Aesthetic experience revisited

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 145-168

  Carroll, Noël ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950157853     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/42.2.145     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968).
2. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981).
3. George Dickie, 'The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude', American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1 (1964), pp. 56-65;
4. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1974).
5. Gary Iseminger, 'Aesthetic Experience', in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., forthcoming);
6. Gary Iseminger, 'Aesthetic Appreciation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 41 (1981), pp. 389-399;
7. David W. Fenner, The Aesthetic Attitude (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1996).
8. Alan Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).
9. Richard Lind, 'The Aesthetic Essence of Art', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 50 (1992), pp. 117-129;
10. James C. Anderson, 'Aesthetic Concepts of Art', in Noël Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).
11. Also put to one side is the question of characterizing the nature of aesthetic pleasure as that issue has been pursued in Kendall Walton, 'How Marvellous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51 (1993), pp. 499-510;
12. Jerrold Levinson, 'What is Aesthetic Pleasure?', in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1996).
13. Monroe Beardsley, 'Aesthetic Experience', in M. Wreen and D. Callen (eds), The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1982), p. 288. Beardsley also discusses what he calls 'detached affect' in this essay, but I suspect that this is not a distinct phenomenological quale. Rather, it seems to me to be a capacity to experience emotions through the use of the imagination in response to things such as fiction. Because these experiences issue through the imagination, they do not impinge on us directly - we are not threatened in our immediate life circumstances by the stalkers in a crime film - and so we do not flee from them. However, the operation of the imagination need not be correlated here with any peculiar experiential quality. Thus, I do not count Beardsley's notion of detached affect as an affective element in his theory. Another theorist who emphasizes the importance of the imagination for aesthetic experience is Roger Fry.
14. See his 'An Essay in Aesthetics' in Morris Weitz (ed.), Problems in Aesthetics (NY: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 49-61.
15. Given his emphasis on the fusion of the subject and object in aesthetic experience, Mikel Dufrenne may also be an example of the affect-oriented approach. See his The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U.P., 1973).
16. Walter Pater, 'Preface from Studies in the History of the Renaissance', in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 836.
17. For Shaftesbury, disinterest, for example, just means 'not motivated by self concern'. See Jerome Stolnitz, 'On the Origins of "Aesthetic Disinterestedness'", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 20 (1961), p. 132.
18. Cited in Fenner, The Aesthetic Attitude, p. 54.
19. For a historical account of this see Albert L. Guérard, Art for Art's Sake (New York: Schocken Books, 1963). This book was originally published in 1936.
20. See also Noël Carroll, 'Four Concepts of Aesthetic Experience', in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2001).
21. Théophile Gautier, 'Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin', in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 758. Perhaps Duchamp's 'Fountain' makes a joke at Gautier's expense. Duchamp, that is, chose a urinal as a way of advancing anti-aestheticism just because Gautier had chosen the bathroom as a weapon to advance aestheticism.
22. One affect-oriented view that I have not examined is Dewey's. For my criticisms of it, see 'Four Concepts of Aesthetic Experience', in Beyond Aesthetics.
23. For a defence of Dewey's approach, see Richard Shusterman, 'The End of Aesthetic Experience', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 55 (1997), pp. 29-41.
24. Marshall Cohen, 'Aesthetic Essence', in Max Black (ed.), Philosophy in America (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965).
25. For a representative statement of this view, see James C. Anderson, 'Aesthetic Concepts of Art'. Though he does not use the notion of the aesthetic, Malcolm Budd may have a similar view of aesthetic experience. On the other hand, he may be talking about the broader category of appropriate experiences of art.
26. However, many of the criticisms of the axiologically oriented approach to aesthetic experience reviewed above would also appear to apply to Budd's notion of appropriate experiences of art. See Malcolm Budd, Values of Art (London: Penguin Books, 1995).
27. For suggestions along these lines see Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1992);
28. Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000).
29. Eddy Zemach, What is an Aesthetic Property?', in Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 55.
30. Robert Stecker appears to be willing to defend such a position. See his 'Only Jerome: A Reply to Noël Carroll', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41 (2001), pp. 76-80.
31. For further counterarguments along the lines in this paragraph, see Noël Carroll, 'Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 40 (2000), pp. 191-208.
32. Noël Carroll, 'Enjoyment, Indifference and Aesthetic Experience: Comments for Robert Stecker', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41 (2001), pp. 81-83.
33. Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999), ch. 3.
34. Jerrold Levinson, 'Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences in Sensibility', in Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds), Aaesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2001).
35. This worry is voiced by David Fenner in his 'Aesthetic Attitude', pp. 104-105.
36. It is also iterated in Gary Kemp, 'The Aesthetic Attitude', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 39 (1999), p. 395.
37. Robert Stecker, Artworks (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State U.P., 1997), p. 275.
38. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art, and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000), Part I.