ABSTRACT
When the imagined consequences of accepting an unfamiliar context involve bodily or psychic injury, where firmly grounded (though perhaps unjustified) fears are conjured up in the individual, hesitancy is understandable. A child on his first day in school, the property owner confronted by representatives of a minority, the fieldtrained soldier who finds himself in jungle terrain-all have reason for apprehension. It is more difficult to understand a person’s unwillingness to assume a flexible attitude in aesthetic situations, to understand, for example, the visceral fear that the devotee of Brahms felt when confronted with Wagner’s music. The risk of real injury is slight even at the most outrageous avant-garde production.
