Craft and Consciousness: Occupational Techniques and the Development of World Images by Joseph Bensman, Robert Lilienfeld (review)

248 Books skiing, motoring and other forms of ‘navigation’ in big cities and across the moorlands of Scotland. She reports in brief form many serious studies of perception and behaviour in the ‘field’. The book calls upon readers for a serious use of their intelligence and of their capacity to re-think many old problems, such as the cause of the apparent difference in the size of the Moon on the horizon and at zenith and the explanation of the ‘electric’ brae phenomenon, in which going down appears to be up and going up appears to be down. Furthermore, it presents many new and fascinating problems and researches , such as those relating to perception and communication under water and the awareness and influence of danger and the assignment of blame for accidents. All topics are documented by numerous references and there is a liberal supply of diagrams and illustrations. Many of the references are particularly valuable because they would be unknown even to up-to-date psychologists. The author says that the references cited are only the tip of an iceberg. It is perhaps permissible to add that her Classical education, in her pre-psychological days, has not enabled her to avoid some linguistic and perhaps other snares. For example: ‘Commercial divers are usually riskier than sports divers’ (p. 151). Do divers use ‘risky’in two senses? While instincts, drives and urges are disallowed as means of psychological explanation (p. 159), it is nevertheless permissible to make statements such as the following: ‘Normally the brain discounts the vestibular sensations of acceleration that result from voluntary head movements, provided the body is stationary or moving slowly’ (p. 141). No doubt the brain is a very shrewd judge in such matters. A passage on page 68 may give some readers food for thought-or perhaps it will only make their brains hesitate -‘Stob Binean and Ben More (Perthshire) appear to be about 200 m higher than each other, when both are about 1,170m and 2 km apart’. Furthermore, ‘restricted vision, on the other hand, may cause worse performance than when blindfolded . . .’ (p. 105). Joking apart, however, 1 must say that I read the book with great pleasure and clapped my hands in applause. 1 feel sure that many another reader will do the same and 1 hope that it will have the wide circulation it deserves. Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Arts. Janet Wolff. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1975. 149 pp. f3.95. Reviewed by Kim James* ‘It is not easy to arrive at a conception of a whole which is constructed from parts belonging to different dimensions. And not only nature, but also art, her transformed image, is such a whole’. Paul Klee went on to direct attention to the difficulties that our linear sequential language places in the way of an ability to convey our multi-modal experience . Wolff’s book is an attempt to elaborate a philosophical basis that would permit a more fruitful approach to the problem of art than has beenthe case so far. Her approach is through hermeneutic philosophy. Though she defines her field as the sociology of art, it is by no means restricted to the historico-social description that is most familiar to artists. For her an adequate sociology of art must make clear the social nature of art in terms of the expression in art of the total ideology or world-view, or aspects of the world-view, of the social group in which the art-form arises. This involves an understanding of the social origin of ideology itself ‘in language, interaction and learned interpretation of the world’. Whilst taking into account features of art that lie outside the purely aesthetic, consideration of the sociology of art must still maintain a central aesthetic perspective. A hermeneutic philosophy allows an examination of the role of art in which the observer can take his own historical condition into account whilst interpreting art forms from any culture. It permits the experiencing of parameters of *34 Marmona Road, London, S E.22, England. existence that the observer may not fully possess. AS described by Wolff, hermeneutics is a philosophy based upon a phenomenology of existence, but...