Art and the domain of the aesthetic

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 191-208

  Carroll, Noël ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347293467     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/40.2.191     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993);
2. Bill Beckley and David Shapiro (eds), Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (New York: Allworth Press, 1998).
3. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1999).
4. Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Vintage, 1997).
5. This particular way of characterizing aesthetic experience is derived from Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 32-42.
6. Monroe C. Beardsley, 'Aesthetic Experience', in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. Michael Wreen and Donald Callen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1982), p. 288.
7. The distinction between 'relatively ultimate' and 'proximate' above and its application to questions of instrumental and intrinsic value derive from Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1998), ch. 6.
8. Beardsley, 'Aesthetic Experience', p. 288.
9. The evolutionary hypotheses I have just conjectured may, of course, all be finally shown to be false. However, that would not demonstrate that the existence of the human capacity to have aesthetic experiences cannot be explained ultimately in terms of evolutionary instrumentalities. For other evolutionary explanations may turn the trick. For example, recent hypotheses that the brain may generate new cells under the influence of stimulation may suggest an evolutionary explanation for our pursuit of aesthetic experiences through art. Art that promotes aesthetic experiences may be an invention, unbeknownst to our conscious awareness, that contributes, perhaps in a particularly effective way, to the turnover of new brain cells involved in memory and learning. In that case, the existence of our pursuit of aesthetic experience through art would be explained by an analogy with the tendency of some animals, including some humans, to lick their own mucous to acquire salt. That is, we seek aesthetic experiences, albeit not consciously, to renew our brain cells. See Nicholas Wade, 'Brain Cells Grow New Cells Daily', New York Times, 15 October 1999, p. 1.
10. One alternative hypothesis to mine might be that aesthetic experience is what evolutionary biologists call a spandrel. A spandrel, in this context, is an epiphenomenal feature of an organism that evolves in tandem with adaptive structures, but which does not contribute to the adaptive advantage of the structure it accompanies. Applied to the human capacity for aesthetic experience, one might say that it evolved in tandem with other human capacities that were adaptive, but that it is not itself adaptively or instrumentally valuable. I would argue, however, that aesthetic experience is not merely an evolutionary add-on, but obviously part and parcel of adaptive variations like pattern detection and expressive recognition, and that these variations are unquestionably instrumental from an evolutionary point of view. The locus classicus for the discussion of spandrels in evolutionary biology is Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, 'The Sprandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', in Elliott Sober (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
11. This argument is similar to one that George Dickie proposes in his classic 'The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude', American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1964).
12. Where Dickie emphasizes the irrelevance of motives, however, I emphasize the issue of the beliefs that subtend the motivations of Jerome and Charles. For expansions on Dickie's argument, see Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999).
13. This argument is an expansion of the one offered by James C. Anderson in his 'Rethinking Aesthetic Appreciation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. XLI, no. 1 (Fall 1982). There Anderson points out that Monroe Beardsley could not be having an aesthetic experience on the view that this necessarily requires valuing said experience intrinsically, since Monroe Beardsley did not believe that there was such a thing as intrinsic value.
14. I discuss design appreciation in my Philosophy of Art, ch. 3.
15. Beardsley, 'The Discrimination of Aesthetic Enjoyment', in The Aesthetic Point of View, p. 42.
16. I have begun some of this work in my Philosophy of Art. I should also like to take the opportunity to exploit this last footnote in order to thank Peter Kivy, Elliott Sober, Gary Iseminger, Greg Horowitz, Jerrold Levinson, Peter Lamarque, and James C. Anderson for their helpful suggestions, though whatever blemishes remain in my arguments are my own.