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p As we have already noted, in Richards’ view the theory of “value” forms the other mainstay of artistic criticism (and of the theory of art), alongside communications theory. The author devoted a special chapter of his Principles of Literary Criticism to a proof of the necessity of a general theory of value for art criticism. We have to know, Richards maintains, what is “good”.

p In his work Ethics and Language (1941) Charles Stevenson correctly points out that Richards operates with two incompatible theories of value: an analytical (emotive) and a naturalistic. Let us look first at his emotive theory of value. His positivist tendency to rely on proven facts and his proclivity for empiricism led Richards to attempt to construct a theory of value without recourse to ethical and “metaphysical” ideas, and, in particular, to the theory of absolute value. In The Meaning of Meaning the authors advance the thesis that arguments about beauty as a specific inherent quality of things is the “survival of primitive word-superstitions" (2, 144). The term “beauty” and other vital concepts of aesthetics are, Richards maintains, not used referentially ( symbolically), but emotively. Having no “referent” “outside the mind" these terms only express emotions and the attitudes of those who use them. Richards sees the proof of this in the polysemanticity of these terms, counting, for example, 43 60 different definitions of the term “beauty”. The utterance “it is beautiful" serves merely as an emotive sign of the expression of our attitude to it, and it may also provoke a similar attitude in others, as well as preparing them for some action or other. Thus Richards was in fact applying the positivist criterion of verification to the fundamental concepts of aesthetics. It has already been shown in the Marxist literature that the principle of verification is a focus of both the strong and the weak sides of empiricism. The former have to do with the fact that the very requirement for the empirical verifiability of knowledge is a generalization of the experimental achievements of modern natural sciences. Latent in this requirement, however, is the danger that a considerable portion of the objects of scientific knowledge (in the present instance, aesthetic knowledge), irreducible, fully or in part, to objects, which can be registered by experimental methods, is entirely excluded from consideration and declared insubstantial. For Richards the neo-positivist the central aesthetic concept-“beauty”-belongs to the class of abstractions devoid of scientific sense. The same fate as “beauty” was shared by such concepts as “form”, “composition”, “harmony”, etc. In Richards’ view no qualities “outside the mind" correspond to these concepts.

p Richards holds that not only utterances about art (about the “beautiful”), but also the utterances of art itself have an emotive character, expressing emotions as attitudes. In his Principles of Literary Criticism he writes that works of art (A) produce an effect (B) on us with a feature (C). But we usually speak as if we perceived A with a quality C (“ beautiful”). We project the effects of works of art onto qualities which exist outside the mind. In Richards’ opinion such projection is a mystical view.

p Richards’ emotivist position is that of negation of the objective character of aesthetic value, the position of relativism and subjectivism.

p Richards tried to overcome subjectivism and relativism, making, to quote Black, “heroic efforts" to provide a naturalistic criterion of evaluation. Richards’ “naturalism” is to a considerable extent due to the influence of orthodox British 44 positivism (Bentham), Dewey’s pragmatic theory of value and Perry’s theory of value, which took as its basis the concept of “interest”.

p A key notion in Richards’ naturalistic theory of value is the concept of “impulse”, which is extremely close in its content to that of need. Impulse designates both physiological need (“nerve impulse”) and psychological need. In the latter instance, when an impulse is conscious, it is a “desire”, “ preference”, “interests”. An unconscious or subconscious impulse is appetence. When an impulse displays a tendency for action, for behaviour of a certain type, it is characterized as an “attitude”. Moreover, this tendency for action is more often concealed and imagined than overt. Value (or good) is in every case connected with the satisfaction of an impulse.

p Richards is not always consistent in his definition of what is good. He sometimes regards as good objects (the natural properties of objects) which satisfy impulses, and in this case he recognizes the objective character of value as a natural property. In other cases he regards as good a psychological process, the properties of the impulses themselves, distinguishing the more and the less important impulses. In this second case Richards’ theory gets into a vicious circle. What is of value is experience highly valued by a good critic. A good critic is someone who is able to appreciate valuable experience. To get out of this circle he “secretly”, in Bilsky’s expression, introduces absolute value, namely a quantitative factor. The value of experience is reckoned by the quantity of impulses which it satisfies. A difficulty arises when impulses are equal in their quantity, and in such cases experts can clearly turn only to their intuition. Thus Richards arrives at the very intuitivism against which he is arguing.  [44•1 

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p How is one experience to be distinguished from another from the viewpoint of value? How, for example, does aesthetic experience differ from non-aesthetic? Richards replies that experiences differ from one another in their quantity and quality of impulses. In what, then, does the particular nature of aesthetic experience consist? Richards refused to recognize specific aesthetic qualities “outside the mind”. But perhaps there is such a thing as specific spiritual aesthetic experience? The whole of modern aesthetics, says Richards, proceeds from this admission, but he regards this very admission as mistaken, arguing that the view of art as a refuge of aesthetics obstructs the study of its value. Experiences of beauty and value are in principle closely similar to many other experiences; they can be seen merely as a further development, a finer organization of ordinary experiences (3, 16). Their value is particularly high because many impulses are satisfied in them, impulses which, moreover, are not specific aesthetic impulses, and which are also operative in non-artistic activity. Thus, his sound tendency not to isolate aesthetic experience and to see its connection with other manifestations of man’s psychic life led Richards to deny the specifics of aesthetic value. This was a shortcoming inherent both in the old utilitarianism and in the new, both in its pragmatic and neo-positivist varieties.

p Richards maintained that not only the direct satisfaction of impulses may be of value, but also their actual exercise, which leads to an elimination of the conflict between impulses: either by means of the “victory” of one of the impulses, or of the harmonization of impulses, bringing the soul into a state of equanimity, which increases its ability to satisfy impulses in the future. The more impulses (positive interests) there are, ordered and free, and the less they are suppressed, the more valuable such experience is for man. The harmonic variety of impulses, their intensity-albeit calculated, and their freedom-albeit illusory, are not exclusive 46 properties of aesthetic experience, but they are more inherent in the latter than in other forms of experience.

p A work of art orders impulses which are unordered in most minds and interfere and conflict with one another. Poetic experience restores the violated balance of interests. Art organizes impulses by two means: exclusion and inclusion, synthesis and elimination. Mental activity is usually based on both procedures, but it is still possible to distinguish experiences which are stable and ordered, thanks either to the narrowing, or extension of reactions. In some poetic works we can see a number of parallel impulses, while in others we see heterogeneous and even contradictory impulses. The second instance is more valuable since systematization has a more stable character. Proceeding from these views Richards accords high value to tragedy, as well as the Aristotelian analysis of tragedy with its concept of catharsis. Richards also explains impersonality, in connection with this property of the aesthetic experience, as a characteristic of this experience. It is manifested in our reacting not in the narrow channel of our personal interest (a single impulse), but through the channels of many, simultaneously active interests (impulses), which become, as it were, disinterested. At the expression level this property corresponds to the fact that the language of most sublime poetry is often extremely abstract (7, 99).

p The systematization of impulses influences the future potential to satisfy impulses. Literature and art are the main means of propagating such influences. Insofar as the impulses which are satisfied by art are not specifically aesthetic, but also enter into non-artistic activity, this influence effects the reader and viewer just as it does the artist. Thus, on the one hand, the value of experience consists in actual, immediate particulars of reactions and attitudes. On the other hand, in noting the potential of art to influence the future satisfaction of impulses, and regarding this as a great merit of art, Richards opposes his position to the conception which merely emphasizes the role of “high moments”, “the quality of the momentary consciousness" as valuable factors of communication with art.

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p Emotions and reactions of pleasure and displeasure, are indicators of impulse satisfaction and of the value of experience. In his explanation of emotions Richards clearly upholds James-Lange theory of emotions. Emotions are primarily signs of attitudes, and they owe their prominent role in the theory of art to this circumstance. Emotions have “a cognitive aspect”. Emotional reactions underlie “immediate judgments" in aesthetic appreciation or, in other words, underlie intuition. Emotions tell us whether impulses have been satisfied or not, and give us information about attitudes and, indirectly, about the outside world (3, 98-99, 132). In his work Coleridge on Imagination Richards formulates this more precisely: “The patterns of our thoughts represent, in various ways, the world we live in. The patterns of our feelings represent only a few special forms of our commerce with it" (6, 89).

p Emotions, as we have said, are primarily signs of attitudes. An attitude is a readiness for action which takes the place of actual behaviour in the absence of the corresponding situation. It is the essential peculiarity of poetry and all the arts that they lack the full appropriate situation (4, 29). Attitudes organize a number of different reactions into a unit, and, moreover, not in actual behaviour but “covertly”, in the imagination. Perception of a work of art is similar to learning a game, in that we organize our reactions more and more effectively. And just as intellectual problems are more economically, swiftly and efficiently resolved in the mind, on paper than in actual behaviour so are emotional problems resolved and impulses ordered more “economically” in the imagination with the aid of art. Aesthetic experience-the formation and signalling of attitudes and emotions-is achieved precisely by means of the emotive use of language (of words in poetry, and of signs in general in art) we were discussing in the previous section.

The analysis of the value of art from the point of view of its psychological and biological effect on man is extremely important. And here Richards’ idea of the harmonizing role of art, of the generalization of emotions, of art as an orientation towards future behaviour is strictly scientific. There is 48 an unmistakable similarity between these ideas and many of the views advanced by Lev Vygotsky in his book The Psychology ot Art, written between 1914 and 1922. However, whereas Vygotsky clearly understood that art can be made into the object of scientific study only when it is considered as one of the vital functions of society in its inalienable connection with all the other spheres of the life of society and in its historical conventions, Richards the neo-positivist did not go further than a naturalist theory of the value of art. In criticizing Freud (namely, his assertion that man stands face to face with reality of nature) Vygotsky wrote in The Psychology oi Art that there is also a social milieu between man and the world, which refracts and directs any stimuli acting directly on man and any reaction of man to the outside. Richards the “naturalist” failed to understand the social nature of the value of art. He fought against the conception of Absolute Values and turned for an explanation of the value of art to “impulses”, but, as Black has aptly observed, “ Richards was fighting one mythology by propagating another".

p Western authors accord Richards an important place in the development of semantic aesthetics, giving in general a high evaluation of his activity. Hotopf, the author of a large monograph on Richards, calls him “an important figure in the intellectual history of our times”. Th. C. Pollock, who took part in the 2nd Congress on General Semantics, maintains that there was no other writer of his generation who did as much to stimulate interest in the basic problems of semantic and literary theory. Tracing the intellectual sources of the semantic theories of art Marx Rieser names Richards alongside Peirce, Cassirer, Whitehead and others. Charles Morris described Richards’ activity “on the semiotical approach to poetry" (or to aesthetics in general) as “pioneer work”, pointing out that it is still of great importance.

p For all the hyperbole of such evaluations the fact remains that Richards’ ideas had great influence on modern aesthetics, particularly of the semantic trend. There can be no 49 doubt that all the leading representatives of semantic aesthetics-Morris, Langer, Heyl and others-felt and feel the influence of his theories. As we have noted above, his theories, and in particular his methods of a semanticolinguistic analysis of text and his theory of interpretation had a considerable influence on the formation of the so-called “analytical” aesthetics.

p All students of the “new criticism"—one of the most active directions in English and American literary studies, as well as the actual members of the school point out that Richards’ ideas played a considerable part in the emergence and development of this tendency, typical of modernist aesthetics as a whole. The new criticism is a strictly formalist tendency, which regards the work of art as an autonomous, closed structure. The new critics exaggerate the role of form at the expense of content, proclaiming the independent role of “pure form" and working out a theory of the aesthetics of abstractionism. This formalist exaggeration in the new criticism was not of course accidental, and was accompanied by the anti-democratic, anti-liberal position they took in the literary struggle raging in the USA. The new critics’ apologia of “pure form" and “pure art" was combined from their very first statements with venomous attacks on Marxist criticism and on what they dubbed “propagandist art”. The hostility of the new critics to progressive art could not fail to influence their general estimation of Richards’ work. After all, it was precisely from him (and T. S. Eliot) that the new critics took the idea of the “autotelic” character of poetry, that develops out of itself and has no aim outside itself, and such formalist methods of interpreting the text as the explanation of “symbols” and “close reading”. The new criticism was in particular characterized by its raising of “ambiguity”, polysemanticity to the status of the supreme virtue of poetry, in consequence of which objective “denotation” is masked by subjective “connotation” and the literary work divorced from reality. This methodology undertakes to defend all that is suggested, subconscious and obscure, in contrast to the logical and clearly and precisely expressed. In other words it is the methodology of modernism.

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p In Marxist literature criticism of Richards’ aesthetics follows the line of a general differentiation of the total inacceptability of his conceptions and a revelation of the true significance of the problems he examines (see 11). Thus, Robert Weimann, a leading critic from the GDR, points out in his book The “New Criticism" and the Development oi Bourgeois Literary Studies (1962) that Richards’ works Principles ot Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism are important works in the theory of literature and that Richards’ aesthetics needs a circumstantial critical analysis with the help of Marxist psychology, ethics and theory of knowledge (19).

While noting the positive aspects of Richards’ aesthetic work it should be stressed that the anti-scientific methodology of neo-positivism prevented the English aesthetician from reaching a correct solution of the problems he tackled. Nominalism, behaviourist tendencies and naturalism in his interpretation of process of communication, an underestimation of the cognitive factor in art, emotivist and naturalist conceptions of value in art-such was the price this talented critic and aesthetician paid for his adherence to the philosophy of semantic idealism.