Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? - Tom G. Palmer

No. 3] Are Patents and Copyrights MorallyJustified? 845
agency for their continued existence. The agents they depend
on, however, are not artists, but audiences,” 2
Romantic notions of creativity, which stress subjective experience
and its expression, emphasize the sublime experience of
the artist. The reproduction of this experience is what constitutes
the artistic attitude. The artist recreates her own experience
in the audience by means of artistic works or
performances. But the concrete experience ofthe artist cannot
be identical with the concrete experience of the audience—the
readers, listeners, or viewers. In opposition to the romantic notions
ofart taken up in personality theories ofintellectual property,
with their emphasis on the subjective, Roman Ingarden
argues that the identification of the work ofart with its creator’s
subjective experiences would mean that “it would be impossible
either to have a direct intercourse with the work or to know
it.” 118
The reason is that everything that would be directly accessible
to us—except for the perceived characters—would be
only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states. No
one would want to identify the concrete psychic contents experienced
by us during the reading with the already longgone
experiences of the author. Thus, the work is either not
directly comprehensible, or else it is identical with our experiences.
Whatever the case, the attempt to identify the literary
work with a manifold of the author’s psychic
experiences is quite absurd. The author’s experiences cease
to exist the moment the work created by him comes into
existence.” 4
In addition, as Ingarden points out, we would have to ask how
we could exclude from an author’s experiences “a toothache he
might have had in the course of writing,” while simultaneously
including in his work “the desires of a character. . . which the
author himself certainly did not, and could not, ~
The fact that two of us can appreciate the “same” work, (say,
for example, a sonata), although we each undergo different
perceptual experiences (you are in the front ofthe hall, I am at
112. Ofcourse, an artist may also be her own audience, but we are here speakingof
ideal roles; one and thesame personmay fulfill various roles. When the term “artist” is
used, it will be understood that artist qua artist is meant, and similarly of other roles,
such as “audience.”
~18. R. INGARDEN, THE LITERARY WORK OF ART 13-14 (1973).
114. Id.
115. Id. at 14.