious only of what he is
able to express to others. Reality is made to exist for a
person through his expression or communication. It is in
this sense that art is communication.

Since humanity, nature and all the complicated rela—
tionships in reality are still evolving, a definitive under-
standing is as little possible as the anticipation of the
completed whole. While reality is infinite, man must remain
finite. Thus a knowledge based solely upon rational or
mechanistic thought must be rejected as are rejected all
closed and completed systems of knowledge. Reality, being,
is not something completed and isolated which one can seek
out and know. Being is becoming.

"Thus the contemporary problem is not

to be deduced from some 5 priori whole;

rather it is to be brought to consciousness

out of a basis which is now experienced and

out of a content Still unclearly willed.

Philosophy as thought is always a conscious-

ness of Being which is complete for this

moment, but which knows it has no final per-

manence in its forms of expression.

Instead of some supposed total view of

the actual and cultural situation, rather we

philosophize in consciousness of a situation

which again leads to the final limits and
bases of the human reality. . . . In

58

philosophy we must always be ready, out of

the present questioning, to elicit those

ideas which bring forth what is real to us:

that is, our humanity."

The contemporary historical situation requires a new
stance toward reality, a stance which is less dogmatic and
mechanistic. There is the empirical world of things which
is other than reason, and there is reason, the non-rational
and the rational in reality. However, all reality for man
must appear in those forms in which it can enter into his
consciousness. In order to exist for man, things must be-
come articulated and thereby communicable through their
ability to be thought. It is thus that Jaspers can say that
reality, truth, is communicability. Abstracted from com-
munication truth hardens into unreality.

Jaspers distinguishes three levels or modes of com-
municability: that of empirical existence, that of conscious-
ness as such, and that of spirit. By spirit Jaspers means
that aspect which tries to embrace all of one's experience,
life and culture within certain ideal totalities. Spirit
". . . is the process of fusing and reconstructing all
totalities in a present which is never finished yet always
fulfilled. . . . Out of a continuously actual and continu-
ously fragmenting whole, it pushes forward, creating again

and again out of its contemporary origins its own possible

reality."2 In other words, spirit is the continuously

 

1Jaspers, Reason and Existeng, op. cit., pp. 48-49.

2Ibid., p. 57.

 

59

summing up and organizing aspect of being. Each mode of
communicability has its own right in encompassing reality
and none can be omitted. Nonetheless, even together they
cannot lead to a self-completed whole. Dissatisfaction
with this incompleteness of the three modes of reality does
not spring out of any of these modes. It springs out of
reason and authentic humanness. This then is also the root
of the universal will to communicate. Jaspers labels this
source as "reason and Existenz." The communication of
Existenz (authentic human essence) he says, is accomplished
through the three modes, but only by breaking through and
beyond them. To be self and to be authentic means to be in
communication unconditionally.

"Existenz, then, only becomes apparent
and thereby real if it comes to itself through,
and at the same time with, another Existenz.
What is authentically human in the community
of reason and Existenz is not, as before in
physical life, simply present in a plurality
of naturally generated examples, which then
find one another and bind themselves together.
Rather communication seems to produce for the
first time that which is communicating: inde-
pendent natures which come to consciousness
of themselves, however, as though they were
not touched by the contingencies of empirical
existence, but had been bound together eter-
nally . . . .

Reason, having its substance in Existenz,
arises from the authentic communication of
one nature with another, and it arises in such
a fashion that empirical existence, conscious-
ness as such, and spirit are, so to speak, the
body of its appearance. . .

Reason is potential Existenz which in its
thinking is continually directed upon an other,
upon the Being which we are not, upon the
world, and upon Transcendence. What these are
then becomes communicable and, therewith, being-
for-us, but in the formality through which they
authentically touch Existenz."

 

1Ibid., p. 92.

 

60

At the point where thought transcends to reason and
authentic individuality, one can find nothing but the inner
perception of the possibility of selfhood, a selfhood which
is, according to Jaspers, unknowable and which becomes actual
only as the communication of authenticity through reason.
Without action we cannot know that men think, and without
thought men would be incapable of what we have termed action.
Their impulsive behavior would be mere event. We become an
authentic self only through communication.

"to dream takes no effort
to think is easy
to act is more difficult
but for a man to act after he has taken thought , this!
is the most difficult thing of all"1

This new stance toward truth and reality, which is
required by the contemporary historical situation, is opposed
by a dogmatic approach which assumes a permanent truth ac-
cessible to all and valid as something fixed outside man's
existence. Truth is already there in the world waiting to
be found. It is a given fact needing only to be transmitted
to men. It is something to surrender to, something closed
in itself, timeless, independent of men. Communication under
such conditions would not be a c00perative production between
persons but would be the giving of a possessed truth by him
who possesses it. This is a truth to which men may refer

but in which they cannot participate. The giving of such a

 

1E.E. Cummings, as quoted by Charles Olson, pp. cit.,

p. 389.

61

truth, instead of a questioning of it, destroys communica-
tion. The other does not really listen to such a giving
since he is no longer even questioned.

Authentic existential truth is not found outside of
its incorporation in communication. It cannot exist or ever
be complete in isolation, for it arises only in and through
communication. In this sense communication is true dialogue,
the mutual knowing of persons. It cannot include the in-
dividual as isolated ego. It cannot be deceptive, superfi-
cial or degenerating. It is limitlessly clarifying and
productive of authentic selfhood.

The understanding of truth as becoming demands of
the individual a greater alertness and a more radical open-
ness to experience. The existential view would be that it
demands an openness which tries to bring every possibility
into the medium of communication in order that it might
attain being for one. The unlimited will to communicate
means not merely to submit one's self to another person but
to hear him, and know him, and to reckon with him and his
truth even if that should necessitate a transformation of
one's self.

This openness in reason is necessary for original
and unrestricted communication. Charles Olson speaks of
the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the indivi-
dual as ego.

"It comes to this, the use of a man,

by himself and thus by others, lies in how

he conceives his relation to nature, that

force to which he owes his somewhat small

existence. If he sprawl, he shall find
little to sing but himself, and shall sing,

62

nature has such paradoxical ways, by way
of artifical forms outside himself. But

if he stays inside himself, if he is con-
tained within his nature as he is partici-
pant in the larger force, he will be able
to listen, and his hearing through himself
will give him secrets which objects share.
And by an inverse law his shapes will make
their own way. It is in this sense that
the projective act, which is the artist's
act in the larger field of objects, leads
to dimensions larger than the man. For a
man's problem, the moment he takes speech
up in all its fullness, is to give his work
his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient
to cause the thing he makes to try to take
its place along side the things of nature.
This is not easy. Nature works from rever-
ence . . "1

Jaspers also insists that there are limits to man's
"holding himself in reserve," his "hovering over" what he
knows. The limits he says are at the point where he is him-
self as reason and where he is reason as potential self.

One must remain open. One trusts the truth of others which
is not his own truth but which, as truth, must contain the
possibility of communication.

"It is risk to see the possible pushed

to its highest degree, to dare to entice it

out at the risk of one's openness and bear-

ing responsibility for which men I trust and

how I trust myself —- and knowing that on

every level communication is possible only

among equals. I must assume responsibility

for failure and deception, perhaps as a

crisis in which communication can for the

first time grow, perhaps as a disaster which

I cannot understand."2

In such communication men put their differences under

rules, and under covenant stand equal in the dignity of

 

1Olson, op. cit., p. 395.

2Jaspers, pp; cit., p. 100.

63

persons. Such agreement presupposes potential humanness on
each side. What is not and cannot become the same thing
becomes related through transcendence which struggles toward
the single reality.

The notion of this ideal single reality (which, in
our finite historical situation is an unreality), as commun-
ication which reaches its goal; this very notion demands the
elevation of communication to a transparent perfection in
which there is no longer any need to communicate.

". . . what the Whole is beyond all division

can momentarily flash out. But this illum-

ination is transitory in the world and, al-

daough of decisive influence upon men, income

municable; for when it is communicated it is

drawn into the modes of the Encompassing

where it is ever lacking. Its experience is

absolutely historical, in time out beyond

time. One can speak out of this experience

but not of it. The ultimate in thinking as

in communication is silence."1

If he wishes to regard the student as an individual
person the teacher of art would do well to understand the
solitary nature of the act of creation. Yet there is real
danger in any misinterpretation of the meaning of indivi-
duality in art. While there is no universal rule for all
art, there is no art without rule. The discipline required
in the production of a work of art is self-discipline which

cannot be imposed from the outside. Nonetheless, discipline

of the most exacting nature is demanded.

 

Ibid., p. 106.

 

64

It may be helpful at this time to consider the fol-
lowing points from the preceeding discussion of communica-
tion in their relation to the teaching of art. //7

1. The process of creation in art is an endless
clarification of reality and an endless production of self.
Art is not the recording of some aspect of reality already
known. It is a mode of clarification. Life does not reach
a state of wholeness and then record itself. Each achieve-
ment of understanding alters the whole and leads to further
development. It is not possible for a teacher to hand on
to his students his appropriation of reality. Such an ob-
jectivist hope ignores the fact that the self is a vital
part of the reality it experiences and that each person's
encounter with reality is influenced by the total pattern of
the self, past and present, and even future as that is
anticipated by the self. Clarification is achieved then,
not by learning to see the world as one's teacher sees it
or as tradition has ordained it will be seen. Clarification
is achieved by direct encounter, by an openness to experi-
ence and an integrity regarding one's conceptions in the
faceof reality-~a readiness for anything which may be per-
ceived. Such an openness and such integrity may be called
authentic response. The teacher must not block such response
by teaching "arty" devices or formulas. Truth is a develop-
ing truth. It is a demand that requires continuing surveil-
lance.

2. Art achieves communicability. As suggested

above, art is an authentic response to reality. In its

65

solitary production, art must be an individual achievement.
"There are two forms, indispensable for the building of true
human life, to which the originative instinct, left to it-
self, does not lead and cannot lead: to sharing in an under-
taking and to entering into mutuality."1 Art is communion,
communion with reality, not communication. Yet a communion
which achieves clarity and meaning achieves, thereby, come
municability. Art is a monologue and thus cannot be commun-
ication. What is revealed by the work of art is an authen-
tic mode of encounter. The authentic self of the person is
revealed by his deed.

Thus there is no, "look of art" to which we should
attempt to educate. Perhaps one of the most prevalent weak-
nesses in art education is the academic demand, frequently
unintentional, for some standard product. For the nineteenth
century academy based upon Renaissance realism, a new academy
based upon one or another modern movement in art has been
substituted. While there is no universal standard for
judging works of art, it is not impossible to recognize with
some degree of success which works indicate a genuine open-
ness in the search for truth. Work which employs rationally
acquired formulas and techniques has a uniformity of ap-
pearance which can be readily detected by one who is alert
to the problem. Having conscienciously avoided the use of
devices and formulas as methods, the teacher must also be

alert to the possibility that his student may learn them from

 

1Buber, op. cit., p. 87.

66

other sources and apply them to his work in the mistaken
idea that they will be valuable in his search for truth.
Such practices usually result in glaring inconsistancies in
the work. Yet the teacher must be careful not to reject a
work that seems awkward if it is an authentic response by
fine student. Even in such awkward expressions the authority
of genuine commitment can usually be recognized by the sen-
sative teacher.

3. The communion which is the creative activity of
art cannot be ego-centered, willful or arbitrary. The artist
wants to apprehend reality with his total being. He will
have an insatiable desire for the truth. In that communion
with reality which can produce a work of art the artist must
bring into his relation to the truth more than the condi-
tioned qualities of his self. He must bring an unconditioned
total commitment to his demand for the truth. The quest for
truth must be so constant and so scrupulous, the exaction
must be so complete that one is willing to stake his life
in the thinking it requires. The individual, personal,
singular truth of such a radical communion with reality can
never be a willful imposition of the self upon reality. It
must never seek selfish ends. It may have but one goal and
that is the unconditional truth which, alas, must be recog-
nized as unconditional only by him who has achieved it
through his radical communion with reality.

"For since it is not impossible, but

only psychologically infinitely difficult,

for a man to act according to his own

truth, realizing at the same time the truth

of others which is not truth for him, hold-
ing fast to the relativity and particularity

67

of all universally valid truths--since it

is not impossible, he must not shirk this

highest demand of truthfulness which is

only apparently incompatible with that of

others. The Idea of man cannot be projected

too high so long as the absolutely impos-

sible is avoided, that which contradicts his

finitude in time."1

Jaspers has indicated the emmense difficulty of an
open approach to art education. To help the student to ac-
cept the responsibility of acting according to his own truth
is not impossible, and since it is not impossible, the
teacher must not shirk this highest demand of education.
It means an attitude of openness on the part of the teacher
who must educate not from his personal truth and his idea
of the student, but from the student's own reality.

Teaching for openness must be a non-directive pro-
cess. The teacher may influence the student but he must
constantly beware the possibility of interference. In our
historical situation the teacher is no longer the bearer
of assured values. It is the lack of such assurance which
brings the demand for Openness and a readiness for any
truth which authentic response may discover. Like art,
teaching must be communicability. It dare not be dogmatic.
What were at one time assured values in art, proportion,
perspective, design principles, etc. no longer satisfy the
demands of truth. They are based upon the stable world of

Newtonian physics and the absolute truth of Euclidean geome-

try. In a world of relativity and probability one must

 

1Jaspers, op. cit., p. 100.

68

shoulder the responsibilities which once the culture carried

for him.

CHAPTER V
ART AND THE HUMAN ACT

We have seen that man creates a community by estab—
lishing rules of order and by restraining his acts to obey
these rules. Art also must have order and the artist estab-
lishes a rule or principle for the work of art. The dif-
ference is that in community the rules require a mutual
respect whereas in art a single person, the artist, is in-
volved in establishing and maintaining the principle. It
is true that if the spectator is to understand the work as

art, he must understand the principle of order which the

artist has constituted in the work. However this has noth
ing to do with the creation of the work. It is a work of

art only when it is completed, at which time its principle
is, of course, already constituted. Whereas communication
and community lead to sharing an undertaking cooperatively
and to entering into mutuality, the creation of a work of

art is a lonely enterprise. "Yes, as an originator man is
solitary. He stands wholly without bounds in the echoing

hall of his deeds. Nor can it help him to leave his soli-
tariness that his achievement is received enthusiastically

by the many . . ."1

 

1Buber, op. cit., p. 87.

69

70

The being of the world as an object is conceived
within the individual, but not its being as a subject, the
relationship between persons. It is not the originative
instinct but the instinct for communication which teaches
the meaning of covenant, of community among equals.

The creation of a work of art is not, to use Buber's
phrase, an affair "between man and man," rather it is an
affair between man and reality.

"Here is an instinct which no mattetho

what power it is raised never becomes greed,

because it is not directed to having but only

to doing; which alone among the instincts can-

not lead its subject away to invade the realm

of other lives. Here is pure gesture which

does not snatch the world to itself, but ex-

presses itself to the world. 1

Art does not "invade the realm of other lives" but
merely stands in testimony to the life and individuality of
the artist. If a man would gain knowledge of art he must
extend himself; he must look for the principle which under-
lies its order, the principle which the artist has put there
and in which the work stands complete, its purpose achieved
and its reason for existence fulfilled. Its individuality,
like that of its creator is constituted in its being. How-
ever, like that of its creator, its value has another basis.
Its value, once it has been created, is a social phenomenon.
The timeliness of the artist's act is determined by histori-

cal conditions. If it answers to the demands of the histor-

ical situation, men will find in it a new dimension to human

 

1Ibid., p. 86.

 

71

experience; if it does not, it will be unnoticed and thus
valueless. The classical works of art which the Greeks and
Romans admired and found meaningful and valuable were left
to litter the Roman landscape for over a thousand years,

or they were heated in kilns to produce lime. This, of
course, did not affect their individuality or their incor-
poration of a formal order and unity as works of art. It
merely affected their value as works of art. In the Renais-
sance they were again valued and their meaning rediscovered,
and they are valued yet today. A work of art does not in-
clude the circumstance that it will be valued, or even that
it will be observed.

Man creates the possibilities of a community by
establishing covenants, rules of order, and by restraining
his actions to obey those rules. Communication is man's
orderly means of sharing and developing his understanding
of himself, of the world and of all reality. Art, too, is"
a method of understanding one's self and the world, but the
creation of a work of art, while it may facilitate the shar-
ing of one's personal response to reality, is, in itself, a
monologue, a communion rather than a communication.

Even when an artist exhibits his creation it may
be questioned whether he is doing more than the scientist
who may present a specimen for public view. A museum is
less a place of communication than a place of contemplation.
The completed work of art stands in relation to its public
as a revelation of the artist's mode of participation. A

sensitive public may gain an enriched concept of the world

72

by the contemplation of works of nature; it may gain an en-
riched concept of the role of man in the contemplation of
works of art. It would be a misuse of language to label
either case a matter of communication. When man creates a
work of art, his act is, as Buber says, "pure gesture,"
communion. How is it then that we as spectators may under-
stand and appreciate such a solitary act? In order to make
visible a mode of response to reality the artist thinks and
acts as a man, not only as a human animal, but as a man of
a specific cultural and historical situation.

While he is speaking to no person, he is speaking yet
in his native tongue, for he knows no other way of speech.
His thoughts and his manner of thought are circumscribed by
his culture even though he directs his thoughts toward Truth
alone. His gesture, his act must be principled or it will
not come into existance as a meaningful expression. It will
not make sense to him. He makes rules which will express,
in the material of his craft, his personal response to
reality, and he follows such rules for the sole purpose of
making the world meaningful to himself.

6 Art communicates because it represents an authentic
human response to reality, not because it has any didatic,
informative, or narrative purpose. It does not tell one
how he should respond, rather it indicates how one person
has authentically responded. Reality, experienced, is never
the equivalent of one's experiencing it, which implicates
the individual as well as reality, the encounter as well as

the reality encountered.

73

"Only art ever records this encounter,

the encounter of the person implicated, his

dumb feel of the push of things, of being in

the midst of things, of his oneness with

them and separateness from them, his last

inward solitary impassioned sense of his own

identity, accepting or rejecting, accepted

or rejected, before his world."

Thus the primary image in art is never its subject
matter, the representation of nature. The primary image is
the image of man's mode of encountering reality. The repre-
sentation of a subject matter, the resemblance to the ob-
ject in nature is, where it appears, the secondary image.
Such representation can never be the object of art but that
is not to say that it has no value in art. Representation
has a value in the exact measure that it affects the artist's
mode of encounter. "The artistic value of the secondary '
image is never in what it ip but in what it does."2

It is just where art differs from nature that the
human act can be seen. Art begins where nature is distorted
by man.3 This difference from nature, this distortion, can

6
make visible the part which the artist plays before nature,
in revealing himself. Art is man's image of himself. It is

a visible manifestation of a man's mode of encountering

reality. A perfect replica of nature could reveal only the

 

1John F. A. Taylor, Design and Expression in the
Visual Arts (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 96
2 0.

2Ibid., p. 222.

3Chapters VI and VII give more specific information
regarding the process of visual perception.

74

aspect of nature. What the artist, and not nature, insti-
tutes makes visible his presence in the face of nature. It
is uniquely art's province to provide an image of man's
participation in Reality.
"In institutions of law, of economy, of
science, of religion, a historian is able to
rediscover, out of the patterns requickened,
the very spirit of the dead. But in orders
of law and economy and science and religion
that spirit is never, as in architecture,
presented, seriously felt as living presences
are felt. That is art's creative novelty
and distinction. . . . For all the arts alike
. . . present this primary image in its sheer
imm diacy."1
If art is not communication, it is nonetheless ex-
pression; the expression of one's inclusive response to his
experience. Therefore we must now turn our attention to a
brief discussion of the fundamentai conditions of expres-
sion in art.2

The most sovereign principle of art has to do with
its unity of form, the complementary relationship of each
of its parts to the others in producing a visual whole. Art
means giving form. Let us re-examine the four basic princi-
ples discussed in Chapter II from the point of view of these

terms of design which are the fundamental conditions of ex-

pression in art. "The conditions under which sense is made

 

lTaylor, Design and Expression . . . , p. 221.

2While a detailed discussion of design or visual
perception is beyond the province of this dissertation, it
does seem important to touch on several principles relative
to the technical conditions which are requisite to the
creation of any work of art. More complete information on
this subject is found in Taylor's Design and Expression in
the Visual Arts and Arnheims' Art and Visual Perceptipp.

75

sharable are the one part of art, considered as an objective
phenomenon, which men can profess to master in terms of

principle."1
I. Art Means Giving Form

An artist cannot create something out of nothing; he
can only combine things already existing into a new unity.
His creative act is that of ordering materials which nature
provides. His problem is to create that combination of

shapes, lines, colors, etc., which will bring forth the image

of his participation in reality; which will give form to his.
sense of being. Just any combination will not give form to
his particular experience. Jaspers has pointed out that

man can never see the unity and completeness of an all in-
clusive Reality even though he believes in it. However, the

artist must so organize his product that it attains within
itself the unity which cannot be seen in the totality of the
world. To do this it is necessary for him to limit his
field of activity. In the pictorial field he thus isolates
a specific sector of reality in which he can achieve that
wholeness which is denied him in the face of the totality

of the real world. Within this space the artist has con-’
trol. He alone governs the form which it will have. "Then,
since at least within that field which he has isolated the
only changes to be observed are changes which he deliberately
makes, he may regard those changes as pure reflections of

himself acting."2

 

1Taylor, Design and Expression . . . , p. 5.

2Ibid., p. 9.

 

76

In order to understand the transformation of the
pictorial field which the artist accomplishes, it is neces-
sary to understand that the bare field is not devoid of pro-
perties. The very act of seeing a bare field, say a smooth
white rectangle like a sheet of paper or a canvas, includes
the presence of an induced structure which, although not
visible, is a force affecting the perception of every figure
or shape the artist introduces into that field. While there
are no visible lines at the central, vertical and horizontal
axes of the rectangle or along the diagonals, observation
will reveal that the balance and stability of any element
introduced by the artist into the field is influenced by

these axes as though they exerted some magnetic force upon

 

it.
Figure I
\ | [I
\\ T //
\ l /
\\ I //
l
._______\_I/1 ______
’1
/ T \
// 1 ‘x\
/ l
// | \\
/ ' \
/ I \

 

 

 

The center, where these four main structural lines cross,
exhibits the greatest force of attraction affecting the

shapes used by the artist.

77

Figure II-a Figure 11-b Figure II-ic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Figure II-a and Figure II-c we see that the disk
is off center. We do not need to measure its position to
see that. In addition we see a tendency for the disk to
want to move toward the right, or toward the upper right
hand corner respectively. Thus we see a tension, a force,
a kind of energy created by the relationship between the
disk and the invisible structural influence of the four
axes. The disk remains most stable in the central location,
Figure 7 where the four axes cross. These lines of force
constitute a kind of invisible structural chart, a frame of
reference, which helps to determine the balance value of
any pictorial element just as the musical scale helps to
determine the pitch value of each tone in a composition.
Every visual pattern is therefore a dynamic pattern created
by invisible forces or tensions. The value of any pictorial
element will vary according to the placement it is given
within the pictorial field. If its position in the pictor-
ial field is changed, the value of an element will change
though the element itself remains constant. That variation
in value is determined by the field and not by the pictorial
element. The forces affecting this value are, as we have

seen, induced by the visual perception of the spectator.

78

"Just as a living organism cannot be

described by its anatomy, so the essence of

a visual experience cannot be expressed by

inches of size and distance, degrees of

angle or wave lengths of hue. These static

measurements define only the stimulus, that

is, the message sent to the eye by the physi-

cal world. But the life of a percept -- its

expression and meaning -- derives entirely

from the activity of the kind of forces that

have been described. Any line drawn on a

sheet of paper, or the simplest form.modeled

from a piece of clay, is like a rock thrown

into a pond. It upsets repose; it mobilizes

space. Seeing is the perception of action."

Arnheim suggests that these forces are psychologi-
cal since they exist in our experience, and that they are
also physically present in the brain. According to Gestalt
psychologists, the cerebral area contains a field of elec-
trochemical forces where such activity takes place during
perception. Now it becomes more clear how one might think
of form as an active force, a notion suggested in Chapter 11.
Every work of art is an energy construct which is organized
to express the artist's mode of encounter with reality.
The form, the relationship of tensions which is required
will be determined by the content of the work, that is by
the encounter which is being expressed. The right organiza-
tion is that organization alone which will satisfy this
single requirement.

The form which an artist gives to his response to

reality consists thus in a balancing of the various forces

to achieve a kind of equilibrium or unity which express the

 

1Arnhein, op. cit., p. 6.

spe

duc

IT

(L

79

specific experience. Within a selected field the artist pro-
duces a visual order or balance in relation to the invisible

structural map.
II. Work For Clarity

An unbalanced work will seem accidental and transi-
tory. It is therefore invalid and incomprehensible as an
artistic statement. Its pattern is ambiguous and lacks
decision or clarity. We must emphasize again that the term
clarity as used here means clarity of form or organization.
In a balanced composition clarity will be apparent in the
fact that all such factors as shape, direction, location,’
etc. are mutually determined by each other in such a way
that the whole assumes the character of inevitableness. A7
change in any part would destroy the unity and consistency
of the whole. The tensions set up by the interplay of forms
within the pictorial field must be handled in such a waymas
to create a structure which represents exactly the vitality
of the reality being expressed as it is encountered by the
artist. Thus while balance or equilibrium is a necessary
aspect of all art, balance is not sufficient in itself for
the creation of a meaningful work of art. It is doubtful
if strictly a representational style (ordinarily called
"realistic," but usually an idealized illustration of ap-
pearance) can constitute a meaningful representation of the
new reality of twentieth century science and thought. The
possibilities of equilibrium within any pictorial field are
infinite. However, a work of art is never merely an image

of balance.

80

"If we define art . . . as the striving
for, and achievement of, balance, harmony,
order, unity, we arrive at the same pervert-
ing one-sidedness as the psychologists did
when they formulated the static conception of
human motivation. Just as the emphasis of
living is on directed activity and not on
empty repose, so the emphasis of the work of
art is not on balance, harmony, unity, but on
a pattern of forces that are being balanced,
ordered, and unified.

A work of art is a statement about the
nature of reality. . . . The work of art is
the necessary and final solution to the pro-
blem of how to organize a reality pattern of
given characteristics."

III. Be Intense (Care Enough)

A work of art is the expression of a man's response
to Reality. To body forth that response a specific equilé
ibrium is required. That equilibrium which is needed in'
order that the work of art should have its desired effect
is called, by Taylor, the normative eguilibrium. "A norma-
tive equilibrium is that which every artistic imagination
is committed to producing; that which, once produced, it
is committed to preserving; that which, being lost, it is
committed to restoring."2

It is a matter of how a man conceives his relation
to nature. If he sees himself as a minor part of nature and
responds with humility in the face of reality, he will be

able to see reality with reverence and directness and his

 

1lbid., p. 26.

2Taylor, Degign and Exppgssion . . . , p. 28.

81

structures of tension will be able to stand beside the'werlds
of nature as monumental expressions of reality.
"You can't reproduce nature. You can

only expose your nature, beside God, as

authentically as you know how. You listen

silently and that sacred power that is

within you dictates and you pbey, and that

is what is called creation."

If on the other hand, man egotistically sees himself
as greater than nature and exalts his soul, going beyond
nature in his willful "perfection" of nature, interposing
the individual ego between the self and nature than even
the most perfect balance will remain a mere arrangement of
artificial forms outside the man. The work will stand only

as a decorative thing unable to speak in the presence of

reality.
IV. Never Generalize

In a work of art, all the effort to balance the shapes,
lines, colors, etc., occurs solely for the purpose of con-
veying a specific response to reality. This may be called
the content of the work, even in abstract and non-represen-
tational art. It is only this content of a work of art that
can determine what is the normative equilibrium for that
work. The function of equilibrium, its norm or principle,
is understood only in relation to the meaning which it helps
make visible. The order in a work of art is expressive not
because the Pattern is balanced, but because the type of

balance it achieves is that particular balance which will

 

1Marc. Chagall, Atlantic. June, 1958.

82

express the artist's individual response. It is expressive
because it is principled, is created by the artist's initi-
ative and decision.

"The artist's field is not an imitation of nature;
it is a parcel of nature which he has caused to imitate
him."1

In thus creating an image of himself as he responds
to reality, the artist has no place for generalization. Only
one organization of forms out of the infinite possibilities
for organization will satisfy the demand of his personal
response to the reality of this particular encounter. It
is only when man's imagination calls forth from the infinite
number of views of reality multiple visual elements that he
is aware of the complex task of orghnizing visflon into mean-
ingful concepts. That particular organization which will
bring about clarity and meaning for him, as he asks what is
real, will be an organization which reflects a man's in;
dividuality. It is not necessary to seek individuality for,
like one's shadow, it moves with speed and dexterity exactly
equal to that of its possessor. What is required is a
reverent search for reality, a radical wrenching away from
idealized preconceived perfection or willful caprice. Man
must not interpose himself between what he is and reality.

He must stand beside nature and commune with what is real.

The artist's problem is to give the seriousness of himself

 

1Taylor, Design and Exppession . . . , p. 9.

83

as a participant in nature to his search for what is true.
This requires a kind of reverence which cannot countenance
any generalization or mere suggestion. The artist must

really mean what he says as a revelation of the real.

D
Q
I
S .

Ti

IE

ELOTJ

CHAPTER VI
TEACHING AND MOTIVATION

Dean Ernest Melby suggests that schools were not de-
signed to be true educational enterprises, but were estab-
lished to teach only a few knowledges and skills which child-
ren are unlikely to learn in the process of growing up. The
knowledge taught under such circumstances is reading, writing
and arithmetic. "It is the same for all children. All are
expected to begin learning to read at the same chronological
age, to progress at the same rate, to be together at 10 and
15."1 Melby blames the lack of true educational enterprise
on faulty emphasis in the school. " . . . The school thinks
first of what the child must learn and second of the child.
We do not measure what school subjects do to the child. we
measure what the child does to the subject."2

"In a formed age there is in truth no

autonomy of education, but only in an age

which is losing form. Only in it, in the

disintegration of traditional bonds, in the

spinning whirl of freedom, does personal

responsibility arise which in the end can

no longer lean with its burden of decision

on any church or culture, but is lonely in
the face of Present Being.

 

1Ernest o. Melby, "The Deprived Child. His Gift to
Education, " The Disadvantaged: Views and Opinions (East

 

Lansim : Mott Institute for C6mmunity Improvement College
of Educati n, Michigan State Univers ty Vol.1, 0. 4,
June,1mg n.p.

92Ibid.

84

85

In an age which is losing form the high-
ly-prized 'personalities', who know how to

serve its fictitious forms and in their name

to dominate the age, count in the truth of

what is happening no more than those who la-

ment the genuine forms of the past and are

diligent to restore them. The ones who count

are those persons who -- though they may be

of little renown -- respond to and are re-

sponsible for the continuation of the living

spirit, each in fhe active stillness of his

sphere of work."

True educational enterprises today are those which
work for "the continuation of the living spirit." In our
age we must be concerned with, "what the school subjects do
to the child." Education fails when it demands the same
knowledge and development from every individual. It fails
when it insists upon a standard subject matter and does not
encourage the living spirit; when it is not concerned with
the humanity of the child as well as his intellectual growth.
Dean Melby insists that, "It is our failure to respect the
child, to believe in him and to care for him that . . .
limits the growth of [even] average and above average child-
ren."2

The old approach to education may be the result of
two beliefs which no longer seem valid. Even in the face of
twentieth century psychology and philosophy, the idea that
learning is an exclusively rational process persists. People

still consider "telling" to be the major activity of teach-

ing, and if it doesn't work the first time, teachers tell

 

1Buber, op. cit., p. 102.

2Melby, op. cit., n.p.

 

86

again and again: drill the information into the child. It
has not been understood that it is not the words the teacher
utters, but, as Taylor says, the words he impregnates that
can teach.1 Education must deal differently with informaa
tion. Teachers must be less the mediums of the transference
of information (which can be secured through other means)
and more the means for reflection, maturing, counseling and
for learning how to use knowledge. This role the teacher
must accept even though it takes a great deal of imagination
and it shakes the comfortable traditional stability of what
is now being done in teaching. Gardner Murphy points out
that the nurture of rationality may lie in some other effort
than the sheer encouragement of rational thought; indeed,
that, "the rational may best continue to grow in the instruc-
tive soil in which it was engendered, and that too clear and
sterile a surgical separation of thought from its ances-
teral and parental roots in love and impulse may threaten
its validity."2
Finally, school is considered to be a preparation
for life rather than part of real life. School and learning
have been looked upon as a journey to some wonderful future
which, whether the child realizes it or not, is well worth
the pains of the trip. Is it any wonder that school and
whatever learning is done there often seems unreal and mean-

ingless? By the time the child has completed twelve years

 

1Taylor, The Masks . . . , p. 235.

2Murphy, op. cit., p. 22.

87

of schooling, the habit of preparing for life and the idea
that living must be pushed aside for such preparation are so
strong that he has learned only to prepare for life, not to
live it. One might almost wake up one morning dead, without
ever having really lived.

Teaching should be a dialogue between the child and
an adult. School should be not telling about life so much
as sharing life. Life begins at least five or six years be-
for school starts. It cannot be postponed or shunted to one
side. School should be an experiencing of life, an example
of good authentic living, a way of waking up to the very
living one is now doing.

". . . the danger has arisen that the new
phenomenon, the will to educate, may degen-
erate into arbitrariness, and that the edu-
cator may carry out his selection and his
influence from himself and his idea of the
pupil, not from the pupil's own reality . .

. . This is almost always due to an interrup-
tion or a temporary flagging of the act of
inclusion, which is not merely regulative for
the realm of education, as for other realms,
but is actually constitutive; so that the
realm of education acquires its true and pre-
‘per force from the constant return of this act
and the constantly renewed connection with
it. The man whose calling it is to influ-
ence the being of persons that can be deter-
mined, must experience this action of his
(however much it may have assumed the form

of nonaction) ever anew from the other side.
Without the action of his spirit being in any
way weakened, he must at the same time be
over there, on the surface of that other spirit
which is being acted upon -- and not of some
conceptional, contrived spirit, but all the
time the wholely concrete spirit of this in-
dividual and unique being, who is living and
confronting him, and who stands with him in
the common situation of educating and being
educated (which is indeed one situation, only
the other is at the other end of it). It is
not enough for him to imagine the child's indi-
viduality, nor to experience him directly as

88

a spiritual person and then to acknowledge'
(him. Only when he catches himself from
over there, and feels how it affects one,
how it affects this other human being, does
he recognize the real limit, baptize his
self-will in Reality and make it true will,
and renew his paradoxical legitimacy."

When one tries to manipulate the child's learning,
it is necessary to shut off many paths, to block numerous
opportunities in order to control the direction of learning.
To achieve a direct route to that learning which it has been
decided the child should attain, it is necessary to block
much more which the child finds meaningful to life than the
teacher is able to offer as preparation for life. By the
time the child has finished school he has spent so much time
doing what someone else wants him to do, "learning" what
someone else tells him he should learn, and stifling his own
inclinations and curiosity, that he is no longer capable of
thinking for himself. Such an approach creates a breed of
acquiescent followers who feel that they must please adults,
and at all costs, avoid trouble, embarrassment, punishment
and disapproval: who seeking answers to someone else's pro-
blems, are too busy being right to think for themselves.

"To a very great degree, school is a

place where children learn to be stupid. A

dismal thought, but hard to escape. Infants

are not stupid. Children of one, two, or

even three throw the whole of themselves into

everything they do. They embrace life and

devour it; it is why they learn so fast, and

are such good company. Listlessness, boredom,

apathy -- these come later. Children come to

school curious; within a few years most of

that curiosity is dead, or at least silent.

Open a first or third grader to questions and
you will be deluged; fifth graders say nothing.

 

1Buber, op. cit., p. 100.

89

They either have no questions or won't ask
them. They think, 'What's the catch?' Last
year, thinking that self-consciousness and
embarrassment might be silencing the child-
ren, I put a question box in the classroom,
and said that I would answer any questions
they put into it. In four months I got one
question -- 'How long does a bear live?'
While I was talking about the life span of
bears and other creatures, one child said
impatiently, 'Come on, get to the point.‘

The expressions on the children's faces seemed
to say, 'You've got us here in school, now
make us do whatever it is that you want us to
do.‘ Curiosity, questions, specu ation --
these are for outside of school."

Not only children and young people, but even teachers
training in service tend to be more concerned with acceptable
answers. They would even give an answer they know to be
wrong,if they were sure the professor would give them a
higher grade. Too often the student's concern is with what
someone else expects rather than what is meaningful to him.
The primary goal is a good grade. Students are afraid of
getting poor marks. Holt indicates that children's strate-
gies are aimed not at learning so much as they are aimed at
avoiding embarrassment, disapproval and the loss of status.
"These self-limiting strategies are dictated above all
else by fear."2 Are children being condemned to that miser-
able fate of the wretched souls who lived, according to Dante,

,"Without or praise or blame with that ill band

of angels mix'd, who nor rebellious proved,

Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves

Were only. From his bounds Heaven drove them forth
Not to impair his Lustre; not the depth

of Hell receives them, lest the accursed tribe
Should glory thence with exultation vain.

1John Holt Ho Children Fail (New York: Pitman
Publishing Corp. , 19W
2

 

Ibid., p. 49.

90

. . . these of death
No hope may entertain: and their blind life
So meanly passes that all other lots
They envy. Fame of them the world hath none,
Nor suffers; Mercy and Justice scorn them both.
. . . I saw
And knew the shade of him, who to base fear
Yielding, abjured his high estate. Fbrthwith
I understand, for certain, this the tribe
Of those ill spirits both to God displeasing

and tolhis foes. The wretches who ne're lived,
I!

How can one know on any day what particular bit of
knowledge or understanding is most needed by a child in
order to clarify his personal concept of reality? The child
alone can know this, and though he may not do it very well,
he can make the choice much better than anyone else can.

Nor can the child be expected to be committed to
purposes assigned to him. One is committed, if committed
at all, to one's personal interests and devices. In school,
by assigning concerns to the child, teachers develop slow
minds which are never brought to the place of urgency through
self-initiated interest.

Authentic education is related to a juristic phil-
osophy. It is based on perceptual field theories of learn-
ing and presents a more realistic picture of growth and be-
havior. The perceptual theory is that behavior is not a
question of the outside stimuli or forces to which one is
exposed, but rather, it is a product of the perceptions of
the individual; not what happens, but how it is perceived

by the individual. This theory puts emphasis upon the

1Alighieri Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry

. Cory The Harvard Classics (New Yerk: P. F. Collier &
Son, 1 09)), p. .

91

individual's unique feelings and insights and indicates in
addition that the ultimate contrdl and direction of behavior
lies always within the personality of the individual rather
than in the external forces exerted upon him.

Perception cannot be changed directly, it can only
be facilitated. Problems of teaching must be looked at in
terms of their meaning to the student, not in relation to
their meaning to the teacher, or in relation to the curri-
culum, no matter how well organized, how logically sequen-
tial, or how "necessary" the outlined material. Learning
is a problem of a total personality, of the student's per-
sonal discovery of meaning. Stated in a slightly more dra-
matic way this means ". . . that anything that can be taught
to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or
no significant influence on behavior."1

Since all of reality cannot be encompassed in a
finite condition, what is really real (objects, persons,
ideas and all interrelationships taken together) is beyond
the province of reason. Finite reason cannot know the in-
finite Reality. The only possible resolution is that reason
must be kept open and free for an encounter, at the very
limits of reason, with that which may be alien to reason.
The truth which may arise through Transcendence is not ex-
pressible in theory or in any teachable doctrine. Heidegger

pointed out that the rational is not a just judge of the

 

1Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 276.

92

strictness of thinking. "It unscrupulously pushes everything
not in conformity with ip into the presumable swamp of the
irrational, which it itself has staked out. Reason and its
conceptions are only ppp kind of thinking and are by no means
determined by themselves, but by that which has been called
thinking, to think in the manner of ratio."1

The point being made here is that subject matter
pursued for itself is meaningless, and that teaching subject
matter in arbitrary isolated doses, not related to the
authentic being of the student, does not build the student's
authenticity or help him to become more integrated and alive.
Rather, arbitrary and isolated subject matter teaching has
a perverse effect upon the becoming of the student. Only
that influence which promotes genuine becoming is consequen-
tial. Only that influence which facilitates the coming into
being of an authentic self can significantly influence be-
havior.

It should be evident that the only learning which is
significant will be self-discovered self-appropriated learn-
ing. "Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been
personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot

be communicated to another. As soon as an individual tries

to communicate such experience directly,‘1 . . it becomes

2

teaching, and its results are inconsequential." Teaching,

 

1Martin,Heidegger, The Question of Beipg, trans.

William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (NEW Haven, Conn.: College
and University Press, 1958), p. 39.

2Rogers, op. cit., p. 276.

93

as the term is used here might also be called "propaganda"
or what Buber has called, "the will to educate." It is an
arbitrary curriculum selected as the result of the educa-
tor's idea of the student rather than from the student's
individual reality. Buber's solution, like Rogers' is

based upon the reality of the single individual. Buber uses

the term "inclusion," Umfassung, or "envelopment" as it also

 

has been translated. This is similar to what Rogers calls,
"an unconditional positive regard" for the other person.

It should be emphasized that what these men are concerned
with is something more than empathy. Empathy means to trans-
pose oneself over there to the other and feel things as the
other feels them. Thus it means the exclusion of one's own
concreteness. What is meant here is an extension of the A
self. It means experiencing the situation at one and the
some time from one's own and from the other's point of view,
the fulfillment of the complete presence of the total re-T
ality in which one participates.

Motivation for real learning is an inherent part of
man's nature. "Motivation," in the sense it has been known
in education is necessary only if the teacher is trying to
manipulate the child and to control his learning. What is
needed is that teachers permit the child to be in contact
with problems that are relevant to his existence and to his
personal concept of reality so that he perceives problems
and issues which he wants to resolve. Rogers suggests three

requirements demanded of the teacher who would permit the

child to learn what is meaningful to him. First, the

94

teacher's real-ness. Rogers calls this "congruence" and
describes it as,
". . . the teacher's being the person that
he is, and being openly aware of the atti-
tudes he holds. It means that he feels ac-
ceptant toward his own real feelings . . . .
Because he accepts his feelings as hip
feelings, he has no need to impose them on
his students, or to insist that they feel the
same way. He is a person, not the faceless
embodiment of a curricular requirement, or

a sterile pipe through which knowledge is
passed from one generation to the next."1

This is what is called authenticity. Its lack is
perhaps one of the greatest and most prevelant barriers to
better education. Most teachers, products of the schools
in which they teach, have learned to prepare for some dis—
tant reality, to do what they are told to do and to learn
what someone tells them they should learn. Teachers have
not learned to face the objective reality of the immediate
present except through some authority or standard such as
the textbook,,the principal or what was learned in teacher's
college. It is extremely difficult to Learn to be authentic
and to face reality on spontaneous and objective terms rather
than through some standard rules or descriptions. Yet this
is a prime requirement of learning, of creativity, and of
teaching.

Roger's second point, acceptance and understanding
seem at first glance to be familiar ideas nearly always
practiced. Most teachers claim to accept all of their stu-

dents and to understand them. Nearly all take courses in

 

1Ibid.,.p. 287.

95

psychology and in child growth and development! Yet what is
required is something more than an intellectual understand-
ing. It is sometimes called empathy. But, it is more than
that. The teacher must accept the child hp hp ip, and must
understand the child's feelings. He must sense the child's
private world as if it were his own, but without, as Rogers
says, losing the "as if" quality. This is what Buber calls
inclusion or envelopment. Rogers indicates ". . . the
teacher who can warmly accept, who can provide an uncondi-
tional positive regard, and who can empathize with the feel-
ings of fear, anticipation, and discouragement which are in-
volved in meeting new material, will have done a great deal
toward setting the conditions for learning."1
The third requirement for creating a facilitating
classroom climate in which significant learning can take
place concerns the provision of resources. Rogers empha-
sizes that resource materials, including lectures and tech-
niques should be made available to the students, hpp forced
ppph phpp, He suggests that the teacher would want his re-
lationship to the group to be such that his feelings could
be freely available to them, yet not be imposed on them or
become a restrictive influence on them. Schools and teachers
do a reasonably good job of providing resources, but they
have not learned how to offer these resources. Resources
are imposed. It is assumed that the teacher knows much bet-

ter than the child what is best for him. What one thinks

 

1Ibid., pp. 287-288.

96

he knows is best for the child to learn is not what he does
learn when it is imposed upon him. The child's only signifi-
cant learning will result from his concern with a problem
that seems relevant to him.

Teachers must stop thinking of the way children
should solve a problem, or the best way to do it. The Child's
own way ip the best way. It is the only way. (It hardly
seems necessary to insist at this point that what is meant
here is the genuine way of the authentic individual, not any
superficial reaction of the child, a simple reflex or mere
childish impulse.

"we must recognize that children who are

dealing with a problem on a very primitive,

experimental, and inefficient level are mak-

ing discoveries that are just as good, just

as exciting, just as worthy of interest and

encouragement, as the more sophisticated dis-

coveries made by more advanced students.

In other words, the invention of the
wheel was as big a step forward as the inven-

tion of the airplane -- bigger in fact. We
teachers will have to learn to recognize when
our students are . . . inventing wheels and

when they are inventing airplanes, and we will

have to learn to avoid the difficult temptation

’ of shdwihg slow students the wheel so that they

my more quickly get to work on the airplanes.

. . . knowledge which— is not genuinely dis-

covered by children will very likely prove use-

less and will be soon forgotten."

The task of the teacher is to help the child discover
and develop for himself a reality which is meaningful to him
in his own experience. The teacher does not have to devise
artificial modes of motivation. The motivation for learning
and growth springs from life's tendency for self-actualiza-

tion. The human organism tends to seek all the differentiated

 

1Holt, op. cit., p. 125. (Italics placed by the
present writer for emphasisJ

97

channels of potential development which seem enhancing to

the self. It is not necessary for the teacher to supply

the energy that is required for growth to take place. This
energy is generated by the child's contact with reality.

But it is contact with reality only as the child experiences
it, not as the teacher thinks it should be logically arranged,
that is capable of generating the energy for genuine growth.

Teaching is not a technique of child management.

It has nothing to do with manipulating and controlling child-
ren. Yet this is what has been done in schools for a long
time.

"The 'old' educator, insofar as he was

an educator, was not 'the man with a will to

power,‘ but he was the bearer of assured

values which were strong in tradition. . . .

the 'old' educator represented particularly

the historical world, the past . . . he in-

stilled values. . . . the formed world; the

world of history faces a particular generation,

which is the world of nature renewed again and

again, always without history."

The modern educator, Buber indicates, "takes on him,
self the tragedy of the person and offers an unblemished
daily sacrafice, or the fire enters his work and consumes
it." For him, "The life and particular being of all his
pupils is the decisive factor . . . For in the manifold
variety of the children the variety of creation is placed

2

before him." The old approach is based partly on the ad-

herence to the teaching of the behavioral sciences which

 

1Buber, op. cit., p. 93.

21bid., p. 95.

98

held that the way a person behaves is a result of the out-
side forces exerted upon him. Combs suggests an interesting
analogy.
"Such a conception of the nature of human
behavior leads to a method of dealing with

human problems based upon fencing people in.

It is a method familiar to any person who has

lived on a farm or has ever driven the cows

home from pasture. One goes down the lane

from the barn to the pasture, carefully clos-

ing the gates where he does not want the

cattle to go and opening those where he wants

them to go, until he reaches the pasture. In

the pasture, he irritates the herd in such

fashion that they move forward and because

the route has been carefully prepared in

advance, move up the lane to the barn."

In the artifical atmosphere of directed activities
the child comes to mistrust reality as he experiences it and
to depend upon the formulas he has been taught. Therefore,
it is the teacher's task to help the child to believe in his
own individuality, his unique vision, and in his capacity
to manage his experience.

In the visual arts language by which the child ex-
presses his ideas visually and artistically is a language of
form. While artistic form is usually recognized only in
highly evolved professional works of art, children's work,
when not distorted by external methods of teaching or by

imitation of nature, does possess a definite structural order.2

 

1Arthur W. Combs, "Personality Theory and Its Implica-
tions for Curriculum Development," Learnin ore About Learn-
in : Pa ers and Reports from the Third KSCE Research Institute,
edfged By Klexandergfirazier (thhington, 5.5.: K§C5, 1959), v
p. 0

2Henry Schaefer-Simmern, The Unfolding of Artistip
Activity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950.

99

Motivation in art which would help the child to give
form.to his own individual vision would be motivation away
from.cliche or formula and away from the imitation of nature.
Art cannot be taught by means of science.

"However, the fallacy is widely diffused
that by means of science . . . man may hope
to become capable of possessing the world men-
tally as it actually is . . . even should
science grasp the entire essence of the world
scientifically, we still would have riddles to
face the very existance of which would be hid-
den from science."1

The artist submits the world to an absolutely dif-
ferent process of mental appropriation.

". . . Perception is something of inde-
pendent importance apart from all abstraction
and . . . the capacity for concrete perceiv-
ing has as strong a claim to be developed by
regular and conscious use as the capacity for
abstract thinking has. It should be under-
stood that man can attain the mental mastery
of the world not only by the creation of con-

cepts but also by the creation of visual con-
ceptions."

Motivation in art must help the child to trust his
personal vision. It will necessarily be non-directive re-
garding supposed ways that objects should be represented
and that pictures should be composed. The teaching of rules
of perspective, principles of design, proportion, etc. causes
a student to replace his visual conceptions with rational
ideas, and thus turn from expression to mere illustration

or decoration. Henry Schaefer-Simmern used non-directive

 

1Conrad Fiedler, On Judging,Works of Visual Art,
trans. Henry Schaefer-Simmern and Fulmer Mood (Berkeiey:
University of California Press, 1949).

21bid., p. 40.

100

methods when he asked his students, "to work as slowly as
possible; after completing the drawing, to observe it at
length; if the outline was not clear enough, to fill it in
with black ink to make a silhouette; and whenever a change
seemed necessary, to start a new drawing."1 Schaefer-
Simmern worded his instructions in such a way as to demand
constant clarity of perceptual experience while avoiding
behavioral prescription. The way doesn't exist before it
is taken. It is created as it is achieved--in both science
and art. There is no chart which contains either the route
to the goal or a diagram of the goal itself. It is gener-
ally understood that creative work in science, while it is
an investigation is also a formulation based upon what is
learned step by step in the process of investigation. Such
investigation has a single purpose--to bring the world into
a comprehensible and comprehended existence. However, it is
less well accepted that creativity in art as well as in
science begins only at that moment when a person is forced
to create the world for himself by his discovering conscious-
ness. In art the child learns what is true by formulating
visual conceptions of the world. He doesn't first understand
the world and then illustrate this discovery. One must learn
by going where to go. This is an awesome truth.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

 

1Schaefer-Simmern, op. cit., p. 73.

 

101

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do.

To you and me; so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.1

It is difficult for teachers to remember that what
is desired is that the student produce something which at-
tains existence by that very production, not something which
exists before the act of creation and can therefore be de-
scribed and "taught." It is for this reason that the teacher
must turn to the child for his subject matter. The child
must develop a visual conception from his world of experience
not necessarily from what adults see objectively as the
world of reality. Art creates the form for something which
does not yet in any way exist in the child's mind, but
which this forming process clarifies and brings into being in
his consciousness.

The teacher does not, of course, ask the child to

draw whatever he wishes and then abandon him. How can he

expect to know what in the child's experience is meaningful

 

1Theodore Roethke, "The Waking," from Words Eor The
Wind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961 , p. 1 4.

102

to him? He could hardly expect the same experience to have
identical meaning for himself and the child. Therefore,

the teacher must ask the student to choose his own subject
and recognize the student's responsibility for the finished
work, expecting him to examine it critically. The teacher
would not critize the work except that if the child indicates
dissatisfaction he might be asked if he could do a better
job. Such a term leaves the child uninfluenced by external
academic ideas and free to consult his own perceptual experi-
ences for enlightenment.

Assignments should be of such a nature as to encour-
age the development of sensitivity toward reality. For ex-
ample, the teacher might ask, "How many different shapes of
leaves can you find?" The assignment to collect many items
each a different variety of a single color, or to collect one
hundred of anything would stimulate interaction with reality.
The student should decide what to do with what he has col-
Lected.

Another way to help the child to understand that per-
sonal responsibility for his expression is both expected and
respected would be to show him, at appropriate times, all
his previous works in the sequence of their production. This
emphasizes for the student his progressive mastery of expres-
sion and offers assurance that his uniqueness and growth
potential are valued. The child's progress may also be
stimulated by showing hinlworks of others--folk art, primi-
tive art and other art which is appropriate to the child's

own stage of perceptual development. It should be emphasized,

103

as Schaefer-Simmern insists, that only works appropriate to
the child's own stage of development should be used for moti-
vation.

Advice that the student work out each picture as
clearly as possible is also "open" motivation, motivation
which leaves to its producer the responsibility for the form
of the final expression.

Murphy tells us that, "the great task of education
is to evoke an understanding love, to fan its flame, to make
creative love broader and deeper, reaching for all that
exists."1 He points out that the child makes abstractions
on the basis of his own direct and often unique experience.
The teacher must help him to become aware of the abstract
principles of expression only as he discovers them himself,
through his own experiences. The child develops personal
conceptions only through direct encounter with reality.

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,
_ And that object became part of him for the day or a certain
part of the day
Or for many years on stretching cycles of years.2

The non-directive or open approach recognizes the
importance of experience as the basis of all personal growth
and realizes that the control of learning is, therefore,

essentially the responsibility of the student. Rather than

limiting the possibilities for growth to a single ideal

 

1Murphy, op. cit., pp. 23-24.

2Walt Whitman, "There Was A Child went Forth," from
Leaves of Gr ss with an introduction by Gray Wilson Allen
(New York: The New American Library of World Literature,
Inc., 1960).

104

direction assumed to be the right one, such an approach
leaves the end of education open to the infinite number of
possibilities which personal experience may discover.

"The question which is always being brought
forward -- 'To where, to what, must we edu-
cate?‘ -- misunderstands the situation.
Only times which know a figure of general
validity -- the Christian, the gentleman,
the citizen -- know an answer to that ques-
tion, not necessarily in words, but by point-
ing with the finger to the figure which rises
clear in the air, out-topping all . . . .
But when all figures are shattered, when no
figure is able anymore to dominate and shape
the present human material, What is there
left to form? ,

Nothing but the image of God.

That is the indefinable, only factual,

direction of the responsible modern educator."1

 

1Buber, op. cit., p. 102.

CHAPTER VII
EVALUATION IN ART EDUCATION

The difficulty that inevitably teachers must face
in acquiring an understanding of art springs from the fact
that the power of visual conception is alien to what they
have come to expect in judgment. If he would understand art,
one must descend from the height of his rational intellect-
ual consciousness, the culmination of his life's work and
the proud achievement of his profession. He must shift his
whole approach to knowing and being in order to contemplate
the world as a visual phenomenon rather than as an object
for rational comprehension. All of our education, supported
by our cultural mores, has been directed toward the achieve-
ment of a rational comprehension of reality. Art is alien
to this approach. The teacher who would learn to understand
and evaluate the art work of his students must learn to ap-
prehend the world in a different way. He must place him-
self in a new relation to the world. He must realize that
man can apprehend the world in a sense which is altogether
different from the rational way which he has come to believe
is the only way of apprehending it.

"Artistic activity begins when man finds
himself face to face with the visible world

as something immensely enigmatical, when,
driven by an inner necessity and applying the

105

106

powers of his mind, he grapples with the

twisted mass of the visible which presses

in upon him and gives it creative form."

We are accustomed to facing the visible world not as
something "immensely enigmatical" but as something to be
understood by rational thought. It happens, however, that
our exclusive dependence upon abstract thought makes the
understanding of our visual perception more difficult. It
has been said that if it were possible to teach geography to
the carrier pigeon, the poor bird would loose his intuitive
sense of orientation. Just so with man; we have lost our
ability to see the world and to obtain meaning from our
visual perception. We must realize with Jaspers that reason
has its limits and that reason must be kept open and free
for any encounter--even with what may be most alien to reason.
The perfect rational appropriation of the world,if such were
possible, would leave much of reality untouched (including
art) and worse, this perfect scientific knowledge would hide‘
frontmen the fact that gaps existed in his comprehension of
reality. Olson suggests that a certain objectivity which
he calls "objectism" is a requirement for the poet or artist.

"Objectism is the getting rid of the

lyrical interference of the individual as

ego, of the 'subject' and his soul, that

peculiar presumption by which Western man

has interposed himself between what he is

as a creature of nature (with certain in-

structions to carry out) and those other

creations of nature which we may, with no

derogation, call objects. For man, himself,
is an object . . ."

 

1Fiedler, op. cit., p. 48.

2Olson, op. cit.

107

In the evaluation of art this objectivity means that
the grasping of visual qualities and the relationships be-
tween visual shapes is the only criterion. A painting is a
painting. Interest in art begins only at that point where
interest in literary content vanishes. That content of a
work which can be conceptually understood and which can be
expressed in verbal terms is not the artistic content of the
work. Such content existed before it was incorporated in
the work of art. The artist did not invent it, he merely
used it. The same literary content is available to all
artists alike and it, in itself, is neither increased when
used by a great artist nor diminished when used by a mere
dabbler. It is not the literary content but the artistic
content, the visual quality, which is great in the one in-
stance and lacking in the other.

Since it is our first impulse to judge a work of art
by its literary content, we must constantly be on the alert
to avoid this fallacy. The artistic content of a work of
art has nothing to do with forms created by nature prior to
the activity of art and independently of it. "At the last
the deformation is all that counts, for it alone can de-
clare visibly the part which man has played before nature
in relating himself to it."1 Artistic activity therefore
resides in the creation of forms which only by that act of
creation attain existence. What art creates is not an echo

of the real world which has its existence without art.

 

1Taylor, Design and Expression . . . , p. 224.

108

"What art creates is the world, made by and for the artistic
consciousness."1

Rather than to imitate nature, the artist's purpose
is to develop his perceptual experiences into a visual con-
ception--to create the form of something which does not yet
exist; to obtain this visual conception which only by the
creation of the work of art attains existence. The work
should therefore be judged upon its success in achieving the
form, which makes manifest this conception. This we have
called, along with Taylor, the normative equilibrium.

"It is what actually all men mean by the
artistic vision, by that vision of rightness

which presides prescriptively over the acts

of persons who in any way participate in art.

Out of respect for it, solely out of respect

for it, are the activities of the artist and

critic ever commonly obliged, or their ima-

ginations joined in a communion of sympathy."

We have already formulated four "basic principles"
for art. It is clear that the first principle, Art Means
Giving Form, is a requirement for normative equilibrium and
that the three others are suggestions for the student who
would achieve such form. By form we mean a configuration
which displays a unity and integration which seems inevit-
able and definitive for this particular work of art. A
work of art has achieved such form when it cannot be broken
into parts which would have completeness or autonomous exis-

tence by themselves. All parts are mutually determined by

each other so that the whole assumes the character of

 

1Fiedler, op. cit., p. 48.
2Taylor, The Masks . . . , p. 175.

109

necessity in all its parts. Any part would appear to be an
incomplete fragment while together they constitute a unity
and completeness which isolates itself as an autonomous ex-
pression. As Taylor suggests it is only out of respect for
form--normative equilibrium--that the critic and artist have
a common obligation. One judges a work of art not on the
basis that it has certain forms, but on the basis that the
forms it has are seen to be precisely those forms which are
required to achieve the expression which they do more or
less completely embody.

While it is impossible to formulate a rule for all
art, each work of art incorporates its own rule of order
inherently within itself. The forms employed impose a com-
mitment in relation to the final structural pattern. Im-
mediately as any form is introduced into the pictorial field
all the other forms must relate to it and to the eventual
form of the whole with perfect consistancy. The formal
structure of works of visual art made by children and primi-
tive peoples seems to be related directly to the natural
development of human perception and visual conception. We
learn from.Arnheim and Schaefer-Simmern that the pictorial
forms children produce grow organically according to definite
rules of development, from the simplest to increasingly com-
plex patterns in a process of gradual differentiation.
Children at the different stages of perceptual development
use a consistent structural order to create an indissoluble
relationship of forms which can be seen to be obligatory.

Their work can be seen to have a normative equilibrium.

110

Four stages of development may be briefly described here.
Arnheim enunciates the law of differentiation. "According
to this law, a perceptual feature will be rendered in the
simplest possible way as long as it is not yet differentiated.
The circle is the simplest possible shape available in the
pictorial medium. Until shape becomes differentiated, the
circle does not stand for foundness, but for any shape at
all and none in particular."1 For the sake of simplicity
the four stages indicated by Schaefer-Simmern will be de-
scribed. The reader is urged to read both accounts however.
The intentional figure which has the shape of a circle is
called the first stage of artistic configuration. Having
no extension in direction, the circle is undifferentiated.
It stands for anything, merely for "thingness" in the un-
differentiated concept of the child. (Figure III) In stage
two the circle becomes extended either vertically or hori-
zontally, or simultaneously in both directions. The first
differentiation of direction is that of the greatest contrast
in which any difference is shown with the greatest possible
differentiation. Any direction which is not vertical is
seen as horizontal.
"In this way the figure obtains an order-

ly structure based on the greatest contrast of

direction. All parts are related to one

another by the horizontal - vertical order.

Not one line can be changed without disturbing

the structural order of form . . . . Only in

their relation to the whole do the parts obtain
structural meaning. Furthermore each single

 

1Arnheim, op. cit., p. 172.

111

part is clearly discriminated from every
other part. The relationship of the greatest
contrast of direction of lines and the re-
lationship of figure and ground constitute,
together, an inseparable totality of form."

(See Figure IV)

Here we have a well-defined normative equilibrium
even though the level of visual conception is not complicated.
In the third stage of visual conception finer differentiations
of direction can be made. While stage two used only right
angles forming the greatest possible differentiation of
direction, stage three employs acute and obtuse angles form-
ing a greater variability of direction. "Now it becomes pos-
sible to distinguish between movements and stationary atti-
tudes, a fact which proves that expression is a result of a
definite stage of visual conceiving; that is, it is a pro-
duct of visual cognition."2 The vitality obtained by the
increasing differentiation within this stage cannot be
achieved by the imitation of nature. Artistic vitality and
growth must result from the development of perceptual abil-
ity and the growth not of intellectual concepts but of
visual concepts. (Figure V) The first three stages of
visual conception have incorporated all the possibilities
of differentiation within a single plane. Spatial depth is
determined and defined by a structural organization in one'
plane. Figures in the distance are shown higher in the pic-

ture plane and smaller in size. (Figure VI) Stage three,

 

1Schaefer-Simmern, op. cit., pp.11,-12.

21bid., p. 14.

112

  

J}

Figure III: In this picture copied from a young child's

  

drawing the circular forms have already been given a per-
pendicular-horizontal orientation. The human form (with
one eye) has two legs drawn at right angles from the body.

Nonetheless the primal circle remains prominent.

W ’ ”3

Figure IV: Here we have the same subject as in Figure 111,

 

 

 

 

 

 

a boy running after his father's truck. However, the con-
sistent use of a vertical-horizontal structure illustrates

clearly this stage of visual development.

 

113

 

 

\1 j: ::

Figure V: These three figures copied from drawings done by
first grade children indicate the greater vitality obtained
with visual development from the stage of right angular con-
ception to the greater differentiation of acute and obtuse

angles. Just as in Figures III and IV, these drawings each

represent a boy running.

.mocmuwac oumoaocw cu onam waammmuooc one mocaaomoo owns» mo own one HH> oudwam

 

 

 

\_§

114

 

 

 

 

 

115

however, permits the development of a more advanced repre-
sentation of depth by a kind of frontal isometric perspec-
tive made possible by the oblique angle of this stage. we
speak of "a kind" of frontal isometric perspective in order
to indicate that what we are discussing is not a mathematical
or geometric form resulting from the rules of perspective by
mere imitation or by rational calculation of any sort.

Rather it is the result of the pictorial realization of
visual conceiving, a complicated application of oblique lines
related to a frontal cube and related to each other by the
relation of parallelism. (Figure VII) Stage four is also
concerned with depth in space. Here the appearance of space
is achieved by overlapping. It is at this stage of visual
conception that shading and light become functionally valid.
Earlier they would be unnecessary, confusing and arbitrary.
That is to say they would be non-artistic. They are not a
part of man's natural visual development before stage four

is reached and are not used by children in the earliest stages
of development unless their use has been prematurely and
intellectually acquired, in which case it would, of course,
be a flaw rather than an asset to the work of art. (Figure
VIII)

While these four stages of differentiation in visual
conception indicate the development attained by the natural
unfolding of the normal person's visual powers, it must be
emphasized that many of us in our contemporary culture do
not allow our visual powers to develop normally. We permit

the development of abstract rational concepts to smother our

116

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I I

 

   
 

  
 

6
I111

Mmgnfi
_\ /

Figure VII: Houses copied from drawings made by children

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

illustrate the use of isometric perspective with the de-
velopment of the use of acute angles.

117

Figure VIII-a: This horse,
copied from the drawing of a
sixth grade child shows con-
sistancy and clarity in a
rather complicated use of
overlapping, especially in

the drawing of the legs.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure VIII-b: This sixth
grade drawing of a boy run-
ning is a clear and well-

defined example of overlap-

ping.

118

visual apprehension of reality. Artists will, of course,
reach still more highly differentiated stages of visual
comprehension. Nonetheless, a thorough understanding of the
growth of visual perception through increasing differentia-
tion as described by Arnheim and Schaefer-Simmern will
greatly assist the teacher to think in terms of form rather
than in terms of the imitation of nature in his evaluation
of the art work of his students.
"From the preceding statements the con-

clusion must be drawn that in judging works

of art one must strictly refrain from forming

a fixed code of laws to which one can submit

artistic phenomena from the beginning on.

Always, understanding can follow achievements

of the artist; it can never precede them.

. . . Every acquired insight becomes an ob-

stacle to further understanding as soon as

it assumes the character of finality and is
hardened in some rule or regulation."1

The purpose of this chapter is to promote the crea-
tive teaching and the creative evaluation of child art, and
to help teachers evaluate in such a way as to encourage the
development by their students of a creative response to
reality. Meaningful evaluation of works of art is possible
only if one realizes that art is a valid response to reality
but one quite alien to the scientific response to reality.
The art work of the student should be approached with a
willingness to accept the unexpected or unique rather than

with any preconceived standard of excellence.

 

1Fiedler, op. cit., p. 73.

119

If we examine the four basic principles previously
enumerated in their relation to evaluation, we may be able

to indicate a practical approach for teachers.
I. Art Means Giving Form

The above discussion on the progressive differentia-
tion through four states of visual conceiving is pertinent
to the evaluation of form in the child's work. It might be
worth mentioning again that form, in itself is of no value.
When we spoke of equilibrium we insisted on the necessity
of a normative equilibrium and we were careful to tie the

norm to expression.
II. Work For Clarity

It has already been pointed out that clarity is to
be understood as clarity of form because the form determines
the expression. Expression has its origin in a perceived
pattern, a configuration of forces or tensions. In the
first three stages of visual conception clarity is main-
tained by maintaining a consistent principle of organization
and by employing only a primary figure-ground relationship.
Where overlapping occurs in stage four we find also the
development of light and shading to clarify the relation in

space of the overlapping parts.
III. Be Intense (Care Enough)

An authentic personal or individual expression is
an indication of real concern. This means an expression

which avoids employing formulas for proportion, harmony,

120

perspective, etc. and which seeks to imitate neither nature
nor a predetermined style of art. The execution of a work
which is an authentic expression will indicate control and
understanding of the tools and materials used which is com-

mensurate with the expression.
IV. Never Generalize

"The perceptual pattern of a work of art is neither

arbitrary nor a purely formal play of shapes and colors.

It is indispensable as a precise interpreter of the idea

the work is meant to express."1 If the work indicates an
openness to visual reality, an "objectism" as opposed to
stereotype or rational abstract conception, if it achieves

a specific expression, if it elicits a meaningful communica-
tion with the reality it projects, it can be said to have
avoided generalization. Every element in such a work is
indispensable for the one purpose of indicating the theme
which embodies the nature of existence for the artist.

We must conclude that art is not communication. It
is not a universal language but a unique, a singular language.
Each work requires interpreting. However each work contains
in itself, in the commitment of its forms, the key to its
language. If it is not communication, art does, nonetheless
present the possibility of communication. The creation of

a work is a monologue, the authentic encounter of an indi-

vidual with reality. Rather than communication, art is a

 

1Arnheim, op. cit., p. 438.

121

communion with reality. But a sensitive observer may see
in the work of art the authentic encounter which it repre-
sents. In this manner it may help not only the artist, but
other men to understand the world and themselves as authen-
tic individuals. The work of art enlarges the range of
human alternatives. It may add a new dimension to the

experience men are capable of.

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Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting, New
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Roethke, Theodore. Words for the Wind. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1961.

Rogers, Carl. Client Centered Therapyziits Current Practice,
Implications and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1951.

. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of
Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961.

 

Schaefer-Simmern, Henry. The Unfolding of Artistic Activity.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950.

Shahn, Ben. The Shape of Content. New York: Vintage Books,
Inc., 1957.

125

Smith, Huston. Condemned to Meaning. New York: Harper &
Rowe Publishers, 1965.

 

Snygg, Donald and Combs, Arthur W. Individual Behavior: A
New Frame of Reference for Psychology. New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1949.

Stein, Gertrude. What Are Masterpieces? Los Angeles: The
Conference Press, 1940.

 

Picasso. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1938.

 

. Portraits and Prayers. New York: Random
House, 1934.

 

Sutherland, Donald. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her
Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.

Sypher, Wylie. Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature.
New York: Random House, 1960.

Taylor, John F. A. The Masks of Society. New York: Apple-
ton-Century-Crofts, 1966.

 

. Design and Expression in the Visual Arts.
New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1964.

 

Thelen, Herbert. Education and the Human Quest. New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1960.

Thorpe, Louis P. and Schmuller, Allen M. Contemporary
Theories of Learning. New York: The Ronald Press,
Co., 1954.

Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art and Essays on Art. trans. Aylmer
Maude. London: Oxford University Press, 1930.

Tussman, Joseph. Obligations and the Body Politic. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1916.

Venturi, Leonelle. Four Steps Toward Modern Art. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1956.

Wheels, Allen. The Quest for Identity. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., Inc., 1958.

Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education. New York:

The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.,
1949.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. with an introduction by
Gray Wilson Allen. New York: The New American Library
of World Literature, Inc., 1960.

Willinski, R.H. Modern French Painters. New York: Reynal
and Hitchcock, n.d.

126

Wolflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History. trans. M.D.
Hottinger. New York: Dover, n.d.

Worringer, Wilhelm. Form in Gothic. trans. Herbert Read.
London: Alec Tiranti, 1957.

 

. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution
to the Psychology of Style. trans. Michael Bullock.
New York: International Universities Press, 1953.

 

Articles

Ciardi, John. "The Form is the Experience," Art Education,
Vol. XIV, No. 7, October, 1961, pp. 16-22.

Combs, Arthur W. "Personality Theory and Its Implications
for Curriculum Development," Learning More About Learn-
ing: Papers and Reports from the Third A.S.C.D. Research
Institute. Edited by Alexander Frazier. Washington,
D.C.: A.S.C.D., 1959, pp. 5-20.

 

Melby, Ernest O. "The Deprived Child: His Gift to Education,"
The Disadvantaged: Views and Opinions, Vol. 1, No. 4,
June, 1966. East Lansing, Michigan, Mott Institute for
Community Improvement. College of Education, Michigan
State University.

Mooney, Ross. Perception and Creation. Columbus: Bureau of
Education Research. The Ohio State University Press,
1956. (mimeographed)

 

Unpublished Material

Green, Thomas. "Actions and Society: A Study in the Foun-
dations of Education." unpublished manuscript.

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