employed and acquire their importance in the ordering of experience previously undifferentiated or indistinct, and the concept ‘art’ functions in the ordering of the experience of art and the objects which give rise to such experience.  If we deal primarily empirically with experiences and not rationalistically with concepts, it takes little insight to recognize that the concept will be dependent upon the experiences from which it obtains its meaning and to which it refers.  Consequently, it will vary in its connotation to the extent that the experiences vary; that is, it will be relative to the experiencer and will embody whatever constancy and variability lie in such experiences.  Here is an instance in which the genetic account of the functional origin of concepts provides a healthier influence and a more satisfactory explanation than does abstract analysis, by redirecting our consideration back to essentials.  Thus it can be seen that the use of the same term is no guarantee of identity of connotation or denotation.  Rather, it reveals the poverty of language in attempting communication of a rich variety of experiences with a paucity of verbal means.  And no mode of experience surpasses the richness and variety of the aesthetic.

Such an interpretation as this requires a review of our thinking about our conceptual tools.  It demands a forthright repudiation of the Platonic-Aristotelian inheritance of completed concepts or ideas, each possessing its own essence.  Indeed, it observes that any discussion of concepts, independently of or in isolation from our experiences, individual and social, is destined to be empty dialectics, perhaps absorbing as a kind of mental acrobatics, but ineffectual or even debilitating for the purpose of sharing experiences.  Thus the skepticism of many toward the question of the definition of ‘art’ is a fitting conclusion to a disjoined inquiry.  Let us better admit of a plurality of meanings to encompass a plurality of experiences, having perhaps some things in common (these being expressed in the conventional connotations of terms), but shading off imperceptibly into experiences inadmissible to some and eventually inadmissible to all.  A language of experience is far more appropriate in dealing with experiences than is a language of things.  The sooner we repudiate the rationalistic conception of a world of finished objects and turn to that one in which we live and act, the more effectively shall we be able to adapt our thinking and expressing to our experiencing.

240

raises the question of whether a definition must be a prerequisite for evaluation or whether evaluation follows from the experience of art and then becomes formulated in a justificatory definition.  The latter, if it were the case, would not necessarily mean subjectivism in evaluating art.  It does insist, however, that art is never art by definition.  A rule, in this case a definition, never made a painting or a piece of music beautiful.  It is the intellectual, who strives for cognitive apprehension of what he has undergone in an art gallery or concert hail, who seeks to understand, to codify, to systematize and regularize, who may inadvertently discover himself upholding the contrary.  Nor is there anything amiss in his cognitive activities, so long as the priority of experience to definition be acknowledged and deferred to.