Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the EighteenthCentury, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to designate, amongother things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind ofattitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the mostpart, aesthetic theories have divided over questionsparticular to one or another of these designations: whetherartworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square theallegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact thatwe give reasons in support of them; how best to capture the elusivecontrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one; whether todefine aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological orrepresentational content; how best to understand the relation betweenaesthetic value and aesthetic experience. But questions of moregeneral nature have lately arisen, and these have tended tohave a skeptical cast: whether any use of ‘aesthetic’ maybe explicated without appeal to some other; whether agreementrespecting any use is sufficient to ground meaningful theoreticalagreement or disagreement; whether the term ultimately answers to anylegitimate philosophical purpose that justifies its inclusion in thelexicon. The skepticism expressed by such general questions did notbegin to take hold until the later part of the 20th century, and thisfact prompts the question whether (a) the concept of the aesthetic isinherently problematic and it is only recently that we have managed tosee that it is, or (b) the concept is fine and it is only recentlythat we have become muddled enough to imagine otherwise. Adjudicatingbetween these possibilities requires a vantage from which to take inboth early and late theorizing on aesthetic matters.
1. The Concept of Taste
The concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. Whythe concept of taste commanded so much philosophical attention duringthe 18th century is a complicated matter, but this much is clear: theeighteenth-century theory of taste emerged, in part, as a correctiveto the rise of rationalism, particularly as applied to beauty, and tothe rise of egoism, particularly as applied to virtue. Againstrationalism about beauty, the eighteenth-century theory of taste heldthe judgment of beauty to be immediate; against egoism about virtue,it held the pleasure of beauty to be disinterested.
1.1 Immediacy
Rationalism about beauty is the view that judgments of beauty arejudgments of reason, i.e., that we judge things to be beautiful byreasoning it out, where reasoning it out typically involves inferringfrom principles or applying concepts. At the beginning of the 18thcentury, rationalism about beauty had achieved dominance on thecontinent, and was being pushed to new extremes by “lesgéomètres,” a group of literary theorists whoaimed to bring to literary criticism the mathematical rigor thatDescartes had brought to physics. As one such theorist put it:
The way to think about a literary problem is that pointed out byDescartes for problems of physical science. A critic who tries anyother way is not worthy to be living in the present century. There isnothing better than mathematics as propaedeutic for literarycriticism. (Terrasson 1715, Preface, 65; quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks1957, 258)
It was against this, and against more moderate forms of rationalismabout beauty, that mainly British philosophers working mainly withinan empiricist framework began to develop theories of taste. Thefundamental idea behind any such theory—which we may callthe immediacy thesis—is that judgments of beauty arenot (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences fromprinciples or applications of concepts, but rather have all theimmediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments. It is the idea, inother words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things arebeautiful, but rather “sense” that they are. Here is anearly expression of the thesis, from Jean-Baptiste Dubos’sCritical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, whichfirst 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 havingsettled the geometrical principles of taste, and defined the qualitiesof each ingredient that enters into the composition of those messes,to examine into the proportion observed in their mixture, in order todecide whether it be good or bad? No, this is never practiced. We havea sense given us by nature to distinguish whether the cook actedaccording to the rules of his art. People taste the ragoo, andtho’ unacquainted with those rules, they are able to tellwhether it be good or no. The same may be said in some respect of theproductions of the mind, and of pictures made to please and move us.(Dubos 1748, vol. II, 238–239)
And here is a late expression, from Kant’s 1790 Critique ofthe Power of Judgment:
If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the endfails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, oreven older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rulesthey established as proofs that his poem is beautiful… . I willstop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and would ratherbelieve that those rules of the critics are false … than allowthat my judgment should be determined by means of a priorigrounds of proof, since it is supposed to be a judgment of taste andnot of the understanding of reason. (Kant 1790, 165)
But the theory of taste would not have enjoyed its eighteenth-centuryrun, nor would it continue now to exert its influence, had it beenwithout resources to counter an obvious rationalist objection. Thereis a wide difference—so goes the objection—between judgingthe excellence of a ragout and judging the excellence of a poem or aplay. More often than not, poems and plays are objects of greatcomplication. But taking in all that complication requires a lot ofcognitive work, including the application of concepts and the drawingof inferences. Judging the beauty of poems and plays, then, isevidently not immediate and so evidently not a matter of taste.
The chief way of meeting this objection was first to distinguishbetween the act of grasping the object preparatory to judging it andthe act of judging the object once grasped, and then to allow theformer, but not the latter, to be as concept- and inference-mediatedas any rationalist might wish. Here is Hume, with characteristicclarity:
[I]n order to pave the way for [a judgment of taste], and give aproper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, thatmuch reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, justconclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relationsexamined, and general facts fixed and ascertained. Some species ofbeauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearancecommand our affection and approbation; and where they fail of thiseffect, it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence,or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders ofbeauty, particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to employmuch reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment. (Hume, 1751,Section I)
Hume—like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, and Reid afterhim (Cooper 1711, 17, 231; Hutcheson 1725, 16–24; Reid 1785,760–761)—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 thatdepends for its objects on the antecedent operation of some othermental faculty or faculties. Reid characterizes internal sense asfollows:
Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature orstructure. To perceive the beauty therefore, we must perceive thenature or structure from which it results. In this the internal sensediffers from the external. Our external senses may discover qualitieswhich do not depend upon any antecedent perception… . But it isimpossible to perceive the beauty of an object, without perceiving theobject, or at least conceiving it. (Reid 1785, 760–761)
Because of the highly complex natures or structures of many beautifulobjects, 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 Disinterest
Egoism about virtue is the view that to judge an action or traitvirtuous is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to servesome interest of yours. Its central instance is the Hobbesianview—still very much on early eighteenth-centuryminds—that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to takepleasure in it because you believe it to promote your safety. AgainstHobbesian egoism a number of British moralists—preeminentlyShaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume—argued that, while a judgmentof virtue is a matter of taking pleasure in response to an action ortrait, the pleasure is disinterested, by which they meant that it isnot self-interested (Cooper 1711, 220–223; Hutcheson 1725, 9,25–26; Hume 1751, 218–232, 295–302). One argumentwent roughly as follows. That we judge virtue by means of an immediatesensation of pleasure means that judgments of virtue are judgments oftaste, no less than judgments of beauty. But pleasure in the beautifulis not self-interested: we judge objects to be beautiful whether ornot we believe them to serve our interests. But if pleasure in thebeautiful is disinterested, there is no reason to think that pleasurein the virtuous cannot also be (Hutcheson 1725, 9–10).
The eighteenth-century view that judgments of virtue are judgments oftaste highlights a difference between the eighteenth-century conceptof taste and our concept of the aesthetic, since for us the conceptsaesthetic and moral tend oppose one another suchthat a judgment’s falling under one typically precludes itsfalling under the other. Kant is chiefly responsible for introducingthis difference. He brought the moral and the aesthetic intoopposition by re-interpreting what we might call the disinterestthesis—the thesis that pleasure in the beautiful isdisinterested (though see Cooper 1711, 222 and Home 2005, 36–38for anticipations of Kant’s re-interpretation).
According to Kant, to say that a pleasure is interested is not to saythat it is self-interested in the Hobbesian sense, but rather that itstands in a certain relation to the faculty of desire. The pleasureinvolved in judging an action to be morally good is interested becausesuch 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 tobecome aware that one has a duty to perform the action, and to becomeso aware is to gain a desire to perform it. By contrast, the pleasureinvolved in judging an object to be beautiful is disinterested becausesuch a judgment issues in no desire to do anything in particular. Ifwe can be said to have a duty with regard to beautiful things, itappears to be exhausted in our judging them aesthetically to bebeautiful. That is what Kant means when he says that the judgment oftaste is not practical but rather “merely contemplative”(Kant 1790, 95).
By thus re-orienting the notion of disinterest, Kant brought theconcept of taste into opposition with the concept of morality, and sointo line, more or less, with the present concept of the aesthetic.But if the Kantian concept of taste is continuous, more or less, withthe present-day concept of the aesthetic, why the terminologicaldiscontinuity? Why have we come to prefer the term‘aesthetic’ to the term ‘taste’? The not veryinteresting answer appears to be that we have preferred an adjectiveto a noun. The term ‘aesthetic’ derives from the Greekterm for sensory perception, and so preserves the implication ofimmediacy carried by the term ‘taste.’ Kant employed bothterms, though not equivalently: according to his usage,‘aesthetic’ is broader, picking out a class of judgmentsthat includes both the normative judgment of taste and thenon-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 widespreadonly, though quickly, after his employment of it in the thirdCritique. Yet the employment that became widespread was not exactlyKant’s, but a narrower one according to which‘aesthetic’ simply functions as an adjective correspondingto the noun “taste.” So for example we find Coleridge, in1821, expressing the wish that he “could find a more familiarword than aesthetic for works of taste and criticism,” beforegoing on to argue:
As our language … contains no other useable adjective,to express coincidence of form, feeling, and intellect, thatsomething, which, confirming the inner and the outward senses, becomesa new sense in itself … there is reason to hope, that the termaesthetic, 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: theexpressions “judgment of taste,” “emotion oftaste” and “quality of taste” have given way to thearguably less offensive ‘aesthetic judgment,’‘aesthetic emotion,’ and ‘aesthetic quality.’However, as the noun ‘taste’ phased out, we became saddledwith other perhaps equally awkward expressions, including the one thatnames this entry.
2. The Concept of the Aesthetic
Much of the history of more recent thinking about the concept of theaesthetic can be seen as the history of the development of theimmediacy and disinterest theses.
2.1 Aesthetic Objects
Artistic formalism is the view that the artistically relevantproperties of an artwork—the properties in virtue of which it isan artwork and in virtue of which it is a good or bad one—areformal merely, where formal properties are typically regarded asproperties graspable by sight or by hearing merely. Artistic formalismhas been taken to follow from both the immediacy and the disinteresttheses (Binkley 1970, 266–267; Carroll 2001, 20–40). Ifyou take the immediacy thesis to imply the artistic irrelevance of allproperties whose grasping requires the use of reason, and you includerepresentational properties in that class, then you are apt to thinkthat the immediacy thesis implies artistic formalism. If you take thedisinterest thesis to imply the artistic irrelevance of all propertiescapable of practical import, and you include representationalproperties in that class, then you are apt to think that thedisinterest thesis implies artistic formalism.
This is not to suggest that the popularity enjoyed by artisticformalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries owed mainly toits inference from the immediacy or disinterest theses. The mostinfluential advocates of formalism during this period wereprofessional critics, and their formalism derived, at least in part,from the artistic developments with which they were concerned. As acritic Eduard Hanslick advocated for the pure music of Mozart,Beethoven, Schumann, and later Brahms, and against the dramaticallyimpure music of Wagner; as a theorist he urged that music has nocontent but “tonally moving forms” (Hanslick 1986, 29). Asa critic Clive Bell was an early champion of the post-Impressionists,especially Cezanne; as a theorist he maintained that the formalproperties of painting—“relations and combinations oflines and colours”—alone have artistic relevance (Bell1958, 17–18). As a critic Clement Greenberg was abstractexpressionism’s ablest defender; as a theorist he heldpainting’s “proper area of competence” to beexhausted by flatness, pigment, and shape (Greenberg 1986,86–87).
Not every influential defender of formalism has also been aprofessional critic. Monroe Beardsley, who arguably gave formalism itsmost sophisticated articulation, was not (Beardsley 1958). Nor is NickZangwill, who recently has mounted a spirited and resourceful defenseof a moderate version of formalism (Zangwill 2001). But formalism hasalways been sufficiently motivated by art-critical data that onceArthur Danto made the case that the data no longer supported it, andperhaps never really had, formalism’s heyday came to an end.Inspired in particular by Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, whichare (more or less) perceptually indistinguishable from thebrand-printed cartons in which boxes of Brillo were delivered tosupermarkets, Danto observed that for most any artwork it is possibleto imagine both (a) another object that is perceptually indiscerniblefrom it but which is not an artwork, and (b) another artwork that isperceptually indiscernible from it but which differs in artisticvalue. From these observations he concluded that form alone neithermakes an artwork nor gives it whatever value it has (Danto 1981,94–95; Danto 1986, 30–31; Danto 1997, 91).
But Danto has taken the possibility of such perceptual indiscerniblesto show the limitations not merely of form but also of aesthetics, andhe has done so on the grounds, apparently, that the formal and theaesthetic are co-extensive. Regarding a urinal Duchamp once exhibitedand a perceptual indiscernible ordinary urinal, Danto maintainsthat
aesthetics could not explain why one was a work of fine art and theother not, since for all practical purposes they were aestheticallyindiscernible: if one was beautiful, the other one had to bebeautiful, since they looked just alike. (Danto 2003, 7)
But the inference from the limits of the artistically formal to thelimits of the artistically aesthetic is presumably only as strong asthe inferences from the immediacy and disinterest theses to artisticformalism, and these are not beyond question. The inference from thedisinterest thesis appears to go through only if you employ a strongernotion of disinterest than the one Kant understands himself to beemploying: Kant, it is worth recalling, regards poetry as the highestof the fine arts precisely because of its capacity to employrepresentational content in the expression of what he calls‘aesthetic ideas’ (Kant 1790, 191–194; see Costello2008 and 2013 for extended treatment of the capacity of Kantianaesthetics to accommodate conceptual art). The inference from theimmediacy thesis appears to go through only if you employ a notion ofimmediacy stronger than the one Hume, for example, takes himself to bedefending 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 propersentiment” (Hume 1751, 173). It may be that artistic formalismresults if you push either of the tendencies embodied in the immediacyand disinterest theses to extremes. It may be that the history ofaesthetics from the 18th century to the mid-Twentieth is largely thehistory of pushing those two tendencies to extremes. It does notfollow that those tendencies must be so pushed.
Consider Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. Danto is right tomaintain that the eighteenth-century theorist of taste would not knowhow to regard it as an artwork. But this is because theeighteenth-century theorist of taste lives in the 18th century, and sowould be unable to situate that work in its twentieth-centuryart-historical context, and not because the kind of theory she holdsforbids her from situating a work in its art-historical context. WhenHume, for instance, observes that artists address their works toparticular, historically-situated audiences, and that a critictherefore “must place herself in the same situation as theaudience” to whom a work is addressed (Hume 1757, 239), he isallowing that artworks are cultural products, and that the propertiesthat works have as the cultural products they are are among the“ingredients of the composition” that a critic must graspif she is to feel the proper sentiment. Nor does there seem to beanything in the celebrated conceptuality of Brillo Boxes, norof any other conceptual work, that ought to give theeighteenth-century theorist pause. Francis Hutcheson asserts thatmathematical and scientific theorems are objects of taste (Hutcheson1725, 36–41). Alexander Gerard asserts that scientificdiscoveries and philosophical theories are objects of taste (Gerard1757, 6). Neither argues for his assertion. Both regard it ascommonplace that objects of intellect may be objects of taste asreadily as objects of sight and hearing may be. Why should thepresent-day aesthetic theorist think otherwise? If an object isconceptual in nature, grasping its nature will require intellectualwork. If grasping an object’s conceptual nature requiressituating it art-historically, then the intellectual work required tograsp its nature will include situating it art-historically.But—as Hume and Reid held (see section 1.1)—grasping thenature of an object preparatory to aesthetically judging it is onething; aesthetically judging the object once grasped is another.
Though Danto has been the most influential and persistent critic offormalism, his criticisms are no more decisive than those advanced byKendall Walton in his essay “Categories of Art.”Walton’s anti-formalist argument hinges on two main theses, onepsychological and one philosophical. According to the psychologicalthesis, which aesthetic properties we perceive a work as havingdepends on which category we perceive the work as belonging to.Perceived as belonging to the category of painting, Picasso’sGuernica will be perceived as “violent, dynamic, vital,disturbing” (Walton 1970, 347). But perceived as belonging tothe category of “guernicas”—where guernicas areworks with “surfaces with the colors and shapes ofPicasso’s Guernica, but the surfaces are molded toprotrude from the wall like relief maps of different kinds ofterrain”—Picasso’s Guernica will beperceived 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 beperceived both as violent and dynamic and as not violent and notdynamic might be thought to imply that there is no fact of the matterwhether it is violent and dynamic. But this implication holds only onthe assumption that there is no fact of the matter which categoryPicasso’s Guernica actually belongs to, and thisassumption appears to be false given that Picasso intended thatGuernica be a painting and did not intend that it be aguernica, and that the category of paintings was well-established inthe society in which Picasso painted it while the category ofguernicas was not. Hence the philosophical thesis, according to whichthe aesthetic properties a work actually has are those it is perceivedas having when perceived as belonging to the category (or categories)it actually belongs to. Since the properties of having been intendedto be a painting and having been created in a society in whichpainting is well-established category are artistically relevant thoughnot graspable merely by seeing (or hearing) the work, it seems thatartistic formalism cannot be true. “I do not deny,” Waltonconcludes, “that paintings and sonatas are to be judged solelyon what can be seen or heard in them—when they are perceivedcorrectly. But examining a work with the senses can by itself revealneither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to perceive it thatway” (Walton 1970, 367).
But if we cannot judge which aesthetic properties paintings andsonatas have without consulting the intentions and the societies ofthe artists who created them, what of the aesthetic properties ofnatural items? With respect to them it may appear as if there isnothing to consult except the way they look and sound, so that anaesthetic formalism about nature must be true. Allen Carlson, acentral figure in the burgeoning field of the aesthetics of nature,argues against this appearance. Carlson observes that Walton’spsychological thesis readily transfers from works of art to naturalitems: that we perceive Shetland ponies as cute and charming andClydesdales as lumbering surely owes to our perceiving them asbelonging to the category of horses (Carlson 1981, 19). He alsomaintains that the philosophical thesis transfers: whales actuallyhave the aesthetic properties we perceive them as having when weperceive them as mammals, and do not actually have any contrastingaesthetic properties we might perceive them to have when we perceivethem as fish. If we ask what determines which category or categoriesnatural items actually belong to, the answer, according to Carlson, istheir natural histories as discovered by natural science (Carlson1981, 21–22). Inasmuch as a natural item’s natural historywill 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 tonatural 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 tonatural items has proven more controversial. Carlson is surely rightthat aesthetic judgments about natural items are prone to be mistakeninsofar as they result from perceptions of those items as belonging tocategories to which they do not belong, and, insofar as determiningwhich categories natural items actually belong to requires scientificinvestigation, this point seems sufficient to undercut theplausibility of any very strong formalism about nature (see Carlson1979 for independent objections against such formalism). Carlson,however, also wishes to establish that aesthetic judgments aboutnatural items have whatever objectivity aesthetic judgments aboutworks of art do, and it is controversial whether Walton’sphilosophical claim transfers sufficiently to support such a claim.One difficulty, raised by Malcolm Budd (Budd 2002 and 2003) and RobertStecker (Stecker1997c), is that since there are many categories inwhich a given natural item may correctly be perceived, it is unclearwhich correct category is the one in which the item is perceived ashaving the aesthetic properties it actually has. Perceived asbelonging to the category of Shetland ponies, a large Shetland ponymay be perceived as lumbering; perceived as belonging to the categoryof horses, the same pony may be perceived as cute and charming butcertainly not lumbering. If the Shetland pony were a work of art, wemight appeal to the intentions (or society) of its creator todetermine which correct category is the one that fixes its aestheticcharacter. But as natural items are not human creations they can giveus no basis for deciding between equally correct but aestheticallycontrasting categorizations. It follows, according to Budd, “theaesthetic appreciation of nature is endowed with a freedom denied tothe appreciation of art” (Budd 2003, 34), though this is perhapsmerely another way of saying that the aesthetic appreciation of art isendowed with an objectivity denied to the appreciation of nature.
2.2 Aesthetic Judgment
The eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists oftaste (or sentimentalists) was primarily a debate over the immediacythesis, i.e., over whether we judge objects to be beautiful byapplying principles of beauty to them. It was not primarily a debateover the existence of principles of beauty, a matter over whichtheorists of taste might disagree. Kant denied that there are any suchprinciples (Kant 1790, 101), but both Hutcheson and Hume affirmedtheir existence: they maintained that although judgments of beauty arejudgments of taste and not of reason, taste nevertheless operatesaccording to general principles, which might be discovered throughempirical investigation (Hutcheson 1725, 28–35; Hume 1757,231–233).
It is tempting to think of recent debate in aesthetics betweenparticularists and generalists as a revival of the eighteenth-centurydebate between rationalists and theorists of taste. But the accuracyof this thought is difficult to gauge. One reason is that it is oftenunclear whether particularists and generalists take themselves merelyto be debating the existence of aesthetic principles or to be debatingtheir employment in aesthetic judgment. Another is that, to the degreeparticularists and generalists take themselves to be debating theemployment of aesthetic principles in aesthetic judgment, it is hardto know what they can be meaning by ‘aesthetic judgment.’If ‘aesthetic’ still carries its eighteenth-centuryimplication of immediacy, then the question under debate is whetherjudgment that is immediate is immediate. If ‘aesthetic’ nolonger carries that implication, then it is hard to know what questionis under debate because it is hard to know what aesthetic judgmentcould be. It may be tempting to think that we can simply re-define‘aesthetic judgment’ such that it refers to any judgmentin which an aesthetic property is predicated of an object. But thisrequires being able to say what an aesthetic property is withoutreference to its being immediately graspable, something no one seemsto have done. It may seem that we can simply re-define‘aesthetic judgment’ such that it refers to any judgmentin which any property of the class exemplified by beauty is predicatedof an object. But which class is this? The classes exemplified bybeauty are presumably endless, and the difficulty is to specify therelevant class without reference to the immediate graspability of itsmembers, and that is what no one seems to have done.
However we are to sort out the particularist/generalist 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, onthe side of generalism, Monroe Beardsley’s Aesthetics(1958) and “On the Generality of Critical Reasons” (1962),Sibley’s “General Reasons and Criteria inAesthetics” (in Sibley 2001), George Dickie’sEvaluating Art (1987), Stephen Davies’s “Repliesto Arguments Suggesting that Critics’ Strong Evaluations Couldnot be Soundly Deduced” (1995), and John Bender’s“General but Defeasible Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluation: TheGeneralist/Particularist Dispute” (1995). Of these, the papersby Isenberg and Sibley have arguably enjoyed the greatestinfluence.
Isenberg concedes that we often appeal to descriptive features ofworks in support of our judgments of their value, and he allows thatthis may make it seem as if we must be appealing to principles inmaking those judgments. If in support of a favorable judgment of somepainting a critic appeals to the wavelike contour formed by thefigures clustered in its foreground, it may seem as if his judgmentmust involve tacit appeal to the principle that any painting havingsuch a contour is so much the better. But Isenberg argues that thiscannot be, since no one agrees to any such principle:
There is not in all the world’s criticism a single purelydescriptive statement concerning which one is prepared to saybeforehand, ‘If it is true, I shall like that work so much thebetter’ (Isenberg 1949, 338).
But if in appealing to the descriptive features of a work we are notacknowledging tacit appeals to principles linking those features toaesthetic value, what are we doing? Isenberg believes we are offering“directions for perceiving” the work, i.e., by singlingout certain its features, we are “narrow[ing] down the field ofpossible visual orientations” and thereby guiding others in“the discrimination of details, the organization of parts, thegrouping of discrete objects into patterns” (Isenberg 1949,336). In this way we get others to see what we have seen, rather thangetting them to infer what we have inferred.
That Sibley advances a variety of particularism in one paper and avariety of generalism in another will give the appearance ofinconsistency where there is none: Sibley is a particularist of onesort, and with respect to one distinction, and a generalist of anothersort with respect to another distinction. Isenberg, as noted, is aparticularist with respect to the distinction between descriptions andverdicts, i.e., he maintains that there are no principles by which wemay infer from value-neutral descriptions of works to judgments oftheir overall value. Sibley’s particularism and generalism, bycontrast, both have to do with judgments falling in betweendescriptions and verdicts. With respect to a distinction betweendescriptions and a set of judgments intermediate between descriptionsand verdicts, Sibley is straightforwardly particularist. With respectto a distinction between a set of judgments intermediate betweendescriptions and verdicts and verdicts, Sibley is a kind of generalistand describes himself as such.
Sibley’s generalism, as set forth in “General Reasons andCriteria in Aesthetics,” begins with the observation that theproperties to which we appeal in justification of favorable verdictsare not all descriptive or value-neutral. We also appeal to propertiesthat are inherently positive, such as grace, balance, dramaticintensity, or comicality. To say that a property is inherentlypositive is not to say that any work having it is so much the better,but rather that its tout court attribution implies value. Soalthough a work may be made worse on account of its comical elements,the simple claim that a work is good because comical is intelligiblein a way that the simple claims that a work is good because yellow, orbecause it lasts twelve minutes, or because it contains many puns, arenot. But if the simple claim that a work is good because comical isthus intelligible, comicality is a general criterion for aestheticvalue, and the principle that articulates that generality is true. Butnone of this casts any doubt on the immediacy thesis, as Sibleyhimself observes:
I have argued elsewhere that there are no sure-fire rules by which,referring to the neutral and non-aesthetic qualities of things, onecan infer that something is balanced, tragic, comic, joyous, and soon. One has to look and see. Here, equally, at a different level, I amsaying that there are no sure-fire mechanical rules or procedures fordeciding which qualities are actual defects in the work; one has tojudge for oneself. (Sibley 2001, 107–108)
The “elsewhere” referred to in the first sentence isSibley’s earlier paper, “Aesthetic Concepts,” whichargues that the application of concepts such as‘balanced,’ ‘tragic,’ ‘comic,’ or‘joyous’ is not a matter of determining whether thedescriptive (i.e., non-aesthetic) conditions for their application aremet, but is rather a matter of taste. Hence aesthetic judgments areimmediate in something like the way that judgments of color, or offlavor, are:
We see that a book is red by looking, just as we tell that the tea issweet by tasting it. So too, it might be said, we just see (or fail tosee) that things are delicate, balanced, and the like. This kind ofcomparison between the exercise of taste and the use of the fivesenses is indeed familiar; our use of the word ‘taste’itself shows that the comparison is age-old and very natural (Sibley2001, 13–14).
But Sibley recognizes—as his eighteenth-century forebears didand his formalist contemporaries did not—that importantdifferences remain between the exercise of taste and the use of thefive senses. Central among these is that we offer reasons, orsomething like them, in support of our aesthetic judgments: bytalking—in particular, by appealing to the descriptiveproperties on which the aesthetic properties depend—we justifyaesthetic judgments by bringing others to see what we have seen(Sibley 2001, 14–19).
It is unclear to what degree Sibley, beyond seeking to establish thatthe application of aesthetic concepts is not condition-governed, seeksalso to define the term ‘aesthetic’ in terms of their notbeing so. It is clearer, perhaps, that he does not succeed in definingthe term this way, whatever his intentions. Aesthetic concepts are notalone in being non-condition-governed, as Sibley himself recognizes incomparing them with color concepts. But there is also no reason tothink them alone in being non-condition-governed while also beingreason-supportable, since moral concepts, to give one example, atleast arguably also have both these features. Isolating the aestheticrequires something more than immediacy, as Kant saw. It requiressomething like the Kantian notion of disinterest, or at leastsomething to play the role played by that notion in Kant’stheory.
Given the degree to which Kant and Hume continue to influence thinkingabout aesthetic judgment (or critical judgment, more broadly), giventhe degree to which Sibley and Isenberg continue to abet thatinfluence, it is not surprising that the immediacy thesis is now verywidely received. The thesis, however, has come under attack, notablyby Davies (1990) and Bender (1995). (See also Carroll (2009), whofollows closely after Davies (1990), and Dorsch (2013) for furtherdiscussion.)
Isenberg, it will be recalled, maintains that if the critic is arguingfor her verdict, her argumentation must go something as follows:
- Artworks having p are better for having p.
- W is an artwork having p.
- Therefore, W is so much the better for havingp.
Since the critical principle expressed in premise 1 is open tocounter-example, no matter what property we substitute for p, Isenbergconcludes that we cannot plausibly interpret the critic as arguing forher verdict. Rather than defend the principle expressed in premise 1,Davies and Bender both posit alternative principles, consistent withthe fact that no property is good-making in all artworks, which theyascribe to the critic. Davies proposes that we interpret the critic asarguing deductively from principles relativized to artistic type, thatis, from principles holding that artworks of a specific types orcategories—Italian Renaissance paintings, romantic symphonies,Hollywood Westerns, etc.—having p are better for having it(Davies 1990, 174). Bender proposes that we interpret the critic asarguing inductively from principles expressing mere tendencies thathold between certain properties and artworks—principles, inother words, holding that artworks having p tend to be better forhaving it (Bender 1995, 386).
Each proposal has its own weaknesses and strengths. A problem withBender’s approach is that critics do not seem to couch theirverdicts in probabilistic terms. Were a critic to say that a work islikely to be good, or almost certainly good, or even that she has thehighest confidence that it must be good, her language would suggestthat she had not herself experienced the work, perhaps that she hadjudged the work on the basis of someone else’s testimony, hencethat she is no critic at all. We would therefore have good reason toprefer Davies’s deductive approach if only we had good reasonfor thinking that relativizing critical principles to artistic typeremoved the original threat of counterexample. Though it is clear thatsuch relativizing reduces the relative number of counterexamples, weneed good reason for thinking that it reduces that number to zero, andDavies provides no such reason. Bender’s inductive approach, bycontrast, cannot be refuted by counterexample, but only bycounter-tendency.
If the critic argues from the truth of a principle to the truth of averdict—as Davies and Bender both contend—it must bepossible for her to establish the truth of the principle beforeestablishing the truth of the verdict. How might she do this? It seemsunlikely that mere reflection on the nature of art, or on the naturesof types of art, could yield up the relevant lists of good- andbad-making properties. At least the literature has yet to produce apromising account as to how this might be done. Observation thereforeseems the most promising answer. To say that the critic establishesthe truth of critical principles on the basis of observation, however,is to say that she establishes a correlation between certain artworksshe has already established to be good and certain properties she hasalready established those works to have. But then any capacity toestablish that works are good by inference from principles evidentlydepends on some capacity to establish that works are good without anysuch inference, and the question arises why the critic should preferto do by inference what she can do perfectly well without. The answercannot be that judging by inference from principle yieldsepistemically better results, since a principle based on observationscan be no more epistemically sound than the observations on which itis based.
None of this shows that aesthetic or critical judgment could never beinferred from principles. It does however suggest that such judgmentis first and foremost non-inferential, which is what the immediacythesis holds.
2.3 The Aesthetic Attitude
The Kantian notion of disinterest has its most direct recentdescendents in the aesthetic-attitude theories that flourished fromthe early to mid 20th century. Though Kant followed the British inapplying the term ‘disinterested’ strictly to pleasures,its migration to attitudes is not difficult to explain. For Kant thepleasure involved in a judgment of taste is disinterested because sucha judgment does not issue in a motive to do anything in particular.For this reason Kant refers to the judgment of taste as contemplativerather than practical (Kant 1790, 95). But if the judgment of taste isnot practical, then the attitude we bear toward its object ispresumably also not practical: when we judge an object aestheticallywe are unconcerned with whether and how it may further our practicalaims. Hence it is natural to speak of our attitude toward the objectas disinterested.
To say, however, that the migration of disinterest from pleasures toattitudes is natural is not to say that it is inconsequential.Consider the difference between Kant’s aesthetic theory, thelast great theory of taste, and Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory,the first great aesthetic-attitude theory. Whereas for Kantdisinterested pleasure is the means by which we discover things tobear aesthetic value, for Schopenhauer disinterested attention (or“will-less contemplation”) is itself the locus ofaesthetic value. According to Schopenhauer, we lead our ordinary,practical lives in a kind of bondage to our own desires (Schopenhauer1819, 196). This bondage is a source not merely of pain but also ofcognitive distortion in that it restricts our attention to thoseaspects of things relevant to the fulfilling or thwarting of ourdesires. Aesthetic contemplation, being will-less, is therefore bothepistemically and hedonically valuable, allowing us a desire-freeglimpse into the essences of things as well as a respite fromdesire-induced pain:
When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raisesus out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge fromthe thralldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed tothe motives of willing, but comprehends things free from theirrelation to the will … Then all at once the peace, alwayssought 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 20thcentury are those of Edward Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz. According toStolnitz’s theory, which is the more straightforward of the two,bearing an aesthetic attitude toward an object is a matter ofattending to it disinterestedly and sympathetically, where to attendto it disinterestedly is to attend to it with no purpose beyond thatof attending to it, and to attend to it sympathetically is to“accept it on its own terms,” allowing it, and notone’s own preconceptions, to guide one’s attention of it(Stolnitz 1960, 32–36). The result of such attention is acomparatively richer experience of the object, i.e., an experiencetaking in comparatively many of the object’s features. Whereas apractical attitude limits and fragments the object of our experience,allowing us to “see only those of its features which arerelevant to our purposes,…. By contrast, the aesthetic attitude‘isolates’ the object and focuses upon it—the‘look’ of the rocks, the sound of the ocean, the colors inthe painting.” (Stolnitz 1960, 33, 35).
Bullough, who prefers to speak of “psychical distance”rather than disinterest, characterizes aesthetic appreciation assomething achieved
by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our actualpractical self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of ourpersonal needs and ends—in short, by looking at it‘objectively’ … by permitting only such reactionson our part as emphasise the ‘objective features of theexperience, and by interpreting even our ‘subjective’affections not as modes of our being but rather ascharacteristics of the phenomenon. (Bullough 1995, 298–299;emphasis in original).
Bullough has been criticized for claiming that aesthetic appreciationrequires dispassionate detachment:
Bullough’s characterization of the aesthetic attitude is theeasiest to attack. When we cry at a tragedy, jump in fear at a horrormovie, or lose ourselves in the plot of a complex novel, we cannot besaid to be detached, although we may be appreciating the aestheticqualities of these works to the fullest… . And we canappreciate the aesthetic properties of the fog or storm while fearingthe dangers they present. (Goldman 2005, 264)
But such a criticism seems to overlook a subtlety of Bullough’sview. While Bullough does hold that aesthetic appreciation requiresdistance “between our own self and its affections”(Bullough 1995, 298), he does not take this to require that we notundergo affections but quite the opposite: only if we undergoaffections have we affections from which to be distanced. So, forexample, the properly distanced spectator of a well-constructedtragedy is not the “over-distanced” spectator who feels nopity or fear, nor the “under-distanced” spectator whofeels 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 ofthe phenomenon” (Bullough 1995, 299). The properly distancedspectator of a tragedy, we might say, understands her fear and pity tobe part of what tragedy is about.
The notion of the aesthetic attitude has been attacked from allcorners and has very few remaining sympathizers. George Dickie iswidely regarded as having delivered the decisive blow in his essay“The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” (Dickie 1964) byarguing that all purported examples of interested attention are reallyjust examples of inattention. So consider the case of the spectator ata performance of Othello who becomes increasingly suspiciousof his own wife as the action proceeds, or the case of the impresariowho sits gauging the size of the audience, or the case of the fatherwho sits taking pride in his daughter’s performance, or the caseof the moralist who sits gauging the moral effects the play is apt toproduce in its audience. These and all such cases will be regarded bythe attitude theorist as cases of interested attention to theperformance, when they are actually nothing but cases of inattentionto the performance: the jealous husband is attending to his wife, theimpresario to the till, the father to his daughter, the moralist tothe effects of the play. But if none of them is attending to theperformance, then none of them is attending to it interestedly (Dickie1964, 57–59).
The attitude theorist, however, can plausibly resist Dickie’sinterpretation of such examples. Clearly the impresario is notattending to the performance, but there is no reason to regard theattitude theorist as committed to thinking otherwise. As for theothers, it might be argued that they are all attending. The jealoushusband must be attending to the performance, since it is the actionof the play, as presented by the performance, that is making himsuspicious. The proud father must be attending to the performance,since he is attending to his daughter’s performance, which is anelement of it. The moralist must be attending to the performance,since he otherwise would have no basis by which to gauge its moraleffects on the audience. It may be that none of these spectators isgiving the performance the attention it demands, but that is preciselythe attitude theorist’s point.
But perhaps another of Dickie’s criticisms, one lesser known,ultimately poses a greater threat to the ambitions of the attitudetheorist. Stolnitz, it will be recalled, distinguishes betweendisinterested and interested attention according to the purposegoverning the attention: to attend disinterestedly is to attend withno purpose beyond that of attending; to attend interestedly is toattend with some purpose beyond that of attending. But Dickie objectsthat a difference in purpose does not imply a difference inattention:
Suppose Jones listens to a piece of music for the purpose of beingable to analyze and describe it on an examination the next day andSmith listens to the same music with no such ulterior purpose. Thereis certainly a difference in the motives and intentions of the twomen: Jones has an ulterior purpose and Smith does not, but this doesnot 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, andreasons for doing so and a variety of ways of being distracted fromthe music. (Dickie 1964, 58).
There is again much here that the attitude theorist can resist. Theidea that listening is a species of attending can be resisted: thequestion at hand, strictly speaking, is not whether Jones and Smithlisten to the music in the same way, but whether theyattend in the same way to the music they are listening to.The contention that Jones and Smith are attending in the same wayappears to be question-begging, as it evidently depends on a principleof individuation that the attitude theorist rejects: if Jones’sattention is governed by some ulterior purpose and Smith’s isnot, and we individuate attention according to the purpose thatgoverns it, their attention is not the same. Finally, even if wereject the attitude theorist’s principle of individuation, theclaim that there is but one way to attend to music is doubtful: onecan seemingly attend to music in myriad ways—as historicaldocument, as cultural artifact, as aural wallpaper, as sonicdisturbance—depending on which of the music’s features oneattends to in listening to it. But Dickie is nevertheless ontosomething crucial to the degree he urges that a difference in purposeneed not imply a relevant difference in attention.Disinterest plausibly figures in the definition of the aestheticattitude only to the degree that it, and it alone, focuses attentionon the features of the object that matter aesthetically. Thepossibility that there are interests that focus attention on justthose same features implies that disinterest has no place in such adefinition, which in turn implies that neither it nor the notion ofthe aesthetic attitude is likely to be of any use in fixing themeaning of the term ‘aesthetic.’ If to take the aestheticattitude toward an object simply is to attend to its aestheticallyrelevant properties, whether the attention is interested ordisinterested, then determining whether an attitude is aestheticapparently requires first determining which properties are theaesthetically relevant ones. And this task seems always to resulteither in claims about the immediate graspability of aestheticproperties, which are arguably insufficient to the task, or in claimsabout the essentially formal nature of aesthetic properties, which arearguably groundless.
But that the notions of disinterest and psychical distance proveunhelpful in fixing the meaning of the term ‘aesthetic’does not imply that they are mythic. At times we seem unable to get bywithout them. Consider the case of The Fall ofMiletus—a tragedy written by the Greek dramatist Phrynicusand staged in Athens barely two years after the violent Persiancapture of the Greek city of Miletus in 494 BC. Herodotus recordsthat
[the Athenians] found many ways to express their sorrow at the fall ofMiletus, and in particular, when Phrynicus composed and produced aplay called The Fall of Miletus, the audience burst intotears and fined him a thousand drachmas for reminding them of adisaster that was so close to home; future productions of the playwere also banned. (Herodotus, The Histories, 359)
How are we to explain the Athenian reaction to this play withoutrecourse to something like interest or lack of distance? How, inparticular, are we to explain the difference between the sorrowelicited 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 TheFall whereas they could attend to other plays. The difference isthat they could not attend to The Fall as they could attendto other plays, and this because of their too intimate connection towhat attending to The Fall required their attending to.
2.4 Aesthetic Experience
Theories of aesthetic experience may be divided into two kindsaccording to the kind of feature appealed to in explanation of whatmakes experience aesthetic: internalist theories appeal tofeatures internal to experience, typically to phenomenologicalfeatures, whereas externalist theories appeal to featuresexternal to the experience, typically to features of the objectexperienced. (The distinction between internalist and externalisttheories of aesthetic experience is similar, though not identical, tothe distinction between phenomenal and epistemic conceptions ofaesthetic experience drawn by Gary Iseminger (Iseminger 2003, 100, andIseminger 2004, 27, 36)). Though internalisttheories—particularly John Dewey’s (1934) and MonroeBeardsley’s (1958)—predominated during the early andmiddle parts of the 20th century, externalist theories—includingBeardsley’s (1982) and George Dickie’s (1988)—havebeen in the ascendance since. Beardsley’s views on aestheticexperience make a strong claim on our attention, given that Beardsleymight be said to have authored the culminating internalist theory aswell as the founding externalist one. Dickie’s criticisms ofBeardsley’s internalism make an equally strong claim, since theymoved Beardsley—and with him most everyone else—frominternalism toward externalism.
According to the version of internalism Beardsley advances inhis Aesthetics (1958), all aesthetic experienceshave in common three or four (depending on how you count) features,which “some writers have [discovered] through acuteintrospection, and which each of us can test in his ownexperience” (Beardsley 1958, 527). These are focus (“anaesthetic experience is one in which attention is firmly fixed upon[its object]”), intensity, and unity, where unity is a matter ofcoherence and of completeness (Beardsley 1958, 527). Coherence, inturn, is a matter of having elements that are properly connected oneto another such that
[o]ne thing leads to another; continuity of development, without gapsor dead spaces, a sense of overall providential pattern of guidance,an orderly cumulation of energy toward a climax, are present to anunusual degree. (Beardsley 1958, 528)
Completeness, by contrast, is a matter having elements that“counterbalance” or “resolve” one another suchthat the whole stands apart from elements without it:
The impulses and expectations aroused by elements within theexperience are felt to be counterbalanced or resolved by otherelements within the experience, so that some degree of equilibrium orfinality is achieved and enjoyed. The experience detaches itself, andeven insulates itself, from the intrusion of alien elements.(Beardsley 1958, 528)
Dickie’s most consequential criticism of Beardsley’stheory is that Beardsley, in describing the phenomenology of aestheticexperience, has failed to distinguish between the features weexperience aesthetic objects as having and the features aestheticexperiences themselves have. So while every feature mentioned inBeardsley’s description of the coherence of aestheticexperience—continuity of development, the absence of gaps, themounting of energy toward a climax—surely is a feature weexperience aesthetic objects as having, there is no reason to think ofaesthetic experience itself as having any such features:
Note that everything referred to [in Beardsley’s description ofcoherence] is a perceptual characteristic … and not an effectof perceptual characteristics. Thus, no ground is furnished forconcluding that experience can be unified in the sense of beingcoherent. What is actually argued for is that aesthetic objects arecoherent, a conclusion which must be granted, but not the one which isrelevant. (Dickie 1965, 131)
Dickie raises a similar worry about Beardsley’s description ofthe completeness of aesthetic experience:
One can speak of elements being counterbalanced in thepainting and say that the painting is stable, balanced andso on, but what does it mean to saythe experience of the spectator of the paintingis stable or balanced? … Looking at a painting in some casesmight aid some persons in coming to feel stable because it mightdistract them from whatever is unsettling them, but such cases areatypical of aesthetic appreciation and not relevant to aesthetictheory. Aren’t characteristics attributable to the paintingsimply being mistakenly shifted to the spectator? (Dickie 1965, 132)
Though these objections turned out to be only the beginning of thedebate between Dickie and Beardsley on the nature of aestheticexperience (See Beardsley 1969, Dickie 1974, Beardsley 1970, andDickie 1987; see also Iseminger 2003 for a helpful overview of theBeardsley-Dickie debate), they nevertheless went a long way towardshaping that debate, which taken as whole might be seen as the workingout of an answer to the question “What can a theory of aestheticexperience be that takes seriously the distinction between theexperience of features and the features of experience?” Theanswer turned out to be an externalist theory of the sort thatBeardsley advances in the 1970 essay “The Aesthetic Point ofView” and that many others have advanced since: a theoryaccording to which an aesthetic experience just is an experiencehaving aesthetic content, i.e., an experience of an object as havingthe aesthetic features that it has.
The shift from internalism to externalism has meant that one centralambition of internalism—that of tying the meaning of‘aesthetic’ to features internal to aestheticexperience—has had to be given up. But a second, equallycentral, ambition—that of accounting for aesthetic value bygrounding it in the value of aesthetic experience—has beenretained. The following section takes up the development and prospectsof such accounts.
2.5 Aesthetic Value
To count as complete a theory of aesthetic value must answertwo questions:
- What makes aesthetic valueaesthetic?
- What makes aesthetic valuevalue?
The literature refers to the first question sometimes as theaesthetic question (Lopes 2018, 41–43; Shelley 2019, 1) andsometimes as the demarcation question (van der Berg 2020, 2;Matherne 2020, 315; Peaco*cke 2021, 165). It refers to the second asthe normative question (Lopes 2018, 41–43; Shelley2019, 1; Matherne 2020, 315).
2.5.1 The Aesthetic Question
The prevailing answer to the aesthetic question is aestheticformalism, the view that aesthetic value is aesthetic becauseobjects bear it in virtue of their perceptual properties, where theseencompass visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactileproperties. Aesthetic formalism rose to prominence when and becauseartistic formalism did, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries(see Section 5.1). Because everyone then took artistic value to be aspecies of aesthetic value, artistic formalism could gain prominenceonly by dragging aesthetic formalism in its train. But whereasartistic formalism has since fallen from favor, aesthetic formalismhas held its ground. The explanation, arguably, has to do with the wayaesthetic formalism honors the conceptual link between the aestheticand the perceptual. Any adequate answer to the aesthetic question mustmeet what we may call the perceptual constraint, that is, itmust plausibly articulate the sense in which aesthetic value isperceptual. Aesthetic formalism does this in the clearest possibleterms.
Versions of aesthetic formalism come in varying strengths. Itsstrongest versions hold objects to have aesthetic value strictly invirtue of their perceptual properties (Bell 1958/1914; Danto 2003,92). Weaker versions either allow objects to have aesthetic value invirtue of their non-perceptual content so long as that contentexpresses itself perpetually (Zangwill 1998, 71–72) or require merelythat objects paradigmatically have aesthetic value in virtue of theirperceptual properties (Levinson 1996, 6). All versions of aestheticformalism struggle, one way or another, to accommodate ourlong-standing practice of ascribing aesthetic value to objects that donot address themselves primarily to the five bodily senses. Considerworks of literature. We have been ascribing aesthetic value to themfor as long as we have been ascribing aesthetic value to artworks ofany kind. How might the aesthetic theorist square her theory with thispractice? A first approach is simply to dismiss that practice,regarding its participants as linguistically confused, as applyingterms of aesthetic praise to objects constitutionally incapable ofmeriting it (Danto 2003, 92). But given how extremely revisionist thisapproach is, we ought to wait on an argument of proportionatelyextreme strength before adopting it. A second approach allows thatliterary works bear aesthetic value, but only in virtue of theirsensory properties, such as properties associated with assonance,consonance, rhythm, and imagery (Urmson 1957, 85–86, 88;Zangwill 2001, 135–140). But this approach accounts for a merefraction of the aesthetic value we routinely ascribe to works ofliterature. Suppose you praise a short story for the eloquence of itsprose and the beauty of its plot-structure. It seems arbitrary tocount only the eloquence as a genuine instance of aesthetic value. Athird approach treats literary works as exceptional, allowing them,alone among works of art, to bear aesthetic value in virtue of theirnon-perceptual properties (Binkley 1970, 269;Levinson 1996, 6 n.9). The difficulty hereis to explain literature’s exceptionality. If literary workssomehow bear aesthetic value in virtue of non-perceptual properties,what prevents non-literary works from doing the same? Moreover, towhatever degree we allow things to have aesthetic value in virtue oftheir non-perceptual properties, to that degree we sever theconnection the formalist asserts between the aesthetic and theperceptual and so undermine our reason for adopting aestheticformalism in the first place.
We might be forced to choose from among these three formalistapproaches to literature if aesthetic formalism constituted the onlyplausible articulation of the sense in which aesthetic value isperceptual, but it doesn’t. Instead of holding that aestheticvalue is perceptual because things have it in virtue of theirperpetual properties, one might hold that aesthetic value isperceptual because we perceive things as having it. This would be acorollary of the immediacy thesis as defined in Section 1.1. If, asthat thesis holds, aesthetic judgment is perceptual, having all theimmediacy of any standard perceptual judgment, then aestheticproperties are perceptual, grasped with all the immediacy of standardperceptual properties. That aesthetic properties are thus perceptualis Sibley’s point in the following:
It is of importance to note first that, broadly speaking, aestheticsdeals with a kind of perception. People have to see the graceor unity of a work, hear the plaintiveness or frenzy in themusic, notice the gaudiness of a colour scheme, feelthe power of a novel, its mood, or its uncertainty of tone. (Sibley2001, 34, emphasis in original)
Sibley says that people have to see the grace or unity of a work andthey have to feel the power of a novel. He doesn’t say that theyhave to see the properties in virtue of which a work has grace orunity or feel the properties in virtue of which a novel has power: theproperties in virtue of which a work has grace or unity need not beperceptual and the properties in virtue of which a novel has powerpresumably will not be. Thus the literature problem, over whichformalism stumbles, does not arise for Sibley, nor for anyone elsecommitted to the immediacy thesis, includingShaftesbury (Cooper 1711, 17, 231), Hutcheson (1725,16–24), Hume (1751, Section I), and Reid (1785, 760–761),among others. For the immediacy theorist, the aesthetic value weascribe to literary works is aesthetic because we perceive literaryworks as bearing it.
2.5.2 The Normative Question
The prevailing answer to the normative question is aesthetichedonism, the view that aesthetic value is value because thingshaving it give pleasure when experienced. Aesthetic hedonism achievedprominence in the 19th century, roughly when aesthetic formalism did.Schopenhauer played a pivotal role in bringing it to prominence byreassigning disinterested pleasure from the role it had been playingin aesthetic judgment to the role of grounding aesthetic value(Schopenhauer 1818 [1969], 195–200). Bentham (1789, ch. 4) andMill (1863 [2001]; ch. 2) arguably played larger roles by popularizingvalue hedonism, that is, the view that pleasure is the ground of allvalue. But whereas value hedonism no longer holds much sway in ethics,and Schopenhauer no longer exerts much influence in aesthetics,aesthetic hedonism has held its ground. The explanation presumably hasto do with the apparent ease with which aesthetic hedonism explainswhy we seek out objects of aesthetic value. Any adequate answer to thenormative question must meet what we may call the normativeconstraint, that is, it must plausibly identify what athing’s having aesthetic value gives us reason to do. Aesthetichedonism, locating that reason in the pleasure taken in experiencingaesthetically valuable objects, does this in the clearest possibleterms.
Advocates of aesthetic hedonism include Schopenhauer 1818 [1969], CliveBell 1914 [1958], C. I. Lewis 1946, Monroe Beardsley 1982, George Dickie1988, Alan Goldman 1990, Kendall Walton 1993, Malcolm Budd 1995,Jerrold Levinson 1996, 2002, Gary Iseminger 2004, Robert Stecker 2006,2019, Nick Stang 2010 and Mohan Matthen 2017. It is only quiterecently that any sustained opposition to hedonism has arisen, a factthat may go some way toward explaining why hedonists, as a rule, seeno need to argue for their view, opting instead to develop it in lightof objections an imagined opposition might make.
Beardsley, for instance, leads with this simple formulation ofhedonism:
The aesthetic value of an object is the value it possesses in virtueof its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification. (Beardsley 1982,21).
But he then anticipates a fatal objection. Sometimes we undervalueaesthetic objects, finding them to have less value than they actuallyhave; other times we overvalue aesthetic objects, finding them to havegreater value than they actually have. The simple formulation above isconsistent with undervaluation, since it is possible to take lessaesthetic pleasure from an object than it has the capacity to provide,but inconsistent with overvaluation, since it is impossible to takegreater aesthetic pleasure from an object than it has the capacity toprovide (Beardsley 1982, 26–27). To remedy this problem,Beardsley appends a rider:
The aesthetic value of [an object] is the value [it] possesses invirtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification whencorrectly and completely experienced (Beardsley 1982, 27, italicsin original).
Suppose we refer to the italicized portion of this formulation asthe epistemic qualification and the non-italicized portion asthe hedonic thesis. The epistemic qualification renders thehedonic thesis consistent with overvaluation, given that you canmisapprehend an object such that you take greater aesthetic pleasurefrom it than it has the capacity to provide when apprehended correctlyand completely.
Beardsley’s version of aesthetic hedonism has served as a modelfor subsequent versions (Levinson 2002, n. 23); at least allsubsequent versions consist of an epistemically qualified hedonicthesis in some form. Beardsley’s version, however, seems open tocounter-example. Consider Tony Morrison’s Beloved, forinstance, or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Takingpleasure from works designed to cause shock, horror, despair, or moralrevulsion may seem perverse; surely, it may seem, such works do nothave whatever aesthetic value they have in virtue of any pleasure theygive. One way to accommodate such cases is to cast aesthetic pleasureas a higher-order response, that is, a response that depends onlower-order responses, which in some cases might include shock,horror, despair, and moral revulsion (Walton 1993, 508; Levinson 1992,18). Another way is to broaden the field of experiences that mayground aesthetic value. Though pleasure as a rule grounds aestheticvalue, in exceptional cases certain non-hedonic yet intrinsicallyvaluable experiences—which may include horror, shock, despair,and revulsion—may also do so (Levinson 1992, 12; Stecker 2005,12). The literature refers to this latter, broadened variety ofhedonism as aesthetic empiricism; it hasn’t settled ona name for the former variety, but we may call it tieredhedonism, given the varying levels of response it takes aestheticexperience to comprise.
Yet another objection, anticipated by hedonists, holds hedonism toimply the heresy of the separable experience (Budd 1985,125). It is a commonplace that for any object bearing aesthetic valuenothing other than it can have just the particular value it has,excepting the improbable case in which something other than it hasjust its particular aesthetic character. The worry is that hedonism,given that it regards aesthetic value as instrumental to the value ofexperience, implies that for any object bearing aesthetic valuesomething wholly other from it, such as a drug, might induce the sameexperience and so serve up the same value. The hedonist’s usualreply is to assert that aesthetic experience is inseparable from itsobject, such that for any aesthetic experience, that experience isjust the particular experience it is because it has just theparticular aesthetic object it has (Levinson 1996, 22–23; Budd1985, 123–124; S. Davies 1994: 315–16; Stang 2012,271–272).
Actual opposition to hedonism did not materialize until the presentcentury (Sharpe 2000, Davies 2004), and most all of that during thepast decade or so (Shelley 2010, 2011, 2019; Wolf 2011; Lopes 2015,2018; Gorodeisky 2021a, 2021b). Why the opposition took so long toshow up is a good question. It is tempting to think its answer residesin the obvious truth of the hedonist’s central premise, namely,that aesthetically valuable objects please us, at least in general.Anti-hedonists, however, have taken no interest in denying thispremise. One useful way to think of the dialectic between hedonistsand their opponents is to regard each as grasping one horn of anaesthetic version of the Euthyphro dilemma, where hedonists holdthings to have aesthetic value because they please and anti-hedonistshold things to please because they have aesthetic value (Augustine2005/389–391, De vera religione §59; Gorodeisky2012a, 201 and 2021b, 262). Seen this way, the fact that aestheticallyvaluable things please tells not at all in favor of the hedonist;indeed, it is precisely this fact that the anti-hedonist thinks thehedonist cannot explain.
For instance, Wolf, in the context of an extended, nuanced caseagainst value welfarism, argues that aesthetic hedonism cannot accountfor the fact that Middlemarch is a better novel than theDa Vinci Code,given that most people apparently like the latterbetter, presumably because it gives them greater pleasure (Wolf 2011,54–55; see also Sharpe 2000, 326). The hedonist has a readyreply in the claim that all standard versions of hedonism are nowepistemically qualified, that while most people may derive greaterpleasure from the Da Vinci Code, a fully informedreader—that is, a reader who gives both texts a correct andcomplete reading—will not, assuming Middlemarch to bethe better novel. But it’s not clear how much appeal to theepistemic qualification ultimately helps the hedonist. Theanti-hedonist will want to know what best explains the fact that afully informed reader will derive greater pleasure fromMiddlemarch (Wolf 2011, 55; D. Davies 2004, 258–259;Sharpe 2000, 325). Suppose we say that it owes to the fully informedreader’s grasping the superiority ofMiddlemarch’s structure, the higher quality of itsprose, the greater subtlety and depth of its character development,and the greater penetration of the insights it affords (Wolf 2011,55). Wouldn’t we then be saying that it owes to her grasping thegreater aesthetic value of Middlemarch? Wouldn’t thatbe part of what a fully informed reader is fully informed about?
Of course, the hedonist may allow Middlemarch to beaesthetically better because of its superior structure, prose,character development, and insight; to allow this, from her point ofview, is simply to allow that these are the elements in virtue ofwhich a fully informed reader will derive greater pleasure. But hereit would be good if the hedonist had an argument. Otherwise, theanti-hedonist will rightly wonder how it is that a correct andcomplete experience of Middlemarch will be an experience ofevery value-conferring feature of Middlemarch yet not anexperience of the value conferred by those features. She will rightlywonder whether the hedonist fails to honor her own commitment toexternalism about aesthetic value; she will rightly wonder, in otherwords, whether the hedonist fails to distinguish between a valuableexperience and an experience of value, just as the internalist aboutaesthetic value fails to distinguish between a coherent and completeexperience and an experience of coherence and completeness.
Earlier we attributed the appeal of hedonism to the apparent ease withwhich it explains our seeking out objects of aesthetic value.Anti-hedonists take that ease to be apparent merely. Someanti-hedonists, for instance, argue that at least some aestheticallyvaluable objects offer up pleasure only on condition that we do notseek it (Lopes 2018, 84–86; Ven der Berg 2020, 5–6; seealso Elster 1983, 77–85). Lopes puts the point this way:
Sometimes an agent has an aesthetic reason to act and yet they couldnot be motivated to act out of a hedonic desire that would besatisfied by their so acting. To get any pleasure, they must act outof non-hedonic motives. Strolling through the Louvre, they happen uponthe Chardins, and they look at them. So long as they do not lookseeking pleasure, they get the pleasure that the paintings afford(Lopes 2018, 85–86).
Lopes’s choice of example is not arbitrary. There are particularart-critical reasons for thinking that Chardins will frustrate thehedonically motivated viewer (Fried 1980, 92; cited in Lopes 2018,85), and Lopes is careful to claim that only “some aestheticpleasures are essential by-products of acts motivated by otherconsiderations” (Lopes 2018, 85). But it’s not as ifLopes’s claim is specific to Chardins. Consider againWolf’s assertation that most readers take greater pleasure fromThe Da Vinci Code than from Middlemarch. If thatassertion is correct, as it plausibly is, perhaps this is because (a)most readers read for pleasure, and (b) The Da Vinci Codeaffords pleasure to readers who read for it, whereas (c)Middlemarch withholds pleasure from such readers, affordingpleasure instead on readers who read in pursuit of some non-hedonicgood.
There is an apparent tension, moreover, between the hedonist’sreliance on the epistemic qualification and her claim that pleasurerationalizes our aesthetic pursuits. Consider theless-than-fully-informed reader who overvalues The Da VinciCode and undervalues Middlemarch. The epistemicqualification is designed to allow the hedonist to explain how thismight occur: such a reader takes greater pleasure from The DaVinci Code, and less (or lesser) pleasure fromMiddlemarch, than she would were she fully informed. Theepistemic qualification, moreover, allows the hedonist to explain whythe uninformed reader has aesthetic reason not to undervalueMiddlemarch: she is missing out on pleasure that would behers if only she gave Middlemarch a fully informed reading.But the hedonist struggles to explain why the uninformed reader hasreason not to overvalue the Da Vinci Code. If The DaVinci Code gives the reader greater pleasure when she overvaluesit, not only has she no aesthetic reason to be fully informed, she hasaesthetic reason not to be. It therefore seems that if pleasurerationalized our hedonic pursuits, we would take ourselves to havereason to experience aesthetic objects in whatever way maximizes ourpleasure. To the degree that we instead take ourselves to have reasonto experience aesthetic objects completely and correctly—to thedegree that we instead take ourselves to have reason to experienceaesthetic objects as having the aesthetic values they in facthave—suggests that pleasure is not the aesthetic goodwe’re after (Shelley 2011).
But if pleasure is not the aesthetic good we’re after, what is?Part of hedonism’s perceived inevitability over the past centuryor so has owed to our inability even to imagine alternatives to it. Ifopposition to hedonism has been slow to materialize, alternatives havebeen slower still. To date, the only fully realized alternative tohedonism is Lopes’s network theory of aesthetic normativity,articulated and defended in his ground-breaking Being for Beauty:Aesthetic Agency and Value (2018).
Earlier we noted how Lopes challenges the hedonist on her own terms,objecting that she cannot adequately explain why we seek out objectsof aesthetic value, given that aesthetic pleasure is at leastsometimes an essential by-product of our seeking after something else(2018, 84–86). Lopes’s deeper challenge, however, targetsthe hedonist’s very terms. Aesthetic considerations rationalizea very great variety of aesthetic acts, according to Lopes:appreciating objects of aesthetic value is one such act, but so too ishanging a poster one way rather than another, selecting this bookrather than that one for a book club, building out a garden this wayrather than that, conserving one video game rather than another,pairing this dish with this wine rather than that one, and so onad infinitum (2018, 32–36). If a theory of aestheticvalue is to accommodate such a vast range of aesthetic acts, withoutsingling out any one as more central than the others, it will have toconceive of aesthetic normativity as a species of some very generalkind of normativity. Lopes, accordingly, conceives of aestheticnormativity as a species of the most generic form of practicalnormativity; that aesthetic acts ought to be performed well followsfrom the premise that all acts ought to be performed well for thesimple reason that they are acts (2018, 135–137). As Lopes putsit: “Aesthetic values inherit their practical normativity from abasic condition of all agency—agents must use what they have toperform successfully” (2018, 135). Just which competencies anaesthetic agent may call upon to perform successfully on any givenoccasion depends on the particular role they happen to be playing inthe particular social practice in which they happen to be performing(2018, 135). It is from the fact that all aesthetic activitynecessarily takes place within the domain of some particular socialpractice that the network theory of aesthetic value takes its name(2018, 119).
In holding aesthetic agents to be performing the greatest variety ofaesthetic acts on the greatest variety of items in coordination withone another, the network theory departs radically from hedonism. But,as Lopes himself observes, the network theory follows after hedonismin one fundamental way: inasmuch as both theories “answer thenormative question but offer nothing in answer to the aestheticquestion,” both “are consistent with any stand-aloneanswer to the aesthetic question” (2018, 48). The claim that thenormative and aesthetic questions admit of stand-alone answers impliesthat aesthetic value is a species of the genus valuein a standard species-genus relation, such that what makes aestheticvalue value has no bearing on what makes it aesthetic and vice-versa.It therefore also implies that aesthetic value is not adeterminate of the determinable value, such that what makesaesthetic value aesthetic is very thing that makes it value.
Do answers to the normative and aesthetic questions stand alone orstand together? If we have not yet registered the urgency of thisquestion, perhaps that is because no one has yet fully articulated,let alone defended, a theory of aesthetic value according to whichaesthetic value is a determinate form of value. Such a theory appearsto be implicit, however, in Shelley 2011, Watkins and Shelley 2012,Gorodeisky and Marcus 2018, Gorodeisky 2021a, and Shelley 2022. Theposition common to these authors has been dubbed the Auburnview (Van der Berg 2020, 11). It answers the aesthetic question,and therein the value question, by holding an item’s havingaesthetic value to rationalize its appreciation in a distinctivelyself-reflexive way, such that part of what you perceive when youappreciate an aesthetically valuable item is that it ought to beappreciated as you appreciating it (Shelley 2011, 220–222;Watkins and Shelley 2012, 348–350; Gorodeisky and Marcus 2018,117–119; Gorodeisky 2021a, 200, 207; Shelley 2022, 12). Thenetwork theorist may object that the Auburn view privileges acts ofappreciation as surely as hedonism does, but such an objection, fromthe Auburn perspective, begs the question. It is in assuming that thenormative and aesthetic questions admit of stand-alone answers thatthe network theorist grants herself the freedom of passing on theaesthetic question, and it is in passing on the aesthetic questionthat she grants herself the freedom of treating each of a very greatvariety of aesthetic acts as equally central. It is in assuming thataesthetic value is a determinate of the determinablevalue, meanwhile, that the Auburnite places herself under thenecessity of answering the aesthetic question, and it is in seeking ananswer to the aesthetic question that she places herself under thenecessity of singling out appreciation as aesthetically central. Thenetwork theorist and the Auburnite agree that the aesthetic questiondeserves an answer sooner or later (Lopes 2018, 46). They disagree,crucially, about whether it deserves an answer sooner rather thanlater.
The network theory and the Auburn view hardly exhaust the options fornon-hedonic theories of aesthetic normativity: Nguyen 2019, Matherne2020, Peaco*cke 2021, Kubala 2021, and Riggle 2022 all representpromising new directions. Yet every new theory of aesthetic value,hedonic or not, must follow after the network theory or the Auburnview in regarding answers to the normative and aesthetic questions asstand-alone or stand-together. A lot hangs on the decision to followone path rather than the other. Perhaps it’s time we attend toit.
