Hazard, Form and Value by Sister Mary Francis Slattery (review)

I78 Books postwar Abstract paintings were realized, basically speaking, as we would ‘shape’ our earthen tea bowls. Ours is a ‘belly-centered’, haptic, culture: a culture of touching, feeling and tasting. We were always closely wrapped up in Nature-‘closed in’-where sky and Earth were One. Things were always close up and we felt rather than saw. We felt, tasted, ate and knew. We hardly ‘saw out to distances’, except in fantasy. We rather ‘listened and felt into distances’. Things solid were never singleshaped ; they were always shifting from form to form in a continual transformation. The Here, the Now, the This, only mattered and so it is even today. Hazard, Form and Value. Sister Mary Francis Slattery. Wayne State Univ. Press, Detroit, 1971. 128 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by: James A. Coldman’ The purpose of this essay in the realm of general aesthetics is to indicate the manner in which value depends upon form and form upon hazard. Introduced is the term affective hazard. Hazard, as used here, indicates the ‘chances against the occurrence of a relation’s being glimpsed’. The delight or ‘excitement’ at this perception is termed affeclive. Form is a totality that is ordered and is distinguished from matter. Matter is substance, form is essence. Unity and totality are attributes of form. Complexity, although sometimes disguised as simplicity, is likely to be present. Consequently, the use of the term organic is understandable, although an artistic form manifestly is not an organism. Form is said to be organic, because, as with a living organism , it appears to be effectually integrated. Value is the degree of satisfaction attained in insuring to a thing its own virtue. Value originates from the consciousness of the need for this fulfilment and is thus dependent on the system. ‘The particular condition that makes a form valuable in itself is, we say, aesthetic.’ Throughout the discussion there is emphasis on the centrality of the mind that perceives, relates and delights. Although some things are not related, they are relatable nonetheless, if certain hazards are overcome. It is the mind that ‘actualizes the relationship’. The relationship is, in the mind, between mental images of relatable things. An ‘idea in itself is a form’. The mind experiences delight and excitement in apprehending a discovered relatedness where ostensibly there is unrelatedness. Hazard is the obstacle to be surmounted in order to recognize this relation and the greater the success in overcoming of the hazard, the greater is the excitement and delight. Yet, exception must be taken with the concluding proposition that ‘everything in the universe is related to every other thing with excitement that isdirectly proportional to the square of distance (obstacle, hazard) between them’. My demurral is not with the qualitative supposition but with the quantification of it. Admittedly this ‘law of affective hazard’ appears at almost the very conclusion of the essay and thus, the preceding concepts are not invalidated by this reasoning but neither do they provide any support for this attempt at a quasi-scientific, quasimathematical formulation. According to the author, the discovery of unity is an important aesthetic imperative. ‘The unity is what we are looking for; the diversity is what we encounter’, however says George Boas in The Limits of Reason (1961) in discussing attempts to ‘understand the world about us’. The simplification of experience allows science to posit general laws rather than present ‘a portrait of the world as we live in it. The latter is what we ask of literature and the other arts.’ But other writers, such as Jacob Bronowski, focus more on the similarities than on the differences. In Science and Hurnan Values (1956) he wrote: ‘The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations-more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the art of creation, in which an original thought is born and it is the same act in original science and original art.’ This fusion or overcoming of hazard is thus not exclusiveto the act of creation but ‘gives meaning to the act of appreciation’ as well. ‘The poem or the discovery exists...