Very few contemporary writers on aesthetics in English occupy Richards' authoritative position. Since the publication of The Principles of Literary Criticism his theories have gained increasingly in prestige among theoretical writers as well as among practical critics, and he seems in the process of gathering a school. Those interested in aesthetics or in practical criticism will generally admit, I believe, that his influence has already had some very salutary effects. He has been instrumental in sobering speculation; he has called attention to a number of problems hitherto inadequately dealt with, notably the problem of communication; and with profound conviction he has insisted on the need we moderns have of art. No doubt these achievements explain in part the prestige his doctrines enjoy. But the felt need, inchoate and confused, for a 'scientific' aesthetics, the meagerness of experimental results, and perhaps also the imperial manner Richards has of dismissiong as mere verbiage theories with which he disagrees and of bravely hacking at very difficult intellectual knots rather than patiently unravelling them, must also be accounted factors. A critical examination of his theories will, however, reveal that they often suffer from defects similar to those he has noticed in others. Under undoubted excellences one discovers a number of incoherences and confusions which need probing, and this all the more urgently on account of the militant intolerance not only of his followers but of Richards himself.

Richards holds that the function of art is to produce an organization of impulses and attitudes through which the individual comes into a competence and sanity he could not otherwise acquire. His theory no doubt contains important truth. But as one reads his account of it one is left with a large number of insistent questions for which no answer is found in his pages. (pp. 209-10)

We must first note the abstract manner in which he describes the processes of organization and the absence of specific illustration which would give the theory reality and precision. Only once is an illustration offered. In The Principles the attempt is made to show how the contradictory impulses of pity and terror are ordered through tragedy. But this single illustration does not satisfy the expectations of the reader, for he is led to expect from the formidable psychological equipment of the preceding chapters something less stale and less rhetorical. One does not object to Richards' purple passages on tragedy or even to the profuse use of capitals with which he punctuates the periods of his emotive efforts. But one does object to rhetoric offered as illustration of actual psychological processes by a psychologist who has made the explicit claim that he writes strictly in the scientific spirit, and who has subjected rival theories to such pitiless strictures because they are not criticism but "inferior poetry…. Too much sack and too little bread." What Richards has to show to put his own outside the reach of the charges he makes against other theories is specifically what impulses are engaged, what attitudes come into play, in the case of the various arts. If the only specific result of the theory is merely to rewrite Aristotle, the tremendous effort is hardly worth while. (pp. 210-11)

[Richards] has told us that we do not know much in specific terms about impulses and attitudes because "psychology is not yet far advanced." If no account of the process is possible, how does he know about it? May not his theory be open to the charges he makes against previous nonscientific aesthetics?

Another observation must be made about the theory of organization. Descriptive aesthetics has come increasingly to feel that there are "varieties of aesthetic experience." Let us consider Nietzsche's classification of the types of art and experience because it is the simplest. It will be remembered he distinguished two types. Now it seems that Richards' organization refers to the type of experience which Nietzsche called Apollonian. (p. 211)

Nietzsche believes, it will be remembered, that there is another type of aesthetic experience, called by him Dionysian…. Richards has nothing at all to say about this type of art and the aesthetic experience it brings about; yet the burden is clearly on him either to prove that the Apollonian experience is the only valid one or to give us an account of the Dionysian.

Richards bases his conviction of the importance of art for society not so much on the intrinsic value of the aesthetic experience, as on the effects which the organization of impulses of which it consists can have on our daily life. Yet his ideas, on scrutiny, appear to be more the expression of a hope than the assertion of irrefragable fact. (p. 212)

In one of the first chapters in The Principles Richards makes an important distinction between the critical and the technical parts of the aesthetic judgment. The critical refers to the value of the aesthetic experience, the technical to the means through which that experience comes about. Now one of the most irreducible confusions in Richards' doctrine results from the fact that through his extreme intolerance of any other approach to aesthetics than the psychological there is no legitimate place in his system for technical analysis of an objective kind. But without objective technical analysis it is difficult to imagine what answer can be given to the question why good art should be preferred to bad. The different degrees of organization produced by good and mediocre poetry respectively presume objective distinctions between the two poems in question. Otherwise we should have to maintain that any objective means may produce a satisfactory subjective condition of organization. And this in turn would be tantamount to maintaining that the distinction commonly made between good and bad art is, technically speaking, of no critical importance whatsoever. In some places this seems to be the only possible construction which the reader can put on Richards' speculations. But this construction cannot of course be consistent with other aspects of his theory. For he maintains that there is a difference in technical quality between different art-objects, and has much to say about the deleterious effects of mediocre or bad art on society.

Yet Richards' psychological method precludes any reference whatsoever to the object. For the object we are asked to substitute psychophysiological processes, thoroughly reducing it thereby to subjective phenomena. We are thus confronted with a radical contradiction. On the one hand the distinction between the technical and the critical parts of aesthetic theory necessarily implies an object, capable of giving rise to the subjective phenomenon of organization, with which the critic is concerned, and on the other the object is destroyed by the psychological method insisted on and one is left with no objective point d' appui for a critical judgment.

The radical nature of the defect reveals itself in its full complexity when one notices the ruthless ease with which Richards discards objective categories currently employed in "technical" description as altogether useless and meaningless…. (pp. 213-14)

Nothing at all remains or can remain of the object when [Richards'] method has been applied with any thoroughness. All the objective features of the work of art become physico-physiological stimuli…. Yet the objective categories which are merely fallacious "projections" of the mind cannot be so easily dispensed with. They—or synonymous terms—are the only ones we have for referring to those objects outside of the mind which are one of the sources, at least, of the stimuli which give rise to the experience. In other words Richards is forced to take notice of the technical "ways and means by which our experiences arise and are brought about."… And for this reason he is forced to bring back, disguised under new names, or, in a large number of instances, lumped together under the heading of "formal elements," the categories which earlier he so unceremoniously disqualified. He has to reintroduce such terms as rhythm, metre, pitch, timbre, and movement in verse…. But though they are pressed into service by him, they have no business whatsoever within the scope of his theory.

The issue however involves more than the matter of a hopeless logical contradiction; it involves the legitimacy of turning aesthetics into psychophysiology. When we are concerned with the technical aspect of art we are concerned with the validity or adequacy, the goodness or badness in Richards' terms, of a work of art. We do not wish to know whether it produces in us a certain kind of organization but whether the means used by the artist are adequate, better than those someone else used, or not as adequate as those he could have used. We are interested in the work of art objectively, and no subjectivistic epistemology or psychological analysis can tell us that our interest is not a legitimate one. It seems as if a psychological approach to criticism leads not only to neglect of the technical side of aesthetics, but also to the denial of its claim to our interest. Nor may any one plead that his interest is in criticism, for that misses the point of this observation, namely that the valid distinction between the technical and the critical does not free the critic from the burden of grounding his speculations in a thorough consideration of the complete aesthetic phenomenon. (pp. 216-17)

Another one of the difficulties into which Richards is led by his psychological method appears when we turn our attention to the problem of the standard. The critic must be able to judge the relative value of the different organizations which various aesthetic experiences are capable of producing. But in order to do so he must be in possession of an objective standard or criterion of the worth of an experience. We must inquire whether Richards' system can offer such a criterion.

The value of the organization is determined by the object in spite of the fact that his method, as we saw above, does not permit of commerce with it. Now there are two reasons why one may say that art is bad: Art fails either technically, as an instrument of communication or, from the critical standpoint, because the experience communicated is worthless. Can we tell objectively whether the means of communication are at fault? We must note, first, that success in communication is partly determined by a number of subjective factors. For instance various levels of aesthetic response must be recognized. This means that various judgments of a work of art are always possible. Again, in artistic creation subjective factors enter, such as the artist's 'normality' and, in the experience of art, the normality of the spectator. We must also consider the divergence of possible readings—a possibility of divergence which exists not only in poetry but in all the arts. All these are of course factors which increase considerably the difficulty of discovering the objective standard.

Richards attempts to resolve the difficulty through the appeal to a "competent reader" or spectator, who decides when the means of communication employed by the artist are capable of producing a valuable organization on the normal beholder.

The objections to an appeal to a competent reader are of course obvious. The objectivity thus gained is specious and the problem has merely been pushed one step back, not at all resolved. For how is a competent reader defined? (pp. 217-18)

We are left in a quandary. We have a theory of the function of art in society, which demands that we be able to determine values objectively. This demand is fundamental. And yet the theory fails to offer us any criterion through which alone we could claim objectivity for our judgments.

Aware of this failure, Richards seems to have repudiated in Practical Criticism, virtually if not explicitly, his previous position and doctrines. He does this by redefining the function of criticism. The critic has become a teacher now, and his most important task is to improve communication. How he is sure his judgment is correct we are not definitely told. But we are told that only after such improvement is he to concern himself with judging the value of the experience. The problem of finding an objective criterion of value is given up. "Value," he tells us, "cannot be demonstrated except through the communication of what is valuable."

Underlying the whole structure of Richards' critical theory lies his misconception about the nature of value and our ability to derive it from a psychological description, which vitiates all his conclusions. "Critical remarks," he says, "are a branch of psychological remarks" and "no special ethical or metaphysical ideas need be introduced to explain value." Were it possible successfully to demonstrate this proposition the result would of course be of the greatest significance, for it would enable science to annex ethics, and ideals of conduct could be determined to the third decimal place in the laboratory.

Value, we are told, consists in the satisfaction by the individual of the broadest and most important system of positive appetencies. And we are further told that the conduct of life is throughout an attempt to organize impulses so that success is obtained for the greater number or mass of them, for the most important and the weightiest set. "That organization which is the least wasteful of human possibilities … is the best."

Whether the conclusion be acceptable or not is irrelevant for our purpose. The following remarks will examine the logic underlying the means by which the results are arrived at. We may disregard of course the use of question-begging terms like wasteful, important, and weightiest, and attend directly to a more serious matter. Has Richards extracted value from a psychological description, or has he injected it from without? In what sense is his value-theory psychological? Is there anything upon the face of the described situation which tells him that a wider organization or even a wider satisfaction is more valuable than a narrower one? Psychology has shown him that there are systems of impulses in conflict; it may have shown him also that some of these go under in the Darwinian struggle of daily life and are never satisifed. But it has not at all shown him that one type of satisfaction is "better" than another unless an a priori valuation has been injected which deems a wider organization better than a narrower. Richards, along with many men today happens to have a naturalistic and humanistic attitude towards life. But he does not derive it from science, as he thinks, although in an entirely different sense it might have been science indeed that led him indirectly to accept such an attitude by making it impossible for him to retain a supernatural conception of the world and the other worldly values which were attached to that conception. (pp. 220-21)