183

p The majority of commentators note that the concept of the interpretant for the American semioticist is far from clear. One of Peirce’s most important statements provides an “extensive” definition of the interpretant as “significate effect of sign”, an effect expressed in thought, action or experience, and feeling (1, 8. 332). “The first proper significate effect of. a sign is a feeling 184 produced by it" (1, 5. 475). Peirce calls this type of “significate effect" of the sign its “emotional interpretant”, which is sometimes the only result produced by the sign. The latter is only attested when the “idea” expressed (or conveyed) by the sign is itself a feeling. “Thus, the performance of a piece of concerted music is a sign. It conveys, and is intended to convey, the composer’s musical ideas; but these usually consist merely in a series of feelings" (1, 5. 475). We noted above that Peirce gives the name expressiveness to the ability of signs which possess aesthetic value to evoke the corresponding feeling. In Peirce’s view, to be an expressive sign is clearly tantamount to having an emotional interpretant of an aesthetic nature. Of the signs it is precisely icon which represents feeling (1, 4. 544). An icon substitutes for qualities of an object, including aesthetic qualities, and in consequence a similar emotion arises (1, 5. 308). An emotional interpretant is the direct result of the action of a sign, which prompts Peirce to give it a different name: “immediate interpretant" (1, 4. 536).   [184•1  But “the only way of directly communicating an idea is by means of an icon; and every indirect method of communicating an jdea must depend for its establishment upon the use of an icon" (1, 2. 278). Thus, in Peirce’s semiotics the emotional interpretant is inherent in icons. From what has been said we can conclude that, according to Peirce, icons in art possess expressiveness, i.e. evoke an aesthetic emotion in the interpreter, or feeling of beauty.

p Is it only the emotional interpretant, we might ask, which is inherent in signs used by art? Peirce does not give a straight answer with respect to art. But he argues that other “significate effects" may also come about on the basis of an emotional interpretant (i.e. mediated by it). In his statement quoted above Peirce reduces these effects briefly to “thought” and “action” (1, 8. 332), to which “logical” and “energetic” interpretants correspond (1, 5. 475-76). When the “ideas” expressed and conveyed by a work of art cannot be reduced to 185 a mere “series of feelings" (1, 5. 475), but are thoughts, the interpretant becomes “logical”. This means that the “effect” is expressed in the form of thought, of an idea, the intellectual content of the mind. But since “all thought. . . must necessarily be in signs" (1, 5. 251, 253), the interpretation of signs is their extrapolation into a different system of signs. With application to art this can mean (and we are talking now of the logical, and not the emotional, interpretant of the signs of art!) a translation of poetic content into the sign system of our usual language (e.g., into the language of art criticism) or into the language of other arts (Peirce himself did not specially investigate the question of the translation of the signs of art into the language of other arts). Acting via the emotions art also influences the actions and behaviour of people (“energetic interpretant”). It must be emphasised that, according to Peirce, art in every instance directly evokes an aesthetic emotion.

p The characteristics of the emotional interpretant have shown that the presence of an icon, whose basis is form, is a sine qua non for the communication of emotion. But then the actual sentiment evoked by a musical piece Peirce views as an icon, reproducing what the composer had in his own mind (2. 391). It follows from this that feeling has form too, and iconic structure. An icon representing external appearance is perhaps enabled to express sentiment by being endowed with an adequate, or similar, form. The posing of this question and its resolution are implicit in the essence of Peirce’s views, but they were not given direct expression by him. Subsequently Susanne Langer attempted to resolve this problem.

p Peirce holds that “every emotion has a subject" (1, 5. 292). The feeling of beauty either comes about as the predicate of certain objects (“not-I”), or is determined by previous cognitions coming about on the basis of a set of other impressions (1, 5. 291). It is characteristic in this process that emotions occur when our attention is arrested on complex and incomprehensible circumstances. Fear arises when we are unable to foresee our fate. The indescribable, inexpressible and incomprehensible usually evoke an emotion, and a scientific explanation is the surest way to calm it. Emotion, including that 186 of the aesthetic variety, is always a less complex predicate than the predicate which it substitutes or the impressions which evoke it. Hence Peirce states that in a sense emotion fulfils the function of a “hypothesis”, since something simpler takes the place of something complex. Emotion is thus also knowledge, but of a very narrow character (1, 5. 292).  [186•1 

p The feeling of beauty, analysed as an “element of cognition”, is placed in dependence on the cognition of those “ logical" properties of beautiful objects which characterize “ kalos" such as harmony, unity of parts in the whole, etc. In this the aesthetic feeling acts as a criterion or “indicator” of true synthesis. The reason is not infallible and needs the help of aesthetics (1, 2. 197). Aesthetic feeling can indicate whether or not we have perceived the corresponding effect of a sign, “although the foundation of the truth in this is frequently very slight" (1, 5. 475). Sometimes aesthetic emotion simply emerges on contemplation of “scientific beauty and truth" (1, 1. 171). Thus, the occurrence of aesthetic feeling is an indicator of the truth of a work of art in the sense of the word “truth” accorded it by Peirce when he talks of “true poetry”. Conversely, bad poetry is false, in the sense that it does not evoke an aesthetic emotion or at any rate does not evoke a proper equivalent emotion.

p But what are we to understand by a proper emotion? Aesthetic value, according to Peirce, is universal. This means that in principle it can evoke an aesthetic emotion in everyone. But this is only “in principle”. In fact this requires a number of separate conditions. Not actually denying that aesthetic emotion is pleasant, Peirce connects its emergence with, above all, an aesthetic ideal, to which beauty must correspond. At the psychological level the ideal should be the habit of feeling, and this habit has grown under the influence and in the process of self-criticism and hetero-criticism (1, 1. 574). The concept of “habit” in general occupies a prominent place in Peirce’s philosophy. He regards habit 187 as “the essence of the logical interpretant" (1, 5. 486). Placing aesthetic emotion in dependence on an ideal, i.e. on the habit of feeling, Peirce sees, by the same token, the essence of the emotional interpretant in habit.

p The dependence of aesthetic emotion on an aesthetic ideal, an active role in whose formation is played by reason, makes it more than a mere phenomenon of feeling, rather a “sort of intellectual sympathy, a sense that here is a Feeling that one can comprehend, a reasonable Feeling" (1, 5. 113). This feature of aesthetic emotion can be seen in its generalized character. The generalization of sentiment functions in different ways. One of the forms of the generalization of sentiment, and insofar the regenerative metamorphosis of sentiment, is poetry (1,1. 676).

p We can conclude our description of Peirce’s semiotic theory of art at this point. It would be no exaggeration to state that Peirce identified all the basic problems of the semiotic theory of art, which are being developed in pace with advances in the theory and its enrichment with new data. To sum up briefly, these problems can be reduced to the following: art as a special type of communication through signs, the role and place of the icon in art, the connection between the signs of art and aesthetic value, semiotics and the problem of representation and expressiveness in art, the correlation of science and art, truth and beauty, the “emotional interpretant" of the signs of art, the structure and generalized character of aesthetic emotion.

Peirce not only posed these problems, he also resolved them on the basis of his philosophical and general aesthetic views. The following section will be devoted to the philosophical interpretation of the semiotic theory of art.