Dictionary of the History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas |
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![]() | III. | AMBIGUITY ASAESTHETIC PRINCIPLE |
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![]() | Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ![]() |
AMBIGUITY AS
AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE
In Western cultural history ambiguity has been a
pejorative term until the twentieth century.
This bias
against the presence of two or more meanings in any
statement reflects the general bias of the civilization
which traditionally
from Classical Greek times has
placed its faith in reason and an orderly
universe—a
civilization which, by extension, has operated on a
tacit
belief in the reliability of the reasoning process and
its
correspondence with external reality. Consequently
men for centuries did
not question the relationship
between words and things, and were able to
assume
that no responsible statement could contradict any
speaking, clarity and coherence, hence truth, could be
achieved by amplification. Thus the Greek word for
universe (κόσμος) carried both a scientific and an aes-
thetic meaning. Ambiguity in this cultural context
represented therefore a failure at truth, a failure in
communication attributable either to excessive brevity,
deliberate obscurity of phrasing, or to ineptitude.
Nevertheless, in spite of this general prejudice
against confusing or
misleading statements, certain
kinds of ambiguous utterances were
acceptable to the
ancient Greeks. The earliest examples of these ambig-
uities are sub-literary and are cast in
forms that still
reflect the primitive faith in a world that contains
precise answers to all questions. Oracular utterances
emanating from holy
places presupposed the accuracy
of the priestess's veiled message, since it
was the voice
of God that spoke through her. Because the passive
role
of medium did not include comprehension, eluci-
dation for the priestess as well as the petitioner came
with the
passage of time. With arcane formulae and
recipes the speaker assumed an
active role—curses,
spells, charms, and ritual signs and dances
being early
examples of human attempts to control external events
through empirical means. The body of knowledge
behind these practical
skills was invariably recorded
in symbolic language, but the obscurity of
this form
of technical jargon could have been ambiguous only
to the
non-initiates of occult fraternities.
Closer to art in our sense of the word are riddles
which are
self-annihilating word games, a form of
social entertainment that also
presupposes the existence
of precise answers to questions, but which
require the
agency of interlocutor and respondee to complete the
process: riddles cease to exist when the meaning is
discovered. The
contrivance of an endpoint of only one
possible answer or meaning
differentiates riddles from
enigmas, myths, and genuine works of art for
which
there are no determinable endpoints of contemplation.
Ambiguity
as an aesthetic principle emerged therefore
when artists deliberately
contrived complex structures
that generated a plurality of meanings.
In Greek literature it was the mantic Pindar who
modified the oracular
tradition for artistic purposes.
In the Hymn to Zeus
(only fragments of which have
survived) God announces that no beauty is
complete
without praise. By inference, therefore, the poet's sta-
tus was holy and his function was to
celebrate. But
what Pindar was celebrating in his hymns of victory
for
athletes, and why the odes are apparently lacking
in unity constitute an
enigma. While there is no mys-
tery as to to
whom the
ἐπινίκια
were addressed, there
is ambiguity as to the true subject of the poems.
More-
over the praises characteristically
open brilliantly, as
all readers have remarked, but trail off and merely stop,
a
criticism that may not be relevant to works meant
to be orchestrated and
choreographed. Nevertheless
the structural peculiarities may point to
another level
of meaning if the poems are accepted as Pindar's
records
of theophanies that occurred at religious
games, an institution that was
more ancient than
Homer and the Trojan War. Traditionally, the arena
in which the contest took place was sacred ground,
the athletic event an
agon, and the victory a kairos
that transformed the contestant into a hero, a term
originally applied only to the dead, but progressively
applied to the
living.
This cultural change created a third, ambiguous
middle zone between the
natural and supernatural
worlds, in metaphysical terms a new ontological
cate-
gory to which the living aspired.
Through excellence
which led to transcendence, the presence of the
gods
could be summoned to this juncture between two
worlds. Victory
conferred therefore a multivalent status
upon the hero, the attainment of a
more complete state
of being poised between time and eternity. But the
duration of this achievement was also ambiguous, since
on the level of
actuality the victory won by the indi-
vidual
could be lost at the next festival. It is likely,
therefore, that the
poet's solution to this cultural para-
dox was
the juxtaposition of his favorite images in the
context of an amorphous
structure: gold representing
the permanence of the state of pure being;
light repre-
senting the incandescent
moment of victory when the
hero became a presence, its occurrence a
metaphor
for the process of heroization, and its visible behavior
mysterious and of short duration. The waning structure
of the Pindarics may
allude therefore to metaphysical
problems that had no solutions, problems
that in a
prelogical age could be expressed only in mythopoeic
terms.
The traditional practice of classifying according to
the place of the
festival might have been consonant
with Pindar's intention, for if the
poems were records
of theophanies, where they occurred was more impor-
tant than other considerations. The Olympia I, in
Richmond Lattimore's translation, begins:
by night, outshines all pride of wealth beside.
But, my heart, would you chant the glory of games,
look never beyond the sun
by day for any star shining brighter through the deserted air,
nor any contest than Olympia greater to sing.
It is thence that the song winds strands
in the hearts of the skilled to celebrate
the son of Kronos. They come their ways
to the magnificent board of Hieron....
might be as follows:
Water is the best of all things if usefulness is the criterion,
but it
is too humble and ordinary to attract attention. Gold,
on the other
hand, not only has the appearance of excellence
but is in fact more
valuable than other metals. But better
than either of these is my ode
composed at Olympia, sacred
to Zeus, and occasioned by the victory of
Syracusan
Hieron....
That this univocal lucidity was achieved by limiting
meanings either by
amplification or its opposites, com-
pression or suppression, reveals something of the aims
and
techniques of Pindar. A multivalenced reading
might superimpose upon the
prose version the follow-
ing:
Water is the best of all things because it supports life which
is the
best of all things. But what is best in the world of
nature is not best
in the metaphysical realm, since the gold
of pure being outshines the
earthly fame that adheres to
the possessors of great wealth. But I am a
poet, and poetry
is of this world. Therefore in the search for subjects
I look
no further than the visible world, but choose excellence.
The sun has no rivals for brilliance by day, Olympia—sacred
to the son of Kronos—none for antiquity and dignity....
Pindar has contrived different levels of reality with
different criteria of
excellence through the use of
gnomic opening, riddle, paradox, symbol,
myth, and
a multiplicity of meanings through overlapping cate-
gories. Moreover, suppressed information
that must be
inferred is not only technique but meaning in poems
that
both celebrate and are theophanies. Olympia is
compared to the sun that
makes invisible lesser stars.
That Pythia, Isthmia, and Nemea are not
mentioned
may be more than tact. Also, the term “Son of
Kronos”
is not only traditional formula, but a way of
evoking
both gods for the purpose of opposing Time with
Permanence if
the self-manifestation of Zeus is the true
subject of the poem. Standing,
as it were, historically
between Mycenae and Athens, and artistically
between
temple and hippodrome, the Theban Pindar in life was
awarded
the right to an equal share of first-fruit offer-
ings by the Pythian priestess of Delphi, and after death,
heroization, his ghost being invited annually to dine
with Apollo (Gilbert
Norwood, Pindar [1945]). But
religious games,
Thebes, and Pindar were all anachro-
nisms
in the light of world history, for the political
reality of the expansion
of the Persian Empire and the
need for a Greek response gave the leadership
of that
civilization to Athens.
The rapidity of change that accounts for the ultimate
displacement of the
arts in Athens also explains the
ascendance of drama over lyric in the
early stages of
this process. For, according to John H. Finley, Jr.,
Aeschylus was “the inventor of the idea of meaningful
time” (Pindar and Aeschylus
[1955]). But the optimistic
view of history presented in Aeschylus' Oresteia gave
way to the inconclusive debate in
Sophocles' Antigone,
and to the doubts raised as to
the ambiguous benefits
of language in Euripides' Hippolytus, for the cultural
relativity introduced by the
Sophists had challenged
not only the traditional content of the arts, but
the
connection between words and things, as well. Thus
on the one hand
Aristophanes complained that “They
have dethroned Zeus, and
Vortex is King” (Georgio di
Santillana, The
Origins of Scientific Thought [1961]).
On the other hand, the new
status of language as
reasoning instrument made words the domain of crea-
tors of systems: the scientists,
philosophers, and histo-
rians in whom the
tacit faith of the dramatists was
continued. Their assertion of the
inevitability of conse-
quences from acts
knowingly or unwittingly committed
was abstracted as the uniformity of
nature's laws which
could be discovered by following the laws of logic.
For
the rationalists, therefore, ambiguity was neither thing
nor
principle, but a phase in the reasoning process
between perception and
knowledge. But the history
of this movement was also one of degeneration,
since
“Men seemed to be capable of sacrificing the Law of
Contradiction for the sake of comfort” (George Boas,
Rationalism in Greek Philosophy [1961]).
The history of rationalism parallels the story of
introspection and the
discovery of the self. The reduc-
tion of the
wealth of Homeric terms for what subse-
quently were the simplified categories of “body”
and
“soul” reveals the metamorphosis of the
conception
of man from aggregate to unit, a change confirmed
in art by
the abandonment of the geometric style of
the late archaic period (Bruno
Snell, The Discovery of
the Mind: The Greek Origins of
European Thought
[1953]). This unification through simplification
pro-
duced at the same time a common
denominator that
could be projected either as causal nexus or as focus
of interest for artistic purposes. The failure of Greek
politics thus gave
a new direction to the arts in the
Greco-Roman period (Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Cul-
ture: Fusion
and Diffusion [1959]). The emergence of
the spiritual landscape of
the pastoral lyric asserted
the validity of the private and subjective
world; the
improbable world of the romances proclaimed at the
same
time the unpredictability of Fortune and a faith
in an incomprehensible but
benign Providence; and the
composition of spiritual biographies called
aretologies
that transformed moral teachers into cult
figures—all
point to the kind of consolation men sought.
Nevertheless, after Aristotle, literary works ad-
dressed to the reason as well as to the sentiments were
subject
to more stringent standards of consistency,
hence the criticism of Vergil's
Aeneid that persists to
this day. Apparently in
the cultural climate of his time,
prevent the poet from longing for the other world, and
this moral ambivalence produced an artistic duplicity
in an epic that attempted to satisfy by simple juxta-
position the rival claims of both worlds. The two halves
of the epic are thus disjunctive, the first modeled upon
the horizontal plan of the Odyssey, the second upon
the vertical transcendence of the Iliad, with no attempt
to relate them. At mid-point between the two halves
Vergil placed the gates from the underworld (VI,
888-98; Loeb Library, I, 571):
And when Anchises had led his son over every scene, and
fired his soul
with love of fame that was to be, he tells
him then of the wars he must
thereafter wage, and instructs
him of the Laurentine peoples and the
city of Latinus and
how he is to flee or face each toil.
Two gates of Sleep there are, whereof the one is said
to be of horn, and
thereby an easy outlet is given to true
shades; the other gleaming with
the sheen of polished ivory,
but false are the dreams sent by the
spirits to the world
above. There then with these words Anchises
attends both
his son and the Sibyl, and dismisses them by the ivory
gate.
Because this episode is pivotal, its interpretation will
determine the
meaning of the whole work. The easiest
solution is to conjecture a mistake
on the part of the
author. The principle of durior
lectio, on the other
hand, requires a reading of the text as
it stands. Clearly
Aeneas and the Sibyl have made their exit from the
wrong gate if the world of political Rome is not to
be dismissed as a vain
dream; alternatively if the reality
of Rome is asserted, Aeneas himself is
a false dream.
Thus the Law of Contradiction is evoked, and as the
two
halves of the epic seem mutually exclusive, cen-
turies of readers have in effect discarded the last six
books.
It is likely, however, that the poet was in fact
asserting both worlds but
could find no satisfactory
solution to his problem. The characterization of
his
eponymous hero as “pious” was Vergil's way of
making
him both historical founder and presiding genius of city
and
empire. Whereas the fusion of two roles in one
character succeeded, the
work as a whole did not, and
the poet's instruction in his will that the
epic be de-
stroyed may be interpreted as the
recognition of his
failure to reconcile the ideas of history and
eternity,
a conjecture made more probable by the fact that
Vergil died
in Greece while revising the Aeneid. The
precise
destination of Vergil's cultural pilgrimage is
unknown, but it was at
Alexandria, through Philo's
multileveled but unified interpretation of
sacred his-
tory, that a solution was found.
Philo's elaborate rami-
fications of the
allegorical method are, therefore, the
first critical treatises on one,
perhaps the most rational,
type of ambiguity.
Among the backgrounds to the solution of this two-
fold problem was typology, a chronological projection
of allegory that was one of the several innovations of
the Old
Testament Prophets. Responding to the imme-
diate political needs of a threatened Judea, their messi-
anic message fused policy with prophecy by
historical
analogy. The recurrent cycle of slavery and deliverance
encouraged faith in a redeemer; therefore some of these
leaders saw their
lives as both fact and symbol: they
were “types” of
Moses and Messiah, intermediary fig-
ures that
recapitulated past events while prophetically
living the future. And by
generalizing and extending
in both directions it was possible to join
together the
end of history with its beginning, erasing the
distinction
between prophecy and apocalypse; thus for Isaiah, the
Messiah that he prophesied was to be another Adam
in another Paradise:
And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of
Jesse.... And
righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins,
and faithfulness
the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall
dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with
the kid.... And the lion shall
eat straw like the ox
(Isaiah
11:1, 5-7).
Isaiah's inclusion of a genealogy was an expression
of faith in the
continuity of history, even as his projec-
tion of a Messiah documented the need for a cult figure
(as
alternative to relapse into idolatry) to focus the
aspirations of a people
in troubled times. Centuries
later the selection of Jesus as the announced
Second
Adam gave to his followers a fixed point for their
interpretation of history, and Moses was then reduced
to a
“type” who prefigured the Christ in whom the
Law and
the Prophetic promises were fulfilled. Alle-
gory became therefore an indispensable tool for this
new religion
with evangelical and universalist aims.
The Prophetic interpretation of political events
constituted in effect the
invention of world history. And
because history was the revealed will of
God, approved
records of the past were subsequently organized into
a
canon and elevated to the status of Scripture. The
transcendence implied by
this new category of writing
produced therefore works in Greco-Roman times
that
took on the character of vulgate romances with apocry-
phal additions. The linear projection of history
was
now abandoned in favor of a single character who
anachronistically
embodied the past and future experi-
ence of
the people. But world history could also be
projected in this fashion, as
in the case of the gigantic
statue of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, the different
mate-
rials of which the figure was made
representing the
chronology of kingdoms, the last or fifth monarchy
being the millenium. The author of the Book of Daniel
(a figure unrecorded
elsewhere before the second cen-
tury) retold
therefore the history of the Jews, compos-
ing
a “myth” of the Old Testament as nucleus to a
story
intended to encourage the people persecuted
though he set his story in Babylonia and Persia, in the
stratified characterization of Daniel the reader recog-
nizes Joseph and Solomon, and in the apocryphal addi-
tions the ritualistic bias of the Haggidic tradition. In
short, the character of Daniel is an “historical ex-
emplum,” and the technique of deliberate anachronism
allowed the author to shift from Hebrew to late
Aramaic in mid-sentence, a fact that could not be
passed unobserved by his first readers. Seen in this light,
the Book of Daniel served the same aretalogical pur-
pose as the Gospels, the author's open-ended scheme
consistent with a religion historically predicated on the
metaphysical principle of becoming. But unlike the
Gospels, Daniel records the Jewish retreat from uni-
versalism, a fact that also explains their rejection of
Philo as biblical exegete. Contrary to his intentions,
therefore, Philo became the ancestor to the medieval
Christian philosophers (Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo,
2 vols. [1962]).
The allegorization that unified the Old and New
Testaments for the
Christians also transformed their
Bible into a universal history; therefore
the word alle-
gory acquired a new meaning. For
the Greek ration-
alists, allegory referred
merely to a figurative use
of language—in short, a fiction. But
for the Christians
symbols were nothing less than visible signs of the
Truth they were instructed to propagate universally.
In the resulting
conflicts the production of apologies
in response to attacks progressively
clarified doctrine
and assumptions (Claude Tresmontant, La Métaphy-
sique du
christianisme et la naissance de la philosophie
chrétienne [1961]) that later received systematic treat-
ment (Étienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age
[1952]).
But it was on the level of sentiment that the appeal
of Christianity lay,
since the pessimism inherent in the
Greek cyclical notion of history, and
its counterpart
for the individual, endless reincarnation in an un-
changing world governed by eternal
laws—could not
compete against a religion that recognized the
individ-
ual soul and offered a personal
redeemer, a compas-
sionate God, and a
progressive, meaningful world his-
tory. The
conversion of Constantine that automatically
made Christianity the official
religion of the empire,
and the expansion of the Church's boundaries as
other
forms of rule failed marked the extent and degree of
this
cultural revolution. According to Erwin Panofsky,
(Gothic
Architecture and Scholasticism [1951], pp. 3, 4):
To the Carolingian revival of the arts there corresponds,
in philosophy,
the phenomenon of John the Scot, equally
magnificent, equally
unexpected.... About a hundred
years of fermentation in both fields
were followed, in art,
by a variety and contrariety of Romanesque... and, in
theology and philosophy, by a similar multiplicity of diver-
gent currents, from uncompromising fideism and
ruthless
rationalism to the proto-humanism of... the school of
Chartres.
The allegory, analogy, and symbolism that charac-
terized medieval thought was the very foundation of
the Gothic
church, beginning with the cruciform
groundplan and the general orientation
of the struc-
ture. The common supposition
that everything visible
was a symbol led William Durandus, the thirteenth-
century Bishop of Mende, to
compile and invent in
his Rationale divinorum
officiorum layer upon layer
of meaning to every detail of
church, ornaments, rites,
and ceremonies. Thus the foundation of the
church
represented Faith; the roof Charity, because it covered
a
multitude of sins; the door, Obedience—“If thou wilt
enter into life, keep the Commandments” (Matthew
19:17).
Moreover, the sacristy symbolized the womb
of the Virgin Mary where Christ
put on his humanity,
since that was where the priests, his
representatives
on earth, put on their robes.
Because the main entrance to the church, the west
door, faced the material
world from which the laity
came to worship, church facades became visual
syn-
opses of theology, and in some
instances the anonymous
artists found ways to represent doctrinal
ambiguities.
Among the statues and the high relief carvings that
make
up the facade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame
in Paris is a standing niche
figure of the Virgin Mary,
heavy with Child. What distinguishes this work
from
others that serve a similar architectural function (Adolf
Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres
Cathedral: Christ-Mary-Ecclesia [1959]) is the series of
choices
the artist made. Like his contemporaries, in
his wish to recall an event in
Time and to evoke its
Eternal meaning he engaged in deliberate
anachronism,
for his Virgin is not yet the Mother of Jesus; never-
theless she is already crowned the
Queen of Heaven.
But beyond these conventional details is the more
significant combination of the Virgin's enigmatic smile
and the gesture of
her hands, arrested in mid-motion.
The viewer is uncertain whether she
(Figlia del tuo
Figlio) is blessing the
Fruit of her Womb or whether
she is praying to the Eternal God. The
ambiguity in
the intent of her gesture reflected that of her status,
for on the one hand the doctrine of Christ's humanity
allowed one to
believe that a dutiful Son would be
obedient to the wishes of his Mother.
On the other,
it was also held that the Incarnation was the greatest
indignity suffered by God—in which case the status
of the Virgin
was merely that of the Chosen Vessel
which gave her a place of honor but
not necessarily
any authority in heaven. Consequently both rank and
titles for which no authority existed, were doubtful.
On the practical level the wish of the Church on
Earth to be in accord with
the one in Heaven raised
questions touching upon the validity of
unauthorized
modes of worship. It is probable that the influence of
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the Marian Doctor, en-
couraged the church's toleration of this form of idolatry
as
counter-measure against the growing popularity of
the secular cult of the
Lady, no longer obscurely deified
in trobar
clus, but openly in the vernacular romances
(Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love [1958]). The
ambiguities that
surround the statue in question stem
from the authoritative statement of
doctrine, the
Creed, which remains officially a Mystery even today.
The implications of a triune God, his dual nature, and
the manner of his
birth challenged the artist to present
a mind in tacit play with
unanswerable questions of
faith inherent in the figures, both depicted and
con-
cealed.
The economic recovery of Europe that permitted
the building of cathedrals
also formalized education
institutionally (Charles Homer Haskins, The Renais-
sance of the
12th Century [1927]) a fact that may
explain the shift from
positive to systematic theology.
But the pedagogue's shift of focus from a
theory of
knowledge to a theory of learning led not only to a
reclassification of things according to theoretical,
practical, mechanical,
and logical categories, but to
empiricism, as well. Consequently in their
theolog-
ical-aesthetic
didascalica they were natural theologians
who
believed that the Creator could best be understood
by his Creation, and
thereby gave an impetus to the
study of the world of things.
They were also mystical theologians who thought
in terms of a sequence of
experience out of which
knowledge was to be derived for the unification
of
man's mind with that of God. Hence the structural
metaphor of the
voyage for Saint Bonaventure's Itiner-
arium, the nuptial metaphor in Hugh of Saint Victor's
De arraha animae, and the figure of Jacob in the
Benjamin Minor of the later Victorine, Richard. For
Richard, man's ascent from earth to heaven by means
of the mystical ladder
was premiss and conclusion.
What he analyzed was each episode of Jacob's
life as
aspects—ways of seeing and interpreting—of
the ulti-
mate unity of things that was implied
by the one-
ness of God. The two wives of Jacob
served therefore
two functions of as many views of the subject
“Man” as the author cared to contemplate. The fer-
tility of Leah and the sterility of Rachel,
on one
level, were interpreted as the appetites of the mind
(Richard of Saint Victor, ed. and trans. Clare Kirch-
berger [1957], p. 91):
For as it is Leah's part to love since she is the affection
of the
soul, so it is Rachel's part to know, for she is reason.
The former
gives birth to ordered affection; the latter to
the reason or the pure
intelligence. Judah represents to
us... love of the highest good. And
when Judah is
born... then Rachel begins to desire children
passionately,
for she wants to know. Where love is there is vision...
and
certainly he who can love invisible things will immediately
desire to know them and to see them by the intelligence.
The canon regulars of Saint Victor (in whose writings
are preserved the
earliest systematic treatment of the
four-fold interpretation of Scripture:
literal, allegorical,
moral, and anagogical) were the ancestors of the
author
of the Epistle to Can Grande. But in adapting
this type
of multivalenced textual criticism to the Divine Com-
edy the author of the
letter (if it was Dante) stipulated
only two, the literal and the
unspecified symbolic,
ambiguously stating that the work was
“polysemos, hoc
est plurium
sensuum,” thus leaving open the question
of how many
levels of meaning apply.
From a structural point of view the Commedia might
have included a fourth part, since the Christian heaven
was located outside
the closed Ptolemaic cosmos. But
while staying within this universe, Dante
chose to open
up his world conditionally. Consequently the problem
that confronts the reader at the end of Purgatorio
is
similar to the pivotal episode in the Aeneid. But
unlike
Vergil's disjunctive ambiguity, Dante's Garden of Eden
is a
conjunctive symbol, the most complex and open
of nexuses in Western
letters. In Eden the pilgrim
Dante sees in a vision a giant temporalized
emblem
(more complex than Dürer's for the Emperor Maxi-
milian I) that is a pageant of the
Church. This allegory
has been glossed alternatively as the Church
Militant
on earth or the Church Triumphant in Heaven, but
the
probability that Dante intended both is made more
likely by the location of
this episode in the work. For
the purposes of his narrative, from Eden the
pilgrim
Dante continued his voyage to God in the Paradiso,
but in terms of the meaning of the work, the
untold
story of the future of mankind also begins at this point.
Thus,
on earth, the closed world of moral categories
is obliterated by the
recovery of innocence, and even
the memory of past history is washed away
by the
waters of Lethe or Divine forgiveness, since Scripture
assures
us that “When He forgives He forgets.” This
uncanonical second baptism constitutes therefore a
new opportunity for man
under the new dispensation
of Christian hedonism. Thus Vergil's valedictory
bene-
diction to Dante (Purgatorio, XXVII, 131, 142):... lo
tuo piacere omai prendi per duce... per ch'io te sovra
te
corono e mitrio (“Now take pleasure as your
guide... [because you are now master of yourself,
body and soul,] I
therefore crown and mitre you”).
The withdrawal of Vergil as Dante's guide was the
poet's way of announcing
the obsolescence of reason
as governing principle for human action or
principle
of political organization, since the second baptism
made
instinctive man's knowledge of natural order, the
poet's definition of
Good. His projection of Evil in the
Inferno recalls therefore the statue in the Book of
Daniel, a human anatomy analyzed both
tropologically
and chronologically but inverted, its posture repre-
senting the stance of sin in relation
to the natural order
created by God. Conversely, the figure of
redemption
in the Purgatorio is represented upright,
the attainment
of the recta ratio by man
paradoxically obliterating his
need for it. Consequently the problem that
is raised
is the connection in Dante's mind between the ideas
of the
possible intellect and plenitude, and what these
terms meant to him. In his
political theory, stated in
metaphysical terms, Dante was explicit on the
first
topic, but not the second (De
Monarchia, trans. H. W.
Schneider [1957], p. 6):
... since this power can not be completely actualized in
a single man or
in any of the particular communi-
ties... there must be a multitude in mankind through
whom this
whole power can be actualized; just as there
must be a multitude of
created beings to manifest ade-
quately
the whole power of prime matter.... With this
judgment Averroes agrees
in his commentary on De anima.
The cultural rebirth of man announced by Dante
was projected two centuries
later as a revolution in
education by Rabelais, for whom the exploration of
hu-
man possibilities through actualization
automatically
meant the rejection of allegory and multiple levels of
reality. He therefore blasted, in the Prologue to the
First Book of Gargantua, the tradition that had ex-
tended from Philo to his day (trans. J. M. Cohen,
Penguin Classics [1955], p. 38):
But do you faithfully believe that Homer, in writing his
Iliad and Odyssey, ever had in
mind the allegories squeezed
out of him by Plutarch, Heraclides
Ponticus, Eustathius,
and Phornutus, and which Politian afterwards
stole from
them in his turn? If you do, you are not within a
hand's
or a foot's length of my opinion. For I believe them to
have
been as little dreamed of by Homer as the Gospel mysteries
were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses; a case which a
certain
Friar Lubin, a true bacon-picker, has actually tried to
prove,
in the hope that he may meet others as crazy as himself
and—as the proverb says—a lid to fit his kettle.
It was not, however, the force of Rabelais' language,
but the Scientific
Revolution that destroyed the alle-
gorical
method. According to Herbert Butterfield in
The Origins of Modern Science (1957), pp. 7, 8:
... it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity
and reduces
the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank
of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the
system of medieval Christendom.... it changed the
character of men's
habitual mental operations... [and]
looms so large as the real origin
both of the modern world
and of the modern mentality that our customary
periodisa-
tion of European
history has become an anachronism and
an encumbrance.
Accordingly, we will approach the centuries extending
from the Florentine
Renaissance to the First World
War as a single epoch, tracing the principle
of ambig-
uity under three headings, all
ultimately derived from
geographical and cosmological exploration.
1. Accidentalism in Open Systems.
The seeming
haphazardness of horizontal and open-ended works in
the Renaissance was implicitly a new projection of
ambiguity, for the sole
rule of the Abbey of Thélème—
Fay ce que vouldras—when translated to
aesthetic
principle produced compositions as savory and varie-
gated (but unpredictable) as the Adventures of Pan-
tagruel. Adventures, which for other men had led to
the
accidental discovery of new continents while
merely searching for new ways
of traveling to places
long known, thus unwittingly shifted the center of
the
world from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and
added impetus to
the nationalism that challenged with
a rival theory of sovereignty the
first modern state, the
Church. Similarly the faith in the goodness of
instinct
that dignified the study of man's actual behavior led
to the
discovery of the ego. But because the ambiguities
of accidentalism at this
time had to be conceptualized
by alternative characterizations of God as
either the
rational or the capricious Uncreated Being, the result
for
men was fideistic optimism or nescience. Thus
Rabelais' optimism shaded
into skepticism for Mon-
taigne, since the
purposeless exploration of the inner
world of man raised more questions
than he could
answer, or that he answered with another question:
“Que sçay-je?” This
impatient shrug of Montaigne
reflects the quickened time-sense of the age
that now
found essays and short novellas more congenial fare
than long
accretions. But it was in the developed drama
with its possibilities for
the simultaneous presentation
of multiple relationships and causal
connections that
the eclecticism and the ambiguities of an open world
were best expressed.
No treatment of ambiguity can avoid the problem
of Hamlet, since for so many both character and play
have become
synonymous with the term. But some of
the problems are the invention of
modern critics, dat-
ing no earlier than the
advent of the proscenium stage
which introduced not only a different
theater but also
a different technique of interpreting drama. The mul-
tiple playing areas of the Elizabethan
stage, simulta-
neous action, multiple
motives, and the several levels
turgy were flattened out by the box-stage, realistic
decor, and notions of verisimilitude and linear progres-
sion of action that characterize the novels of Zola.
Therefore the delight of the critic in the multivalence
of Hamlet's madness, or speculation on the motives
for the delay in revenge are false problems; Hamlet
is under palace arrest, and only by his assumed antic
disposition (plan known to Horatio) does he have li-
cense to prowl and to spy.
The genuine ambiguities have to do with the ideas
explored by Shakespeare,
and with the structure and
scope of the play. First, revenge is throughout
Shake-
speare a negative term, at best
what Francis Bacon
calls “a kind of wild justice, which the more
man's
nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.”
Whether Shakespeare meant to say that revenge is
acceptable when purged of
passion and executed more
in sorrow than in anger, or whether revenge is
all that
remains of justice when the times are out of joint must
remain a moot point. Secondly, two notions of kingship
are present in the
play: on the political level, Den-
mark's
kings are elected; on the theological level suc-
cession of reigns and of dynasties are foreordained by
God.
Thus, upon his providential return to Denmark,
after Hamlet has proof of
Claudius' guilt and the assur-
ance that he is
God's chosen instrument, he announces
his royal pretension with
“I, Hamlet the Dane.” Later,
in reviewing with
Horatio the evidence against
Claudius, he declares that “the
interim is mine,” sug-
gesting
that the eldest crime has made invalid the
present reign. Hamlet,
therefore, is his father's succes-
sor, the
purpose of his uncrowned rule to bring to an
end a dynasty and his own life
which are parts of the
general rottenness of Denmark. Hamlet thus is
both
scourge of God and victim whose double role in life
requires
premeditation of all action to prevent the
tainting of his mind, that
purity rewarded in death by
an apotheosis hymned by flights of angels.
But death for the other characters is also a con-
summation, the manner of their dying indicating, but
not
revealing entirely, the ambiguous connection be-
tween the actualization of God's will that is provi-
dence, and justice on earth. Among the problems
that
Hamlet ponders therefore are the purposes of knowl-
edge, the limits of reason, and God's will. But ulti-
mately all attempts at the capturing of
God's mind
are not only vain but blasphemous; therefore augury
must be
defied, and like the fallen sparrow man is God's
captive, nescience
reason's response to omniscience,
and readiness the proper state of the
will in relation
to providence.
The historical setting and the scope of the play are
impossible to
determine, since on the one hand the
ostensible reason for dispatching Hamlet to England
is for the
collection of the Danegeld (ca. ninth century);
on the other hand, he is a
student at Wittenberg which
was founded in 1502, but which did not enjoy a
foreign
reputation until Shakespeare's day. Obviously anach-
ronism is present, but the usual
function of collapsing
time does not seem to apply. In Hamlet the author's
motive appears to be the opposite: the
extension of
Danish and English history centuries beyond the two
months required by the action. Similarly, the dramatic
structure,
“all beginning,” becomes appropriate when
it is
perceived that Shakespeare was experimenting
with the hero in posse, a risky artistic challenge that
requires
the identification of an adolescent protagonist
with his potentialities
rather than with his achieve-
ments, with
becoming rather than with being: “For he
was likely, had he been put on, to have
prov'd most
royal.”
Technically, Shakespeare had to negotiate the con-
stant shift in focus from the drama on the stage to the
drama
within Hamlet's inexperienced but learning
mind by regularly suspending the
action with an ab-
normal number of
internalizing soliloquies. That
Shakespeare thought he succeeded in his
attempts may
be seen in Fortinbras' epilogue, for when the poet feels
secure in his accomplishment he characteristically vio-
lates the illusion he has created in order to reveal
his
hand as creator. As for the meaning of so protean a
play, the
history of Hamlet criticism parodies Polonius'
response to cloud formations, the various inter-
pretations placed upon Hamlet's antic disposition
by
the other characters, and their various reactions to the
play
within the play—all these examples anticipating
the Rorschach
Test (1923) which is based upon the
interpretation of an articulate but
amorphous shape
that elicits self-revealing commentary. The work is
therefore informed with its own literary criticism,
including the tacit
assertion that works of art may be
exercises in criticism as well as
creation, endeavors
always subject to the fashions of the day. The explicit-
ness of this awareness Shakespeare
reserved for his
Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra, V,
ii):
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I'th' posture of a whore.
But the poet's desire to free his work from himself
and from Time is also
present in Hamlet, for the play
concludes with an
infinite regress. Horatio offers to
follow his prince in death, but his
duties are not yet
over. He is not only to report Hamlet's cause aright
his breath in pain “to tell my story.” Because Shake-
speare's Hamlet is not the Hamlet of saga, chronicle,
romance, or other dramatic presentations, telling the
story aright requires returning to the beginning, da
capo, and re-experiencing the play, a simple form of
regress that was a familiar device in music.
2. The Autonomy of Art and Self-Reference.
The
multivocality of Shakespearean drama that conceals
the
author's point of view finds its counterpart in
painting with Leonardo's
invention of sfumato. This
shading and blurring of
outline in combination with
the disjunctive background explains the
enigmatic
quality of the Mona Lisa (E. H. Gombrich, The
Story
of Art, 9th ed. [1958]). A comparison of her smile with
that of the Virgin of Notre Dame described above
reveals the historic
changes in artistic aims, since re-
peated
viewings of the medieval statue will add noth-
ing to the doctrinal ambiguities once they are per-
ceived, for the work, like the church's sacraments,
was
no more than a visible sign for a reality that existed
elsewhere.
But in the case of Leonardo it is precisely
the repeated viewings that
convince the beholder that
her expressions change. Because the moods of
the
beholder that are read into the picture are ipso
facto
valid, viewing the Mona Lisa becomes a continuous
process of
collaborative recreation. Thus the roles of
artist and audience are
temporally reversed, and the
question of who is who and what is what
remains an
open one. This problem was made the subject of a
painting
by Vermeer (Figure 1).
The original title of “An Artist in His Studio” was
“The Painter's Art” (Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer
[1952]) which tells us a great deal more about the
meaning of the work. Vermeer has depicted an artist
painting from a human
model costumed and furnished
with the trumpet of fame, the book of history,
and
the crown of immortality. But a number of questions
are raised in
the viewer's mind. First, the imper-
sonation of Immortality, whether it can be done, and
what reality
there is in the artist's portrait of her. It
has therefore been conjectured
that the artist was
painting Hope although his model represented
another
figure. Secondly, the causal connection between fame
and the
artist's work have been reversed, for fame is
a by-product of, not the
subject of a painting.
But more importantly, who is the artist? The identity
of the painter
depicted by Vermeer is concealed from
the viewer since he is seen only from
the back. And
when one steps outside the frame of the canvas, the
same
question is posed in a different context, for the
beholder is standing
where Vermeer must have stood
as he painted the picture. While this last
point may
be made of all easel paintings, it has special relevance
to
this particular work because of the subject and its
treatment. On the left
side of the canvas is part of
a tapestry painted to look as though it might
have been
hanging over the canvas itself. But an equally possible
interpretation is that it hangs in the doorway that
separates two rooms. In
either case it is pulled back
to reveal an artist in his
studio—or, “An Artist in His
Studio.”
Whosesoever the hand that pulls back the
tapestry to reveal the painter
painting, the viewer is
permitted an insight into the creative process
itself,
the most secret of mysteries. Yet at the same time it
is also
public and cosmic, for fame is the judgment
of the world, but the
governance of the world may
be providential or entirely fortuitous, an
historical
accident.
What then is the “subject” of this painting whose
surface lucidity, explicitness of detail, and quietness of
statement
conceal as many ambiguities as the beholder
can think up? It is astonishing
that something originat-
ing in so small and
contained an area as a narrow Dutch
room can have such wide application.
But to say that
an event “originates” in a specific
place is to make
an arbitrary decision, for within the context of the
assumptions implicit in the painting, this need not be
the case. If no
limits of inference are set and if the
detail in the painting may at the same time be both
cause and effect. Moreover, the abstraction that is
Fame and the anonymity of the artist depicted place
them in the category of common, not proper nouns.
Consequently it may be surmised that Vermeer was
handling abstractions that touch upon communication
and the human understanding, both within the self and
the public at large; that Vermeer was analyzing the
interpenetration of working, thinking, and creating, as
well as the possibility of an almost infinite succession
of appreciation. That Vermeer's legal executor was the
pioneer microbiologist Leeuwenhoek, famous for his
microscopes, is perhaps not without significance.
The self-reference in a painting about painting was
an acknowledgment of the
disappearance of traditional
content from art. When secularization also
came to
music, it had certain natural advantages that perhaps
explains
its ascendancy in the eighteenth century.
Divorced from reference to the
outside world, it be-
came not only the most
abstract and formal of the arts,
but also a language without a subject. Or,
stated in
another way, it became the subject of its own discourse.
Thus when the composers turned their attention to the
exploration of formal
patterns their realization that
reiteration was the only referential mode
available to
this kind of music prompted them to explore the ambi-
guities intrinsic to any melody. The
pleasure they
derived in contriving these excursions is recorded by
the number and extent of variations upon themes,
whether their own or those
of others, for such exercises
could be cast as independent works, as are
the Goldberg
Variations of Bach, or as part of a
larger work. Because
the point about themes and variations can most conve-
niently be made by the simplest of
examples, we choose
the second movement of Haydn's G Major Symphony
No. 94, the
“Surprise,” one of the twelve he composed
for the
London season of 1792. In it Haydn projected
a series of physical postures,
psychological states, and
courtly ceremonies that concluded in the
genial
nescience of a quiddity: What is a tune? For the oddity
of
reiterative utterances is that through repetition the
original statement is
both strengthened and under-
mined, and
credence in its validity is progressively
obliterated into nonexistence or
modified to the status
of an enigma, as the title of a work of Elgar's
declares.
The surprise commemorated in the informal title of
Haydn's symphony refers
to the fortissimo crash in the
16th measure of the second movement, a
social joke
that records Haydn's disapproval of the conventions
of the
time that permitted dozing at concerts. But since
jokes do not bear
repeating, Variationen was a useful
solution to an
artistic problem. Thus the technically
simple, superficially naive work
begins with the most
innocent of melodies, the first half of which the modern
listener associates with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little
Star.”
This toy of a tune is introduced by the first and
second
violins, then as if to put finger to lip and walk tiptoe,
the
first violins play it again very softly, while the
second violins disappear
pizzicato into the accompani-
ment. The
listener is now ready for something to
happen—but not the loud
crash he just heard. While
he is recovering from his surprise, Haydn with
mock
innocence gives the second half of the melody.
The variations begin in the 33rd measure when the
melody is abandoned to the
second strings and the first
warbles momentarily with the flutes. The
second vari-
ation, beginning with the 49th
measure, introduces a
series of questions. Is it possible to make this
music-box
tune heroic? Haydn shifts to the minor and increases
volume.
The result is as ludicrous as the listener ex-
pected. But surprisingly, when it is repeated exactly,
something
ominous creeps into the music. Bemused,
the listener now expects to hear
the second half of the
melody repeated; instead Haydn shifts to the
relative
key and engages in private mutterings. The listener
feels
excluded from what seemed to have been a con-
versation. All patterns of expectancy are undermined
by this
digression, and the listener gradually realizes
the destructive function of
irrelevance (measures 57
to 74). Haydn then pretends to apologize for his
in-
hospitality by returning to the
tune with the notes
playfully doubled as though in compensation for
his
lapse of attention. The listener is safely back in the
world of
the miniature. But is he? As it turns out, he
has been led back only to
hear loudly proclaimed the
martial and genuine heroic possibilities of the
melody.
The conclusion of the second movement however is
not
coterminal with its performance, for the question
of what a melody is
remains. Haydn's selection of a
well-known theme that had been used as
popular
French folk song and German religious chorale might
have been
his way of alluding to other possibilities,
possibilities that are now
being gathered in the La Rue
Union Thematic Catalogue of 18th-Century Sympho-
nies. The two versions familiar to
Haydn's audience
were:
[Description: Clefs of a Haydn tune and a French Folk Song]
[Description: Clefs of a Bach tune]
In addition to the demonstration of the ambiguity
of melody, Haydn has also
suggested in the da capo
portions that
repetition does not exist. But there are
other paths open to musicians if
they are preoccupied
with the irretrievability of experience. Guarantees
that
preclude the possibility of recurrence can be built into
compositions, and some of the works of the twentieth-
century John Cage, along with other moderns who
are
attempting to rejuvenate music, are so conceived. The
problem of
modernity is important to ambiguity as
aesthetic principle, for its traces
at the same time the
decline of multivalence and opens up the question
of
what the word “Art” means.
3. Modernity and the Rejuvenation of the Arts.
The
idea of modernity clearly present from the early
Renaissance
was not formulated as aesthetic principle
until the nineteenth century. The
oddity of this fact
is perhaps best explained by the artists'
unwillingness
to abandon notions of hierarchy; consequently the story
of the Scientific Revolution from their point of view
is largely that of
resistance. The New Science had its
distinctly negative aspect, since the
collapse of the old
cosmology (Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World
to the Infinite Universe [1957]) had taken
with it those
older sciences that had been assimilated to it. The
decline of symbolism (Johann Huizinga, The Waning
of the
Middle Ages [1924]) was hastened therefore, and
the astrology, the
faculty psychology, and the humoral
medicine that relied upon the stars
were automatically
discredited. Thus the complex, multivalenced reso-
nances that the artists had been able to
achieve through
correspondence and cross-reference were now lost. The
coincidental revival of magic indicated therefore not
only a new phase of
empiricism necessary for the
reconstruction of the sciences, but also a
longing for
secret, ancient wisdom, the possession of which gave
one
the power and status of an adept. Hence the
flourishing of witchcraft with
its arcane formulae and
recipes, the Hieroglyphics
of Horapollo, the Cabbalah,
the further additions to the Hermetic corpus,
and the
emblem books that had as their last readers women
and children
in seventeenth-century Holland.
For the artists not committed to such exotica the
problem was acute, since
it was not only the traditional
sciences, but also one of the major props
of their
activity, the siderealized classical myths, that had been
undermined (Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan
Gods [1953]). As for the poets, the limits of language
became painfully apparent, and this dilemma was ex-
pressed both in their works and in the
collections of
paradoxes that attempted to join together different
worlds by verbal statements while acknowledging at
the same time the
impossibility of the undertaking
(Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia epidemica [1966]). The
century following
Shakespeare's was the last to concern
itself with theodicies since the role
of God was now
passive; He existed, as it were, in the past tense
merely
as the Creator of the world described by a Descartes,
a Newton,
or a Darwin (John C. Greene, The Death
of Adam: Evolution
and its Impact on Western Thought
[1959]). Poets had learned to
perceive the world
differently, but their delight was of short
duration
(Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the
Muse:
Newton's 'Opticks' and the Eighteenth Century Poets
[1946]) and as a class they never again recaptured the
authority they
formerly enjoyed. Their work, along
with that of the painters, degenerated
into academic
exercises stripped, as it were, of content, since they
had imposed upon themselves unnecessarily long the
task of upholding a no
longer viable tradition.
The new direction for the arts—rooted in the com-
merce and technology that was one facet of the
Renaissance—had been stated centuries earlier by the
sixteenth-century Portugese, Camoens, born in the
same year that Vasco da
Gama died. His epic, Os
Lusíadas,
had opened with a declaration for actual-
ity
and modernity (trans. William C. Atkinson [1952],
p. 39):
This is the story of heroes who... opened a way to Ceylon,
and further,
across seas no man had ever sailed be-
fore.... Let us hear no more then of Ulysses and Aeneas,
no more
of Alexander and Trajan. The heroes and poets
of old have had their
day.
This plea was for the most part ignored by the poets
and painters, and not
for want of heroes or themes
since Spain, England, and France had their
Vasco da
Gamas also. Moreover, the seventeenth-century battle
between
the Ancients and the Moderns was primarily
the concern of the critics and
fought on different
grounds well after the war was over. The
revolution
in modernity that should have re-defined the meaning
of the
word “Art” was delayed; meanwhile the sig-
nificant achievements from this period
were coming
from practical men: the architects who quickly rebuilt
the
churches and hospitals after the Great Fire of
London, the craftsmen who
planned the English manor
houses and laid out the gardens, the artisans in
the
ateliers of France who designed furniture, and the
Dutch factory
workers who turned out porcelain and
china. It was only when Baudelaire,
the contemporary
principle that in extremis the artists finally responded
and the arts were rejuvenated. But one of the conse-
quences of this late re-orientation in critical theory was
to make ambiguous what constituted an art, for any-
thing could aspire to that condition or be analyzed in
aesthetic terms. Not only a life-style like Baudelaire's
Dandy, but cities, factories, and subsequently, plans for
regional development and political states—not to
mention found objects—have been so appraised. Un-
derstandably, modernity could not always be distin-
guished from mere novelty, since the rapid develop-
ment of technology along with the sciences made
inescapable the awareness of change and the shifting
grounds of reality.
For radical changes had been taking place in the
sciences, as well, and the
complete causality implicit
in Newton's reduction of all physical phenomena
to
matter, motion, time, and space was now challenged.
In the
Einsteinian world wherein matter had dissolved
into energy, time was a
geometric projection, and the
motion of individual charged particles
unpredictable,
Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer began to pon-
der the latest physical discoveries in terms
of radical
problems of the understanding. Because the laws that
had
governed the familiar world of large objects did
not seem to operate on the
atomic level on which that
world is built, the introduction of the
conjunctive
principles of correspondence and contrariety became
an
operational necessity. Since, however, these princi-
ples were admitted to be merely “a new mode of
description” that conjoined different categories of
analysis,
the ambiguities of language, mind, reasoning,
and levels of reality were
now assimilated to physical
research and theory. The epistemological
quandary
that the physicists since Einstein found themselves in
gave
added impetus to the cultural relativity explored
by the psychologists,
anthropologists, linguists, and
historians whose interest was to analyze
structures of
thought and patterns of behavior.
The cumulative effect of these various endeavors was
the total reappraisal
of the meaning of history and of
human culture. It was in this context that
“ambiguity”
as applied to the arts underwent a
semantic shift
(William Empson, Seven Types of
Ambiguity [1949])
for in the bewildering diversity of categories of
thought
one response was to take pleasure in complexity; hence
the
presence of a multiplicity of meaning in a work,
or the possibility of a
variety of readings was equated
with the positive value of richness. The
term became
therefore one of approbation, and attention was now
directed to the psychology of ambiguity (Ernst Kris,
Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art [1952]). For the
aestheticians also the isolation of the locus of ambiguity
seemed to be a more fruitful line of inquiry than a
taxonomy, since artists
have not limited themselves to
one type, and the combination of types in a
single work
allowed for different analyses. Both approaches are
obviously ahistorical. Ambiguities for us, however,
have referred to
something and often point to the
central concern of the artist, to the
ideas and problems
in cultural history that ought to be explored for pur-
poses of appreciation.
In the long history of ambiguity as a pejorative term,
an important
distinction must be made. As stated
above, for the critics ambiguity
represented an an-
noyance in the cognitive
process that was to be elimi-
nated as
quickly as the rules of logic would permit.
For artists the embarrassment
of dilemmas and the
delay in their resolution was the very focus of
their
interest; hence saying more than one thing at a time
to express
the complexity of experience has normally
been one of their aims. Thus in
spite of the ultimate
agreement on the uniformity of nature's laws,
artists,
critics, and scientists have for centuries addressed
themselves to different orders of reality.
This condition may be coming to an end, for the
current trend away from
formal logic in favor of non-
discursive
modes may be pointing to a new basis of
agreement more intimate than in the
past. The merging
of function of studio and laboratory which is
illustrative
of this union might also mean the end of pessimism
in the
arts, since both are at present being utilized for
the exploration of the
limits of human perception, of
tolerance, attention-span, and how the
interpretation
of events occurs. Accordingly, the researches of the
neuro-psychologists are analogous to the experi-
mentations of Op Artists and Electronic Composers
(Fritz Winckel, Music, Sound, Sensation: A Modern
Exposition [1967]) and the results of these collabo-
rative efforts within the framework of the new
biology
may signify the emergence of a new image of man.
What is
certain is that under pressure of historical
changes, all disciplines in
the post-critical age are
forced to revalue their methods of gathering data
and
drawing inferences, and are consequently preoccu-
pied with the problems of heuristics. Thus the art
of
interpretation for Michael Polanyi and Elizabeth
Sewell is subsumed
under their cover-term, discovery,
a way of
approaching problems, whether scientific,
philosophical, or artistic, those
categories themselves
no longer meaningful in the realignment of
disciplines
that constitutes for them an intellectual revolution.
Seen in this light, the periodic restructuring of
human knowledge and the
invention of new methods
of reasoning have as their purpose the elimination of
unity, both in man and in nature. But it may be ob-
served that each new way of reasoning generates new
ambiguities which in turn provoke the search for more
comprehensive theories of causality. Consequently, if
knowledge has no limits, ambiguity must remain a
permanent part of the human experience. Under these
conditions it is likely that artists will continue to search
for significance through the cultural paradoxes exposed
by their perceptions of discrepancies. And from the
complexity and multivalence of their experiences they
will continue to provide others with that special kind
of entertainment that we call the arts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
There exists no single work that traces ambiguity or
multivalence
through the whole of Western culture; there-
fore the suggested readings are arranged historically. Jean
Daniélou, S. J., Sacramentum futuri:
Études sur les origines
de la typologie
biblique (Paris, 1950). Jean Pépin, Mythe
et allégorie: les origines grecques et
les contestations judéo-
chrétiennes (Paris, 1958). For Eastern
Christianity see
R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory and Event:
A Study of the Sources
and Significance of Origen's Interpretation
of Scripture
(London, 1959). For the history of mystical
theology, Pierre
Pourrat, La Spiritualité
chrétienne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1921-27),
trans. W.
H. Mitchell and S. P. Jacques as Christian Spiritu-
ality, 3 vols. (London,
1922-27). Henri de Lubac, S. J.,
Exégèse médiévale:
les quatre sens de l'écriture, 3 vols. (Paris,
1959-61). For literary tropes, Ernst Robert Curtius,
Europäische Literatur und lateinisches
Mittelalter (Berne,
1948), trans. Willard R. Trask as European Literature and
the Latin Middle Ages
(New York, 1953) and their counter-
part
in the visual arts, Erwin Panofsky, Studies in
Iconology:
Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance
(New York,
and London, 1939). For theological aesthetics see
Gerardus
van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty:
The Holy in
Art (London, 1963); for philosophical criticism
and a brief
history of aesthetics, the studies of Monroe C.
Beardsley;
also E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion
(New York, 1960),
Northrop Frye Anatomy of
Criticism (Princeton, 1957), and
George Boas, The Heaven of Invention (Baltimore, 1961).
For more
specialized studies, Winifred Nowottny, The Lan-
guage Poets Use (Oxford, 1962),
R. P. Blackmur, Language
As Gesture (New York,
1952), Kenneth Burke, A Grammar
of Motives (New
York, 1954), and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal
Icon
(Lexington, Ky., 1954). For the relationship between
structural
linguistics, mythology, and cultural anthropology,
Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology,
trans. Claire
Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York,
1963).
For a new epistemology grounded in the ambiguities of
heuristics, Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New
York,
1966).
TOM TASHIRO
[See also Analogy; Chain of Being; Hierarchy; Metaphor;Myth; Poetry; Symbol.]
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