This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Arts Without Mystery, given by Dennis Donahoo, was originally broadcast in 1982.

We cultivate these days a merely spectacular relation to ideas and attitudes.

We watch them as they pass, as in a Lord Mayor's Parade.

They hold our interest while they stay in sight, but we're not committed to any of them.

The same predicament arises in the reception of the arts.

There is no longer a discourse, an accepted frame of reference and definition,

which would enable us to know whether we agree or disagree on a particular

matter. The words we use in criticism are obviously ideological and compromised. They're not neutral.

Words which sound innocent, like tone, form, action and scene are just as argumentative as

words like revolution, history, praxis and dialectic.

You know a critic by the words he uses, but knowing him doesn't mean that you can easily talk to him.

The words he uses enforce judgments already made by others,

so there is no moment at which you could begin a conversation free of bias.

The pluralist way of dealing with the built-in commitment of words is to think of them all ironically,

to engage in a play of mind which ranges over them all with equal nonchalance. So we hear words

like beauty and truth, as if they had inverted commas around them.

But the play of mind doesn't make available even the possibility of a shared understanding of the object.

It's an act of power, not of communication.

All you can do with a play of mind is to watch its performance.

One of the peculiar things about the present situation is that while the dialects of criticism

have become more than ever divisive, the arts as an institution have been drawn into the

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