On Proofs and Profits:
Art in Higher Education

und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?

Friedrich Hölderlin 1

This endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry,
As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

Wallace Stevens 2

The tangible benefits deriving from art, and specifically studio art, in the curriculum may seem as obvious as providing the requisite education for careers as artists and in related professions; perhaps less obviously, the museum and gallery exhibitions and their supporting scholarship serveing as a resource for studio art courses and the whole academic community also provide a means for the institution to engage and to contribute to the larger community. True enough. But adducing only tangible benefits such as these begs the question, for what are the benefits provided by the artist through the artwork presented in exhibition? Tangible benefits rest on intangible benefits, more significant if more elusive for their contributions to the education of the individual person and to the larger society. 3

Considering the position of art in the higher education curriculum, proving the profits of its inclusion in the curriculum, engages a set of interacting domains: art, education, the individual person, the society. Taking up the question of the benefits of art in the university and college curriculum presupposes theories of these domains, and indeed a theory or metatheory of their interaction. It also entails considering how it is that the benefits deriving from art in the curriculum is a matter for which a proof of profits is to be sought.

That this is the case, that the profit of art in the curriculum is a matter for which proof is to be sought, is suggested by the commonplace trivialization and marginalization of art in the curriculum and in the larger society. This position of art in the curriculum suggests a widespread misprision of art and a concommitant misplacement of art at the margin of the curriculum. More troubling still, it suggests that a misprision of the conception of the individual person, and the conception of the education appropriate to the individual person, has become commonplace. A more adequate grasp of art and of the conception of the individual person and of education will urge a profound integration of art into the curriculum.

Education provides for transmission of that portion of the human domain not transmitted by nature. Education is much more than a passing along of information to be passively received, or the imparting of a closed body of knowledge, for central to what is to be transmitted is what is entailed in the active, continuous remaking--the creation--of the human domain. This is a perpetual task: one is both formed by and forms the cultural domain in which one dwells. Because of this active aspect of culture, education cannot consist only in the dissemination of information or the acquisition of skills, or even the development of the capacity for cognition, though of course education must include these. An education that conduces to the development of the individual person's capacity to contribute to the creation of the human domain must include the development of the capacities to reason, to act, and to feel, bringing these capacities into a unity of experience. This is precisely an education that conduces to the realization of the individual person as such.

The forms and contents we give to education are selected from the possibilities enabled by the field of human experience as being worth transmitting, synchronically from individual to individual, diachronically from generation to generation. Selection among these possibilities is not value-free, though this is not to suggest a simplistic distinction of fact and value. The forms and contents of knowledge in which the curriculum consists each involve central inherent concepts and contents peculiar to the form. These concepts denote certain aspects of experience to form a network of possible relationships by which experience can be understood. Each form has its methods by which experience of the world can be explored, and by which the results of that exploration can be expressed, conveyed and examined in critical thought and intersubjective dialogue. 4

Poiesis, the forming by which a thing is brought to be, is fundamental to art in both its broad and narrow senses. Art in its broadest sense is the bringing to being of that which does not have its being by nature, that is, without human agency. As art in this broadest sense entails human agency, it entails choice to determine what of all possible things is to be brought forth. One of the things that may be brought forth is, in this broadest sense of art, education itself as having its end in the bringing to being of the individual person as such. Another of the things that may be brought forth is art in the narrower sense: fine art, the visual arts, or henceforth simply art.

Art, like all things that are brought to be by human agency, is made possible by the structure of the field of human experience. To understand any human activity at its fundamental level is to understand that activity in terms of its eduction from the structure of the field of human experience. The profits art provides are intrinsic to and derived from the manner in which the field of experience is taken up by the enterprise of the artist. The adequate proof of the benefits provided by art is to be found in an adequate analysis of the field of experience, of the enterprise of the artist and its contribution to the individual artist and viewer, and to the collectivity of viewers and potential viewers constituting society. 5 I shall urge that central to these benefits provided by art within the curriculum is a making visible in the artwork the createdness of the human domain, opening a world, setting forth a space and time for indwelling. Certainly this is not exhaustive of what art does, in the curriculum or in the larger society. It is, I suggest, fundamental to everything else art does.

I shall initially present a grounding of the artist's enterprise in the phenomenology of the lived experience of being-in-the-world. Though the brevity requisite to the occasion allows this only in adumbration, this grounding is important in enabling what may be educed from it to have something more than the character of seeming speculation. 6 I shall then suggest some lines of argument regarding the benefits provided by the visual arts 7 in the curriculum that follow from this preliminary grounding of the visual arts in the situation of the human.

The field of human experience is bipolar, consisting on the one hand in the biological ground of the embodied sensa, and on the other hand in reference to the whole of what is (albeit an initially empty reference, subsequently but never exhaustively filled). 8

The field of sensory experience is the ostensible domain of the arts, each of which engage one or more of the senses. What is apprehended in the sensa is the world of appearances, albeit filtered and limited by the very condition of embodiedment which makes possible its appearing. Within the field of sensory experience, concrete particulars appear. What is given in perception is things; what does not appear without some effort on the part of the viewing subject is shapes, colors, lines, apart from their appearing as qualities and aspects of things.

Reference to the whole is presence-to-being, including the things appearing within the sensory field, the spatial and temporal field in which they appear, and the self to whom they appear, as well as the nonappearing: being understood as unrestricted.

Between the concrete particulars apprehended by sensory perception and reference to the whole of what is, cultures are constructed in acts of interpretation as ways of understanding, acting and feeling. Perhaps a summary diagram will clarify these relationships:

subject                                  
. (one's awareness)  ....reference to the whole....
.                    .   presence-to-being        .
.                    .   (understanding)          .
.                    .                            .
--intentionality.........interpreting: culture   nature
.                    .  (knowledge)               .
.                    .                            .
.                    .                            .
object               ....sensa, biological ground..
  (everything other         (perception)
  than one's awareness)

Yet artworks, by virtue of their manifesting their coming-to-be in themselves, have a special claim on centrality. Artworks, by virtue of their being perceptible structures, "thought-things," 11 enacted in the materiality of a medium, stand and remain standing in perduring availability as object to subject, in copresence with every potential subject. It may be objected that this obtains for objects in general. We might distinguish artworks from mere objects by positing that artworks are representations, and not merely in the jejune sense that artworks are depictions, in the sense of re-present-ations, of another pregiven entity, or taking a more encompassing ontological move, present-ations of entities actual or possible. This is to say that artworks are referential, in a way that mere objects are not. Still, this is insufficient: the artness of the artwork consists in something other than mere referentiality. As Arthur Danto has urged:

works of art, in categorical contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented. 12

We must distinguish, however, between that enculturation as a coming to possession of "culture" and as an originary instantiation of culture, an instantiation which entails exploration and discovery, and which is the bringing into being of a new being. Thus Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

One can invent pleasurable objects by linking old ideas in a new way and by presenting forms that have been seen before. This way of painting or speaking second hand is what is generally meant by culture. Cézanne's or Balzac's artist is not satisfied to be a cultured animal but assimilates the culture down to its very foundations and gives it a new structure: he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. What he expresses cannot, therefore, be the translation of a clearly defined thought, since such clear thoughts are those which have already be uttered by ourselves or by others. "Conception" cannot preceed "execution." There is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic expression, and only the work itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something rather than nothing to be said. . . . The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere--not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life. It summons one away from the already constituted reason in which "cultured men" are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which contains its own origins. 20

Art, in the practice of art in the studio course, makes visible the originary act of poiesis. This bringing into being of a new being, an opening of a world, is quintessentially the enterprise of the artist. This enterprise is paradigmatic for the creation of the human domain in all of cultural activity. In the simultaneity of its conception and execution, the artwork is an intuitive grasping of the whole instantiated in the particularity of its form and materials, a presenting of the whole in its sensuously perceptible significant presence. 21 The artwork constitutes, rather than refers to experience: it is a presenting, rather than a re-presenting. 22 This presenting is a concentrating of that which is ordinarily dispersed in quotidean experience, in which the form of the artwork is abstracted within the field of sensa, rather than from the field of sensa. A world brought forth from earth, mediating between retention and protention, the artwork elicits attending in the Now of perception, an attending which is contemplative rather than representative or calculative thinking. Contemplative attending is dwelling within the world opened and held open by the artwork. This indwelling is a unity of intellection, volition, and emotion at the locus of subjectivity where these capacities have their common origin. This locus, this core, is the center of one's being. Core is cognate with the Latin cor, and with the Greek kardia: heart, not in the physiological sense but in their sense of one's center of being as the receptive correlate of significant presences.

Education from which art is absent through omission or marginalization is to the extent of that absence abstract, lacking in the foundation of experience which is sensory perception regarded as such. However powerfully such an education may develop the intellect, however effectively such an education may impart the skills requisite to action, it is lacking in the cultivation of the ground of experience having its origin in perceptual attending to what appears as significant presences. As the paradigmatic locus of the origin of significant presences, artworks ground us appreciatively on the earth and open a world for indwelling, a clearing for the appearing of the mystery of the whole of Being in which we may experience the astonishment that there are things and not nothing, and that each of us is the clearing in which beings and Being appear. In this clearing, we find the center of appearings to be our center. We may reclaim this center of experience when we make art the center of education.

I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Nancy Wood, Houston Community College, Chair of the session, for the invitation to contribute this paper to the session "Proving the Value, Providing the Profit," of the 1995 Mid-America College Art Association Conference, and to Distinguished Research Professor Ben Mahmoud, University of Northern Illinois,

1. "and what are poets for in a destitute time?" Friedrich Hölderlin, "Brod und Wein," 7.14. Ed. Eric L. Santer, Friedrich Hölderlin: Hyperion and Selected Poems. (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 184-5 [bilingual ed.]. Santer reads "...and who wants poets at all in lean years?" I am following Albert Hofstadler's translation in "What Are Poets For," Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971, 1975), p. 91. Return

2. Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," ed. Samuel French Morse, Poems by Wallace Stevens (New York: Random House, 1959), pp. 150-151. Return

3. So as not to quibble over the definition of terms: I am taking 'tangible' in the sense of that which may be exactly comprehended, and 'intangible' in the sense of that which eludes precise definition, elusive. See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, s.v. (New York: American Heritage Publishing, 1969). Return

4. Paul H. Hirst, "Liberal education and the nature of knowledge," Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 44. Return

5. It is tempting to prove the value and provide the profit by collecting statistical data. There is quite a vogue for this. Perhaps a clamor for it, as the evaluation of institutional effectiveness is implicated in accreditation proceedings, in the internal evaluation of faculty and of programs, and may be tied to budgets through performance-based funding. Quantified measures of performance look impressive in a report, placate the clamor for accountability and even provide accurate statistics on some measures of institutional effectiveness but yet may miss the point of the educational enterprise. As Frederick Turner has put the matter: "How does one measure with a Scantron form the very turning of the soul?" [Turner, "The Teacher and the Coming Age," The Teacher: A Mythic Presence in the Modern World Conference, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, October 14, 1989.] The abstraction entailed in quantified measures of effectiveness renders too facile the forgetting that that with which the enterprise is concerned is the education of individuals and the concomittant transmission of culture. And while we may have use of statistical data (indeed, less is available than one would wish), we need not place all our eggs in a spreadsheet. Nor would so doing be appropriate; as Henry Rosovsky notes [The University: An Owner's Manual (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), pp. 233-234]: "A university cannot be run by cost accountants or as a commercial enterprise responding only to changing markets. That is bad for us and worse for the societies we seek to serve." It is the worse because it reduces the enterprise of education to consist solely in short-term utilitarianism, putting at risk the education of the individual student that will contribute to the student's individual development qua person, and even the subsequent long-term professional achievement and contribution to the larger society that such a view would presumably seek. For the visual arts in higher education, as for higher education broadly considered, to seek the justification of the educational enterprise as if it were a matter of producing so many units at this or that cost per thousand is to negate the humanity of our students and of ourselves, of our enterprise and of our discipline; to do so is ultimately to reduce society to a system of 'rationalized' production and nothing more. This is certainly not to say that accountability in the prudent management and allocation of resources is not appropriate, for it obviously is. But it is to say that the justification for the expenditure of resources is not to be found in the methods of the accounting, nor in the parsimony with which those resources are allocated, but in the arche and the telos of the enterprise. First cause and end are not to be measured in readily quantified terms, for we are concerned with the education of individual persons, and not with the manufacture of sausages. So instead of providing an account of mathematized strategies of accountability, I instead want to proceed by providing what those who clamor for accountability may regard as mere platitudes, ungrounded speculation. I propose to do this not because these propositions are novel (though they are perhaps too infrequently reiterated), but in order to examine them, and to look at what I see to be an incommensurability of ideologies between those who would accept only a single mode of mathematized proof and those for whom only other modes of proof are adequate to the enterprise. Return

6. That the notion of grounding is problematical need not be troubling: to seek a ground for a phenomenon is to give an account of the requisite conditions of its coming-to-be, an account which presupposes that the more complex has its being from the less complex. That this process, continued indefinately, leads to circularity, or to an infinite regress, or to a ground-of-grounds does not disallow the process or obviate its necessity, though it is perhaps to seek more certainty than the enterprise allows. Return

7. Though I shall focus on the visual arts for the purposes of the occasion, the arguments adduced here are readily extended to the other arts and to the humanities. Return

8. In this analysis, both in many of its particulars and more broadly, I have been much influenced by the work of Robert E. Wood, which I gratefully acknowledge. See his A Path Into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Professor Wood's Approaches to Aesthetics: Reflections on the Great Tradition is forthcoming; reference here is to the 1991 MS. To begin in this way implies a distinction of subject and object, though this need not require their problematical separation along the lines of Cartesian res intensa and res extensa, for subjectivity is always already embodied, within a world, within what is, and insofar as the subject is conscious, that consciousness is intentional, always filled with objecta, with what is over against the subjectivity of the subject, understood here as the irreducible interiority of the self. While the field of human experience may be thus analysed as bipolar, this bipolarity subsists within a lived unity. Return

9. The notion that art entails epistemological and thus truth claims may strike some as strange; J. M. Bernstein's The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Pennsylania State University Press, 1992) traces the move to establish the aesthetic as an autonomous realm, adducing an argument aganst the post-Kantian categorical distinction between the good, the true, and the beautiful. Return

10. Inter alia, Northrop Frye, "The Instruments of Mental Production," in ed. Wayne C. Booth, The Knowledge Most Worth Having (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 59-83; esp. p. 75. Return

11. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1971, 1978), p. 62. Return

12. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 147-148. I suggest that the long traditionof setting the visual arts apart from the liberal arts is a disservice to both, and worse, a disservice to the student, particularly to those studio majors for whom the practice of the studio is most efficacious in conducing to a grasp of the relevance of the liberal arts to the issues raised in the studio. Return

13. "As earth juts through world." The terminology is Heidegger's in "The Origin of the Work of Art," ibid., p. 46: "That into which the earth sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we call the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters. Earth, self-dependent, is effortless and untiring. . . . In sitting up a world, the work sets for the earth. . . . The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there." Cf. R. Raj Singh, "Heidegger and the World in an Artwork," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48:3 (Summer 1990), pp. 215-222. Return

14. Edwin Jones, Reading the Book of Nature: A Phenomenological Study of Creative Expression in Science and Painting. (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1989), p.144: "the ontic activity understood as creative expression, whether executed by scientists, artists, or philosophers, is seen to have its possibility, as well as its inherent norms, rooted in the ontological structures of human existence, and ultimately in the basic condition Heidegger called "Being-in-the-world." When an expressive act is performed that brings the significance of one's personal world into the light of a mutual understanding, so as to communicate to others how it is to exist in the "one world" wherein we all dwell together, a unitary ontic-ontological structure is implicated: the structure I have called "creativity." Gestures are performed in space and time, directed by the anticipatory understanding that will be expressed in those same gestures as their significance; as a result, an expressive artifact is created, exhibiting in its own phenomenal structures the significance of a world; it thereby mediates the mutual being-toward a world that underlies the shared meaning-horizon presupposed by all communication. Such is the task, and the achievement, of creative expression." Return

15. The term 'situation' as used here is adopted from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne," Bulletin de psychologie 235 (Nov. 1964); see also Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), pp. 254-265. Return

16. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 198-199: "As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of passages.... Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield a profit, a contest where the winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis: it is an unrehearsed intellectual adven- ture.... Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partenership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance." Return

17. The artwork is its theory enacted in perceptible form. By theory, in this context, I refer to the set of assumptions and presuppositions, often implicitly and unreflectively accepted, that constitute the field from which the ar twork emerges in facture, and from which its interpretation proceeds. Indeed, the assumptions and presuppositions constituting a theoretical field, even if impicitly and unreflectively held, is the minimal condition for the recognition of the artwork as such. The facture of the artwork integrates practice and theory; the recipocity of theory and practice art is encountered as lived experience. As thus experienced, this integration of theory and practice may serve as paradigmatic for the integration of theoria and praxis in other domains, including those in which this integration is problematical. Claims that artworks have their facture and are interpreted without the engagement of a theoretical field are tantamount to claims of the notion of an "innocent eye" and are viciously circular, being in themselves assertions of a theoretical position. "Hostility to theory," Terry Eagleton has urged, "usually means opposition to other people's theories and an oblivion to one's own." [Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 7.] Return

18. This view and its expression here is indebted to Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p.378 I have in mind also Martin Buber's distinction of the other regarded as 'Thou' rather that 'It'; Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald G. Smith (New York: Scribner's, 1958); among the secondary literature, Robert E. Wood, Martin Buber's Ontology: An Analysis of I and Thou (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) Return

19. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Wein- heimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 306: "understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves." [Author's emphasis.] See also Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992) for an important treatment of differing horizons of understanding as an occasion of education. Return

20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 18-19. Return

21. My use of 'significant presence' is not unlike Robert Plant Armstrong's term "affecting presence." See his The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) and Wellspring: On the Myth and Source of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Return

22. The distinction of presencing versus representing is treated usefully in Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley, "Toward an Indexical Criticism," Postmodern Culture 5:3 (May, 1995), available via WWW at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.595/arsebrin.595.html; see especially section 23ff. Return