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Personal Qualities and the Intentional Fallacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Colin Lyas
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Extract

In their article ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Beardsley and Wimsatt raised problems about the legitimacy of certain critical practices. These problems, raised again in later writings and intensively discussed in recent years, remain unsettled and this lecture is intended to throw light upon them.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 6: Philosophy and The Arts , March 1972 , pp. 194 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1972

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References

page 194 note 1 Reprinted in Wimsatt, W. K., The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday, 1966).Google Scholar Page references are to this volume.

page 194 note 2 Notably in Beardsley, M. C., Aesthetics (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1959)Google Scholar chs. I and x; Wimsatt, W. K. ‘Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited’ in Demetz, and others (eds.), The Disciplines of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar and Beardsley, M. C., The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne, 1971).Google Scholar

page 194 note 3 Quite what is being distinguished here is not clear. I shall show however that no radical separation of personal and poetic studies can be maintained.

page 195 note 1 But see Wimsatt's later article in Demetz, , p. 222.Google Scholar

page 196 note 1 For more on the debate over this matter see the papers collected in my Philosophy and Linguistics (London: Macmillan, 1971).Google Scholar

page 196 note 2 Which is not to say that in practice (as opposed to in principle) we need dispense with such references. See Wimsatt, in Demetz, , op. cit., p. 211 § 4 (b).Google Scholar

page 197 note 1 See §§ 5 and 10 below.

page 200 note 1 Although possibly a mistaken one. See on this Walton, K., ‘Categories of Art’, Philosophical Review, 1971.Google Scholar

page 200 note 2 Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) p. 17.Google Scholar

page 201 note 1 The question ‘Response to what?’ raises, of course, profound issues in the philosophy of art.

page 202 note 1 ‘Aesthetic and Personal Qualities’, PAS 1971–1972.Google Scholar

page 202 note 2 This is surely not what was, even in effect, said in the earlier paper, or less controversy would have been provoked by it. Note too that Beardsley still seems to maintain that speaker-in-the-work and the author should be kept distinct. See The Possibility of Criticism, p. 59.Google Scholar

page 203 note 1 I have argued this in the paper referred to above.

page 204 note 1 Lewis, C. S. and Tillyard, E. M. W., The Personal Heresy (Oxford: Oxford paperbacks, 1965) p. 33.Google Scholar

page 204 note 2 It will be clear how closely this is related to the ‘operationalism’ allowed by Wimsatt in a passage quoted above, this in spite of the fact that Tillyard appears to be under attack on p. 10 of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’.

page 206 note 1 See Wimsatt, in Demetz, , p. 210Google Scholar, and Kemp, John, ‘The Work of Art and the Artist's Intentions’, British Journal of Aesthetics (1964).Google Scholar

page 207 note 1 As a case in point here, note the terms used as examples in the argument on p. 20 of Beardsley's Aesthetics.

page 208 note 1 Beardsley says very little about what I have called ‘personal qualities’. Where he does touch on them the discussion is not happy, as in the following example: ‘Many of the regional qualities we find in art are most aptly, but of course metaphorically, named by qualities taken over from the moral aspects of human nature: they are “disciplined”, “decisive”, “decorous”, “calm”, “controlled”, “sound”, “strong”, “bold”, “healthy”, to cite only positive terms. But an analogy is not a causal connection. To prove that decorous music makes us behave decorously, it is not enough to point out the similarity between the music and the hoped for behaviour.’ (Aesthetics, pp. 565–6.)Google Scholar

page 208 note 2 ‘The artist's intention is a series of psychological states or events in his mind’ (Aesthetics, p. 17).Google Scholar See, though, Wimsatt, in Demetz, , p. 220.Google Scholar

page 208 note 3 Wimsatt, in Demetz, , p. 194.Google Scholar

page 208 note 4 Ibid.

page 208 note 5 ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, p. 5.Google Scholar

page 208 note 6 Aesthetics, p. 20.Google Scholar

page 208 note 7 Note here the whole of Wimsatt's first section in Demetz, , pp. 193–7.Google Scholar

page 209 note 1 ‘A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem … come out of a head, not out of a hat.’ ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, p. 4.Google Scholar

page 209 note 2 Nor do they say much that is positive about such knowledge. See, e.g., Wimsatt, in Demetz, , p. 210.Google Scholar