Realm of Art

In this vivid, penetrating analysis of man's participation in art, Professor Anderson has written a phenomenology of the creative experience. Such a master of the philosophy of art as Santayana would have appreciated this book, for like Santayana the author finds in art the key to the ultimate place of the human spirit. But unlike Santayana's, Anderson's words are addressed especially to contemporary man, whose questioning of the meaning and prospects of creative effort and the flow of history comes to a particularly intense focus in the art of today. Through fresh and often strikingly novel interpretations of significant examples from many arts, the author provides concrete illustration and evidence for each analytical theme and concept. The presentation of each step in this depiction of creative experience focuses upon a perennial issue of the interpretation of art. Anderson offers provocative accounts of aesthetic intuition as ultimate, of the art-work as distinguished from the art-object, of the central place of meaning and truth in art, of the close relation of comedy to tragedy, and of the sublime as a relatively common form of art.The goal of his analysis is to give an accurate account of aesthetic intuition--to show that it relates to the coursing of events underlying it, and that it is the culmination of these events in the sense of being their ground. Thus he finds in creative experience the talisman of human life, the source of the promise of a history lived by free men.