Psychical Distance
1
Running Head: PSYCHICAL DISTANCE
The Evolution of Psychical Distance as an Aesthetic Concept
Gerald C. Cupchik
University of Toronto
Abstract. The problem of psychical distance refers to the relationship that a person has with an
aesthetic object or work. Two basic traditions can be distinguished which have played a
meaningful role in describing the underlying processes. The British Empiricist and
Enlightenment traditions established the idea that the “real” objective properties of aesthetic
works engage viewers and evoke feelings of pleasure. The Romantic tradition placed a greater
emphasis on interpretive activity in recipients who “willingly suspend disbelief” and temporarily
enter the “fictive” worlds of poetry and drama. Writing in the early 20th century, Edward
Bullough produced the idea of “psychical distance” which combines both personal involvement
and an awareness that the object or event is a cultural artifact. As the 20th century unfolded, we
witness the death of the “aesthetic object” as such and the emergence of a view which
accommodated artists, aesthetic artifacts, and receivers as open-ended and interacting systems.
The complementary role of the realist and constructivist viewpoints is emphasized.
Keywords: creation, reception, cultural and aesthetic artifacts, aesthetic distance
Psychical Distance
2
INTRODUCTION
Cultural psychology is challenged to understand the complementary processes of creation
and reception, and the “aesthetic objects” or artifacts that link them. Seeing artifacts as “aesthetic
objects” requires a different attitude than is evident in everyday perception. Mundane perception
is action oriented and involves the identification of useful objects even when they are depicted
symbolically in artworks. In aesthetic perception, the sensory qualities of an object are valued in
and of themselves, and the two kinds of information, symbolic and sensory, can be viewed
relationally, expressively, and metaphorically. Our conception of creators and audiences who
stand in relation to these artifacts is also of necessity complex. People can be viewed as minds
engaged in an “effort after meaning” (Bartlett, 1932; see Rosa, 1996) and/or as bodies whose
perceptual mechanisms, viscera, and nervous systems are affected by the aesthetic object,
artifact, or event. Of course, both the object and the person exist against the dynamic background
of changing cultures and roles, one that was present in the context of creation and others that
shape the context of appreciation.
In a social sense, there are three possible relationships involving persons and creative
cultural artifacts. First, there is the relationship of the creator to the artifact. Second, there is the
relationship of the recipient or audience to this work, and third there is the potential for
communication between creators and recipients mediated by the artifacts. These relationships
have to do with the communication of ideas and feelings through creative works. Intimacy and
distance, which are important qualities of social relationships, also apply to aesthetic reactions.
Personal involvement has traditionally been characterized in terms of psychical distance.
Qualitatively, psychical distance reflects the non-utilitarian attitude that a person must adopt as a
Psychical Distance
3
precondition for an aesthetic episode to occur. Quantitatively, psychical distance reveals the
relative closeness that a person feels toward an aesthetic artifact or event as a consequence of
interacting with it.
The origins of the concept of psychical distance can be traced back at least to the 18th
century where the contrasting Lockean and Leibnitzian (Allport, 1955) traditions of Content and
Act psychology (Boring, 1950), respectively, affected aesthetic theory. British Empiricists, like
John Locke, favored a realist position according to which sense data convey the properties of
objects in the everyday world. Taste Theorists, such as Lord Shaftsbury, defined beauty as Unity
in Multiplicity, a formal property of artworks that could also be discerned through sensory input.
The Leibnitzian and Kantian approaches shaped the holisitic thinking of German Idealists like
Schilller (1795) for whom aesthetic perception represented a way of relating to things that
harmonized both thought and feeling, and involved the whole personality (see introduction to
Bullough, 1957). The German scholar August Wilhelm Schlegel and the English Romantic poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge also focused on individuals stressing
the willing suspension of
disbelief and acts of imagination in response to poetry and drama (Burwick, 1991). The main
goal of this paper is to show that the processes implied by aesthetic distance (a content oriented
concept) and willing suspension of disbelief (an act oriented concept) are complementary and,
when integrated, provide a comprehensive account of aesthetic engagement.
Psychical Distance
4
ART OBJECTS AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE
Philosophers working within the epistemological framework of British Empiricism
maintained that a proper aesthetic attitude was needed for the appreciation of art and literature
(see Fenner, 1996). Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713; actually the third Earl of Shaftesbury,
Anthony Ashley Cooper) introduced the concept of disinterestedness whereby the aesthetic
object is approached in and of itself and without regard for any practical purpose that it might
serve. This attitude was a precondition for appreciating the absolute properties that defined
aesthetic beauty, defined as Unity in Multiplicity. The Moral Sense, a taste (i.e., quality) faculty,
would then enable viewers to immediately discern beauty in the same direct way that physical
properties like color were perceived. Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) extended Shaftesbury’s
ideas from a Neo-Platonic to a relational realist viewpoint. While acknowledging that beauty
was a real property of objects that could be perceived either correctly or incorrectly, he
emphasized relations between the object and the perceiver. The locus of judgment was therefore
grounded in the observer whose “internal sense” faculty could discriminate “uniformity amidst
variety.” In addition to a disinterested attitude, the sense of taste was a function of a practiced
eye and therefore experience could facilitate aesthetic judgment.
The new aesthetics of the Enlightenment stressed manipulating an audience’s
imagination and emotions in contrast with “the rhetorical-allegorical style of the humanist and
baroque tradition” (Schneider, 1995, p. 82). This could be accomplished by selecting subject
matter that represented universally shared natural and social worlds and no assumptions are
made about the need for recipients to possess specialized knowledge in order to appreciate the
work. Images should be guided by strict mimesis, the controlled “imitation of nature” (Schneider,
Psychical Distance
5
1995). The goal of art was to create an illusionist style of representation in which the natural
world, governed by laws of causality, could be faithfully and immediately apprehended by the
senses in a single glance. This “visualist criterion” associated an objective representation of the
world with sight so that the aesthetic event, “as if it were the thing itself,” would link a person
with the familiar world (Schneider, 1995, p. 83). Addison (1762-1719) stressed the value of the
visual sense (and especially landscape painting) as a source of aesthetic pleasure both in terms of
direct sense impressions and subsequent recollections (Addison, 1963). French neoclassicism
emphasized the importance of the “three unities” of time, place, and action in determining
dramatic illusion and the evocative power of a play (Burwick, 1991). This rationalist attitude
applied to both painting and poetry, which already embodied a “painterly” sensuality and could
guide the person’s intuition toward insight.
Richard Payne Knight (1786), the late 18th century scholar, offered an associationist
account of illusion in theatre as a kind of passive response (see Burwick, 1991) in which the
audience responds “in sympathy with increasing emotional stimulation until the reason
surrenders to the force of the passions” (Burwick, 1991, p. 222).
Knight’s perspective
“substitutes associational response for aesthetic engagement” and consequently, “the mimetic
and reflexive excitement of the drama becomes virtually irrelevant” (Burwick, 1991, 207).
Audience members remain at a distance from the unfolding drama: “Fiction is known to be
fiction, even while it interests us most” (cited in Burwick, 1991, p. 207). Knight also analyzed
aesthetic reactions in terms of pleasure and pain responses to sensory stimulation. The example
given was of a person’s response to the vaulted roof of a Gothic cathedral that is supported by
slender columns. If the person “suspects” that the columns are not sufficient, then ideas of
Psychical Distance
6
“weakness and danger” may be experienced. This is an excellent example of how associations
can shape the experience of aesthetic events and is an application of British Empiricist ideas.
IMAGINATIVE MENTAL ACTIVITY AND AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
A Tale of Two Schlegels: Johann Elias and August Wilhelm
Johann Elias Schlegel (1719-1749)
Johann Elias Schlegel was a playwright involved in theatre management whose
experiences shaped his analysis of dramatic theory and aesthetics in general (Wilkinson, 1945).
Schlegel’s theorizing was always grounded in the facts of his own experience rather than in some
abstract model. He was seen as “kindly, yet slightly aloof, humane and tolerant, yet fastidiously
discriminating” (Wilkinson, 1945, p. 50), but he rebelled against the ideas of Gottsched, his
conservative and powerful professor in Leipzig. Rather than working from a priori rigid
principles, as Gottsched did, Schlegel favored an exploration of established great works of
literature to determine their underlying structural properties and effects.
He believed that the difference between reality and art was not governed by the choice of
subject matter (Wilkinson, 1945), nor was pleasure a function of subject matter because even
ugliness could be a topic for art. The treatment is what determines whether a work is original and
gives pleasure, which indeed is the most important function of art. Each art form has a distinctive
medium with which the artist works and one cannot reject a particular medium on the ground
that it does not exist in everyday life. Thus, one cannot reject verse as a medium in drama on the
premise that people don’t normally speak that way, and similarly one cannot reject sculpture for
not being colored. Aesthetic experience is shaped by order and not by the subject matter or the
medium as such. If the subject matter evokes excessively strong emotion that seizes the
Psychical Distance
7
imagination, then the hidden order cannot be discerned.
Johann Schlegel was against any conception of drama which emphasized its ability to
trick the spectator through the senses and emotion into believing that the event on the stage is
real. He held that we have an element of detachment but this can be understood as a reaction
against the use of “crude naturalism with intent to deceive” (Wilkinson, 1945, p. 78). Theatre
reflects the social realities and historical traditions of its audience but at the same time can
enhance social awareness. By selecting critical moments in life and expressing them in carefully
fashioned dialogue, the playwright exposes the hidden workings of a character’s mind. The
author can provide motives to account for actions as they unfold in a play to a greater degree
than is available in daily life. Probability must be available within the framework of the drama
itself because the unity of action is more important than the unities of time and place. In short, by
providing a meaningful context to account for action, the author brings coherence and
meaningfulness to the audience’s experience.
August Wilhelm Schlegel ( 1767-1845)
Following Kant’s influence, scholars in the Romantic tradition, such as August Wilhelm
Schlegel, grounded “aesthetic illusion in imagination rather than in emotion” (Burwick, 1991, p.
193). Writing in the early 19th century, Schlegel described the ways that illusion is shaped by
events on the theatrical stage. He countered the Neoclassical principle that powerful dramatic
illusion was created by the unity of time, place, and action, treating it as a “waking dream, to
which we voluntarily surrender ourselves” (cited in Burwick, 1991, p. 194). Schlegel proposed
the very modern idea that reality and illusion actually coexist. “The reality of the dramatic
dialogue is that the text is written; the illusion is that dramatic dialogue is spoken spontaneously”
Psychical Distance
8
(Burwick, 1991, p. 201). Illusion is sustained by the very knowledge of the artifice underlying its
seemingly spontaneous dialogue. The acceptance of a dramatic work as real is not determined by
“probability” but “depends on the appearance of truth to the senses” (cited in Burwick, 1991, p.
210). Even the impossible might be accepted “so long as the grounds for impossibility are left
out of the circle of our comprehension or are cleverly veiled from our attention” (p. 210). When
illusion overcomes the spectators, “they overlook the secondary matters, and forget the whole of
the remaining objects around them” (p. 210). Schlegel not only included audience participation
as an important aspect of theatre but added that their awareness of participating in sustaining an
illusion contributes to the overall aesthetic process. However, critics who are obsessed with the
realism of details suffer from a “prosaic disbelief” or “lack of faith” that disrupts engagement
and reveals a deficient imagination.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, critic and poet, extended Wilhelm Schlegel’s account of
aesthetic illusion, placing a greater emphasis on the role of will in adopting an aesthetic attitude.
He described aesthetic illusion as the product of a “willing suspension of disbelief for the
moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817/1983, cited in
Burwick, 1991, p. 221). Coleridge was also interested in the delusional states that result from
taking drugs like opium with which he himself experimented. His image of a person as “halfwaking, half-sleeping” in the aesthetic experience reflected this dual concern, but was endemic
to 18th century criticism and evident in the writing of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s
grandfather, among others.
Coleridge objected to mechanistic models proposed by associationists like Knight
Psychical Distance
9
because they treated the mind as passive. Instead, he emphasized the logic of the imagination
rather than the reception of sensation. Imagination provides a basis for the fluid continuity of
conscious experience. Henri Bergson (1920) later provided a comparable description of states of
“pure duration” in consciousness: “Pure duration is what the succession of our states of
consciousness becomes when our ego drifts through life and refrains from drawing a distinction
between the present state and previous states” (p. 75; translated from the French in Fraisse, 1963,
p. 70). Chiari (1992) interprets Bergson’s internal duration as “nothing less than the continuous
life of memory prolonging the past into the present, regardless of any awareness in the present of
a clear, ceaselessly growing image of the past” (Chiari, 1992, p. 256). Further, Fraisse (1963)
infers that, in the experience of internal duration, “our thoughts and even more our emotions fuse
together in perfect harmony” (p. 70). This subjective unity detaches experience from “the exact
stimuli corresponding to it” and a search for these stimuli would “destroy the state of fusion” (p.
70). In drawing a link between Coleridge and Bergson’s notion of the internal “duration,”
Haeger (1992) states that Coleridge argued “strenuously for a causal relationship between
thought and consciousness that derives the former from the latter” (p. 99). This bottom-up
model suggests that unified consciousness and not analytical thought is the ground and source of
aesthetic experience.
This juxtaposition of imagination versus thought was expressed in Coleridge’s
comparison of children and adults in their response to the familiar literary themes of artifice and
reality. Whereas children can readily suspend this distinction, adults are used to executing
comparative judgments. This makes it more difficult for them to use their imagination and accept
the fictive as “real” when reading a story, or a “representation” as the “transaction itself” when
Psychical Distance
10
viewing a play. Adult audience members experience an antagonism between what they know
(rational awareness that a play is a play) and what they feel (a sympathetic emotional response to
the dramatic action); the simultaneity of artifice and illusion (see Burwick, 1991, p. 197) to
which Wilhelm Schlegel alluded. Excessive rational analysis can therefore get in the way of
aesthetic absorption. It is for this reason that adults must learn to “willingly suspend disbelief”
and set aside comparative judgments as to whether or not events in a work correspond faithfully
to the everyday world.
The antipathy that Romantic scholars felt toward mimesis was reflected in Coleridge’s
treatment of the distinction between copy and imitation. While a “copy merely mirrors and
reproduces, an imitation reveals the conscious artistry involved” (Burwick, 1991, p. 209). The
copy is a mere replica of the real, reflecting the accidents of the moment. In imitation,
imagination creates an ideal, through a “combination of a certain degree of dissimilitude with a
certain degree of similitude” (cited in Burwick, 1991, p. 212). Thus, Shakespeare did not merely
copy a character, but rather developed a character by “imitating the psychological veracities
discovered through meditation” (Burwick, 1991, p. 211). Whereas a landscape painting might be
seen as a copy, stage scenery involves an “analogon of deception” (see Burwick, 1991, p. 209).
Proper aesthetic illusion implies that the spectator avoids the everyday tendency to judge and
compare, but instead accepts the selected elements present in imitation as facilitators of illusion.
Aesthetic pleasure for the spectator derives “from knowing that the scene represented was unreal
and merely an illusion” (cited in Burwick, 1991, p. 213). In this way, recognizing the difference
between similitude and dissimilitude, between reality and artifice, produces a sense of delight in
the spectator.
Psychical Distance
11
According to Burwick (1991), Coleridge’s “faith in the logical coherence of illusion” (p.
224) was a substitution for “the classical precepts of representative and probable” (p. 224)
addressed by Horace and Aristotle. The notion of being representative implies some kind of
typicality or familiarity of the poetic reference which makes it accessible to the reader. Too
strong a departure from the representative into excessive individualization and novelty makes the
poetic reference seem alien to the reader. In Coleridge’s analysis of poetic faith and the logic of
the imagination, “unwanted particularization disrupts the illusion of verisimilitude;..the copy
intrudes upon the imitation” (Burwick, 1991, p. 225). The ideal is to achieve a balance between
the generic and the individual. The generic “makes the character representative and symbolic,
therefore instructive” because it is relevant to all people. The individual, on the other hand,
“gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite and individual” (cited in
Burwick, 1991, p. 226). Achieving this balance is the goal of every poet, and part of suspending
personal judgment during aesthetic episodes involves having confidence in authorial judgment. It
is this confidence that fosters the “willing suspension of disbelief.” We experience aesthetic
pleasure when the improbable is willingly accepted as probable, and imitation offers us just the
right amount of “Difference” from reality.
In sum, Coleridge was against the naturalist and realist idea that the goal of stagecraft
was to create an external illusion that would both deceive and engage the spectator. Foakes
(1990) has underscored the idea that Coleridge transferred the illusion from the stage and its
scenery to the mind of the spectator. But Foakes added that audiences arrive at the theatre with
expectations derived from prior knowledge and accept certain conventions regarding their
relationship with the actors, the play, and so on. “The willing suspension of disbelief begins at
Psychical Distance
12
the box office” (Foakes, 1990, p. 227). Accordingly, dramatic illusion is
an activity of mind on the part of spectators, who, having willingly entered a
special place for play-acting in the acceptance of a range of possible rules and
conventions, yield for a limited time to an emotional and intellectual involvement
with what takes place on the stage, filling out in the imagination the inevitable
incompleteness and artifice of the representation, while always remaining aware
of the action as play and as distinct from life outside the theatre” (ibid, p. 228).
He notes that breaking the stage-illusion is one way of stimulating the audience. One can
therefore appreciate experimental theatre, happenings, and surround cinema as attempting to
break the bounds of convention and reawaken the senses and experiences of the spectators
(Casebier, 1971).
John Dewey’s (1859-1952) Modern Account of Aesthetic Experience
Dewey’s book Art as Experience
reaches back to Romanticism’s concern with
imagination and experience, and forward to a broader systemic treatment of complementary
processes in creation and reception that achieve a harmony between the structure of the person
(artist or viewer) and the work. His main contribution was to describe “experience” as a “whole”
that “carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency... ...Because of
continuous merging, there are no holes, mechanical junctions, and dead centers when we have an
experience” (p. 353). Both artists and recipients have common experiences as an aesthetic
episode unfolds. “Between the poles of aimlessness and mechanical efficiency there lies those
courses of action in which through successive deeds there runs a sense of growing meaning
conserved and accumulating toward an end that is felt as accomplishment of a process” (p. 355).
Psychical Distance
13
“The process continues until a mutual adaptation of the self and object emerges and that
particular experience comes to a close” (p. 359). From Dewey’s perspective, adaptation
represents a resolution of the problem of aesthetic distance, one in which intellectual and
emotional harmony bonds a person to the work, thereby establishing an optimal degree of
distance.
Dewey understood the active and complementary relations between “artistic” (i.e.,
“doing”) and “esthetic” (i.e., “undergoing”) processes that are grounded in experience. Doing
and perceiving are integrated one within the other. Because “An experience has pattern and
structure... The action and its consequences must be joined in perception. This relationship is
what gives meaning.” (p. 359). And further, “nothing takes root in mind when there is no balance
between doing and receiving” (p. 360). The very urge to paint completes an experience for the
artist: “Without external embodiment, an experience remains incomplete” (p. 365). Something
that is artistic also “presupposes a prior period of gestation in which doings and perceptions
projected in imagination interact and mutually modify one another” (p. 365). “The real work of
an artist is to build up an experience that is coherent in perception while moving with constant
change in its development” (p. 364). This led Dewey to conclude: “....because the artist is
controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already
done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly
as a scientific inquirer is absurd” (p. 360).
Reception, too, is not seen as a passive act. The distinction between recognition and
perception is fundamental. “Recognition is perception arrested before it has a chance to develop
freely” (p. 365).” “In recognition we fall back, as upon a stereotype, upon some previously
Psychical Distance
14
formed scheme” (p. 366). In arousing the “old,” it limits “consciousness of the experience that is
had” (p. 366). Reception “involves surrender” (p. 366) and “is a process consisting of a series of
responsive acts that accumulate toward objective fulfillment” (p. 365). In order “...to perceive, a
beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to
those which the original producer underwent.... Without an act of recreation the object is not
perceived as work of art” (p. 367). The observer must be like the artist who “selected, simplified,
clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest” and “go through these operations
according to his point of view and interest. In both, an act of abstraction, that is extraction of
what is significant, takes place. In both, there is comprehension in its literal signification - that
is, a gathering together of details and particularly physically scattered into an experienced
whole” (p. 367).
EDWARD BULLOUGH’S CONCEPT OF “PSYCHICAL DISTANCE”
Background
The modern treatment of aesthetic distance derives from Edward Bullough’s (1912)
seminal article titled “‘Psychical distance’ as a factor in art and an aesthetic principle.” His paper
offered a psychologically oriented integration of the Empiricist and Romantic intellectual
traditions. A cursory examination of his personal background accounts for this synthesizing
disposition. In a biographical preface to an edited collection of three papers by Bullough
(Bullough, 1957), Elizabeth Wilkinson tells us that he was a linguist, born in 1880 in Switzerland
of English and German parentage. The cultural diversity of his family background led to
expertise in modern European languages as well as Chinese. Wilkinson concluded that his
appreciation of diversity in cultural perspectives, both with reference to “the cultural backcloth
Psychical Distance
15
of a people” (p. xxv) as well as to works of art and literature, saved him “from the anachronistic
crudities, the local and historical parochialism, which are a blemish on much criticism and
aesthetics” (p. xxv). He was a founding member of the British Psychological Society, conducted
research on color appreciation at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratories, and was elected to
the Chair of Italian at Cambridge University a year before his untimely death in 1934.
Bullough was ahead of his time in his critical reflections on the experimental method and
was skeptical about using the stimulus-response approach for the study of aesthetic process.
Experiments in the isolated context of a laboratory can only provide some sense for the
“elements” of aesthetic experiences. As a foreshadowing of Heisenberg’s principle, Bullough
said “to be asked in the midst of an intense aesthetic impression ‘whether one likes it,’ is like a
somnabulist being called by name” (p. 108). The onus of interpretation always lies with the
experimenter who must appreciate the complementary relationship of the simple to the complex
and vice-versa. He was against the idea of reducing everything to a single principle to account
for aesthetic preferences. Like the Romantic philosophers, he argued that “The aesthetic ‘fact’ is
a distinctive mode of consciousness” (Bullough, 1957, p. xxvii). A more sophisticated model
was therefore needed to distinguish between beauty and agreeableness in the study of aesthetic
judgment and preference.
Wilkinson (1945) has suggested that the idea of aesthetic distance could be traced to
Schiller’s treatment of éloingment, the notion that poets should not write in the moment of strong
emotion but, rather, “in the tranquility of distancing recollection” (cited in the introduction to
Bullough, 1957, p. xxxv). Bullough (1912) appears to have transposed this concept from the
poetic to the aesthetic domain. His theorizing was very much in tune with other ideas expressed
Psychical Distance
16
in the early 20th century. In his very first publication titled “Mind and form,” Bullough (1904)
expressed the gestalt principle that art is formation (Gestaltung) which reveals an “inward life.”
The German Aktualgenese (perceptual mircogenesis) school similarly believed in the "intrinsic
structuredness of perception" and empirically examined how a coherent (i.e., meaningful) gestalt
emerges over time as perception progresses toward conception (see Flavell & Draguns, 1957).
Bullough’s work complements that of Lipps (1903-1906/1962) who formalized the
concept of Einfühlung, or empathy, which contrasted with Worringer’s (1905/1953) more
detached account of Abstraktion, and Wolfflin’s (1950/1915) description of the psychological
processes underlying the linear (e.g., Neoclassical) versus painterly (e.g., Baroque) dimension of
artistic style. The Russian Formalists (Shklovsky, 1917/1988) also argued early in the 20 th
century that perception in everyday life becomes automatic and habitual, and the goal of
aesthetic devices is to defamiliarize perception, to reawaken it through novelty. In all these
theories and approaches, formal properties of the stimulus, be it an artwork or a person’s
emotional experience, interact in an orderly way with a person’s experience, as if shaping or
giving form to it.
Processes Underlying “Psychical Distance”
Bullough’s distinctly phenomenological approach to experience treated the notion of
“psychical distance” as an “outlook,” a “metaphor,” a space that “lies between our own self and
such objects as are the sources or vehicles” (p. 89) shaping our “affections,” defined as bodily or
spiritual reactions involving sensation, perception, emotional states or ideas. In the intellectual
lineage of the British Empiricists, though more Continental in sensibilities, he saw distance as
transforming the experience, say of fog, “in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to
Psychical Distance
17
speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our
personal needs and ends” (p. 89); then, “by looking at it ‘objectively,’ as it has often been called,
by permitting only such reactions on our part as emphasise the ‘objective’ features of the
experience, and by interpreting even our ‘subjective’ affections not as modes of our being but
rather as characteristics of the phenomenon” (p. 89). Bullough’s own poetic account offered a
phenomenological description of fog as “the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of
transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird
grotesqueness;” and so on (p. 88). In other words, the qualities of our experience are projected
onto the stimulus, in this instance, the physical phenomenon of fog.
Bullough’s psychological analysis of the “working of Distance” acknowledged that it is
“not simple, but highly complex” (p. 89). It has both a “negative inhibitory aspect - the cutting
out of the practical side of things...- and a positive side - the elaboration of the experience on the
new basis...” (p. 89).
The “distanced view of things is not, and cannot be, our normal
outlook....and the sudden view of things from their reverse, usually unnoticed side, comes upon
us as a revelation, and such revelations are precisely those of Art” (pp. 89-90). As such, Distance
provides “the much needed criterion of the beautiful as distinct from the merely agreeable” (p.
90) and offers a unique synthesis of traditional opposites; subjectivity-objectivity, idealisticrealistic, sensual-spiritual, personal-impersonal, and individualistic-typical. Distance is therefore
“one of the essential characteristics of the ‘aesthetic consciousness’” (p. 90) and of “the
contemplation of the object” (p. 91).
Distance should not be understood to “imply an impersonal, purely intellectually
interested relation... On the contrary, it describes a personal relation, often highly emotionally
Psychical Distance
18
coloured, but of a peculiar character “(p. 91) because the practical side is filtered out. In his
model of the interaction between people and aesthetic works or events, Bullough made reference
to the “antinomy of Distance.” On the one hand, we need “some degree of predisposition” in
order to appreciate the “appeal” of a work. He articulated a principle of concordance to account
for variations in taste whereby the success and intensity of a work’s appeal stands “in direct
proportion to the completeness with which it corresponds with our intellectual and emotional
peculiarities and the idiosyncracies of our experience” (p. 92). As applied to appreciating drama,
the principle involves achieving the greatest concordance or “resemblance with his own
experience - provided that he succeeds in keeping the Distance between the action of the play
and his personal feelings” (p. 93). The same principle applies to the artist who “will prove
artistically most effective in the formulation of an intensely personal experience, but he can
formulate it artistically only on condition of a detachment from the experience qua personal” (p.
93). The central principle is therefore the same for both viewers and artists: the goal is maximal
involvement without excessive self-absorption; “utmost decrease of Distance without its
disappearance” (p. 94). This is Bullough’s main theoretical contribution to the study of aesthetic
distance.
The next modern innovation of Bullough was to treat distance as a matter of degrees
which is a function of “the nature of the object” but also varies in accordance with “the
individual’s capacity for maintaining a greater or lesser degree” (p. 94). Persons also differ in
their “habitual measure of Distance” and the same individual “differs in his ability to maintain it
in the face of different objects and of different arts” (p. 94). Bullough introduced the concept of a
Distance-limit, “that point at which Distance is lost and appreciation either disappears or changes
Psychical Distance
19
its character” (p. 95). Two extreme conditions can be observed in relation to Distance; underdistancing and over-distancing. Under-distancing occurs when the subject matter is “‘crudely
naturalistic,’ ‘harrowing,’ ‘repulsive in its realism’” and over-distancing takes place when the
style “produces the impression of improbability, artificiality, emptiness or absurdity” (p. 94).
The more evocative the theme (e.g., by referring to “organic affections” or “sexual
matters”), and the more mundane its reference (e.g., “to topical subjects occupying public
attention at the moment”), the higher the probability of pushing the bounds of aesthetic distance
and evoking everyday, practical, and personal responses. However, “even the most personal
affections, whether ideas, percepts or emotions, can be sufficiently distanced to be aesthetically
appreciable” (p. 95). Artists and authors are distinguished by their ability to achieve this
distance, rising above “practical and problematic import” and turning problems of the moment
into dramatically and humanly interesting situations. Indeed, the fact that the artist can achieve
greater aesthetic distance regarding feelings, sensations, and situations, compared to the average
person, “have often quite unjustly earned for him accusations of cynicism, sensualism,
morbidness or frivolity” (p. 95).
Distancing “the subject matter sufficiently to rise above its practical problematic import”
(p. 95) is a matter of the viewer’s perspective and can also be facilitated by the “manner of
presentment” or style of the work. The medium can affect psychical distance, sometimes
hindering and at other times facilitating it. Thus, the fact that “living human beings” are
“vehicles of dramatic art” is a problem faced by theatrical performances that encourage underdistancing. Dance is even a stronger “lure to under-distancing” because “its animal spirits are
frequently quite unrelieved by any glimmer of spirituality,” a very 19th century moral evaluation.
Psychical Distance
20
This viewpoint is further revealed in the comment that “The whole censorship problem..may be
said to hinge upon Distance; if every member of the public could be trusted to keep it, there
would be no sense whatever in the existence of a censor of plays” (p. 97). For sculpture, “the
human form in its full spatial materiality constitutes a similar threat to Distance” (pp. 97-98). An
“inability to realise the distinction between sculptural form and bodily shape” by people with
“Our northern habits of dress and ignorance of the human body have enormously increased the
difficulty of distancing Sculpture,..” (p. 98).
Distance is decreased to the extent that subject matter reminds us of our everyday lives.
Style serves to attenuate this rush toward familiarity and possible digression away from the work
into personal reminiscences. In idealistic Art, which commemorates “religious, royal or patriotic
functions,” artists can use exaggeration of size (i.e., monumentality), extraordinary attributes
(i.e., combinations of human and animal features), or conventionalized gestures and expressions
to distance figures in the subject matter of an artwork and make them stand out. Similarly, fairytales and tales of strange adventures were “invented to satisfy the craving of curiosity, the desire
for the marvellous,” but “by their mere eccentricity in regard to the normal facts of experience
they cannot have failed to arouse a strong feeling of distance” (p. 102).
With a sense for the immediacy of perceptual experience, Bullough observed: “The mere
realism of foreshortening and of the boldest vertical perspective may well have made the naive
Christian of the 16th century conscious of the Divine Presence - but for us it has become a work
of Art.” (p. 103). Similarly in tragedy, “it is largely the exceptional which produces the Distance
of tragedy: exceptional situations, exceptional characters, exceptional destinies and
conduct”.....“The exceptional element of the tragic figures -- ...is their consistency of direction, a
Psychical Distance
21
fervour of ideality, a persistence and driving-force which is far above the capacities of average
men” (p. 103). Because of Distance, “real tragedy..truly appreciated, is not sad....it is the homage
to the great and exceptional in the man who in a last effort of spiritual tension can rise to
confront blind, crowning Necessity even in his crushing defeat” (p. 104).
In drama, various features of stage-presentation enhance the sense of Distance: “the
general theatrical milieu, the shape and arrangement of the stage, the artificial lighting, the
costumes, mise-en-scene and make-up, even the language, especially verse” (p. 104). One factor
that creates Distance for sculpture is its lack of color, and interestingly, pedestals serve to place a
work in a space of its own and remove it from our own viewing space. Factors that contribute to
Distance in paintings are: the two-dimensionality and framing of pictures, the fact that “neither
their space (perspective and imaginary) nor their lighting coincides with our (actual) space or
light” (p. 105), the reduction in scale of represented objects, and most importantly, “unification
of presentment” effected by “such qualities as symmetry, opposition, proportion, balance,
rhythmical distribution of parts, light-arrangements, in fact all so-called ‘formal’ features,
‘composition’ in its widest sense” (p. 105). The “visibly intentional arrangement or unification,
must by the mere fact of its presence, enforce Distance, by distinguishing the object from the
confused, disjointed and scattered form of actual experience” (p. 106). Style therefore serves a
dual role. A high degree of finish reduces Distance and makes a work more accessible, while
salient stylistic qualities remove the work from the everyday world. Thus, when is comes to
themes of sensuality in Art, Distance serves to spiritualize, purify, and filter them.
In the end, Art serves to balance the interplay of the individual and the typical. While the
typical or abstract counteracts under-distancing by limiting concreteness in art and emphasizing
Psychical Distance
22
the generally social, the individual opposes over-distancing by bridging to the personal. Finally,
Bullough argued against the fundamental principle of hedonistic aesthetics that beauty is
pleasure. This is of course the main principle of experimental aesthetics, both classical (Fechner,
1876) and modern (Berlyne, 1971, 1974), which holds that moderate levels of complexity
produce the greatest pleasure, and thereby affirms the idea that the beautiful is also the
agreeable. Bullough argued, instead, that “the agreeable is non-distanced pleasure” (p. 108).
While “the agreeable is felt as an affection of our concrete, practical self” (p.108), the aesthetic
experience is focused on the object. It is psychical distance that also keeps us from simply
responding to the agreeableness of colours as “warm or cold, stimulating or soothing, heavy or
light.” Instead, colors are seen “a kind of personality; colours are energetic, lively, serious,
pensive, melancholic, ...etc” (p. 110). Bullough concluded that the aesthetic state has a two-fold
character “in which we know a thing not to exist, but accept its existence” (p. 113).
Distancing and Empathy
Bullough was clearly aware of the similarity between his notion of psychical distance and
the concept of Einfühlung as expressed by various writers of that era, Lipps, Witasek, and
Volkelt - when he said that Distance “is essential to the occurrence and working of ‘empathy” (p.
117). According to Lipps' (1903-06/1962) analysis of Einfühlung, or empathy, according to
which we spontaneously imitate an expressive person or object and the resulting kinaesthetic
senations produce an experience of the emotional state itself. We then attribute a comparable
emotional state to the stimulus through a process described as feeling into. Kreitler and Kreitler
(1972) pointed out that this requires “the active participation of the observer” who “must be
ready to experience” the emotion (p. 269). Thus, Lipps and Bullough fall into the long tradition
Psychical Distance
23
reaching back at least to Kant, Wilhelm Schlegel, and Coleridge which stresses the active role of
the observer in imaginatively constructing meaning.
A practical adaptation of the emphasis on interpretive activity was proposed by Frank
(1939) in his classic paper on “projective techniques.” He argued that a field (object or
experience) with relatively little structure provides the individual with an occasion to “project...
his way of seeing life, his meanings, significances, patterns, and especially his feelings” (p. 403).
The results are “constitutive as when the subject imposes a structure or form of configuration
(Gestalt) upon an amorphous, plastic, unstructured substance such as clay, finger paints...; or
they may be interpretive as when the subject tells what a stimulus-situation, like a picture, means
to him; or they may be cathartic as when the subject discharges affect or feeling upon the
stimulus-situation and finds an emotional release that is revealing of his affective reactions
toward the represented stimulus-situation...” (p. 403). But projection does not necessarily
produce objects of aesthetic value because the person lacks distance and does not meaningfully
contemplate the medium itself.
Philosophical Commentary and Criticisms of Bullough
Philosophers who study aesthetic attitude or experience all quote from Bullough’s (1912)
seminal work, but their citations focus on isolated concepts related to aesthetic distance. They
fail to grasp the fact that Bullough was offering a distinctively psychological theory of process
and not just the isolated concept of “psychical distance.” Fenner (1996) offers a modern
rendering of the related notion of aesthetic attitude and continues the disposition of empiricist
philosophers to distinguish between object and subject. Accordingly, “an aesthetic object is any
object, or event, that is the focus of an aesthetic experience” (p. 8). An aesthetic attitude is
Psychical Distance
24
intentionally adopted to “facilitate the spectator’s having of an aesthetic experience” (p. 4). Thus,
there are aesthetic properties in an object or event which, when discerned, give rise to an
aesthetic experience. Beardsley (1982) adopted five criteria to describe the aesthetic character
of experience, including object directness (attention to phenomenally given qualities and
relations in the object), felt freedom (regarding the results of the experience), detached affect (a
sense of emotional distance that enables spectators to rise above even negative emotions elicited
by a work), active discovery (exercising constructive mental activity), and wholeness (an
enhanced sense of personal integration resulting from the encounter).
The notion of aesthetic attitude has been subject to extensive debate among philosophers.
George Dickie (1964) argued that “the aesthetic attitude is a myth” and criticized the very words
used to describe its boundary conditions. The core of Dickie’s critique was aimed at the dual
concepts of distance and distinterest. “The question is: Are there actions denoted by the phrase
“to distance” or states of consciousness denoted by “being distanced”? His answer was grounded
in personal anecdote.
“When the curtain goes up, when we walk up to a painting, or when we look at a sunset
are we ever induced into a state of being distanced either by being struck by the beauty of
the object or by pulling off an act of distancing? I do not recall committing any such
special actions or of being induced into any special state, and I have no reason to suspect
that I am atypical in this respect” (p. 57).
In a further attempt to demonstrate that there is nothing distinctive about aesthetic
attention, Dickie described “a playwright watching a rehearsal or an out-of-town performance
Psychical Distance
25
with a view to rewriting the script” (p. 59) and stated:
“The playwright might enjoy or be bored by the performance as any spectator
might be. The playwright’s attention might even flag. In short, the kinds of things
which may happen to be playwright’s attention are no different from those that
may happen to an ordinary spectator, although the two may have quite different
motives and intentions” (p. 59).
This critique does not demonstrate an appreciation for the complex problems faced by
creative writers and the importance of shifting between engaged experience and detached
judgment while working through a piece.
Dickie concluded that being in an aesthetic attitude reduces to attending closely to a
work of art and this is all that is left “after the aesthetic attitude has been purged of distancing
and distinterested” (p. 64) as operative concepts. Adopting a dismissive attitude toward this
“equation,” which he deemed “vacuous,” Dickie concluded that “if the definition has no vices, it
seems to have no virtues either” (p. 64). An aesthetic attitude is viewed, “in more recent times”
(p. 65), as a way of lowering prejudices against artistic styles. While of no theoretical value for
aesthetics, it may have therefore practical application. This microscopic (i.e., analytical) analysis
of language might appear clever but without a meaningful and in-depth analysis of process it
appears somewhat trite and while Dickie may play formally with the “distance” and “disinterest”
concepts, his own appreciation of attentional processes lacks subtlety.
Dickie’s (1973) final critique of the idea treated aesthetic distance as a voluntary action
Psychical Distance
26
that is necessary for experiencing the state of mind termed aesthetic consciousness as if it were a
hypnotic state of mind. He argued that Bullough and others who adopted the aesthetic attitude
viewpoint were overly committed to the belief that people are generally concerned with “the
reality of things” (p. 18). Dickie simply does not believe that “being distanced,” and therefore
insulated from everyday practical concerns, is a necessary condition for aesthetic appreciation.
He believes that people don’t have to suspend practical activity because any “person who is in
his right mind” (p. 22) knows that watching a play in a theatre is not a practical activity.
Dickie’s analysis holds that devices which supposedly encourage aesthetic distance, such
as frames or raised stages, are signals which remind us of “conventions governing particular art
situations” rather than a “special psychological force which restrains spectators” (p. 25) or “a
special mental state so delicate that the least external pressure destroys it” (p. 27). We almost
always have “a background awareness of something external to a work” (p. 27) and neither it nor
“momentary distractions necessarily interfere with appreciation” (p. 27). If concerns with
external things distract a person from the work then that person is “out of relation” with the work
or not attending to it, and there is no need to speak of states of being “under-distanced.” In short,
“there is no necessary conflict between aesthetic appreciation and practical concerns” (p. 26) and
“no reason to think that a psychological force to restrain either action or thoughts occurs or is
required in the ordinary, non-desperate case of aesthetic experience “ (p. 28). This critique is
comparable to that offered by behavioral psychologists, such as Duffy (1941), for whom there is
no need to posit special states such as emotion; one model of behavior stressing situational or
conventional cues is sufficient. But it also draws our attention to the role of social conventions in
shaping attitudes toward aesthetic events.
Psychical Distance
27
Alan Casebier (1971) took on Dickie’s early challenge to the concept of distance, arguing
“that there are many more types of distance and non-distance cases than he considers” (p. 72).
He cited a number of examples that go beyond the narrow definition of distance as “focused
attention” and considered as “unwarranted” Dickie’s assumption that distance implies inattention
to the aesthetic object. With reference to Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane, he described an
historian who might focus his attention on its historical accuracy and be concerned with its
“external relations” to American history. A second example involved an hypothetical friend of
William Randolph Hearst who attends closely to the film but considers it to be an intentional
slur, as did many who saw it as a parody of the famous publisher’s life. A third viewer, a film
maker, might also consider practical external relations between the visual and auditory qualities
of the film and film-craft. Still a fourth observer might be drawn away from the film by a series
of remembrances triggered by the apparent similarity between her own marital situation and that
of Kane’s first wife. While this viewer might digress away from the film, the others are variously
involved in attending in conjunction with different forms of contextualizing the work. Thus, one
can be both personally involved in many different ways while maintaining a certain aesthetic
distance.
SYSTEMS THEORY AND THE DEATH OF THE AESTHETIC “OBJECT”
The Aesthetic Work as an “Object”
In the early part of the 20th century, New Criticism maintained that the properties and
structures of literary works could be formally and objectively analyzed in much the same way as
Psychical Distance
28
physical objects in daily life (e.g., T.S. Eliot, 1932/1975). By accomplishing this, literary
criticism could have the same standing as scientific investigation, an achievement indeed during
the era of the Vienna Circle and its positivist doctrine (Cupchik, & Leonard, 2001). The same
idea could also be found in formalist art criticism (e.g., Clement Greenberg, 1946/1957) which
sought to preserve the sanctity of modernist High Art in the face of an encroachment by Popular
(i.e., “Low”) Art and Mass Media (Benjamin, 1967). One might argue that the desire to preserve
the “aura” (Benjamin, 1967) of an original work of art extends, on the one hand, the cult of
genius begun in the Renaissance when artworks were first signed, and on the other hand, the
need to preserve the High Art “object” as a thing which could be privately owned or hung in a
public art gallery as an embodiment of cultural and financial value. Monroe Beardsley’s
(1958/1981) highly concrete description of a painting by Renoir (Three Bathers) as an aesthetic
object exemplifies this material perspective. He described it as an oil painting on canvas,
executed in 1892, containing some lovely flesh tones, that is located on a wall in New York’s
Metropolitan Museum, and is worth a great deal of money!
The Aesthetic Work as a System
The death of the aesthetic “object” as a thing, in the mid-20th century, can be traced in
part to information theory which dealt with the simultaneous presence of symbolic and purely
sensory qualities in visual, musical, and literary creative works. Moles (1958/1968) wanted to
“show the role that information theory plays in the mechanisms of perception and more
particularly of esthetic perception” (p. 4). His focus was on aesthetic messages, be they musical,
visual, or “polydimensional” (e.g., cinerama), and on the channel “which conveys a message
from a transmitter to a receiver” (p. 7). “A message is a finite, ordered set of elements of
Psychical Distance
29
perception drawn from a repertoire and assembled in a structure,” the elements of which “are
defined by the properties of the receiver” (p. 9). The information that is transmitted along these
channels is conceptualized as a quantity and can thereby be measured and related to human
perception and behavior.
My concern here is not with the application of an engineering metaphor to the world of
aesthetics which has received due criticism (Green & Courtis, 1966/1969). Rather, it is to show
the value of treating an artwork in an abstract manner as a multilayered event. Moles stated that
“Within the same material message, there is a superposition of several distinct sequences of
symbols. These symbols are made of the same elements grouped in different ways” (Moles,
1958/1968, p. 129). According to the information theoretic viewpoint, subject matter and style
emerge from the same basic material elements (e.g., dabs of color) organized in different ways.
At a basic level, relations among physical/sensory elements of the medium distributed in space
(e.g., dabs of color) convey aesthetic information that defines artistic style. These same
elementary properties also group to denote objects, people, settings, and events at the higher
symbolic level of semantic organization.
The multilayering concept in visual aesthetics can also be analyzed in terms of figure
and ground relations. The figural part of a work, its subject matter, conveys semantic
information, while the ground of the work encompasses its style and transmits syntactic
information (Berlyne, 1971, 1974).
A comparable view of the multileveled nature of the
aesthetic work was also expressed at a slightly later time period by Gestalt oriented theorists
(Arnheim, 1986; Kreitler & Kreitler, 1972). Arnheim (1986) underscored the application of
Gestalt laws to visual shapes possessing structural unity rather than those which are piecemeal or
Psychical Distance
30
atomistic. Accordingly, “...every Gestalt is generated by a two-way process operating downward
from the comprehensive structure of the whole and at the same time upward from the structures
of the constituent subwholes”
(p. 283). These "subwholes" or "isolable sections of
contexts".....“while clearly influenced by the context, retain considerable independence and by
their conspicuous presence enrich the structural interaction of which the perceiver becomes
aware” (p. 283). This implies that a meaningful hierarchy should be viewed in terms of "stepwise
dependencies" among segments. A “part is a Gestalt embedded in a larger context. A whole,
more often than not, is also a part of a larger context, which, however, is being ignored, with or
without justification” (p. 284). The central point here is that meaning is always dependent on
context both within and without the work and these contexts can be hierarchically structured
thereby setting the stage for depth as a fundamental property of aesthetic meaning and
involvement.
Kreitler and Kreitler (1972) applied a comparable Gestalt analysis “in clarifying what it is
in the contents and structure of works of art which makes it the carrier of such a multiplicity of
meanings and significations whose wholeness persists in the face of a variety of multileveled
integrations” (p. 294). Multileveledness is
…the capacity of a work of art to be grasped, elaborated, and experienced in
several systems of connects potential meanings, each of which allows a
meaningful, clear, comprehensive, and sometimes even autonomous organization
of all the major constituents of the work of art (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1972, p. 295).
However, regardless of whether the different levels complement one another, they
Psychical Distance
31
represent hierarchically more comprehensive meanings, remain autonomous, or
tend to fuse within the framework of a more general conception, each level
affords a view of the whole, without impairing the wholeness quality of the work
of art, produced by many or all of the levels together (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1972, p.
297).
Multileveledness “appears to be a joint product of characteristics in the work of art and of
certain modes of perception and elaboration on the part of the observer” (p. 297).
The Kreitlers (1972) provided a very interesting account of relations between
multileveledness and aesthetic distance looking back over the history of the concept. A
“disinterested” attitude, in Bullough’s sense, eliminates practical involvement with a play, for
example, and inhibits action that would normally be called for if the events were taking place in
real life rather than on the stage. This distancing also enhances attention to the work and
intensity of the internal experience elicited by the work. But a second viewpoint suggests that
“Apparent detachment is thus a side effect of an intense, multileveled personal involvement in
the work of art” (p. 282). Thus the complexity of experience evoked by identifying with different
characters and their potentially incompatible viewpoints is another inhibitor of action. According
to the first viewpoint, “distance is a factor external to experiencing and limits its
boundaries...without reducing its intensity and degree of personal involvement” (p. 282). The
second approach holds that “distance is a factor inherent in the very act of experiencing art fully
and uninhibitedly” (p. 282). It is closer to the Gestalt and constructivist emphasis on “the
structuring of experience, i.e., its chainlike and multileveled nature” (p. 283).
Psychical Distance
32
An important addition of later 20th century thought has to do with the social role of the
recipient or audience member. The Kreitlers argue that in its early stages “art seems to have been
much more closely bound up with action and participation” (pp. 283-284), while the emergence
of High Art was accompanied by social codes stressing behavioral inhibition. The Kreitlers
therefore tie aesthetic distance to inhibition and conclude that “the optimal degree of inhibition
can hardly be determined in isolation from the accepted social role of the observer” and “on the
complex system of interactions between observer, object, and situation” (p. 284).
This more complex appreciation of the structure of aesthetic works and events was also
central to an emerging movement in the humanities emphasizing the polyvalent (Schmidt, 1982),
indeterminate (Iser, 1971), and open-ended (Eco, 1989) quality of the interpretive process.
Reader-Response theorists (Holland, 1975; Fish, 1980) and constructivist (Schmidt, 1982)
scholars in the latter half of the 20th century stressed the idea that it is impossible to uncover
“true meaning” in literary and other aesthetic works. While aesthetic conventions may govern the
appreciation of stylistic structures, it is important to appreciate the subjective and interpretive
roles of individuals and communities. It is precisely this open-ended and multileveled nature of
art and literary works that invites deeper intellectual and emotional examination.
Gestalt Applications
Iser (1978) has proposed a theory of the reading process that takes into account Gestalt
principles, and demonstrates the value of a contextualizing and systemic approach. He described
the reader as synthesizing a text into an expanding network of connections that integrates
Psychical Distance
33
denoted references and contexts. In the act of reading, a person is constantly anticipating future
events in the text, while retrieving and modifying things from memory. The fragmented quality
of literary texts challenges the Gestalt principle of good continuation by making it difficult to
build consistency. These breaks in good continuation, which are embedded by the author in a
text through "fragmented, counterfactual, contrastive or telescoped sequence" (Iser, 1978, p.
186), mobilize interpretive activity. It is this "impeded” quality of a text that promotes the
production of diversified interpretive images.
Meaning emerges from the grouping of these interpretations with coherence serving as a
criterion for interrelating "the polyphonic harmony of the layered structure" (Iser, 1978, p. 175)
of the text. Relations between part and whole or "theme" and "field" is defined in terms of
"relevance" (Gurwitsch, 1964). Themes can be juxtaposed against different contexts or "fields"
in accordance with a sender or receiver's goals, needs, etc. The notion of thematic relevance is
particularly important to the problem of multilayered meaning because a change of context can
lead to the reconceptualization of meaning. There is a clear similarity here between Arnheim’s
gestalt analysis of part-whole relations in visual images and Iser’s account of the search for
coherence in “impeded” texts.
Summary and Implications
The aesthetic work is no longer conceived of in object terms in which the more or less
stable physical materiality of a painting is confused with invariance of its meaning. But there is
a link with the past. Both 20th and 17th century scholars believed that aesthetic beauty resides
within the coherence or unity amidst the diversity of organized levels, respectively. The
Psychical Distance
34
emphasis placed by constructivists in the later 20th century on the interpretive role of the
individual can be seen as a return to the holistic Kantian and Leibnitzian traditions, continued
through the Gestalt and Phenomenological schools. The same work means different things to
different people under different circumstances (Schmidt, 1982), implying that meaning depends
on the context that is brought to bear. When the context is internal to the piece, as described by
Iser, meaning will depend on how parts of a text are seen in relation to each other. When the
context is external, it depends on the kinds of questions the viewer is asking about the
artist/author, the era in which the work was executed, and its originality in relation to earlier
styles. If the accepted boundary of contexts is quite wide, then interpreters can bring to bear
arbitrary ones that reflect their own doctrinal agendas, as in some Postmodern criticism.
SYNTHESIS
The two dominant approaches to aesthetic distance describe external and internal models.
The Enlightenment and Empiricist traditions emphasized realism and the ways that an artist or
playwright’s carefully constructed representations of the world could externally modulate
experiences of pleasure and excitement. This external model is based on the mundane premise
that people spontaneously engage in acts of cognition to recognize familiar objects and universal
Psychical Distance
35
themes from everyday life, and generally experience feelings of pain or pleasure associated with
them. The evocative potency of the work diminishes psychical distance in part because of the
immediacy of this effect and the fact that the locus of emotion is perceived as “out there” in the
aesthetic artifact or event which caused the experience in the first place. According to this
model, attachment (i.e., close psychological distance) should be to works that evoke positive
feelings or excitement in accordance with the recipient’s affective needs (Cupchik, 1995).
This concept of a work as an “aesthetic object” applies best if it is approached in the
context of action. The context of action is inherently purposive in nature and involves a
pragmatic attitude on the part of the person. Approaching a work as an aesthetic object within a
context of action can imply different things. It may be seen as a commodity with a certain
monetary value to be collected or to be given to a museum because of its tax deduction value.
Similarly, an artist can produce artworks repeatedly in a particular style because there is a market
for them. A work can be viewed systemically in the context of action if only some of its qualities
are relevant, as in the case of a decorative piece that fits into a particular setting. Aesthetic
distance in the context of action would then be based on the approach or avoidance value
attached to the object.
Scholars in the Romantic tradition, on the other hand, focused on the role of the recipient
in constructing an interpretation of the meaning of a work. Acts of imagination provide an
internal way to synthesize sensory and symbolic qualities of the multilayered aesthetic artifact or
event into a coherent whole. Treating the aesthetic work as if it were real requires a willing
suspension of disbelief (that the work is not absolutely faithful to the literal world) and an effort
at finding meaning in the piece. This applies to artist/authors and recipients alike who, at the
Psychical Distance
36
higher levels of appreciation, engage both in “doing” and “undergoing.” These Gestalt-like acts
of closure also depend on the perspective (i.e., understanding, vision both literally and
metaphorically) that artists/authors and recipients bring to the creative works. It is here that
context (i.e., knowledge, personal and social relevance) shapes perspective which in turn
determines what is real for the creative person and the recipient. Thus, the internal experience of
the person provides a ground for the aesthetic episode and is the locus of the unfolding meaning
and emotion. When the structure of a work is personally, intellectually, or emotionally
meaningful to the artist/author/recipient, distance is reduced between them and an attachment is
formed.
A common framework is needed a priori in order to synthesize these two approaches.
Objects and the artifacts that denote them have both material sensory qualities that define them
perceptually and symbolic meaning that identifies them linguistically. In everyday cognition,
there is a bias in favor of identifying useful objects and sensory qualities are automatically
discarded on route to object recognition (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). However, aesthetic episodes
are unique because both material sensory and symbolic qualities are attended to and merge in a
unified experience. In fact, artists and authors intentionally manipulate sensory qualities to make
them salient and reawaken our sensibilities, thereby making us aware of the process of
perception itself. It is this process of deautomatizing perception from the cognitive bias of
everyday life that constitutes a first step in aesthetic education.
The integration of these qualitatively different material sensory and symbolic qualities
into a coherent whole provides a cross-modal challenge for both the artist and the audience. The
aesthetic attitude provides an opportunity for integrating sensory and symbolic information,
Psychical Distance
37
structure and sign, style and subject matter, into a coherent experience without concern for its
functional value. The more representational a work, the more the sensory qualities are subsumed
within the symbolic ones to maximize verisimilitude. The less representational a work, the more
the sensory qualities take on a life of their own in the form of a style, and the more difficult it is
to “read” the work unless the underlying code of order is known. This balance between symbolic
and sensory qualities, usually referred to as subject matter and style, affects the relative distance
between the person and the work.
The context of experience focuses on the whole encounter with a work and is valued
intrinsically. Approaching a work in the context of experience has interesting implications in
terms of treating it as an object or as a system. Artists, particularly during modern times, have
sought to affirm the surface of an artwork as a thing that occupies space. One reason for doing
this was to eliminate views of artworks as mirrors of, or windows onto, reality. In modern art this
was accomplished by affirming the two dimensionality of a piece and reducing illusionary depth
of space. Therefore, it is possible to experience a work of art in its thingness or sensory
materiality. Qualities like impasto (i.e., thickness of surface paint) can make viewers feel like
reaching out to touch the salient surface. Thus, implied tactile qualities of a work as an object
can reduce aesthetic distance.
However, it is in a systemic view of artworks that the context of experience plays a more
significant role. Experience can be shaped by relational meaning within the sensory qualities of
the work. The overall compositional structure of a work in and of itself shapes experience
unbeknownst to the viewer (though manipulated intentionally by the artist). This does not merely
refer to the placement of objects in a rendered scene for the purpose of creating balance or
Psychical Distance
38
tension. The very selection and juxtaposition of colors according to principles of
complementarity and contrast can create the illusion of space or even of motion. Once subject
matter is thrown into the mix, experience extends to all domains of symbolic meaning, both
social and personal.
As many scholars have noted, digressions into the self through evoked associations serve
to distance the person from the work. However, this is avoided to the extent that the viewer
works to integrate the physical/sensory and symbolic levels of meanings in the search for
coherence. Resonance between these two seemingly disparate domains engages the viewer
because structure in the sensory domain serves as a metaphor for the symbolic. Thus, the theme
of isolation can be effectively communicated by appropriately situating a solitary figure, but it is
experienced more fully, and metaphorically, though the creation of a highly enclosed space
(Cupchik & Wroblewski-Raya, 1998).
The work loses its object quality in the context of experience, where it possesses both
structure and indeterminacy. Thus, there is some kind of order involving subject matter and/or
style but, because the levels have some autonomy, there are many different ways to perceive and
interpret it. The interaction with the artist/author is governed by an attempt to bring coherence
(unity amidst diversity) to relations between the manipulated medium and its effects in the
unfolding work, while preserving maximum uncertainty in the synthesis. A successful painting is
one in which an attempt to make a visual statement is appreciated by cognoscenti who can work
backward to uncover the evolution of the piece from the perspective of the artist. The audience,
too, tries to bring coherence to the unfolding interpretation and accompanying experience. But
the audience members start with the whole and must analyze the structure embedded within and
Psychical Distance
39
only the most experienced can readily do so. The greater the number of dimensions or levels of
the work that the audience members can discern and appreciate, the richer their experience. The
more they engage the work interpretively, the greater will be their pleasure.
Absorption defines a condition wherein the boundaries between the person and the
aesthetic work, understood as open systems, are minimized. It would be highest when: (1) the
symbolic meaning or perceived subject matter of the work elicits clear personal associations in
the recipient, and (2) the sensory experiences elicited by the work give experiential form to the
symbolic meaning. Since the locus of construction is within the recipient, the boundaries
between the work and the recipient is minimized and the experienced connection is heightened.
A trade-off between subject matter and style becomes relevant here if negative affect is elicited.
Under these circumstances, an intellectualized attention to style reduces excessive affect and
moves the recipient to a more comfortable position relative to the work (Cupchik & WroblewskiRaya, 1998).
It is also important to address communal absorption in aesthetic works which are
incorporated into social or religious rituals. While artifacts from small-scale societies are
“aesthetic objects” and considered collector’s items by people from large industrialized states,
they are systemic virtual objects for members of the source society. Each virtual object conveys
important information about the social structure and beliefs of the society (Layton, 1991), while
embodying dynamic and expressive qualities as well. Together they give the work an “aura,” an
evocative quality that both arouses intensified consciousness of shared meanings, while
providing the soothing feelings that result from collective experiences or “happenings.”
Absorption thereby becomes an intersubjective cognitive and emotional event. Scheff’s (1979)
Psychical Distance
40
treatment of ritual emphasizes the role that it plays in catharsis, the spilling of pent up emotions
in a safe collective context. Popular culture can be seen in a similar light as providing collective
emotional associations for people raised in a particular historical era (Cupchik & Leonard, 2001).
In essence, it makes it possible to express pent up emotions in a subculture, and provides an
affective marker for the feelings of a generation. Stories can also be seen as raising
consciousness and moral valuation (Averill, in press). Chassidic story-telling, for example, has
used simple but engaging language to increase people’s awareness of moral and spiritual aspects
of daily life (Buxbaum, 1994).
Detachment refers to a situation in which the context of action outweighs in importance
the context of experience. At an individual level, it might involve the purchase of an “aesthetic
object” based on some criterion external to it, such as value based on market parameters (i.e.,
notoriety of the artist, availability of his/her works, and so on). Detachment can also occur even
when a work is treated systemically. Someone might experience sympathy (as opposed to
empathy) for the circumstances of situated characters depicted in paintings, dramas, and so on,
but “not want to get involved,” so to speak. One could not accuse the person of failing to attend
to the play, but it simply does not have an affectively evocative quality. This might reflect the
topical nature of the subject matter that is alien to individual members of an audience who are
unfamiliar with the issues.
Communal detachment is a phenomenon of large-scale societies and can be attributed in
part to the effects of mass media. Television and the internet, while providing speedy and
unparalleled access to information, also provide a large-scale frame around both good and bad
events taking place in the world. This creates a sense of detachment as one observes possible
Psychical Distance
41
horrors at a safe and sometimes voyeuristic distance. Thus, while media can bring us knowledge
about problems in far away lands or even in our back yards, they also affirm our separation from
them. At the same time, one cannot put the blame on a medium in and of itself. As a complex
system it functions simultaneously at many levels. While writers, cinematographers, costume
designers, and others, might work collectively to create aesthetic programs, they are potentially
constrained by the forces of globalization and corporate power. The shaping of programs might
work downward from the hierarchy of power, favoring particular themes, and desiring to
produce agreeable feelings which favorably dispose people toward the products linked with
them. While new larger and more detailed formats of films are becoming available, they
temporarily serve to attract perceptual attention. But once the novelty wears off, the same
problem prevails.
CONCLUSIONS
The two streams from which modern aesthetic theory flows are based on different
ontologies. The Empiricist view is fundamentally mechanistic and assumes a kind of realism
according to which the structure of objects and events in the physical world do two things. First,
they operate through the equivalent of affordances (Gibson, 1971) or constraints (Hochberg,
1986) that determine the image experienced by viewers according to the criteria of everyday
perception and cognition. Second, they assume that these objects and events manipulate emotion
along a dimension of pain versus pleasure, and leave memories which serve as markers for them.
Not surprisingly, the ideas of the Taste Theorists were formulated in relation to representational
paintings which provide the clearest examples of mimesis, an attempt to copy the physical
world. Aesthetic distance reflects an awareness of the work as a cultural artifact and is aided by
Psychical Distance
42
the stylistic manipulation of a medium which makes the materiality of the work salient.
The Romantic tradition is more vitalistic in its approach and is sensitive to the organic
development of the experience as encounters with cultural artifacts unfold in time. It also
emphasizes the constructive efforts of individuals and audiences in the search for meaning.
Given that meaning is indeterminate, it is impossible to use truth as a criterion of aesthetic
appreciation. Rather, the contexts associated with an aesthetic episode will shape the interpretive
process. Theoretical developments
occurred in relation to drama and the problem of
distinguishing reality from unreality. While the real is part of an intersubjectively shared world,
the unreal is wrapped up with hope and fantasy, both individual and collective. Since both
themes are present in dramatic works, the audience must “willingly suspend disbelief” and go
along with the imitation or simulation (Oatley, 1999) of events in the dramatic world that
recreates social episodes.
Aesthetic distance helps situate the person with reference to an aesthetic event. It
involves an awareness of the event as such, be it a painting or a performance, as different from,
though meaningfully related to the everyday world. It preserves the aesthetic viewpoint, one in
which sensory and stylistic qualities are given a standing of equal importance with symbolic
subject matter. A “willing suspension of disbelief” is essential if the person or audience is to set
aside the everyday criterion of singular referential meaning. The combination of both sensory
and symbolic meaning, provides the artist/author with an opportunity to create new stylistic
codes or meanings. The viewer or listener also becomes engaged in a process of synthesizing
meaning and this affords the experience of both challenge and pleasure in the interpretive
process. Grounding the aesthetic experience in culturally shared knowledge and becoming aware
Psychical Distance
43
of the interpretive process itself are important aspect of aesthetic episodes. Rather than
juxtaposing realist and constructivist ontologies, they should be viewed as complementary with
the framework of “constructivist realism” (Cupchik, 2001).
Psychical Distance
44
References
Addison, J. (1963). On the pleasures of the imagination. In G. Smith (Ed.), The spectator in four
volumes. New York: Dutton.
Allport, Gordon W. (1955). Becoming; basic considerations for a psychology of personality.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Arnheim , R. (1986). The trouble with wholes and parts. New Ideas in Psychology, 4, 281-284.
Averill, J. (in press). The rhetoric of emotion, with a note on what makes great literature great.
Empirical Studies on the Arts.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beardsley, M. C. (1981). Aesthetics: Problems in the philosophy of criticism. New York:
Harcourt. (Original work published, 1958)
Bearsley, M. C. (1982). The aesthetic point of view. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1967). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.),
Illuminations (pp. 217-251). New York: Shocken Books.
Bergson, H. (1920). Essai sur les donnée immédiates de la conscience. (19th edition). Paris:
Alcan.
Berlyne, D. E. (1971). Aesthetics and psychobiology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Berlyne, D. E. (Ed.) (1974). Studies in the new experimental aesthetics. Washington:
Hemisphere.
Boring, Edwin, G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-
Psychical Distance
45
Crofts.
Bullough, E. (1904). ‘Matter and form.” The Modern Language Quarterly, VII(1), 10-15.
Bullough, E. (1912). `Psychical distance' as a factor in art and as an aesthetic principle. British
Journal of Psychology, 5, 87-98.
Bullough, E. (1957). Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press.
(Edited posthumously by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson)
Burwick, F. (1991). Illusion and the drama: Critical theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic
era. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.
Buxbaum, Y. (1994). Storytelling and spirituality in Judaism.. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Casebier, A. (1971). The concept of aesthetic distance. The Personalist, Winter, 70-91.
Chiari, J. (1992). Vitalism and contemporary thought. In F. Burwick & P. Douglas (Eds.), The
crisis in modernism: Bergson and the vitalist controversy (pp.245-273). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Coleridge, S. T. (1983). Biographia literaria, 2 vols., J. Engell & W. J. Bate (Eds.). In The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 7. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
(Original work published, 1817).
Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory
research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2, 671-684.
Cupchik, G.C. (1995). Emotion in aesthetics: Reactive and reflective models. Poetics, 23,
Cupchik, Gerald (2001). Constructivist realism: An ontology that encompasses positivist and
constructivist approaches to the social sciences [33 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative
Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 2(1). Available
177-188.
Psychical Distance
46
at: http://qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-eng.htm [Date of access: 2, 12, 2001].
Cupchik, G.C. & Leonard, G. (2001). High and popular culture from the viewpoints
of psychology and cultural studies. In D. Schram & G. Steen (Eds.), The Psychology and
Sociology of Literature: In Honour of Elrud Ibsch (pp. 421-441). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Cupchik, G.C. & Wroblewski-Raya, V. (1998). Loneliness as a theme in painting. Visual Arts
Research, 24(1), 65-71.
Dewey, J. (1969). Art as experience. In F. A. Tillman & S. M. Cahn (Eds.), Philosophy of art and
aesthetics (pp. 252-269). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published, 1934)
Dickie, G. (1964). The myth of the aesthetic attitude. American Philosophical Quarterly, 1(1),
56-65.
Dickie, G. (1973). Psychical distance: In a fog at sea. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 12(1),
17-29.
Duffy, E. (1941). An explanation of “emotional” phenomena without use of the concept “emotion.”
Journal of General Psychology, 25, 283-293.
Eco, U. (1989). The open work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (originally
published in 1962)
Eliot, T. S. (1975). Tradition and the individual talent. In Frank Kermode (Ed.), Selected Prose
(pp. 37-44). London: Faber and Faber. (originally published in 1932)
Fechner, G. (1978). Die Vorschüle der Aesthetik (2 vols.) Hildesheim: Georg Holms. (original
work published in 1876)
Fenner, D.E.W. (1996). The aesthetic attitude. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Psychical Distance
47
Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Flavell, J., & Draguns, J. (1957). A microgenetic approach to perception and thought.
Psychological Bulletin, 54, 197-217.
Foakes, R. A. (1990). Making and breaking dramatic illusion. In F. Burwick & W. Pape (Eds.),
Aesthetic illusion: Theoretical and historical approaches (pp. 217-228). Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Fraisse, P. (1963). The psychology of time. New York: Harper & Row.
Frank, L. K. (1939). Projective methods for the study of personality. The Journal of Psychology,
8, 389-413.
Gibson, J. J. (1971). The information available in pictures. Leonardo, 4, 27-35
Green, R. T. & Courtis, M. C. (1969). Information theory and figure perception: the metaphor
that failed. In J. Hogg (Ed.), Psychology and the visual arts (pp. 239-254).
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. (Original work published, 1966).
Greenberg, C. (1957/1946). Avant-garde and kitsch. In B. Rosenberg and D. W. White (Eds.).
Mass culture: The popular arts in America (pp. 98-110). New York: The Free Press of
Glencoe.
Gurwitsch, A. (1964). The field of consciousness. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Haeger, J. H. (1992). Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Romantic background to Bergson. In F.
Burwick & P. Douglas (Eds.), The crisis in modernism: Bergson and the vitalist
controversy (pp.98-108). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hochberg, J. (1986). Parts and wholes: A response to Arnheim. New Ideas in Psychology, 4,
Psychical Distance
48
285-293.
Holland, N. (1975). Five readers reading. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hutcheson, F. (1725). An inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue. London: D.
Midwinter and others.
Iser, W. (1971). Indeterminacy and the reader's response in prose fiction. In J. Hillis Miller (Ed.),
Aspects of narrative: Selected papers from the English institute (pp. 1-45). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Knight, R. P. (1786). Analytical inquiry into the principles of taste. London: T. Payne.
Kreitler, H., & Kreitler, S. (1972). The psychology of the arts. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Lipps, T. (1962). Empathy, inner imitation, and sense feelings. In M. Rader (Ed.), A modern
book of esthetics: An anthology (pp. 374-382). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Layton, R. (1991) The anthropology of art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Moles, A. (1968). Information theory and esthetic perception. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press. (Original work published, 1958)
Oatley, K. (1999). Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional
simulation. Review of General Psychology, 3(2), 101-117.
Rosa, A. (1996). Bartlett's psycho-anthropological project. Culture & Psychology, 2(4), 355-378.
Scheff, T. J. (1979). Catharsis in healing, ritual, and drama. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Schmidt, S. J. (1982). Foundations for the empirical study of literature. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. (transla
Psychical Distance
49
Schneider, H. J. (1995). The staging of the gaze: Aesthetic illusion and the scene of nature in the
eighteenth century. In W. Pape & F. Burwick (Eds.), Reflecting senses: Perception and
appearance in literature, culture, and the arts (pp.77-95). New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Shklovsky, V. (1988). Art as technique. In D. Lodge (Ed.), Modern criticism and theory (pp. 1630). New York: Longman. (Originally published, 1917)
Wilkinson, E. M. (1945). Johann Elias Schlegel: A German pioneer in aesthetics. Oxford, UK:
Basil Blackwell.
Wolfflin, H. (1950). Principles of art history. New York: Dover. (Original work published, 1915)
Worringer, W. (1953). Abstraction and empathy. New York: International Universities Press.
(Original work published, 1908)