Frances to Michael and others... 1. There are admittedly a lot of terms here that may not strictly meet with full agreement as to their common meaning or to the common notion they should call to mind, such as representation and abstraction and simulation and others, but that is another thread. 2. The speculative theory of empathy and even distance posited by europrussian precisionists seems for me to be a psychical fantasy somewhat that harks back to the imaginative "notion" of suppressed mentality and hidden subjectivism. Using art to seek relief from tension may be useful therapy, but hardly truthful theory. At its broadest the theory seems to be an attempt at eventually classifying art according to its ability to mainly evoke a strong feeling of psychical connectivity in the percipient with what their mind may be suppressing or inhibiting, such as a person maintaining the correct mental distance and depth and interest from an artwork in order for the experience to be aesthetically and artistically successful. To posit this attempt as a general or universal theory of all art globally seems to be without much validity at the present, given the current state of knowledge about such stuff. Their suggested theory of formal abstraction and even of personal style as a controller of conformity to representation however may be quite useful, at least as a special approach to these issues, if not as a global approach to them. Their speculative theory of empathy and apathy as the root origin and core cause or key source of abstraction and style should therefore be approached with skeptical doubt. 3. The idea of identification and simulation and imitation in nature and in mind is reflective of the pragmatist stance turning on iconicity. The process of abstraction as pragmatism holds it is realized by signers via those objects that are mainly iconic signs of formal similarity, where abstraction is found to be a representational matter of kind and degree. To abstractly cull a represented property from a referred object is to extract some of that property. The issue is how far iconicity can be stretched at the micro level or at the macro level before any or all familiar identical similarity with an object is lost. There is furthermore a warranted difference to be justly noted between the familiarity and similarity and identity of an object that acts as a sign of another object, which difference pragmatism attempts to adequately address. 4. To say that "art moralizes nature and nature demoralizes art" is to also say that "culture moralizes nature and nature demoralizes culture" both of which imply that the making of a nation takes the natural tendency for humans to group together into an unnatural immoral extreme. In other words, anything based on nationalism and patriotism and tribalism is naturally wrong and bad and even evil.
Michael wrote... William Conger wrote: "What is the critical question here? I find all the excerpts quite plausible." Right now, I just posted them as a starting point to discuss his essay. As I mentioned in a previous post, I may have unconsciously incorporated his ideas about the tendency to abstraction into my formulation that "art moralizes nature and nature demoralizes art." I had mainly forgotten his discussion of empathy, especially the remark that "esthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment" (p. 367) and also his claim that the "instinct of imitation" is an elementary need and "stands outside of esthetics," which he qualifies in the next sentence by saying the instinct of imitation is not identical to naturalism in art. (363)
