The paper attempts to explain why Pepper’s Aesthetic Quality is not merely a major contextualistic theory of aesthetics but one of the very best aesthetics yet presented. He defines the aesthetic field as that of events with enhanced quality and offers a highly illuminating, fresh, and original account of aesthetic experience and how it is organized. He treats the main hindrances to the realization of quality, discusses novelty, conflict, and emotion as means of vivifying quality, and elucidates three modes of organization as ways of increasing the spread of quality. Organization for the contextualist is not primarily a way of producing harmony but rather is an ordering of conflicts. Both conflict and organization are indispensable for works vivid in quality and massive in spread and richness. So what is needed is a massive organization of conflicts. Finally, the contextualist's account of dramatic conflict affords the basis for a new and more promising theory of tragedy.

Working within the contextualistic framework, Pepper sets out to develop a somewhat new consistent, single-mindedly contextualistic aesthetics, perhaps more consistent than Dewey’s Art as Experience (he does not mention Edman’s work here); and this theory he regards as one of the best. But unlike most protagonists of a new view, he insists that it is not the only adequate aesthetics (p. 7).

It seems to me that in Aesthetic Quality he does indeed provide one of the very best aesthetic theories, offering a highly illuminating, fresh, and original account of aesthetic experience and how it is organized. For him "quality is the life of art, organization the body" (p. 114). By quality he has in mind immediately intuited experience, the feel of things--something on the order of Dewey’s had quality. Each event has its distinctive character marking it off as a whole. Although this quality is experienced as a totality, we may make distinctions within it, each distinction corresponding to a strand with its quality; and each event also has its relational structure or texture of strands, its organization of strands. We may either say that the overall quality of the texture is diffused into the strands or that the details are so fused into the perception of the whole that only subsequent analysis shows their number and diversity (p. 25).

Not merely works of art but everyday things may be vivid in quality: for instance, billowing clouds, geese flying in V-formation, ripples in a pond, the smell of new-mown hay or of vegetation after a rain, the taste of partially ripe persimmons or of wild dewberries, the deep croak of a bullfrog, the rasping sound of cicadas, a mocking bird’s song, the screeching of brakes, the feel of a kitten's fur, and so on indefinitely. Indeed, for the contextualist every event is intrinsically vivid in quality so that what has to be explained is not vivid quality but dullness, and Pepper insists that this is due to monotony and habit (p. 54). Accordingly, the contextualist may touch on the hindrances to realization of quality, point out the main devices for enhancing it, and sketch the ways of giving it depth and spread through organization. Pepper does this by making focal use of nine concepts: (1) practical activity, (2) conflict, (3) analysis, (4) regularity, (5) novelty, (6) emotion, (7) fusion, a concept to which we have already referred, (8) attention, and (9) interest.

It is commonly held that the first four of these--practical activity, conflict, analysis, and regularity--are the chief hindrances to the actualization of quality, and Croce, among others, suggests that for more quality we have only to eliminate these factors. Conflict frequently leads to practical activity intended to resolve it, and the practical is usually regarded as antithetical to the aesthetic. Regularity readily becomes monotonous, and many critics think of analysis as the bane of quality. And quite a case can be made for the deleterious effect of these factors. In a conflict situation leading to practical action there is no time to savor the quality. Regular habitual activity makes for efficient carrying out of vital goals but readily becomes mechanical and desensitizes us to quality. A person who is busy analyzing a poem or a song may indeed find it difficult or impossible at the moment to retain the intuition of quality. But, according to Pepper, "what kills beauty in big doses, is its greatest stimulant in moderation" (p. 52), and his detailed documentation of this thesis in Aesthetic Quality is one of his most original contributions.

For him novelty and conflict are the two chief ways of enhancing quality (p. 54); and he distinguishes three forms of novelty: (1) the uniqueness of every event (as in Bergson and James), (2) the naive novelty that precedes habit and monotony and affords sophisticated adults a freshness akin to children's way of facing things, and (3) the intrusive novelty which breaks up habits once they have set in (p. 61). The artist makes use of (2) and (3) to help us appreciate the uniqueness of events and freshen our experience of them. By accentuating some feature of an event or by breaking up the fringes of a habit pattern or placing it in a different context, we become alive to the quality of the pattern. What the artist does with great skill is analogous to our homely devices of changing the pictures on the wall or rearranging the living room furniture: in each case we come to take in the quality of what is before us instead of simply taking it for granted.

Intrusive novelty grades into conflict so that the latter is an extreme case of the former, but an extreme so great that it normally turns into urgent practical action (p. 72). Accordingly, to intensify quality most effectively the artist has both the task of setting up conflicts and controlling them so that the quality they generate is not drained off in practical activity. Conflicts are readily developed by placing obstacles in the way of drives or ranging purposes against purposes; and for Pepper the optimal aesthetic material seems to be "a rich, resourceful, and strong personality stirred by a powerful drive to some end, in the way of the attainment of which resistant and stinging obstacles are placed" (pp. 74-75).

Dramatic conflict in plays and novels fits this format beautifully, but drives can also be set up and blocked in each of the arts to enhance quality. Emotion is generated by blocking a powerful purposive drive, and Pepper speaks of it as the culmination of the factors which strip away habit and reveal the qualities of things (p. l09). Emotion for him is "the very essence of quality," indeed "the very quality of the event itself when this event is voluminous, intense, and highly fused (p. 89).

Setting up appropriate conflicts to generate quality, then, is something artists are adept at. But what can they do to prevent the quality from turning into practical moral action? Pepper answers that this may be done by means of aesthetic conventions (p. 75), through which the necessary "psychical distance" may be had. In the first place, the conflic-ting purposes are implanted not directly in our daily purposes but rather in our imagination (p. 76-77). For example, Shakespeare has Iago plant the seeds of jealousy and suspicion in Othello, not directly in us as appre-ciators. So it is not we who take practical measures about it. Further, such conventions of the theater as the elevated stage, the lighting and sound effects, the actors’ orientation toward the audience, sometimes poetic diction, the concentrated action, and the break between scenes are means by which the playwright and producer control the situation and put the spectator in place.

So much for practical activity and conflict and how they may be converted from enemies of the aesthetic to ways of intensifying quality. Let us now return to analysis and regularity and see what the contextualist can make of these two alleged enemies of the aesthetic. For Pepper both of them have a special relation to organization. As he puts it, "regularity is by and large the method of organization, and analysis is simply rendering explicit the elements of the method" (p. 53). And organization contributes momentously to the increase of quality by extending its spread and depth. Without organization we do not have massive beauty (p. 116).

Pepper finds the beginning of organization in emotion, noting that the principle of dominant emotion and that of natural emotional sequence provide distinctive ways of unifying a work of art. But for his principal discussion of the topic he distinguishes three modes of organization on the basis of whether or not the elements of organization are intrinsic to the work of art, or are drawn from the outside, or are part one and part the other (p. 116): 1. intrinsic (pattern and design), 2. extrinsic (funded social interests and schemes and scales), and 3. intrinsic-extrinsic (types).

With respect to the first mode, if the aesthetic purpose of organization is to increase the spread of quality, it is noteworthy that two of the reasons why quality does not have unlimited spread for human appreciation turn about human limits of attention and interest (pp. 168-169). In Pepper's terminology pattern is concerned with the limits of attention and design with the limits of interest (p. 169). Thus the intrinsic organization of a work of art aims at increasing the limits of attention and interest. Through grouping, pattern combats confusion whereas design attacks monotony through providing variety. Although, to be sure, attention does not perform all the work of organization, Pepper maintains that "it is the fundamental and never to be neglected determinant of organization" (p. 172). Indeed, the structure of attention is the structure of experience and is therefore crucial for the individuality of a texture. To realize the quality and individuality of a texture is to discriminate the structure of attention in it (p. 175).

Seeing how elements intrinsic to a work of art help organize it may seem clear, but how can elements outside it have anything to do with its organization? Pepper answers that although funded social interests and schemes and scales are extrinsic in that their origin is outside art and in that they are never completely incorporated in a work of art, the work may tap them and thus acquire for itself the organizing values of, for example, fashions, manners, laws, forms of government, customs, mores, and fundamental human drives. Artists are products of their society and likely to reflect in a high degree the social conditions of their period. If they cut themselves off from their social environment, their work is likely to become weak and imitative. But to the extent that the interests depicted in, say, a novel find their place in the total organization of interests, that larger organization mainly outside the book may nevertheless afford a powerful organizing agency for it.

Pepper illustrates with an example drawn from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, noting that when the author "tells us that George Osborne is an officer in the English army and describes his activities in that capacity, the organization obtained for the book is not simply that of the described and suggested events but rather that of the place of an officer in the English army, the relation of the army to other departments of government, and so on, as a result of which we are not surprised to find him in Belgium when Napoleon’s army is approaching, and we understand his death in terms of the plain duty of a soldier. The whole organization of the English army does not appear in the book, but the place of George Osborne in the organization does appear, and in that sense the organization of the army functions [extrinsically] as an organizing instrument in the book" (pp. 121-122). Perhaps I should add that this is another instance of practical interests being put to the service of quality, this time primarily for extending its spread.

Schemes as systematic summaries of discrimination and scales as selections of elements out of a scheme according to some rule constitute Pepper's second group of extrinsic organizing principles, and it is obvious that analysis is required to become aware of them. A scheme or scale provides a structural frame for elements of a work of art in such fashion that they are interconnected and placed with reference to one another. As opposed to the concrete social interests, schemes and scales are clear-cut and precise and their elements are abstract and relational; but their function as extrinsic organizing principles is much the same as that of the social interests.

Pepper's third mode of organizing principles, the extrinsic-intrinsic ones, are types. The type is extrinsic in that it has an existence independent of any particular work of art; intrinsic in that it appears fully, or almost fully, in the work. A type is a group of related strands appearing fully or almost fully in an individual object and repeatable in other individual objects. The organizing power of types, Pepper declares, "is more evident than that of any other mode of organization" (p. 145); and types bring into art the unique value of recognition (p. 147), the aesthetic significance of which has been appreciated since at least the time of Plato and Aristotle. So types provide both ready, secure organization and an effective means of enhancing quality.

For the contextualist, then, both conflict and organization are indispensable for the greatest works of beauty, ones vivid in quality and massive in spread and depth. As we have seen, in connection with conflict we think of quality, fusion, and emotion and in connection with organization, of relations, regularities, analysis, and discrimination. But for the contextualist, as Pepper's account makes clear, these items require radically different interpretations from the traditional ones. Fusion, for example, is not to be identified with confusion, and analysis is not to be thought of as breaking some whole down into ultimate timeless elements but rather as an affair of tracing strands into control textures. The allegedly simple qualities of traditional analysts, moreover, are not simple but fused qualities. But no one of the above concepts is in greater need of reinterpretation than is that of organization.

As the contextualist sees it, organization is not synonymous with harmony. It is not to be thought of as primarily a way of removing all dissonances and tensions or of resolving all conflicts, for this would organize at the price of losing internal vitality. Conflict is too important as a generator of vivid quality simply to be eliminated. Controlled yes, but eliminated no! The ideal organization, accordingly, is one which balances instead of doing away with conflicts. It is an organization of conflicts (p. 116), an ordering which holds in a unified structure an extensive body of vivid, intense qualities and hence of conflicts.

Perhaps a word should be added on the contextualistic theory of criticism. It holds that the primary aesthetic judgment is, "This is a texture vivid in quality" (p. 221). The more vivid the quality and the richer and more extensive its spread, the greater its aesthetic value. The contextualist, of course, denies that the highest praise for a work of art is that it is pleasing.

In conclusion, in this paper I have tried to explain why Pepper’s Aesthetic Quality is not merely a major contextualistic theory of aesthetics but one of the very best aesthetics yet presented. He defines the aesthetic field as that of events with enhanced quality and offers a highly illuminating, fresh, and original account of aesthetic experience and how it is organized. Organization for the contextualist is not primarily a way of producing harmony but rather is an ordering of conflicts, and for works of great beauty we need a massive organization of conflicts. Finally, the contextualist’s account of dramatic conflict affords the basis for a new and more promising theory of tragedy.

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