Aesthetic Experience

Richard Shusterman, Adele Tomlin, Richard Shusterman, Adele Tomlin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415378321
• eBook ISBN: 9781134182879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In this volume, a team of internationally respected contributors theorize the concept of aesthetic experience and its value. Exposing and expanding our restricted cultural and intellectual presuppositions of what constitutes aesthetic experience, the book aims to re-explore and affirm the place of aesthetic experience--in its evaluative, phenomenological and transformational sense--not only in relation to art and artists but to our inner and spiritual lives.

Part I
Experience and the nature of the aesthetic

1
Aesthetic essence

Malcolm Budd

Does the aesthetic have an essence? If so, can it be captured in non-aesthetic terms or is the aesthetic an irreducible concept?

Whatever the scope of “the aesthetic” may properly be thought to be—I return to this issue in section II—three preliminary points. In the first place, “the aesthetic” ranges over items in different categories: there are aesthetic judgments, aesthetic pleasures, aesthetic values, aesthetic attitudes, aesthetic interest, aesthetic sensitivity, aesthetic properties, aesthetic character, aesthetic appreciation, aesthetic responses and so on.¹ Second, aestheticians have been inclined to privilege one of these categories of the aesthetic, assigning to it a basic status and explicating the others in terms of it. Third, the various categories of the aesthetic are inter-definable, no matter which, if any, is taken as basic, how exactly they are related to one another (not everyone understanding them as being connected in the same manner), and despite disagreements about what should properly be thought of as falling within a particular category. Such disagreements arise from different requirements for membership of the category. For example, whereas some require an aesthetic judgment about an item to be one acquired through first-hand acquaintance with the item,² others allow a belief founded on the opinion of another to be an aesthetic judgment. Again, some of those who agree that pleasure in the perception of a single color, sound, taste or smell is an aesthetic pleasure operate with a notion of judgment, as Kant did, which is such that the mere announcement of such a pleasure in the linguistic form of a judgment—”It’s pleasurable”—counts as the expression of an aesthetic judgment. Others hold that the linguistic expression of an aesthetic pleasure or response is an aesthetic judgment—is a judgment at all—only if it claims intersubjective validity, as no mere expression of pleasure, even one formulated in judgmental form, properly does: it would be an aesthetic judgment only if it claimed an item’s capacity or suitability to give pleasure, or that it merits a pleasurable response. I will skirt disagreements of this kind.

Now the idea of aesthetic judgment might well be understood to include general, universal and comparative (or superlative) judgments: “Some/most/all of the [46!] prints in Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji are wonderful”; “Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji is a finer set than Hiroshige’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.” To illustrate the inter-definability of the various aesthetic categories, it will simplify matters if the idea of aesthetic judgment is restricted to singular judgments and is understood to include only judgments that are solely about the aesthetic value or character³ of a single item: on the one hand, those that are purely evaluative, restricted to expressing an assessment of the aesthetic value of an item, grading it as aesthetically good, mediocre, or bad, for example (“verdicts,” as Frank Sibley called them); on the other hand, those that attribute to an item a property that is a ground of aesthetic value (positive or negative), a property in virtue of which the item may be aesthetically praised or faulted, the set of such properties constituting the item’s aesthetic character.⁴ If any ground of an item’s aesthetic value, as realized in the item, is itself called an aesthetic value (positive or negative) of the item,⁵ then with the idea of aesthetic value assigned the basic role, and exploiting the ambiguity of the notion,⁶ the ideas of aesthetic judgment, pleasure, property and attitude might be defined in some such economical fashion as this:

An aesthetic judgment is a judgment that ascribes (positive or negative) aesthetic value to an item.

An aesthetic pleasure is a pleasure taken in the apparent perception or imaginative realization of aesthetic value.⁷

An aesthetic property of an item is any property of it that has aesthetic value.

An aesthetic attitude is an attitude of a kind conducive to a reliable perceptual- or imagination-based judgment of aesthetic value.

If, however, the basic status is assigned to the idea of aesthetic judgment, the other categories might be defined in terms of it just as easily:

An aesthetic value is a value of a kind ascribed by an aesthetic judgment.

An aesthetic pleasure is a pleasure taken in the apparent perception or imaginative realization of a value rightly or wrongly ascribed to the object of pleasure by a positive aesthetic judgment.

An aesthetic attitude is an attitude towards an item of a kind that is conducive to an aesthetic judgment about the item being well founded.

An aesthetic property is a property ascribed to an item by an aesthetic judgment.

And so on round the circle of aesthetic categories.

It follows that if any category can be defined in non-aesthetic terms, all can. Nevertheless, one category might still be basic if the others can be defined (in non-aesthetic terms) only in virtue of their connections with it, whereas it can be elucidated independently of its connections with them (as with a word used paronymously).

II

Any attempt to articulate the essence of the aesthetic runs up against the problematic scope of the aesthetic. For there are different conceptions of its scope, no one of which has a proper claim to be the right one. Consider purely sensory (or sensuous) pleasure. The crucial feature of purely sensory pleasure, understood as pleasure in the perception of a single undifferentiated color expanse, as such, or in the perception of a sound of a constant pitch, loudness and timbre or a taste or smell in which a single sensory quality, sweetness or acidity, for example, is detected, is that there is no variety in the object as it is perceived, just a single, structureless, homogeneous quality. Accordingly, a pleasurable series of such perceptions—successive perceptions either of coexistent items or of items that occur one after another—each of which yields pleasure, the pleasure of each being independent of the relation of its object to that of any other, affords only sensory pleasure, since no pleasure is taken in anything other than a homogeneous quality. Likewise, a single perception of a complex object yields only sensory pleasure if different elements of it delight one but not in virtue of any relations among them. Some think of purely sensory pleasure as being a species of aesthetic pleasure. But for others, aesthetic pleasure, by contrast, involves variety in its intentional object, pleasure being taken in the manner in which the various aspects are related to one another or in a property generated by the character of the aspects and the relations among them (so that the experience of a “well balanced” wine qualifies, not as purely sensory, but as aesthetic). Accordingly, it is not just that the intentional object of aesthetic pleasure must be complex: the pleasure must be due to the way in which the elements relate to one another. This conception distinguishes aesthetic from purely sensory pleasure by the requirement that aesthetic pleasure is pleasure resulting from structure (in one sense of that word).⁸

This divergence in understanding of the scope of the aesthetic is not the only one. As yet there has been no need to distinguish art from non-art or to draw a distinction between one art and another, between different works within the same art, or between different aspects of a work. But for some, not all forms of artistic appreciation are aesthetic. In the first place, there are those who, seeking to stay close to the original meaning of the term, allow into the aesthetic only those arts that address a specific sensory mode (or a number of such modes), the conduit and appeal of these arts being specifically visual or specifically auditory, for example, open only to those who possess the necessary sense and use it to take in what the art offers (or who are able to imagine the work, as someone now deaf can imagine a piece of music by means of the score), thus placing the appreciation of literature—or at least literature the specific appeal of which does not reside essentially in the sounds or visual appearance of its constituent words—outside the aesthetic.⁹ According to the simplest form of this conception, for those arts that fall within the domain of the aesthetic there is no distinction between a work’s artistic and its aesthetic value, but for those that fall outside that domain, although a work possesses an artistic value it lacks an aesthetic value. Second, whereas the term “aesthetic” is often used in a wide sense to cover not only the aesthetic appreciation of nature and non-artistic artifacts but every kind of artistic appreciation, some prefer to operate with a narrower sense of the term, effecting a distinction between two kinds of properties of works of art—aesthetic and artistic properties. For those who use the term in the wide sense, artistic appreciation just is aesthetic appreciation of works of art. For those who use it in the narrower sense, although the aesthetic appreciation of a work of art is part of its artistic appreciation, it does not exhaust it, since the distinction between the aesthetic properties of a work of art and its artistic properties carries with it a distinction between its aesthetic and its artistic value. Not everyone who recognizes the distinction between the two kinds of property, each kind being relevant to the artistic evaluation of a work that possesses such a property, draws it in just the same way. But perhaps it would be agreed that artistic properties, unlike aesthetic properties, are such that they cannot be directly perceived or detected by attending exclusively to the work itself, even by someone who has the cognitive stock required to understand the work, since they are properties the work possesses only in virtue of the relations in which it stands to other things.¹⁰ It would, of course, be possible to combine these two conceptions, both excluding from the aesthetic any art that does not address a specific sensory mode (or a number of such modes) and imposing the distinction between aesthetic and artistic properties of a work of art. This would yield the result that the idea of a work’s artistic value diverges everywhere from that of its aesthetic value.

There are two reasonable responses to this proliferation of conceptions. A proposed account of the essence of the aesthetic might be intended to capture one particular conception of the scope of the aesthetic, or it might, in virtue of the generality of its formulation, be sufficiently elastic to be molded to...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Experience and the nature of the aesthetic
• Part II The value and scope of aesthetic experience
• Part III Aesthetic experience, artists, and philosophies of art
• Index