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Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top The Concept of the
AestheticFirst published Fri Sep 11, 2009; substantive revision Thu
Sep 12, 2013Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the
Eighteenth Century, the term "aesthetic" has come to be used to
designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of
judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of
value. For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over
questions particular to one or another of these designations:
whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square
the allegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact
that we give reasons in support of them; how best to capture the
elusive contrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one;
whether to define aesthetic experience according to its
phenomenological or representational content; how best to
understand the relation between aesthetic value and aesthetic
experience. But questions of more general nature have lately
arisen, and these have tended to have a skeptical cast: whether any
use of "aesthetic" may be explicated without appeal to some other;
whether agreement respecting any use is sufficient to ground
meaningful theoretical agreement or disagreement; whether the term
ultimately answers to any legitimate philosophical purpose that
justifies its inclusion in the lexicon. The skepticism expressed by
such general questions did not begin to take hold until the later
part of the Twentieth Century, and this fact prompts the question
whether (a) the concept of the aesthetic is inherently problematic
and it is only recently that we have managed to see that it is, or
(b) the concept is fine and it is only recently that we have become
muddled enough to imagine otherwise. Adjudicating between these
possibilities requires a vantage from which to take in both early
and late theorizing on aesthetic matters. 1. The Concept of Taste
1.1 Immediacy 1.2 Disinterest 2. The Concept of the Aesthetic 2.1
Aesthetic Objects 2.2 Aesthetic Judgment 2.3 The Aesthetic Attitude
2.4 Aesthetic Experience Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet
Resources Related Entries
1. The Concept of TasteThe concept of the aesthetic descends
from the concept of taste. Why the concept of taste commanded so
much philosophical attention during the Eighteenth Century is a
complicated matter, but this much is clear: the eighteenth-century
theory of taste emerged, in part, as a corrective to the rise of
rationalism, particularly as applied to beauty, and to the rise of
egoism, particularly as applied to virtue. Against rationalism
about beauty, the eighteenth-century theory of taste held the
judgment of beauty to be immediate; against egoism about virtue, it
held the pleasure of beauty to be disinterested.1.1
ImmediacyRationalism about beauty is the view that judgments of
beauty are judgments of reason, i.e., that we judge things to be
beautiful by reasoning it out, where reasoning it out typically
involves inferring from principles or applying concepts. At the
beginning of the Eighteenth Century, rationalism about beauty had
achieved dominance on the continent, and was being pushed to new
extremes by les gomtres, a group of literary theorists who aimed to
bring to literary criticism the mathematical rigor that Descartes
had brought to physics. As one such theorist put it:The way to
think about a literary problem is that pointed out by Descartes for
problems of physical science. A critic who tries any other way is
not worthy to be living in the present century. There is nothing
better than mathematics as propaedeutic for literary criticism.
(Terrasson 1715, Preface, 65; quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks 1957,
258)It was against this, and against more moderate forms of
rationalism about beauty, that mainly British philosophers working
mainly within an empiricist framework began to develop theories of
taste. The fundamental idea behind any such theorywhich we may call
the immediacy thesisis that judgments of beauty are not (or at
least not primarily) mediated by inferences from principles or
applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of
straightforwardly sensory judgments; it is the idea, in other
words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are
beautiful, but rather taste that they are. Here is an early
expression of the thesis, from Jean-Baptiste Dubos's Critical
Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, which first appeared in
1719:Do we ever reason, in order to know whether a ragoo be good or
bad; and has it ever entered into any body's head, after having
settled the geometrical principles of taste, and defined the
qualities of each ingredient that enters into the composition of
those messes, to examine into the proportion observed in their
mixture, in order to decide whether it be good or bad? No, this is
never practiced. We have a sense given us by nature to distinguish
whether the cook acted according to the rules of his art. People
taste the ragoo, and tho' unacquainted with those rules, they are
able to tell whether it be good or no. The same may be said in some
respect of the productions of the mind, and of pictures made to
please and move us. (Dubos 1748, vol. II, 238239)And here is a late
expression, from Kant's 1790 Critique of the Power of Aesthetic
Judgment:If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in
the end fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or
Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce
all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful
. I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and
would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false than
allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori
grounds of proof, since it is supposed to be a judgment of taste
and not of the understanding of reason. (Kant 1790, 165)But the
theory of taste would not have enjoyed its eighteenth-century run,
nor would it continue now to exert its influence, had it been
without resources to counter an obvious rationalist objection.
There is a wide differenceso goes the objectionbetween judging the
excellence of a ragout and judging the excellence of a poem or a
play. More often than not, poems and plays are objects of great
complication. But taking in all that complication requires a lot of
cognitive work, including the application of concepts and the
drawing of inferences. Judging the beauty of poems and plays, then,
is evidently not immediate and so evidently not a matter of
taste.The chief way of meeting this objection was first to
distinguish between the act of grasping the object preparatory to
judging it and the act of judging the object once grasped, and then
to allow the former, but not the latter, to be as concept- and
inference-mediated as any rationalist might wish. Here is Hume,
with characteristic clarity:[I]n order to pave the way for [a
judgment of taste], and give a proper discernment of its object, it
is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede,
that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant
comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general
facts fixed and ascertained. Some species of beauty, especially the
natural kinds, on their first appearance command our affection and
approbation; and where they fail of this effect, it is impossible
for any reasoning to redress their influence, or adapt them better
to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders of beauty,
particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to employ much
reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment. (Hume, 1751,
Section I)Humelike Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, and Reid
after him (Cooper 1711, 17, 231; Hutcheson 1725, 1624; Reid 1785,
760761)regarded the faculty of taste as a kind of internal sense.
Unlike the five external or direct senses, an internal (or reflex
or secondary) sense is one that depends for its objects on the
antecedent operation of some other mental faculty or faculties.
Reid characterizes it as follows:Beauty or deformity in an object,
results from its nature or structure. To perceive the beauty
therefore, we must perceive the nature or structure from which it
results. In this the internal sense differs from the external. Our
external senses may discover qualities which do not depend upon any
antecedent perception . But it is impossible to perceive the beauty
of an object, without perceiving the object, or at least conceiving
it. (Reid 1785, 760761)Because of the highly complex natures or
structures of many beautiful objects, there will have to be a role
for reason in their perception. But perceiving the nature or
structure of an object is one thing. Perceiving its beauty is
another.1.2 DisinterestEgoism about virtue is the view that to
judge an action or trait virtuous is to take pleasure in it because
you believe it to serve some interest of yours. Its central
instance is the Hobbesian viewstill very much on early
eighteenth-century mindsthat to judge an action or trait virtuous
is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to promote your
safety. Against Hobbesian egoism a number of British
moralistspreeminently Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Humeargued that,
while a judgment of virtue is a matter of taking pleasure in
response to an action or trait, the pleasure is disinterested, by
which they meant that it is not self-interested (Cooper 1711,
220223; Hutcheson 1725, 9, 2526; Hume 1751, 218232, 295302). One
argument went roughly as follows. That we judge virtue by means of
an immediate sensation of pleasure means that judgments of virtue
are judgments of taste, no less than judgments of beauty. But
pleasure in the beautiful is not self-interested: we judge objects
to be beautiful whether or not we believe them to serve our
interests. But if pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested, there
is no reason to think that pleasure in the virtuous cannot also be
(Hutcheson 1725, 910).The eighteenth-century view that judgments of
virtue are judgments of taste highlights a discontinuity between
the eighteenth-century concept of taste and our concept of the
aesthetic, since for us the concepts aesthetic and moral tend
oppose one another such that a judgment's falling under one
typically precludes its falling under the other. Kant is chiefly
responsible for removing this discontinuity. He brought the moral
and the aesthetic into opposition by re-interpreting what we might
call the disinterest thesisthe thesis that pleasure in the
beautiful is disinterested (though see Cooper 1711, 222 and Home
2005, 3638 for anticipations of Kant's re-interpretation).According
to Kant, to say that a pleasure is interested is not to say that it
is self-interested in the Hobbesian sense, but rather that it
stands in a certain relation to the faculty of desire. The pleasure
involved in judging an action to be morally good is interested
because such a judgment issues in a desire to bring the action into
existence, i.e., to perform it. To judge an action to be morally
good is to become aware that one has a duty to perform the action,
and to become so aware is to gain a desire to perform it. By
contrast, the pleasure involved in judging an object to be
beautiful is disinterested because such a judgment issues in no
desire to do anything in particular. If we can be said to have a
duty with regard to beautiful things, it appears to be exhausted in
our judging them aesthetically to be beautiful. That is what Kant
means when he says that the judgment of taste is not practical but
rather merely contemplative (Kant 1790, 95).By thus re-orienting
the notion of disinterest, Kant brought the concept of taste into
opposition with the concept of morality, and so into line, more or
less, with the present concept of the aesthetic. But if the Kantian
concept of taste is continuous, more or less, with the present-day
concept of the aesthetic, why the terminological discontinuity? Why
have we come to prefer the term aesthetic to the term taste? The
not very interesting answer appears to be that we have preferred an
adjective to a noun. The term aesthetic derives from the Greek term
for sensory perception, and so preserves the implication of
immediacy carried by the term taste. Kant employed both terms,
though not equivalently: according to his usage, aesthetic is
broader, picking out a class of judgments that includes both the
normative judgment of taste and the non-normative, though equally
immediate, judgment of the agreeable. Though Kant was not the first
modern to use aesthetic (Baumgarten had used it as early as 1735),
the term became widespread only, though quickly, after his
employment of it in the third Critique. Yet the employment that
became widespread was not exactly Kant's, but a narrower one
according to which aesthetic simply functions as an adjective
corresponding to the noun taste. So for example we find Coleridge,
in 1821, expressing the wish that he could find a more familiar
word than aesthetic for works of taste and criticism, before going
on to argue:As our language contains no other useable adjective, to
express coincidence of form, feeling, and intellect, that
something, which, confirming the inner and the outward senses,
becomes a new sense in itself there is reason to hope, that the
term aesthetic, will be brought into common use. (Coleridge 1821,
254)The availability of an adjective corresponding to taste has
allowed for the retiring of a series of awkward expressions: the
expressions judgment of taste, emotion of taste and quality of
taste have given way to the arguably less offensive aesthetic
judgment, aesthetic emotion, and aesthetic quality. However, as the
noun taste phased out, we became saddled with other perhaps equally
awkward expressions, including the one that names this entry.2. The
Concept of the AestheticMuch of the history of more recent thinking
about the concept of the aesthetic can be seen as the history of
the development of the immediacy and disinterest theses.2.1
Aesthetic ObjectsArtistic formalism is the view that the
artistically relevant properties of an artworkthe properties in
virtue of which it is an artwork and in virtue of which it is a
good or bad oneare formal merely, where formal properties are
typically regarded as properties graspable by sight or by hearing
merely. Artistic formalism has been taken to follow from both the
immediacy and the disinterest theses (Binkley 1970, 266267; Carroll
2001, 2040). If you take the immediacy thesis to imply the artistic
irrelevance of all properties whose grasping requires the use of
reason, and you include representational properties in that class,
then you are apt to think that the immediacy thesis implies
artistic formalism. If you take the disinterest thesis to imply the
artistic irrelevance of all properties capable of practical import,
and you include representational properties in that class, then you
are apt to think that the disinterest thesis implies artistic
formalism.This is not to suggest that the popularity enjoyed by
artistic formalism during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth
Centuries owed mainly to its inference from the immediacy or
disinterest theses. The most influential advocates of formalism
during this period were professional critics, and their formalism
derived, at least in part, from the artistic developments with
which they were concerned. As a critic Eduard Hanslick advocated
for the pure music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and later
Brahms, and against the dramatically impure music of Wagner; as a
theorist he urged that music has no content but tonally moving
forms (Hanslick 1986, 29). As a critic Clive Bell was an early
champion of the post-Impressionists, especially Cezanne; as a
theorist he maintained that the formal properties of
paintingrelations and combinations of lines and coloursalone have
artistic relevance (Bell 1958, 1718). As a critic Clement Greenberg
was abstract expressionism's ablest defender; as a theorist he held
painting's proper area of competence to be exhausted by flatness,
pigment, and shape (Greenberg 1986, 8687).Not every influential
defender of formalism has also been a professional critic. Monroe
Beardsley, who arguably gave formalism its most sophisticated
articulation, was not (Beardsley 1958). Nor is Nick Zangwill, who
recently has mounted a spirited and resourceful defense of a
moderate version of formalism (Zangwill 2001). But formalism has
always been sufficiently motivated by art-critical data that once
Arthur Danto made the case that the data no longer supported it,
and perhaps never really had, formalism's heyday came to an end.
Inspired in particular by Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which are (more or
less) perceptually indistinguishable from the brand-printed cartons
in which boxes of Brillo were delivered to supermarkets, Danto
observed that for most any artwork it is possible to imagine both
(a) another object that is perceptually indiscernible from it but
which is not an artwork, and (b) another artwork that is
perceptually indiscernible from it but which differs in artistic
value. From these observations he concluded that form alone neither
makes an artwork nor gives it whatever value it has (Danto 1981,
9495; Danto 1986, 3031; Danto 1997, 91).But Danto has taken the
possibility of such perceptual indiscernibles to show the
limitations not merely of form but also of aesthetics, and he has
done so on the grounds, apparently, that the formal and the
aesthetic are co-extensive. Regarding the Brillo boxes that Warhol
exhibited in 1964 and those delivered to markets he maintains
thataesthetics could not explain why one was a work of fine art and
the other not, since for all practical purposes they were
aesthetically indiscernible: if one was beautiful, the other one
had to be beautiful, since they looked just alike. (Danto 2003,
7)But the inference from the limits of the artistically formal to
the limits of the artistically aesthetic is presumably only as
strong as the inferences from the immediacy and disinterest theses
to artistic formalism, and these are not beyond question. The
inference from the disinterest thesis appears to go through only if
you employ a stronger notion of disinterest than the one Kant
understands himself to be employing: Kant, it is worth recalling,
regards poetry as the highest of the fine arts precisely because of
its capacity to employ representational content in the expression
of what he calls aesthetic ideas (Kant 1790, 191194; see Costello
2008 and 2013 for extended treatment of the capacity of Kantian
aesthetics to accommodate conceptual art). The inference from the
immediacy thesis appears to go through only if you employ a notion
of immediacy stronger than the one Hume, for example, takes himself
to be defending when he claims (in a passage quoted in section1.1)
that in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the fine arts,
it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the
proper sentiment (Hume 1751, 173). It may be that artistic
formalism results if you push either of the tendencies embodied in
the immediacy and disinterest theses to extremes. It may be that
the history of aesthetics from the Eighteenth Century to the
mid-Twentieth is largely the history of pushing those two
tendencies to extremes. It does not follow that those tendencies
must be so pushed.Consider Warhol's Brillo Boxes. Danto is right to
maintain that the eighteenth-century theorist of taste would not
know how to regard it as an artwork. But this is because the
eighteenth-century theorist of taste lives in the Eighteenth
Century, and so would be unable to situate that work in its
twentieth-century art-historical context, and not because the kind
of theory he holds forbids him from situating a work in its
art-historical context. When Hume, for instance, observes that
artists address their works to particular, historically-situated
audiences, and that a critic therefore must place himself in the
same situation as the audience to whom a work is addressed (Hume
1757, 239), he is allowing that artworks are cultural products, and
that the properties that works have as the cultural products they
are are among the ingredients of the composition that a critic must
grasp if she is to feel the proper sentiment. Nor does there seem
to be anything in the celebrated conceptuality of Brillo Boxes, nor
of any other conceptual work, that ought to give the
eighteenth-century theorist pause. Francis Hutcheson asserts that
mathematical and scientific theorems are objects of taste
(Hutcheson 1725, 3641). Alexander Gerard asserts that scientific
discoveries and philosophical theories are objects of taste (Gerard
1757, 6). Neither argues for his assertion. Both regard it as
commonplace that objects of intellect may be objects of taste as
readily as objects of sight and hearing may be. Why should the
present-day aesthetic theorist think otherwise? If an object is
conceptual in nature, grasping its nature will require intellectual
work. If grasping an object's conceptual nature requires situating
it art-historically, then the intellectual work required to grasp
its nature will include situating it art-historically. Butas Hume
and Reid held (see section 1.1)grasping the nature of an object
preparatory to aesthetically judging it is one thing; aesthetically
judging the object once grasped is another.Though Danto has been
the most influential and persistent critic of formalism, his
criticisms are no more decisive than those advanced by Kendall
Walton in his essay Categories of Art. Walton's anti-formalist
argument hinges on two main theses, one psychological and one
philosophical. According to the psychological thesis, which
aesthetic properties we perceive a work as having depends on which
category we perceive the work as belonging to. Perceived as
belonging to the category of painting, Picasso's Guernica will be
perceived as violent, dynamic, vital, disturbing (Walton 1970,
347). But perceived as belonging to the category of guernicaswhere
guernicas are works with surfaces with the colors and shapes of
Picasso's Guernica, but the surfaces are molded to protrude from
the wall like relief maps of different kinds of terrainPicasso's
Guernica will be perceived not as violent and dynamic, but as cold,
stark, lifeless, or serene and restful, or perhaps bland, dull,
boring (Walton 1970, 347). That Picasso's Guernica can be perceived
both as violent and dynamic and as not violent and not dynamic
might be thought to imply that there is no fact of the matter
whether it is violent and dynamic. But this implication holds only
on the assumption that there is no fact of the matter which
category Picasso's Guernica actually belongs to, and this
assumption appears to be false given that Picasso intended that
Guernica be a painting and did not intend that it be a Guernica,
and that the category of paintings was well-established in the
society in which Picasso painted it while the category of guernicas
was not. Hence the philosophical thesis, according to which the
aesthetic properties a work actually has are those it is perceived
as having when perceived as belonging to the category (or
categories) it actually belongs to. Since the properties of having
been intended to be a painting and having been created in a society
in which painting is well-established category are artistically
relevant though not graspable merely by seeing (or hearing) the
work, it seems that artistic formalism cannot be true. I do not
deny, Walton concludes, that paintings and sonatas are to be judged
solely on what can be seen or heard in themwhen they are perceived
correctly. But examining a work with the senses can by itself
reveal neither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to
perceive it that way (Walton 1970, 367).But if we cannot judge
which aesthetic properties paintings and sonatas have without
consulting the intentions and the societies of the artists who
created them, what of the aesthetic properties of natural items?
With respect to them it may appear as if there is nothing to
consult except the way they look and sound, so that an aesthetic
formalism about nature must be true. Allen Carlson, a central
figure in the burgeoning field of the aesthetics of nature, argues
against this appearance. Carlson observes that Walton's
psychological thesis readily transfers from works of art to natural
items: that we perceive Shetland ponies as cute and charming and
Clydesdales as lumbering surely owes to our perceiving them as
belonging to the category of horses (Carlson 1981, 19). He also
maintains that the philosophical thesis transfers: whales actually
have the aesthetic properties we perceive them as having when we
perceive them as mammals, and do not actually have any contrasting
aesthetic properties we might perceive them to have when we
perceive them as fish. If we ask what determines which category or
categories natural items actually belong to, the answer, according
to Carlson, is their natural histories as discovered by natural
science (Carlson 1981, 2122). Inasmuch as a natural item's natural
history will tend not to be graspable by merely seeing or hearing
it, formalism is no truer of natural items than it is of works of
art.The claim that Walton's psychological thesis transfers to
natural items has been widely accepted (and was in fact
anticipated, as Carlson acknowledges, by Ronald Hepburn (Hepburn
1966 and 1968)). The claim that Walton's philosophical thesis
transfers to natural items has proven more controversial. Carlson
is surely right that aesthetic judgments about natural items are
prone to be mistaken insofar as they result from perceptions of
those items as belonging to categories to which they do not belong,
and, insofar as determining which categories natural items actually
belong to requires scientific investigation, this point seems
sufficient to undercut the plausibility of any very strong
formalism about nature (see Carlson 1979 for independent objections
against such formalism). Carlson, however, also wishes to establish
that aesthetic judgments about natural items have whatever
objectivity aesthetic judgments about works of art do, and it is
controversial whether Walton's philosophical claim transfers
sufficiently to support such a claim. One difficulty, raised by
Malcolm Budd (Budd 2002 and 2003) and Robert Stecker
(Stecker1997c), is that since there are many categories in which a
given natural item may correctly be perceived, it is unclear which
correct category is the one in which the item is perceived as
having the aesthetic properties it actually has. Perceived as
belonging to the category of Shetland ponies, a large Shetland pony
may be perceived as lumbering; perceived as belonging to the
category of horses, the same pony may be perceived as cute and
charming but certainly not lumbering. If the Shetland pony were a
work of art, we might appeal to the intentions (or society) of its
creator to determine which correct category is the one that fixes
its aesthetic character. But as natural items are not human
creations they can give us no basis for deciding between equally
correct but aesthetically contrasting categorizations. It follows,
according to Budd, the aesthetic appreciation of nature is endowed
with a freedom denied to the appreciation of art (Budd 2003, 34),
though this is perhaps merely another way of saying that the
aesthetic appreciation of art is endowed with an objectivity denied
to the appreciation of nature.2.2 Aesthetic JudgmentThe
eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of
taste (or sentimentalists) was primarily a debate over the
immediacy thesis, i.e., over whether we judge objects to be
beautiful by applying principles of beauty to them. It was not
primarily a debate over the existence of principles of beauty, a
matter over which theorists of taste might disagree. Kant denied
that there are any such principles (Kant 1790, 101), but both
Hutcheson and Hume affirmed their existence: they maintained that
although judgments of beauty are judgments of taste and not of
reason, taste nevertheless operates according to general
principles, which might be discovered through empirical
investigation (Hutcheson 1725, 2835; Hume 1757, 231233).It is
tempting to think of recent debate in aesthetics between
particularists and generalists as a revival of the
eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of
taste. But the accuracy of this thought is difficult to gauge. One
reason is that it is often unclear whether particularists and
generalists take themselves merely to be debating the existence of
aesthetic principles or to be debating their employment in
aesthetic judgment. Another is that, to the degree particularists
and generalists take themselves to be debating the employment of
aesthetic principles in aesthetic judgment, it is hard to know what
they can be meaning by aesthetic judgment. If aesthetic still
carries its eighteenth-century implication of immediacy, then the
question under debate is whether judgment that is immediate is
immediate. If aesthetic no longer carries that implication, then it
is hard to know what question is under debate because it is hard to
know what aesthetic judgment could be. It may be tempting to think
that we can simply re-define aesthetic judgment such that it refers
to any judgment in which an aesthetic property is predicated of an
object. But this requires being able to say what an aesthetic
property is without reference to its being immediately graspable,
something no one seems to have done. It may seem that we can simply
re-define aesthetic judgment such that it refers to any judgment in
which any property of the class exemplified by beauty is predicated
of an object. But which class is this? The classes exemplified by
beauty are presumably endless, and the difficulty is to specify the
relevant class without reference to the immediate graspability of
its members, and that is what no one seems to have done.However we
are to sort out the particularist/genealist debate, important
contributions to it include, on the side of particularism, Arnold
Isenberg's Critical Communication (1949) Frank Sibley's Aesthetic
Concepts (in Sibley 2001) and Mary Mothersill's Beauty Restored
(1984) and, on the side of generalism, Monroe Beardsley's
Aesthetics (1958) and On the Generality of Critical Reasons (1962),
Sibley's General Reasons and Criteria in Aesthetics (in Sibley
2001), George Dickie's Evaluating Art (1987) and John Bender's
General but Defeasible Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluation: The
Generalist/Particularist Dispute (1995). Of these, the papers by
Isenberg and Sibley have arguably enjoyed the greatest
influence.Isenberg concedes that we often appeal to descriptive
features of works in support of our judgments of their value, and
he allows that this may make it seem as if we must be appealing to
principles in making those judgments. If in support of a favorable
judgment of some painting a critic appeals to the wavelike contour
formed by the figures clustered in its foreground, it may seem as
if his judgment must involve tacit appeal to the principle that any
painting having such a contour is so much the better. But Isenberg
argues that this cannot be, since no one agrees to any such
principle:There is not in all the world's criticism a single purely
descriptive statement concerning which one is prepared to say
beforehand, If it is true, I shall like that work so much the
better (Isenberg 1949, 338).But if in appealing to the descriptive
features of a work we are not acknowledging tacit appeal to
principles linking those features to aesthetic value, what are we
doing? Isenberg believes we are offering directions for perceiving
the work, i.e., by singling out certain its features, we
narrow[ing] down the field of possible visual orientations and
thereby guiding others in the discrimination of details, the
organization of parts, the grouping of discrete objects into
patterns (Isenberg 1949, 336). In this way we get others to see
what we have seen, rather than getting them to infer from principle
what we have so inferred.That Sibley advances a variety of
particularism in one paper and a variety of generalism in another
will give the appearance of inconsistency where there is none:
Sibley is a particularist of one sort, and with respect to one
distinction, and a generalist of another sort with respect to
another distinction. Isenberg, as noted, is a particularist with
respect to the distinction between descriptions and verdicts, i.e.,
he maintains that there are no principles by which we may infer
from value-neutral descriptions of works to judgments of their
overall value. Sibley's particularism and generalism, by contrast,
both have to do with judgments falling in between descriptions and
verdicts. With respect to a distinction between descriptions and a
set of judgments intermediate between descriptions and verdicts,
Sibley is straightforwardly particularist. With respect to a
distinction between a set of judgments intermediate between
descriptions and verdicts and verdicts, Sibley is a kind of
generalist and describes himself as such.Sibley's generalism, as
set forth in General Reasons and Criteria in Aesthetics, begins
with the observation that the properties to which we appeal in
justification of favorable verdicts are not all descriptive or
value-neutral. We also appeal to properties that are inherently
positive, such as grace, or balance, or dramatic intensity, or
comicality. To say that a property is inherently positive is not to
say that any work having it is so much the better, but rather that
its tout court attribution implies value. So although a work may be
made worse on account of its comical elements, the simple claim
that a work is good because comical is intelligible in a way that
the simple claims that a work is good because yellow, or because it
lasts twelve minutes, or because it contains many puns, are not.
But if the simple claim that a work is good because comical is thus
intelligible, comicality is a general criterion for aesthetic
value, and the principle that articulates that generality is true.
But none of this casts any doubt on the immediacy thesis, as Sibley
himself observes:I have argued elsewhere that there are no
sure-fire rules by which, referring to the neutral and
non-aesthetic qualities of things, one can infer that something is
balanced, tragic, comic, joyous, and so on. One has to look and
see. Here, equally, at a different level, I am saying that there
are no sure-fire mechanical rules or procedures for deciding which
qualities are actual defects in the work; one has to judge for
oneself. (Sibley 2001, 107108)The elsewhere referred to in the
first sentence is Sibley's earlier paper, Aesthetic Concepts, which
argues that the application of concepts such as balanced, tragic,
comic, joyous is not a matter of determining whether the
descriptive (i.e., non-aesthetic) conditions for their application
are met, but is rather a matter of taste. Hence aesthetic judgments
are immediate in something like the way that judgments of color, or
of flavor, are:We see that a book is red by looking, just as we
tell that the tea is sweet by tasting it. So too, it might be said,
we just see (or fail to see) that things are delicate, balanced,
and the like. This kind of comparison between the exercise of taste
and the use of the five senses is indeed familiar; our use of the
word taste itself shows that the comparison is age-old and very
natural (Sibley 2001, 1314).But Sibley recognizesas his
eighteenth-century forebears did and his formalist contemporaries
did notthat important differences remain between the exercise of
taste and the use of the five senses. Central among these is that
we offer reasons, or something like them, in support of our
aesthetic judgments: by talkingin particular, by appealing to the
descriptive properties on which the aesthetic properties dependwe
justify aesthetic judgments by bringing others to see what we have
seen (Sibley 2001, 1419).It is unclear to what degree Sibley,
beyond seeking to establish that the application of aesthetic
concepts is not condition-governed, seeks also to define the term
aesthetic in terms of their not being so. It is clearer, perhaps,
that he does not succeed in defining the term this way, whatever
his intentions. Aesthetic concepts are not alone in being
non-condition-governed, as Sibley himself recognizes in comparing
them with color concepts. But there is also no reason to think them
alone in being non-condition-governed while also being
reason-supportable, since moral concepts, to give one example, at
least arguably also have both these features. Isolating the
aesthetic requires something more than immediacy, as Kant saw. It
requires something like the Kantian notion of disinterest, or at
least something to play the role played by that notion in Kant's
theory.2.3 The Aesthetic AttitudeThe Kantian notion of disinterest
has its most direct recent descendents in the aesthetic-attitude
theories that flourished from the early to mid Twentieth Century.
Though Kant followed the British in applying the term disinterested
strictly to pleasures, its migration to attitudes is not difficult
to explain. For Kant the pleasure involved in a judgment of taste
is disinterested because such a judgment does not issue in a motive
to do anything in particular. For this reason Kant refers to the
judgment of taste as contemplative rather than practical (Kant
1790, 95). But if the judgment of taste is not practical, then the
attitude we bear toward its object is presumably also not
practical: when we judge an object aesthetically we are unconcerned
with whether and how it may further our practical aims. Hence it is
natural to speak of our attitude toward the object as
disinterested.To say, however, that the migration of disinterest
from pleasures to attitudes is natural is not to say that it is
inconsequential. Consider the difference between Kant's aesthetic
theory, the last great theory of taste, and Schopenhauer's
aesthetic theory, the first great aesthetic-attitude theory.
Whereas for Kant disinterested pleasure is the means by which we
discover things to bear aesthetic value, for Schopenhauer
disinterested attention (or "will-less contemplation") is itself
the locus of aesthetic value. According to Schopenhauer, we lead
our ordinary, practical lives in a kind of bondage to our own
desires (Schopenhauer 1819, 196). This bondage is a source not
merely of pain but also of cognitive distortion in that it
restricts our attention to those aspects of things relevant to the
fulfilling or thwarting of our desires. Aesthetic contemplation,
being will-less, is therefore both epistemically and hedonically
valuable, allowing us a desire-free glimpse into the essences of
things as well as a respite from desire-induced pain: When,
however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us
out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from
the thralldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed
to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their
relation to the will ... Then all at once the peace, always sought
but always escaping us ... comes to us of its own accord, and all
is well with us. (Schopenhauer 1819, 196)The two most influential
aesthetic-attitude theories of the Twentieth Century are those of
Edward Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz. According to Stolnitz's
theory, which is the more straightforward of the two, bearing an
aesthetic attitude toward an object is a matter of attending to it
disinterestedly and sympathetically, where to attend to it
disinterestedly is to attend to it with no purpose beyond that of
attending to it, and to attend to it sympathetically is to accept
it on its own terms, allowing it, and not one's own preconceptions,
to guide one's attention of it (Stolnitz 1960, 3236). The result of
such attention is a comparatively richer experience of the object,
i.e., an experience taking in comparatively many of the object's
features. Whereas a practical attitude limits and fragments the
object of our experience, allowing us to see only those of its
features which are relevant to our purposes, the aesthetic
attitude, by contrast, isolates the object and focuses upon itthe
look of the rocks, the sound of the ocean, the colors in the
painting. (Stolnitz 1960, 35).Bullough, who prefers to speak of
psychical distance rather than disinterest, characterizes aesthetic
appreciation as something achievedby putting the phenomenon, so to
speak, out of gear with our actual practical self; by allowing it
to stand outside the context of our personal needs and endsin
short, by looking at it objectively by permitting only such
reactions on our part as emphasise the objective features of the
experience, and by interpreting even our subjective affections not
as modes of our being but rather as characteristics of the
phenomenon. (Bullough 1995, 298299; emphasis in original).Bullough
has been criticized for claiming that aesthetic appreciation
requires dispassionate detachment:Bullough's characterization of
the aesthetic attitude is the easiest to attack. When we cry at a
tragedy, jump in fear at a horror movie, or lose ourselves in the
plot of a complex novel, we cannot be said to be detached, although
we may be appreciating the aesthetic qualities of these works to
the fullest . And we can appreciate the aesthetic properties of the
fog or storm while fearing the dangers they present. (Goldman 2005,
264)But such a criticism seems to overlook a subtlety of Bullough's
view. While Bullough does hold that aesthetic appreciation requires
distance between our own self and its affections (Bullough 1995,
298), he does not take this to require that we not undergo
affections but quite the opposite: only if we undergo affections
have we affections from which to be distanced. So, for example, the
properly distanced spectator of a well-constructed tragedy is not
the over-distanced spectator who feels no pity or fear, nor the
under-distanced spectator who feels pity and fear as she would to
an actual, present catastrophe, but the spectator who interprets
the pity and fear she feels not as modes of [her] being but rather
as characteristics of the phenomenon (Bullough 1995, 299). The
properly distanced spectator of a tragedy, we might say,
understands her fear and pity to be part of what tragedy is
about.The notion of the aesthetic attitude has been attacked from
all corners and has very few remaining sympathizers. George Dickie
is widely regarded as having delivered the decisive blow in his
essay The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude (Dickie 1964) by arguing
that all purported examples of interested or distanced attention
are really just examples of inattention. So consider the case of
the spectator at a performance of Othello who becomes increasingly
suspicious of his wife as the action proceeds, or the case of the
impresario who sits gauging the size of the audience, or the case
of the father who sits taking pride in his daughter's performance,
or the case of the moralist who sits gauging the moral effects the
play is apt to produce in its audience. These and all such cases
will be regarded by the attitude theorist as cases of interested or
distanced attention to the performance, when they are actually
nothing but cases of inattention to the performance: the jealous
husband is attending to his wife, the impresario to the till, the
father to his daughter, the moralist to the effects of the play.
But if none of them is attending to the performance, then none of
them is attending to it disinterestedly or with distance (Dickie
1964, 5759).The attitude theorist, however, can plausibly resist
Dickie's interpretation of such examples. Clearly the impresario is
not attending to the performance, but there is no reason to regard
the attitude theorist as committed to thinking otherwise. As for
the others, it might be argued that they are all attending. The
jealous husband must be attending to the performance, since it is
the action of the play, as presented by the performance, that is
making him suspicious. The proud father must be attending to the
performance, since he is attending to his daughter's performance,
which is an element of it. The moralist must be attending to the
performance, since he otherwise would have no basis by which to
gauge its moral effects on the audience. It may be that none of
these spectators is giving the performance the attention it
demands, but that is precisely the attitude theorist's point.But
perhaps another of Dickie's criticisms, one lesser known,
ultimately poses a greater threat to the ambitions of the attitude
theorist. Stolnitz, it will be recalled, distinguishes between
disinterested and interested attention according to the purpose
governing the attention: to attend disinterestedly is to attend
with no purpose beyond that of attending; to attend interestedly is
to attend with some purpose beyond that of attending. But Dickie
objects that a difference in purpose does not imply a difference in
attention:Suppose Jones listens to a piece of music for the purpose
of being able to analyze and describe it on an examination the next
day and Smith listens to the same music with no such ulterior
purpose. There is certainly a difference in the motives and
intentions of the two men: Jones has an ulterior purpose and Smith
does not, but this does not mean Jones's listening differs from
Smith's . There is only one way to listen to (to attend to) music,
although there may be a variety of motives, intentions, and reasons
for doing so and a variety of ways of being distracted from the
music. (Dickie 1964, 58).There is again much here that the attitude
theorist can resist. The idea that listening is a species of
attending can be resisted: the question at hand, strictly speaking,
is not whether Jones and Smith listen to the music in the same way,
but whether they attend in the same way to the music they are
listening to. The contention that Jones and Smith are attending in
the same way appears to be question-begging, as it evidently
depends on a principle of individuation that the attitude theorist
rejects: if Jones's attention is governed by some ulterior purpose
and Smith's is not, and we individuate attention according to the
purpose that governs it, their attention is not the same. Finally,
even if we reject the attitude theorist's principle of
individuation, the claim that there is but one way to attend to
music is doubtful: one can seemingly attend to music in myriad
waysas historical document, as cultural artifact, as aural
wallpaper, as sonic disturbancedepending on which of the music's
features one attends to in listening to it. But Dickie is
nevertheless onto something crucial to the degree he urges that a
difference in purpose need not imply a relevant difference in
attention. Disinterest plausibly figures in the definition of the
aesthetic attitude only to the degree that it, and it alone,
focuses attention on the features of the object that matter
aesthetically. The possibility that there are interests that focus
attention on just those same features implies that disinterest has
no place in such a definition, which in turn implies that neither
it nor the notion of the aesthetic attitude is likely to be of any
use in fixing the meaning of the term aesthetic. If to take the
aesthetic attitude toward an object simply is to attend to its
aesthetically relevant properties, whether the attention is
interested or disinterested, then determining whether an attitude
is aesthetic apparently requires first determining which properties
are the aesthetically relevant ones. And this task seems always to
result either in claims about the immediate graspability of
aesthetic properties, which are arguably insufficient to the task,
or in claims about the essentially formal nature of aesthetic
properties, which are arguably groundless.But that the notions of
disinterest and psychical distance prove unhelpful in fixing the
meaning of the term aesthetic does not imply that they are mythic.
At times we seem unable to get by without them. Consider the case
of The Fall of Miletusa tragedy written by the Greek dramatist
Phrynicus and staged in Athens barely two years after the violent
Persian capture of the Greek city of Miletus in 494 BC. Herodotus
records that[the Athenians] found many ways to express their sorrow
at the fall of Miletus, and in particular, when Phrynicus composed
and produced a play called The Fall of Miletus, the audience burst
into tears and fined him a thousand drachmas for reminding them of
a disaster that was so close to home; future productions of the
play were also banned. (Herodotus, The Histories, 359)How are we to
explain the Athenian reaction to this play without recourse to
something like interest or lack of distance? How, in particular,
are we to explain the difference between the sorrow elicited by a
successful tragedy and the sorrow elicited in this case? The
distinction between attention and inattention is of no use here.
The difference is not that the Athenians could not attend to The
Fall whereas they could attend to other plays. The difference is
that they could not attend to The Fall as they could attend to
other plays, and this because of their too intimate connection to
what attending to The Fall required their attending to.2.4
Aesthetic ExperienceTheories of aesthetic experience may be divided
into two kinds according to the kind of feature appealed to in
explanation of what makes experience aesthetic. Internalist
theories appeal to features internal to experience, typically to
phenomenological features, whereas externalist theories appeal to
features external to the experience, typically to features of the
object experienced. (The distinction between internalist and
externalist theories of aesthetic experience is similar, though not
identical, to the distinction between phenomenal and epistemic
conceptions of aesthetic experience drawn by Gary Iseminger
(Iseminger 2003, 100, and Iseminger 2004, 27, 36)). Though
internalist theoriesparticularly John Dewey's (1934) and Monroe
Beardsley's (1958)predominated during the early and middle parts of
the Twentieth Century, externalist theoriesincluding Beardsley's
(1982) and George Dickie's (1988)have been in the ascendant since.
Beardsley's views on aesthetic experience make a strong claim on
our attention, given that Beardsley might be said to have authored
the culminating internalist theory as well as the founding
externalist one. Dickie's criticisms of Beardsley's internalism
make an equally strong claim, since they moved Beardsleyand with
him most everyone elsefrom internalism toward externalism.According
to the version of internalism Beardsley advances in his Aesthetics
(1958), all aesthetic experiences have in common three or four
(depending on how you count) features, which some writers have
[discovered] through acute introspection, and which each of us can
test in his own experience (Beardsley 1958, 527). These are focus
(an aesthetic experience is one in which attention is firmly fixed
upon [its object]), intensity, and unity, where unity is a matter
of coherence and of completeness (Beardsley 1958, 527). Coherence,
in turn, is a matter of having elements that are properly connected
one to another such that[o]ne thing leads to another; continuity of
development, without gaps or dead spaces, a sense of overall
providential pattern of guidance, an orderly cumulation of energy
toward a climax, are present to an unusual degree. (Beardsley 1958,
528)Completeness, by contrast, is a matter having elements that
counterbalance or resolve one another such that the whole stands
apart from elements without it:The impulses and expectations
aroused by elements within the experience are felt to be
counterbalanced or resolved by other elements within the
experience, so that some degree of equilibrium or finality is
achieved and enjoyed. The experience detaches itself, and even
insulates itself, from the intrusion of alien elements. (Beardsley
1958, 528)Dickie's most consequential criticism of Beardsley's
theory is that Beardsley, in describing the phenomenology of
aesthetic experience, has failed to distinguish between the
features we experience aesthetic objects as having and the features
aesthetic experiences themselves have. So while every feature
mentioned in Beardsley's description of the coherence of aesthetic
experiencecontinuity of development, the absence of gaps, the
mounting of energy toward a climaxsurely is a feature we experience
aesthetic objects as having, there is no reason to think of
aesthetic experience itself as having any such features:Note that
everything referred to [in Beardsley's description of coherence] is
a perceptual characteristic and not an effect of perceptual
characteristics. Thus, no ground is furnished for concluding that
experience can be unified in the sense of being coherent. What is
actually argued for is that aesthetic objects are coherent, a
conclusion which must be granted, but not the one which is
relevant. (Dickie 1965, 131)Dickie raises a similar worry about
Beardsley's description of the completeness of aesthetic
experience:One can speak of elements being counterbalanced in the
painting and say that the painting is stable, balanced and so on,
but what does it mean to say the experience of the spectator of the
painting is stable or balanced? Looking at a painting in some cases
might aid some persons in coming to feel stable because it might
distract them from whatever is unsettling them, but such cases are
atypical of aesthetic appreciation and not relevant to aesthetic
theory. Aren't characteristics attributable to the painting simply
being mistakenly shifted to the spectator? (Dickie 1965, 132)Though
these objections turned out to be only the beginning of the debate
between Dickie and Beardsley on the nature of aesthetic experience
(See Beardsley 1969, Dickie 1974, Beardsley 1982, and Dickie 1987;
see also Iseminger 2003 for a helpful overview of the
Beardsley-Dickie debate), they nevertheless went a long way toward
shaping that debate, which taken as whole might be seen as the
working out of an answer to the question What can a theory of
aesthetic experience be that takes seriously the distinction
between the experience of features and the features of experience?
The answer turned out to be an externalist theory of the sort that
Beardsley advances in the 1982 essay The Aesthetic Point of View
and that many others have advanced since: a theory according to
which an aesthetic experience just is an experience having
aesthetic content, i.e., an experience of an object as having the
aesthetic features that it has.The shift from internalism to
externalism has not been without costs. One central ambition of
internalismthat of fixing the meaning of aesthetic by tying it to
features peculiar to aesthetic experiencehas had to be given up.
But a second, equally central, ambitionthat of accounting for
aesthetic value by tying it to the value of aesthetic experiencehas
been retained. Indeed most everything written on aesthetic
experience since the Beardsley-Dickie debate has been written in
service of the view that an object has aesthetic value insofar as
it affords valuable experience when correctly perceived. This
viewwhich has come to be called empiricism about aesthetic value,
given that it reduces aesthetic value to the value of aesthetic
experiencehas attracted many advocates over the last several years
(Beardsley 1982, Budd 1985 and 1995, Goldman 1995 and 2006, Walton
1993, Levinson 1996 and 2006, Miller 1998, Railton 1998, and
Iseminger 2004), while provoking relatively little criticism
(Zangwill 1999, Sharpe 2000, D. Davies 2004, and Kieran 2005). Yet
it can be wondered whether empiricism about aesthetic value is
susceptible to a version of the criticism that has done internalism
in.For there is something odd about the position that combines
externalism about aesthetic experience with empiricism about
aesthetic value. Externalism locates the features that determine
aesthetic character in the object, whereas empiricism locates the
features that determine aesthetic value in the experience, when one
might have thought that the features that determine aesthetic
character just are the features that determine aesthetic value. If
externalism and empiricism are both true, there is nothing to stop
two objects that have different, even wholly disparate, aesthetic
characters from nevertheless having the very same aesthetic
valueunless, that is, the value-determining features of an
experience are bound logically to the character-determining
features of the object that affords it such that only an object
with those features could afford an experience having that value.
But in that case the value-determining features of the experience
are evidently not simply the phenomenological features that might
have seemed best suited to determine the value of the experience,
but perhaps rather the representational or epistemic features of
the experience that it has only in relation to its object. And this
is what some empiricists have been urging of late:Aesthetic
experience aims first at understanding and appreciation, at taking
in the aesthetic properties of the object. The object itself is
valuable for providing experience that could only be an experience
of that object . Part of the value of aesthetic experience lies in
experiencing the object in the right way, in a way true to its
nonaesthetic properties, so that the aim of understanding and
appreciation is fulfilled. (Goldman 2006, 339341; see also
Iseminger 2004, 36)But there is an unaddressed difficulty with this
line of thought. While the representational or epistemic features
of an aesthetic experience might very plausibly contribute to its
value, such features very implausibly contribute to the value of
the object affording such an experience. If the value of the
experience of a good poem consists, in part, in its being an
experience in which the poem is properly understood or accurately
represented, the value of a good poem cannot consist, even in part,
in its capacity to afford an experience in which it is properly
understood or accurately represented, because, all things being
equal, a bad poem presumably has these capacities in equal measure.
It is of course true that only a good poem rewards an understanding
of it. But then a good poem's capacity for rewarding understanding
is evidently to be explained by the poem's already being good; it
is evidently in virtue of its already being good that a poem
rewards us on condition that we understand it.Other empiricists
have taken a different tack. Instead of trying to isolate the
general features of aesthetic experience in virtue of which it and
its objects are valuable, they simply observe the impossibility, in
any particular case, of saying much about the value of an aesthetic
experience without also saying a lot about the aesthetic character
of the object. So, for example, referring to the values of the
experiences that works of art afford, Jerrold Levinson maintains
thatif we examine more closely these goods we see that their most
adequate description invariably reveals them to involve
ineliminably the artworks that provide them . The cognitive
expansion afforded us by Bartok's Fourth String Quartet, similarly,
is not so much a generalized effect of that sort as it is a
specific state of stimulation undetachable from the particular
turns and twists of Bartok's carefully crafted essay . even the
pleasure we take in the Allegro of Mozart's Symphony no. 29 is, as
it were, the pleasure of discovering the individual nature and
potential of its thematic material, and the precise way its
aesthetic character emerges from its musical underpinnings . there
is a sense in which the pleasure of the Twenty-Ninth can be had
only from that work. (Levinson 1996, 2223; see also Budd 1985,
123124)There is no denying that when we attempt to describe, in any
detail, the values of experiences afforded by particular works we
quickly find ourselves describing the works themselves. The
question is what to make of this fact. If one is antecedently
committed to empiricism, it may seem a manifestation of the
appropriately intimate connection between the aesthetic character
of a work and the value of the experience that the work affords.
But if one is not so committed, it may seem to manifest something
else. If, when attempting to account for the aesthetic value of
Bartok's Fourth String Quartet in terms of the value of the
experience it affords, we find ourselves unable to say much about
the value of that experience without saying something about the
quartet's particular turns and twists, this may be because the
value resides in those twists and turns and not in the experience
of them. To affirm such a possibility, of course, is not to deny
that the value the quartet has in virtue of its particular twists
in turns is a value that we experience it as having. It is rather
to insist on sharply distinguishing between the value of experience
and the experience of value, in something like the way Dickie
insisted on sharply distinguishing between the unity of experience
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twists and turns, consists in the value of the experience that it
affords, which experience is valuable, at least in part, because it
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