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ESTHETIC IMMEDIACY
ESTHETICS, as D. W. Prall defines it in his ?Dsthetic Analysis,is "the science of the immediate" (p. 12). The immediate is contrasted with process, with the physical and mental events in space or time, as the quality of process. Thus esthetics "is an account of the surface, and the surface structure, of our world, as felt in immediate content, instead of an account of processes conditioning that surface externally and internally, physically, that is, or organically or psychologically" (p. 173).While this view is a starting point for an original and persuasive treatment of special esthetic problems, as every one who has read Prall's book will surely agree, it is also a significant contribution to epistemology. For if esthetic cognition deals exclusively with quality as directly presented, it must be cognition by acquaintance and not, like science, knowledge mediated by concepts. "Once we go beyond into conceptual schemes, or into non-apparent physical constitution, we have penetrated the esthetic surface; our activity has become intellectual" (p. 6).An obvious and strong objection to Prall's theory is that conceptual knowledge is relational knowledge. If Prall were right, it will be said, acquaintance with esthetic quality would be exclusive of relational knowledge. But this is incompatible with the fact that all works of art exhibit form or relational structure.To answer this objection Prall insists that esthetic form is known by acquaintance as "sensuous structural determinateness" (p. 12). "The elements that we are to take as basic should be sensuous elements, and the relations, since they must connect such elements, will be the only sort of relations capable of connecting sensuous elements, namely sensuous relations" (p. 42). By sensuous relations Prall does not mean conceptual relations which happen to be exemplified by or illustrated in a sensory presentation like three dots in a row illustrating the concept of betweenness. To keep esthetic immediacy clear of concepts Prall must argue, and this is the striking part of his theory, that the sensuous structure of art can not have a conceptual correlate. Of course, the elements of a work of art appear in a temporal succession or spatial juxtaposition. But this matrix of space-time, which is common not only to works of art but to all existing objects, is conceptually describable and, therefore, does not give the purely qualitative esthetic structure. Let one element be next to another in space or time. In contributing to esthetic form these elements may have a wide qualitative separation...
