Volume 42, Number 12 · July 13, 1995
A New Way of Seeing
By Stuart Hampshire
Looking at Giacometti Macrae)
by David Sylvester
Chatto and Windus, (to be published in March 1996 by Henry Holt/John, 256 pp., £25.00
Why has it often been thought that concentrating on abstract argument, remote from ordinary perceptions, is the highest activity of a person, the nearest to the divine? Because Aristotle and the Christian theologians have told us so, and their fiction has passed into the language we use when we distinguish reason from emotion, or intellect from imagination, or science from art. Fully within the rationalist tradition, Kant in the Critique of Judgment categorized the visual arts as free works of imagination, and thus inaccessible to reasoning and to explanation, as well as the domain of unaccountable genius. This has become the conventional wisdom.
Review, 4530 words
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