CLEMENT GREENBERG
"A Draft of Chapter One"
from
Homemade Esthetics
Art
can be neither defined nor described satisfactorily. We can recognize it,
point to it, but we can't get hold of it with words or concepts. In order to
do that, we would have to be able to observe much more than we've been
able to of what goes on inside us when we experience or make art. But
nei ther introspection nor experimental psychology has gotten close
enough to the mental or psychic processes involved in the experiencing or
making of art.
This imperviousness to words and concepts-to discourse-isn't par–
ticular to art; it belongs to all intuitive activity.
Art,
esthetic experience,
makes itself evident solely as a matter of intuition, of direct, unmediated
insight. So does ordinary sense perception, so does introspection. We can't
reason or infer our way of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, or
sensing differences of temperature. Nor can we reason or infer our way of
knowledge of what goes on inside our consciousness. In short, we haven't
been able to get close enough to intuition by means other than itself to
substitute anything else for it. We know intuition only through intuition
itself. Which means that if you can't exercise intuition spontaneously
nobody can teach or show you how to. It's up to you alone to see, hear,
touch, smell, taste. Similarly, it's up to you alone to get art
as
art, esthetic
experience
as
esthetic experience. That is the way it is with intuitive activ–
ity: the
how
of it can't be communicated, transmitted or taught; and because
the how, the means, of it can't be communicated or taught, neither can the
what,
the results, of it be.
There does happen, however, to be effective agreement about the
results of sensory intuition and, to a certain useful extent, about those of
introspective intuition too. All passably sane and physically intact people
Editor's note:
"A Draft of Chapter One" was to have been the opening of a book on esthet–
ics; Greenberg had been refining his views on the subject since giving a series of seminars
at Bennington College in 1971, but never completed the projected book.
Homemade
Esthetics,
edited by Janice Van Horne Greenberg, includes this piece along with the seminars
and related essays. It will be published by Oxford University Press in May.
