[294] LECTURE XXIV, Feb. 7, 1956 At the end of Thursday's lecture I spoke about three artistic ^afunctions, and I will go back to this because I think it's not only helpful to understand the different theories of art but also important for the valuation of a special work of art. These three functions were the cognitive,^b the anticipatory^c, and the expressive^d, and I will speak about the three of them in this order. THE COGNITIVE FUNCTION^e: If you understand "cognitive" in terms of what is usually called cognitive in the scientific realm and also in history and philosophy, and psychology and sociology, then of course the word cognitive shouldn't be used at all for the realm of art. If, however, the word

cognitive is used in the sense of discovering a new dimension of reality and grasping it and taking it into our mind, then a cognitive element is present in every art. This can be proved directly in visual arts, where we have objects, even if they are non-representative---we have colors and forms, and these colors and forms are a definite subject-matter which have in themselves a representative character even if it is abstract and not naturalistic. And even sharper, we can find it in poetry and drama and novel, where we use words, and words also have always a denotative meaning: they denote some content, and this content appears to our minds, in the moment in which we hear these words.

In music, the situation seems to be more difficult, but even there we discover possibilities of self-revelation in reality through the different instruments, including the human voice, or as the old Pythagoreans^f called it, we discover the numbers which are the basis for musical reception and understanding