On an apparent truism in aesthetics

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 43, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 260-278

  Livingston, Paisley ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN   (Denmark)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049368421     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/43.3.260     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Alan Tormey, 'Critical Judgments', Theoria, vol. 39 (1973), pp. 35-49, at p. 39.
2. Frank Sibley, 'Particularity, Art, and Evaluation', in John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (eds), Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 88-103, at p. 99.
3. Marcia Muelder Eaton, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2001), p. 11;
4. cf. her 'The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 52 (1994), pp. 383-397, at p. 392.
5. Immanuel Kant, for example, famously writes that 'Whether a dress, a house, or a flower is beautiful is a matter about which one declines to allow one's judgement to he swayed by any reasons or principles. One wants to see the object with one's own eyes, as though our pleasure depended on sensation', Kritik der Urteilskraft, §8;
6. cf. The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 56.
7. For astute commentary, see Robert Hopkins, 'Beauty and Testimony', in Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Philosophy, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 47 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2000), pp. 209-236.
8. Other statements of the apparent truism include Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U.P., 1973), p. 341;
9. Étienne Gilson, Introduction aux arts du beau (Paris: Vrin, 1963), p. 224;
10. Alan H. Goldman, 'Aesthetic Qualities and Aesthetic Value'. Journal of Philosophy, vol. 87 (1990), pp. 23-37, at. P. 31;
11. David Hume, 'Of the Standard of Taste', in Eugene F. Miller (ed.), Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 226-249, at PP. 237-238;
12. Arnold Isenberg, 'Critical Communication', in William Callaghan et al. (eds), Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 156-171;
13. Richard W. Miller, 'Three Kinds of Objectivity', in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1998), pp. 26-58, at p. 35;
14. Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 115, 164-166, 331 ff;
15. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981), p. 623;
16. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 131;
17. Frank Sibley, 'Aesthetic and Non-aesthetic', in Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 33-51, at p. 40.
18. For a supplementation of (T) with such a clause, see M. Mothersill, 'Critical Reasons', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2 (1961), pp. 74-78, at p. 78, where we read that the critic and audience must he 'confronted by the work in question or some adequate reproduction'.
19. No adequacy conditions are discussed. Of relevance in this context is Barbara E. Savedoff, 'Looking at Art through Photographs', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Critidsm, vol. 51 (1993), pp. 455-462.
20. Tormey, 'Critical Judgments', p. 39.
21. On 'seemg-in', see Richard Wollheim, 'On Pictorial Representation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56 (1998), pp. 217-226;
22. Jerrold Levinson, 'Wollheim on Pictorial Representation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56 (1998), pp. 227-233;
23. and Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image, and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1998). At p. 195 Hopkins evokes, but does not pursue, the idea of analogues in other modalities.
24. Sibley, 'Aesthetic and Non-aesthetici, in Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 33-51, at p. 40.
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 177.
26. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O'Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U.P., 1973). P. 90.
27. Roger Scruton writes that 'any attempt to define aesthetic appreciation in sensuous terms will fail to explain the arts of poetry and narrative', Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 154;
28. Marcia Muelder Eaton: 'Direct inspection in my definition of intrinsic must include more than perception in the case of literature'; see her 'The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties', p. 392;
29. Rohert Stecker, Artworks: Definition Meaning Value (University Park: Pennsylvania State U.P., 1997), p. 37.
30. A philosopher who makes the contrary assumption is Nick Zangwill, though he admits a certain hesitation on this score; see his The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 2001), p. 40.
31. A similar point about the aesthetic significance of the moral character of Baudelaire's work is eloquently made by Henry James; see his Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 157-158;
32. for more recent critical commentary in this vein, see Richard D, E. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1999), pp. 60, 134.
33. Miller, 'Three Kinds of Objectivity', in Aesthetics and Ethics, p. 35.
34. On the 'cognitive stock' necessary to appreciation, see Richard Wollheim, 'Criticism as Retrieval'. in Art and its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1980), pp. 185-204.
35. Derek Matravers restates the point crisply when he observes that all 'aesthetic clod' can acquire the belief that a bit of music is sad by reading a program note; 'Aesthetic Concepts and Aesthetic Experience', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36 (1996), pp. 265-277, at p. 269.
36. Similarly. Matravers dis-ambiguates 'aesthetic beliefs' by constructing a subset of beliefs directly caused by aesthetic experience. The specificity of the latter, he suggests in passing, has to do with 'feelings'. See his 'Aesthetic Concepts and Aesthetic Experience', pp. 273, 275.
37. For plausible doubts about Sibley as a proponent of supervenience theses in aesthetics, see John E. MacKinnon, 'Heroism and Reversal: Sibley on Aesthetic Supervenience', in Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 81-99.
38. Although Sibley gives no reference, these terms and related 'principles of adjectival determination' derive from W. E. Johnson, Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1921), vol. I, pp. 173-185, 237-238.
39. A similar claim, couched in terms of the multiple realization of aesthetic properties ill non-aesthetic ones, is pressed in Zangwill, Metaphysics of Beauty, pp. 38-39.
40. Johnson, Logic, vol. 1, p. 237.
41. Frank Jackson, 'Epiphenomenal Qualia', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 32 (1982), pp. 127-136;
42. 'What Mary Didn't Know', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 83 (1986), pp. 291-295.
43. Paul M. Churchland, 'Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 82 (1985), pp. 8-28;
44. David Lewis, 'What Experience Teaches', in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1999), pp. 262-290:
45. Austen Clark, A Theory of Sentience (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2000), pp. 30-35;
46. Brian Loar, 'Phenomenal States' in James E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 4. Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1990), pp. 81-108.
47. Cf. Jerrold Levinson: 'We need not fear that our linguistic resources will be inadequate to capturing aesthetic attributes and differences once they have been recognized', in his Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1990), p. 117.
48. Siblcy, 'Particularity, Art, and Evaluation', in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 96.
49. for a bullish gloss on this paper, see John W. Bender, 'General but Defeasible Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluation: The Particularist/Generalist Dispute', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 53 (1995), PP. 379-392;
50. for particularist dissent, James Shelly, 'The Character and Role of Principles in the Evaluation of Art', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 42 (2002), pp. 37-51.
51. Examples include Margaret Olivia Little, 'Moral Generalities Revisited', in Brad Hooker and M. O. Little (eds), Moral Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 280.
52. An influential paper conjoining moral generahsm and aesthetic particularism "was Stuart Hampshire's, 'Logic and Appreciation', in W. Elton (ed.), Aesthetics and Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 161-169.
53. Earlier statements in moral philosophy include Shelly Kagan, 'The Additive Fallacy', Ethics, vol. 99 (1988), pp. 5-31;
54. Michael Philips, 'Weighing Moral Reasons', Mind, vol. 96 (1987), pp. 367-376;
55. and Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), p. 60.
56. For a critique, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, 'On Denying a Significant Version of the Constancy Assumption', Theoria, vol. 65 (1999), pp. 90-113.
57. For Sibley's espousal of the reversal thesis and the artwork as an 'organic whole', see his 'General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics', p. 107. Goldman mistakenly attributes only a Rossian view to Sibley in Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), p. 138.
58. Goldman, Aesthetic Value, pp. 12-14, 132-143.
59. The thesis that all aesthetic effects or distinctive phenomenal impressions are inherently valenced and relative to attitudmal sensibilities is sharply contested by Jerrold Lcvinson in his 'Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility', in Aesthetic Concepts, pp. 61-80.
60. Goldman does not say so, but once this much is allowed, even convergence of verdicts would not establish much, since an unknown difference in sensibility could mask reversals and over-determinations of property valences. For speculations about the motives for searching for a consistent personal aesthetic-as well as sceptical considerations-see Ted Cohen, 'On Consistency in One's Personal Aesthetics', in Aesthetics and Ethics, pp. 106-26. Cohen adopts, but does not argue for, an Isenberg-inspired version of particularism about critical reasons.
61. The conversational implicature analogy was drawn earlier by Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored, pp. 85, 147;
62. and forwarded by Lcvinson, 'Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility', in Aesthetic Concepts, p. 64. I wonder, however, just how informative this analogy is. Grice's mechanisms are supposed to explain how we get from what is said to what is implicated or meant, while what the aestheticians want to contend is that when the critic says 'X is graceful, dainty, etc., therefore X is aesthetically good', there is no deductively valid argument-no matter what the critic says, means, or implies. And critics could still make misleading assertions if they did not say 'therefore' and only implied that the conclusion follows.
63. This is the tack Walter Sinnott-Armstrong takes against Dancy's moral particularism; see the former's 'Some Varieties of Particularism', Metaphilosophy, vol. 30 (1999), pp. 1-12.
64. Eugène Ionesco, L'impromptu de l'Alma, ou Le camélé on du berger, in Emmanuel Jacquart (ed.), Théàtre Complet (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 423-466.
65. Stephen Davies, 'Replies to Arguments Suggesting that Critics' Strong Evaluations Could Not be Soundly Deduced', Grazer philosophische Studien, vol. 38 (1990), pp. 157-195.
66. Here I draw on Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith, 'Ethical Particularism and Patterns', in Hooker and Little (eds), Moral Particularism, pp. 79-99.
67. Miller, 'Three Versions of Objectivity', p. 42.
68. Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, p. 39.
69. For this thesis, see C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1946), pp. 468-469;
70. for complaints, Mothersill, Beauty Restored, passim.
71. Lippert-Rasmussen stresses the particularist's inability to accommodate contrast arguments in his 'On Denying a Significant Version of the Constancy Assumption'.
72. A similar point is made by Aaron Ridley in 'The Philosophy of Medium-Grade Art', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36 (1996), pp. 413-423.I thank Peter Lamarque for bringing this to my attention in his editorial comments on my paper.
73. Compare Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?, trans. Martin McLaughlin (New York: Pantheon, 1999). p. 6: 'A classic is a "work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, hut which always shakes the particles off . Classics are books "which, the more "we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.'