## 1. The Concept of Taste



The concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. Why
the concept of taste commanded so much philosophical attention during
the 18th century is a complicated matter, but this much is clear: the
eighteenth-century theory of taste emerged, in part, as a corrective
to the rise of rationalism, particularly as applied to beauty, and to
the rise of egoism, particularly as applied to virtue. Against
rationalism about beauty, the eighteenth-century theory of taste held
the 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 are
judgments of reason, i.e., that we judge things to be beautiful by
reasoning it out, where reasoning it out typically involves inferring
from principles or applying concepts. At the beginning of the 18th
century, rationalism about beauty had achieved dominance on the
continent, and was being pushed to new extremes by "les
geometres," a group of literary theorists who
aimed to bring to literary criticism the mathematical rigor that
Descartes had brought to physics. As one such theorist put it:



> 
> The way to think about a literary problem is that pointed out by
> Descartes for problems of physical science. A critic who tries any
> other way is not worthy to be living in the present century. There is
> nothing better than mathematics as propaedeutic for literary
> criticism. (Terrasson 1715, Preface, 65; quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks
> 1957, 258)
> 



It was against this, and against more moderate forms of rationalism
about beauty, that mainly British philosophers working mainly within
an empiricist framework began to develop theories of taste. The
fundamental idea behind any such theory--which we may call
*the immediacy thesis*--is that judgments of beauty are
not (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences from
principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the
immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments. It is the idea, in
other words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are
beautiful, but rather "sense" that they are. Here is an
early expression of the thesis, from Jean-Baptiste Dubos's
*Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music*, which
first 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 having
> settled the geometrical principles of taste, and defined the qualities
> of each ingredient that enters into the composition of those messes,
> to examine into the proportion observed in their mixture, in order to
> decide whether it be good or bad? No, this is never practiced. We have
> a sense given us by nature to distinguish whether the cook acted
> according to the rules of his art. People taste the ragoo, and
> tho' unacquainted with those rules, they are able to tell
> whether it be good or no. The same may be said in some respect of the
> productions 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 of
the Power of Judgment*:



> 
> If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end
> fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or
> even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rules
> they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful... . I will
> stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and would rather
> believe that those rules of the critics are false ... than allow
> that my judgment should be determined by means of *a priori*
> grounds of proof, since it is supposed to be a judgment of taste and
> not of the understanding of reason. (Kant 1790, 165)
> 



But the theory of taste would not have enjoyed its eighteenth-century
run, nor would it continue now to exert its influence, had it been
without resources to counter an obvious rationalist objection. There
is a wide difference--so goes the objection--between judging
the excellence of a ragout and judging the excellence of a poem or a
play. More often than not, poems and plays are objects of great
complication. But taking in all that complication requires a lot of
cognitive work, including the application of concepts and the drawing
of inferences. Judging the beauty of poems and plays, then, is
evidently not immediate and so evidently not a matter of taste.



The chief way of meeting this objection was first to distinguish
between the act of grasping the object preparatory to judging it and
the act of judging the object once grasped, and then to allow the
former, but not the latter, to be as concept- and inference-mediated
as any rationalist might wish. Here is Hume, with characteristic
clarity:



> 
> [I]n order to pave the way for [a judgment of taste], and give a
> proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that
> much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just
> conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations
> examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained. Some species of
> beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearance
> command our affection and approbation; and where they fail of this
> effect, it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence,
> or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders of
> beauty, particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to employ
> much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment. (Hume, 1751,
> Section I)
> 



Hume--like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, and Reid after
him (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 that
depends for its objects on the antecedent operation of some other
mental faculty or faculties. Reid characterizes internal sense as
follows:



> 
> Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature or
> structure. To perceive the beauty therefore, we must perceive the
> nature or structure from which it results. In this the internal sense
> differs from the external. Our external senses may discover qualities
> which do not depend upon any antecedent perception... . But it is
> impossible to perceive the beauty of an object, without perceiving the
> object, or at least conceiving it. (Reid 1785, 760-761)
> 



Because of the highly complex natures or structures of many beautiful
objects, 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 trait
virtuous is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to serve
some interest of yours. Its central instance is the Hobbesian
view--still very much on early eighteenth-century
minds--that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to take
pleasure in it because you believe it to promote your safety. Against
Hobbesian egoism a number of British moralists--preeminently
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume--argued that, while a judgment
of virtue is a matter of taking pleasure in response to an action or
trait, the pleasure is disinterested, by which they meant that it is
not self-interested (Cooper 1711, 220-223; Hutcheson 1725, 9,
25-26; Hume 1751, 218-232, 295-302). One argument
went roughly as follows. That we judge virtue by means of an immediate
sensation of pleasure means that judgments of virtue are judgments of
taste, no less than judgments of beauty. But pleasure in the beautiful
is not self-interested: we judge objects to be beautiful whether or
not we believe them to serve our interests. But if pleasure in the
beautiful is disinterested, there is no reason to think that pleasure
in the virtuous cannot also be (Hutcheson 1725, 9-10).



The eighteenth-century view that judgments of virtue are judgments of
taste highlights a difference between the eighteenth-century concept
of taste and our concept of the aesthetic, since for us the concepts
*aesthetic* and *moral* tend oppose one another such
that a judgment's falling under one typically precludes its
falling under the other. Kant is chiefly responsible for introducing
this difference. He brought the moral and the aesthetic into
opposition by re-interpreting what we might call *the disinterest
thesis*--the thesis that pleasure in the beautiful is
disinterested (though see Cooper 1711, 222 and Home 2005, 36-38
for anticipations of Kant's re-interpretation).



According to Kant, to say that a pleasure is interested is not to say
that it is self-interested in the Hobbesian sense, but rather that it
stands in a certain relation to the faculty of desire. The pleasure
involved in judging an action to be morally good is interested because
such 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 to
become aware that one has a duty to perform the action, and to become
so aware is to gain a desire to perform it. By contrast, the pleasure
involved in judging an object to be beautiful is disinterested because
such a judgment issues in no desire to do anything in particular. If
we can be said to have a duty with regard to beautiful things, it
appears to be exhausted in our judging them aesthetically to be
beautiful. That is what Kant means when he says that the judgment of
taste is not practical but rather "merely contemplative"
(Kant 1790, 95).



By thus re-orienting the notion of disinterest, Kant brought the
concept of taste into opposition with the concept of morality, and so
into line, more or less, with the present concept of the aesthetic.
But if the Kantian concept of taste is continuous, more or less, with
the present-day concept of the aesthetic, why the terminological
discontinuity? Why have we come to prefer the term
'aesthetic' to the term 'taste'? The not very
interesting answer appears to be that we have preferred an adjective
to a noun. The term 'aesthetic' derives from the Greek
term for sensory perception, and so preserves the implication of
immediacy carried by the term 'taste.' Kant employed both
terms, though not equivalently: according to his usage,
'aesthetic' is broader, picking out a class of judgments
that includes both the normative judgment of taste and the
non-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 widespread
only, though quickly, after his employment of it in the third
Critique. Yet the employment that became widespread was not exactly
Kant's, but a narrower one according to which
'aesthetic' simply functions as an adjective corresponding
to the noun "taste." So for example we find Coleridge, in
1821, expressing the wish that he "could find a more familiar
word than aesthetic for works of taste and criticism," before
going on to argue:



> 
> As our language ... contains no other *useable* adjective,
> to express coincidence of form, feeling, and intellect, that
> something, which, confirming the inner and the outward senses, becomes
> a new sense in itself ... there is reason to hope, that the term
> *aesthetic*, 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: the
expressions "judgment of taste," "emotion of
taste" and "quality of taste" have given way to the
arguably less offensive 'aesthetic judgment,'
'aesthetic emotion,' and 'aesthetic quality.'
However, as the noun 'taste' phased out, we became saddled
with other perhaps equally awkward expressions, including the one that
names this entry.


## 2. The Concept of the Aesthetic



Much of the history of more recent thinking about the concept of the
aesthetic can be seen as the history of the development of the
immediacy and disinterest theses.


### 2.1 Aesthetic Objects



Artistic formalism is the view that the artistically relevant
properties of an artwork--the properties in virtue of which it is
an artwork and in virtue of which it is a good or bad one--are
formal merely, where formal properties are typically regarded as
properties graspable by sight or by hearing merely. Artistic formalism
has been taken to follow from both the immediacy and the disinterest
theses (Binkley 1970, 266-267; Carroll 2001, 20-40). If
you take the immediacy thesis to imply the artistic irrelevance of all
properties whose grasping requires the use of reason, and you include
representational properties in that class, then you are apt to think
that the immediacy thesis implies artistic formalism. If you take the
disinterest thesis to imply the artistic irrelevance of all properties
capable of practical import, and you include representational
properties in that class, then you are apt to think that the
disinterest thesis implies artistic formalism.



This is not to suggest that the popularity enjoyed by artistic
formalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries owed mainly to
its inference from the immediacy or disinterest theses. The most
influential advocates of formalism during this period were
professional critics, and their formalism derived, at least in part,
from the artistic developments with which they were concerned. As a
critic Eduard Hanslick advocated for the pure music of Mozart,
Beethoven, Schumann, and later Brahms, and against the dramatically
impure music of Wagner; as a theorist he urged that music has no
content but "tonally moving forms" (Hanslick 1986, 29). As
a critic Clive Bell was an early champion of the post-Impressionists,
especially Cezanne; as a theorist he maintained that the formal
properties of painting--"relations and combinations of
lines and colours"--alone have artistic relevance (Bell
1958, 17-18). As a critic Clement Greenberg was abstract
expressionism's ablest defender; as a theorist he held
painting's "proper area of competence" to be
exhausted by flatness, pigment, and shape (Greenberg 1986,
86-87).



Not every influential defender of formalism has also been a
professional critic. Monroe Beardsley, who arguably gave formalism its
most sophisticated articulation, was not (Beardsley 1958). Nor is Nick
Zangwill, who recently has mounted a spirited and resourceful defense
of a moderate version of formalism (Zangwill 2001). But formalism has
always been sufficiently motivated by art-critical data that once
Arthur Danto made the case that the data no longer supported it, and
perhaps never really had, formalism's heyday came to an end.
Inspired in particular by Warhol's *Brillo Boxes*, which
are (more or less) perceptually indistinguishable from the
brand-printed cartons in which boxes of Brillo were delivered to
supermarkets, Danto observed that for most any artwork it is possible
to imagine both (a) another object that is perceptually indiscernible
from it but which is not an artwork, and (b) another artwork that is
perceptually indiscernible from it but which differs in artistic
value. From these observations he concluded that form alone neither
makes 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 indiscernibles
to show the limitations not merely of form but also of aesthetics, and
he has done so on the grounds, apparently, that the formal and the
aesthetic are co-extensive. Regarding a urinal Duchamp once exhibited
and a perceptual indiscernible ordinary urinal, Danto maintains
that



> 
> aesthetics could not explain why one was a work of fine art and the
> other not, since for all practical purposes they were aesthetically
> indiscernible: if one was beautiful, the other one had to be
> beautiful, since they looked just alike. (Danto 2003, 7)
> 



But the inference from the limits of the artistically formal to the
limits of the artistically aesthetic is presumably only as strong as
the inferences from the immediacy and disinterest theses to artistic
formalism, and these are not beyond question. The inference from the
disinterest thesis appears to go through only if you employ a stronger
notion of disinterest than the one Kant understands himself to be
employing: Kant, it is worth recalling, regards poetry as the highest
of the fine arts precisely because of its capacity to employ
representational content in the expression of what he calls
'aesthetic ideas' (Kant 1790, 191-194; see Costello
2008 and 2013 for extended treatment of the capacity of Kantian
aesthetics to accommodate conceptual art). The inference from the
immediacy thesis appears to go through only if you employ a notion of
immediacy stronger than the one Hume, for example, takes himself to be
defending 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 proper
sentiment" (Hume 1751, 173). It may be that artistic formalism
results if you push either of the tendencies embodied in the immediacy
and disinterest theses to extremes. It may be that the history of
aesthetics from the 18th century to the mid-Twentieth is largely the
history of pushing those two tendencies to extremes. It does not
follow that those tendencies must be so pushed.



Consider Warhol's *Brillo Boxes*. Danto is right to
maintain that the eighteenth-century theorist of taste would not know
how to regard it as an artwork. But this is because the
eighteenth-century theorist of taste lives in the 18th century, and so
would be unable to situate that work in its twentieth-century
art-historical context, and not because the kind of theory she holds
forbids her from situating a work in its art-historical context. When
Hume, for instance, observes that artists address their works to
particular, historically-situated audiences, and that a critic
therefore "must place herself in the same situation as the
audience" to whom a work is addressed (Hume 1757, 239), he is
allowing that artworks are cultural products, and that the properties
that works have as the cultural products they are are among the
"ingredients of the composition" that a critic must grasp
if she is to feel the proper sentiment. Nor does there seem to be
anything in the celebrated conceptuality of *Brillo Boxes*, nor
of any other conceptual work, that ought to give the
eighteenth-century theorist pause. Francis Hutcheson asserts that
mathematical and scientific theorems are objects of taste (Hutcheson
1725, 36-41). Alexander Gerard asserts that scientific
discoveries and philosophical theories are objects of taste (Gerard
1757, 6). Neither argues for his assertion. Both regard it as
commonplace that objects of intellect may be objects of taste as
readily as objects of sight and hearing may be. Why should the
present-day aesthetic theorist think otherwise? If an object is
conceptual in nature, grasping its nature will require intellectual
work. If grasping an object's conceptual nature requires
situating it art-historically, then the intellectual work required to
grasp its nature will include situating it art-historically.
But--as Hume and Reid held (see section 1.1)--grasping the
nature of an object preparatory to aesthetically judging it is one
thing; aesthetically judging the object once grasped is another.



Though Danto has been the most influential and persistent critic of
formalism, his criticisms are no more decisive than those advanced by
Kendall Walton in his essay "Categories of Art."
Walton's anti-formalist argument hinges on two main theses, one
psychological and one philosophical. According to the psychological
thesis, which aesthetic properties we perceive a work as having
depends on which category we perceive the work as belonging to.
Perceived as belonging to the category of painting, Picasso's
*Guernica* will be perceived as "violent, dynamic, vital,
disturbing" (Walton 1970, 347). But perceived as belonging to
the category of "guernicas"--where guernicas are
works with "surfaces with the colors and shapes of
Picasso's *Guernica*, but the surfaces are molded to
protrude from the wall like relief maps of different kinds of
terrain"--Picasso's *Guernica* will be
perceived 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 be
perceived both as violent and dynamic and as not violent and not
dynamic might be thought to imply that there is no fact of the matter
whether it is violent and dynamic. But this implication holds only on
the assumption that there is no fact of the matter which category
Picasso's *Guernica* actually belongs to, and this
assumption appears to be false given that Picasso intended that
*Guernica* be a painting and did not intend that it be a
guernica, and that the category of paintings was well-established in
the society in which Picasso painted it while the category of
guernicas was not. Hence the philosophical thesis, according to which
the aesthetic properties a work actually has are those it is perceived
as having when perceived as belonging to the category (or categories)
it actually belongs to. Since the properties of having been intended
to be a painting and having been created in a society in which
painting is well-established category are artistically relevant though
not graspable merely by seeing (or hearing) the work, it seems that
artistic formalism cannot be true. "I do not deny," Walton
concludes, "that paintings and sonatas are to be judged solely
on what can be seen or heard in them--when they are perceived
correctly. But examining a work with the senses can by itself reveal
neither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to perceive it that
way" (Walton 1970, 367).



But if we cannot judge which aesthetic properties paintings and
sonatas have without consulting the intentions and the societies of
the artists who created them, what of the aesthetic properties of
natural items? With respect to them it may appear as if there is
nothing to consult except the way they look and sound, so that an
aesthetic formalism about nature must be true. Allen Carlson, a
central figure in the burgeoning field of the aesthetics of nature,
argues against this appearance. Carlson observes that Walton's
psychological thesis readily transfers from works of art to natural
items: that we perceive Shetland ponies as cute and charming and
Clydesdales as lumbering surely owes to our perceiving them as
belonging to the category of horses (Carlson 1981, 19). He also
maintains that the philosophical thesis transfers: whales actually
have the aesthetic properties we perceive them as having when we
perceive them as mammals, and do not actually have any contrasting
aesthetic properties we might perceive them to have when we perceive
them as fish. If we ask what determines which category or categories
natural items actually belong to, the answer, according to Carlson, is
their natural histories as discovered by natural science (Carlson
1981, 21-22). Inasmuch as a natural item's natural history
will 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 to
natural 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 to
natural items has proven more controversial. Carlson is surely right
that aesthetic judgments about natural items are prone to be mistaken
insofar as they result from perceptions of those items as belonging to
categories to which they do not belong, and, insofar as determining
which categories natural items actually belong to requires scientific
investigation, this point seems sufficient to undercut the
plausibility of any very strong formalism about nature (see Carlson
1979 for independent objections against such formalism). Carlson,
however, also wishes to establish that aesthetic judgments about
natural items have whatever objectivity aesthetic judgments about
works of art do, and it is controversial whether Walton's
philosophical claim transfers sufficiently to support such a claim.
One difficulty, raised by Malcolm Budd (Budd 2002 and 2003) and Robert
Stecker (Stecker1997c), is that since there are many categories in
which a given natural item may correctly be perceived, it is unclear
which correct category is the one in which the item is perceived as
having the aesthetic properties it actually has. Perceived as
belonging to the category of Shetland ponies, a large Shetland pony
may be perceived as lumbering; perceived as belonging to the category
of horses, the same pony may be perceived as cute and charming but
certainly not lumbering. If the Shetland pony were a work of art, we
might appeal to the intentions (or society) of its creator to
determine which correct category is the one that fixes its aesthetic
character. But as natural items are not human creations they can give
us no basis for deciding between equally correct but aesthetically
contrasting categorizations. It follows, according to Budd, "the
aesthetic appreciation of nature is endowed with a freedom denied to
the appreciation of art" (Budd 2003, 34), though this is perhaps
merely another way of saying that the aesthetic appreciation of art is
endowed with an objectivity denied to the appreciation of nature.


### 2.2 Aesthetic Judgment



The eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of
taste (or sentimentalists) was primarily a debate over the immediacy
thesis, i.e., over whether we judge objects to be beautiful by
applying principles of beauty to them. It was not primarily a debate
over the existence of principles of beauty, a matter over which
theorists of taste might disagree. Kant denied that there are any such
principles (Kant 1790, 101), but both Hutcheson and Hume affirmed
their existence: they maintained that although judgments of beauty are
judgments of taste and not of reason, taste nevertheless operates
according to general principles, which might be discovered through
empirical investigation (Hutcheson 1725, 28-35; Hume 1757,
231-233).



It is tempting to think of recent debate in aesthetics between
particularists and generalists as a revival of the eighteenth-century
debate between rationalists and theorists of taste. But the accuracy
of this thought is difficult to gauge. One reason is that it is often
unclear whether particularists and generalists take themselves merely
to be debating the existence of aesthetic principles or to be debating
their employment in aesthetic judgment. Another is that, to the degree
particularists and generalists take themselves to be debating the
employment of aesthetic principles in aesthetic judgment, it is hard
to know what they can be meaning by 'aesthetic judgment.'
If 'aesthetic' still carries its eighteenth-century
implication of immediacy, then the question under debate is whether
judgment that is immediate is immediate. If 'aesthetic' no
longer carries that implication, then it is hard to know what question
is under debate because it is hard to know what aesthetic judgment
could be. It may be tempting to think that we can simply re-define
'aesthetic judgment' such that it refers to any judgment
in which an aesthetic property is predicated of an object. But this
requires being able to say what an aesthetic property is without
reference to its being immediately graspable, something no one seems
to have done. It may seem that we can simply re-define
'aesthetic judgment' such that it refers to any judgment
in which any property of the class exemplified by beauty is predicated
of an object. But which class is this? The classes exemplified by
beauty are presumably endless, and the difficulty is to specify the
relevant class without reference to the immediate graspability of its
members, 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, on
the side of generalism, Monroe Beardsley's *Aesthetics*
(1958) and "On the Generality of Critical Reasons" (1962),
Sibley's "General Reasons and Criteria in
Aesthetics" (in Sibley 2001), George Dickie's
*Evaluating Art* (1987), Stephen Davies's "Replies
to Arguments Suggesting that Critics' Strong Evaluations Could
not be Soundly Deduced" (1995), and John Bender's
"General but Defeasible Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluation: The
Generalist/Particularist Dispute" (1995). Of these, the papers
by Isenberg and Sibley have arguably enjoyed the greatest
influence.



Isenberg concedes that we often appeal to descriptive features of
works in support of our judgments of their value, and he allows that
this may make it seem as if we must be appealing to principles in
making those judgments. If in support of a favorable judgment of some
painting a critic appeals to the wavelike contour formed by the
figures clustered in its foreground, it may seem as if his judgment
must involve tacit appeal to the principle that any painting having
such a contour is so much the better. But Isenberg argues that this
cannot be, since no one agrees to any such principle:



> 
> There is not in all the world's criticism a single purely
> descriptive statement concerning which one is prepared to say
> beforehand, 'If it is true, I shall like that work so much the
> better' (Isenberg 1949, 338).
> 



But if in appealing to the descriptive features of a work we are not
acknowledging tacit appeals to principles linking those features to
aesthetic value, what are we doing? Isenberg believes we are offering
"directions for perceiving" the work, i.e., by singling
out certain its features, we are "narrow[ing] down the field of
possible visual orientations" and thereby guiding others in
"the discrimination of details, the organization of parts, the
grouping of discrete objects into patterns" (Isenberg 1949,
336). In this way we get others to see what we have seen, rather than
getting them to infer what we have inferred.



That Sibley advances a variety of particularism in one paper and a
variety of generalism in another will give the appearance of
inconsistency where there is none: Sibley is a particularist of one
sort, and with respect to one distinction, and a generalist of another
sort with respect to another distinction. Isenberg, as noted, is a
particularist with respect to the distinction between descriptions and
verdicts, i.e., he maintains that there are no principles by which we
may infer from value-neutral descriptions of works to judgments of
their overall value. Sibley's particularism and generalism, by
contrast, both have to do with judgments falling in between
descriptions and verdicts. With respect to a distinction between
descriptions and a set of judgments intermediate between descriptions
and verdicts, Sibley is straightforwardly particularist. With respect
to a distinction between a set of judgments intermediate between
descriptions and verdicts and verdicts, Sibley is a kind of generalist
and describes himself as such.



Sibley's generalism, as set forth in "General Reasons and
Criteria in Aesthetics," begins with the observation that the
properties to which we appeal in justification of favorable verdicts
are not all descriptive or value-neutral. We also appeal to properties
that are inherently positive, such as grace, balance, dramatic
intensity, or comicality. To say that a property is inherently
positive is not to say that any work having it is so much the better,
but rather that its *tout court* attribution implies value. So
although a work may be made worse on account of its comical elements,
the simple claim that a work is good because comical is intelligible
in a way that the simple claims that a work is good because yellow, or
because it lasts twelve minutes, or because it contains many puns, are
not. But if the simple claim that a work is good because comical is
thus intelligible, comicality is a general criterion for aesthetic
value, and the principle that articulates that generality is true. But
none of this casts any doubt on the immediacy thesis, as Sibley
himself observes:



> 
> I have argued elsewhere that there are no sure-fire rules by which,
> referring to the neutral and non-aesthetic qualities of things, one
> can infer that something is balanced, tragic, comic, joyous, and so
> on. One has to look and see. Here, equally, at a different level, I am
> saying that there are no sure-fire mechanical rules or procedures for
> deciding which qualities are actual defects in the work; one has to
> judge for oneself. (Sibley 2001, 107-108)
> 



The "elsewhere" referred to in the first sentence is
Sibley's earlier paper, "Aesthetic Concepts," which
argues that the application of concepts such as
'balanced,' 'tragic,' 'comic,' or
'joyous' is not a matter of determining whether the
descriptive (i.e., non-aesthetic) conditions for their application are
met, but is rather a matter of taste. Hence aesthetic judgments are
immediate in something like the way that judgments of color, or of
flavor, are:



> 
> We see that a book is red by looking, just as we tell that the tea is
> sweet by tasting it. So too, it might be said, we just see (or fail to
> see) that things are delicate, balanced, and the like. This kind of
> comparison between the exercise of taste and the use of the five
> senses is indeed familiar; our use of the word 'taste'
> itself shows that the comparison is age-old and very natural (Sibley
> 2001, 13-14).
> 



But Sibley recognizes--as his eighteenth-century forebears did
and his formalist contemporaries did not--that important
differences remain between the exercise of taste and the use of the
five senses. Central among these is that we offer reasons, or
something like them, in support of our aesthetic judgments: by
talking--in particular, by appealing to the descriptive
properties on which the aesthetic properties depend--we justify
aesthetic 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 that
the application of aesthetic concepts is not condition-governed, seeks
also to define the term 'aesthetic' in terms of their not
being so. It is clearer, perhaps, that he does not succeed in defining
the term this way, whatever his intentions. Aesthetic concepts are not
alone in being non-condition-governed, as Sibley himself recognizes in
comparing them with color concepts. But there is also no reason to
think them alone in being non-condition-governed while also being
reason-supportable, since moral concepts, to give one example, at
least arguably also have both these features. Isolating the aesthetic
requires something more than immediacy, as Kant saw. It requires
something like the Kantian notion of disinterest, or at least
something to play the role played by that notion in Kant's
theory.



Given the degree to which Kant and Hume continue to influence thinking
about aesthetic judgment (or critical judgment, more broadly), given
the degree to which Sibley and Isenberg continue to abet that
influence, it is not surprising that the immediacy thesis is now very
widely received. The thesis, however, has come under attack, notably
by Davies (1990) and Bender (1995). (See also Carroll (2009), who
follows closely after Davies (1990), and Dorsch (2013) for further
discussion.)



Isenberg, it will be recalled, maintains that if the critic is arguing
for her verdict, her argumentation must go something as follows:


1. Artworks having *p* are better for having *p*.
2. *W* is an artwork having *p*.
3. Therefore, *W* is so much the better for having
*p*.



Since the critical principle expressed in premise 1 is open to
counter-example, no matter what property we substitute for p, Isenberg
concludes that we cannot plausibly interpret the critic as arguing for
her verdict. Rather than defend the principle expressed in premise 1,
Davies and Bender both posit alternative principles, consistent with
the fact that no property is good-making in all artworks, which they
ascribe to the critic. Davies proposes that we interpret the critic as
arguing deductively from principles relativized to artistic type, that
is, from principles holding that artworks of a specific types or
categories--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 as
arguing inductively from principles expressing mere tendencies that
hold between certain properties and artworks--principles, in
other words, holding that artworks having p tend to be better for
having it (Bender 1995, 386).



Each proposal has its own weaknesses and strengths. A problem with
Bender's approach is that critics do not seem to couch their
verdicts in probabilistic terms. Were a critic to say that a work is
likely to be good, or almost certainly good, or even that she has the
highest confidence that it must be good, her language would suggest
that she had not herself experienced the work, perhaps that she had
judged the work on the basis of someone else's testimony, hence
that she is no critic at all. We would therefore have good reason to
prefer Davies's deductive approach if only we had good reason
for thinking that relativizing critical principles to artistic type
removed the original threat of counterexample. Though it is clear that
such relativizing reduces the relative number of counterexamples, we
need good reason for thinking that it reduces that number to zero, and
Davies provides no such reason. Bender's inductive approach, by
contrast, cannot be refuted by counterexample, but only by
counter-tendency.



If the critic argues from the truth of a principle to the truth of a
verdict--as Davies and Bender both contend--it must be
possible for her to establish the truth of the principle before
establishing the truth of the verdict. How might she do this? It seems
unlikely that mere reflection on the nature of art, or on the natures
of types of art, could yield up the relevant lists of good- and
bad-making properties. At least the literature has yet to produce a
promising account as to how this might be done. Observation therefore
seems the most promising answer. To say that the critic establishes
the truth of critical principles on the basis of observation, however,
is to say that she establishes a correlation between certain artworks
she has already established to be good and certain properties she has
already established those works to have. But then any capacity to
establish that works are good by inference from principles evidently
depends on some capacity to establish that works are good without any
such inference, and the question arises why the critic should prefer
to do by inference what she can do perfectly well without. The answer
cannot be that judging by inference from principle yields
epistemically better results, since a principle based on observations
can be no more epistemically sound than the observations on which it
is based.



None of this shows that aesthetic or critical judgment could never be
inferred from principles. It does however suggest that such judgment
is first and foremost non-inferential, which is what the immediacy
thesis holds.


### 2.3 The Aesthetic Attitude



The Kantian notion of disinterest has its most direct recent
descendents in the aesthetic-attitude theories that flourished from
the early to mid 20th century. Though Kant followed the British in
applying the term 'disinterested' strictly to pleasures,
its migration to attitudes is not difficult to explain. For Kant the
pleasure involved in a judgment of taste is disinterested because such
a judgment does not issue in a motive to do anything in particular.
For this reason Kant refers to the judgment of taste as contemplative
rather than practical (Kant 1790, 95). But if the judgment of taste is
not practical, then the attitude we bear toward its object is
presumably also not practical: when we judge an object aesthetically
we are unconcerned with whether and how it may further our practical
aims. Hence it is natural to speak of our attitude toward the object
as disinterested.



To say, however, that the migration of disinterest from pleasures to
attitudes is natural is not to say that it is inconsequential.
Consider the difference between Kant's aesthetic theory, the
last great theory of taste, and Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory,
the first great aesthetic-attitude theory. Whereas for Kant
disinterested pleasure is the means by which we discover things to
bear aesthetic value, for Schopenhauer disinterested attention (or
"will-less contemplation") is itself the locus of
aesthetic value. According to Schopenhauer, we lead our ordinary,
practical lives in a kind of bondage to our own desires (Schopenhauer
1819, 196). This bondage is a source not merely of pain but also of
cognitive distortion in that it restricts our attention to those
aspects of things relevant to the fulfilling or thwarting of our
desires. Aesthetic contemplation, being will-less, is therefore both
epistemically and hedonically valuable, allowing us a desire-free
glimpse into the essences of things as well as a respite from
desire-induced pain:



> 
> When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises
> us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from
> the thralldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed to
> the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their
> relation to the will ... Then all at once the peace, always
> sought 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 20th
century are those of Edward Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz. According to
Stolnitz's theory, which is the more straightforward of the two,
bearing an aesthetic attitude toward an object is a matter of
attending to it disinterestedly and sympathetically, where to attend
to it disinterestedly is to attend to it with no purpose beyond that
of attending to it, and to attend to it sympathetically is to
"accept it on its own terms," allowing it, and not
one's own preconceptions, to guide one's attention of it
(Stolnitz 1960, 32-36). The result of such attention is a
comparatively richer experience of the object, i.e., an experience
taking in comparatively many of the object's features. Whereas a
practical attitude limits and fragments the object of our experience,
allowing us to "see only those of its features which are
relevant 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 in
the painting." (Stolnitz 1960, 33, 35).



Bullough, who prefers to speak of "psychical distance"
rather than disinterest, characterizes aesthetic appreciation as
something achieved



> 
> by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our actual
> practical self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our
> personal needs and ends--in short, by looking at it
> 'objectively' ... by permitting only such reactions
> on our part as emphasise the 'objective features of the
> experience, and by interpreting even our 'subjective'
> affections not as modes of *our* being but rather as
> characteristics of the phenomenon. (Bullough 1995, 298-299;
> emphasis in original).
> 



Bullough has been criticized for claiming that aesthetic appreciation
requires dispassionate detachment:



> 
> Bullough's characterization of the aesthetic attitude is the
> easiest to attack. When we cry at a tragedy, jump in fear at a horror
> movie, or lose ourselves in the plot of a complex novel, we cannot be
> said to be detached, although we may be appreciating the aesthetic
> qualities of these works to the fullest... . And we can
> appreciate the aesthetic properties of the fog or storm while fearing
> the dangers they present. (Goldman 2005, 264)
> 



But such a criticism seems to overlook a subtlety of Bullough's
view. While Bullough does hold that aesthetic appreciation requires
distance "between our own self and its affections"
(Bullough 1995, 298), he does not take this to require that we not
undergo affections but quite the opposite: only if we undergo
affections have we affections from which to be distanced. So, for
example, the properly distanced spectator of a well-constructed
tragedy is not the "over-distanced" spectator who feels no
pity or fear, nor the "under-distanced" spectator who
feels 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 of
the phenomenon" (Bullough 1995, 299). The properly distanced
spectator of a tragedy, we might say, understands her fear and pity to
be part of what tragedy is about.



The notion of the aesthetic attitude has been attacked from all
corners and has very few remaining sympathizers. George Dickie is
widely regarded as having delivered the decisive blow in his essay
"The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude" (Dickie 1964) by
arguing that all purported examples of interested attention are really
just examples of inattention. So consider the case of the spectator at
a performance of *Othello* who becomes increasingly suspicious
of his own wife as the action proceeds, or the case of the impresario
who sits gauging the size of the audience, or the case of the father
who sits taking pride in his daughter's performance, or the case
of the moralist who sits gauging the moral effects the play is apt to
produce in its audience. These and all such cases will be regarded by
the attitude theorist as cases of interested attention to the
performance, when they are actually nothing but cases of inattention
to the performance: the jealous husband is attending to his wife, the
impresario to the till, the father to his daughter, the moralist to
the effects of the play. But if none of them is attending to the
performance, then none of them is attending to it interestedly (Dickie
1964, 57-59).



The attitude theorist, however, can plausibly resist Dickie's
interpretation of such examples. Clearly the impresario is not
attending to the performance, but there is no reason to regard the
attitude theorist as committed to thinking otherwise. As for the
others, it might be argued that they are all attending. The jealous
husband must be attending to the performance, since it is the action
of the play, as presented by the performance, that is making him
suspicious. The proud father must be attending to the performance,
since he is attending to his daughter's performance, which is an
element of it. The moralist must be attending to the performance,
since he otherwise would have no basis by which to gauge its moral
effects on the audience. It may be that none of these spectators is
giving the performance the attention it demands, but that is precisely
the attitude theorist's point.



But perhaps another of Dickie's criticisms, one lesser known,
ultimately poses a greater threat to the ambitions of the attitude
theorist. Stolnitz, it will be recalled, distinguishes between
disinterested and interested attention according to the purpose
governing the attention: to attend disinterestedly is to attend with
no purpose beyond that of attending; to attend interestedly is to
attend with some purpose beyond that of attending. But Dickie objects
that a difference in purpose does not imply a difference in
attention:



> 
> Suppose Jones listens to a piece of music for the purpose of being
> able to analyze and describe it on an examination the next day and
> Smith listens to the same music with no such ulterior purpose. There
> is certainly a difference in the motives and intentions of the two
> men: Jones has an ulterior purpose and Smith does not, but this does
> not 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, and
> reasons for doing so and a variety of ways of being distracted from
> the music. (Dickie 1964, 58).
> 



There is again much here that the attitude theorist can resist. The
idea that listening is a species of attending can be resisted: the
question at hand, strictly speaking, is not whether Jones and Smith
*listen* to the music in the same way, but whether they
*attend* in the same way to the music they are listening to.
The contention that Jones and Smith are attending in the same way
appears to be question-begging, as it evidently depends on a principle
of individuation that the attitude theorist rejects: if Jones's
attention is governed by some ulterior purpose and Smith's is
not, and we individuate attention according to the purpose that
governs it, their attention is not the same. Finally, even if we
reject the attitude theorist's principle of individuation, the
claim that there is but one way to attend to music is doubtful: one
can seemingly attend to music in myriad ways--as historical
document, as cultural artifact, as aural wallpaper, as sonic
disturbance--depending on which of the music's features one
attends to in listening to it. But Dickie is nevertheless onto
something crucial to the degree he urges that a difference in purpose
need not imply a *relevant* difference in attention.
Disinterest plausibly figures in the definition of the aesthetic
attitude only to the degree that it, and it alone, focuses attention
on the features of the object that matter aesthetically. The
possibility that there are interests that focus attention on just
those same features implies that disinterest has no place in such a
definition, which in turn implies that neither it nor the notion of
the aesthetic attitude is likely to be of any use in fixing the
meaning of the term 'aesthetic.' If to take the aesthetic
attitude toward an object simply is to attend to its aesthetically
relevant properties, whether the attention is interested or
disinterested, then determining whether an attitude is aesthetic
apparently requires first determining which properties are the
aesthetically relevant ones. And this task seems always to result
either in claims about the immediate graspability of aesthetic
properties, which are arguably insufficient to the task, or in claims
about the essentially formal nature of aesthetic properties, which are
arguably groundless.



But that the notions of disinterest and psychical distance prove
unhelpful in fixing the meaning of the term 'aesthetic'
does not imply that they are mythic. At times we seem unable to get by
without them. Consider the case of *The Fall of
Miletus*--a tragedy written by the Greek dramatist Phrynicus
and staged in Athens barely two years after the violent Persian
capture of the Greek city of Miletus in 494 BC. Herodotus records
that



> 
> [the Athenians] found many ways to express their sorrow at the fall of
> Miletus, and in particular, when Phrynicus composed and produced a
> play called *The Fall of Miletus*, the audience burst into
> tears and fined him a thousand drachmas for reminding them of a
> disaster that was so close to home; future productions of the play
> were also banned. (Herodotus, *The Histories*, 359)
> 



How are we to explain the Athenian reaction to this play without
recourse to something like interest or lack of distance? How, in
particular, are we to explain the difference between the sorrow
elicited 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 *The
Fall* whereas they could attend to other plays. The difference is
that they could not attend to *The Fall* as they could attend
to other plays, and this because of their too intimate connection to
what attending to *The Fall* required their attending to.


### 2.4 Aesthetic Experience



Theories of aesthetic experience may be divided into two kinds
according to the kind of feature appealed to in explanation of what
makes experience aesthetic: *internalist theories* appeal to
features internal to experience, typically to phenomenological
features, whereas *externalist theories* appeal to features
external to the experience, typically to features of the object
experienced. (The distinction between internalist and externalist
theories of aesthetic experience is similar, though not identical, to
the distinction between phenomenal and epistemic conceptions of
aesthetic experience drawn by Gary Iseminger (Iseminger 2003, 100, and
Iseminger 2004, 27, 36)). Though internalist
theories--particularly John Dewey's (1934) and Monroe
Beardsley's (1958)--predominated during the early and
middle parts of the 20th century, externalist theories--including
Beardsley's (1982) and George Dickie's (1988)--have
been in the ascendance since. Beardsley's views on aesthetic
experience make a strong claim on our attention, given that Beardsley
might be said to have authored the culminating internalist theory as
well as the founding externalist one. Dickie's criticisms of
Beardsley's internalism make an equally strong claim, since they
moved Beardsley--and with him most everyone else--from
internalism toward externalism.



According to the version of internalism Beardsley advances in
his *Aesthetics* (1958), all aesthetic experiences
have in common three or four (depending on how you count) features,
which "some writers have [discovered] through acute
introspection, and which each of us can test in his own
experience" (Beardsley 1958, 527). These are focus ("an
aesthetic experience is one in which attention is firmly fixed upon
[its object]"), intensity, and unity, where unity is a matter of
coherence and of completeness (Beardsley 1958, 527). Coherence, in
turn, is a matter of having elements that are properly connected one
to another such that



> 
> [o]ne thing leads to another; continuity of development, without gaps
> or dead spaces, a sense of overall providential pattern of guidance,
> an orderly cumulation of energy toward a climax, are present to an
> unusual degree. (Beardsley 1958, 528)
> 



Completeness, by contrast, is a matter having elements that
"counterbalance" or "resolve" one another such
that the whole stands apart from elements without it:



> 
> The impulses and expectations aroused by elements within the
> experience are felt to be counterbalanced or resolved by other
> elements within the experience, so that some degree of equilibrium or
> finality is achieved and enjoyed. The experience detaches itself, and
> even insulates itself, from the intrusion of alien elements.
> (Beardsley 1958, 528)
> 



Dickie's most consequential criticism of Beardsley's
theory is that Beardsley, in describing the phenomenology of aesthetic
experience, has failed to distinguish between the features we
experience aesthetic objects as having and the features aesthetic
experiences themselves have. So while every feature mentioned in
Beardsley's description of the coherence of aesthetic
experience--continuity of development, the absence of gaps, the
mounting of energy toward a climax--surely is a feature we
experience aesthetic objects as having, there is no reason to think of
aesthetic experience itself as having any such features:



> 
> Note that everything referred to [in Beardsley's description of
> coherence] is a perceptual characteristic ... and not an effect
> of perceptual characteristics. Thus, no ground is furnished for
> concluding that experience can be unified in the sense of being
> coherent. What is actually argued for is that aesthetic objects are
> coherent, a conclusion which must be granted, but not the one which is
> relevant. (Dickie 1965, 131)
> 



Dickie raises a similar worry about Beardsley's description of
the completeness of aesthetic experience:



> 
> One can speak of elements being counterbalanced *in the
> painting* and say that the painting is stable, balanced and
> so on, but what does it mean to say
> the *experience* of the spectator of the painting
> is stable or balanced? ... Looking at a painting in some cases
> might aid some persons in coming to feel stable because it might
> distract them from whatever is unsettling them, but such cases are
> atypical of aesthetic appreciation and not relevant to aesthetic
> theory. Aren't characteristics attributable to the painting
> simply being mistakenly shifted to the spectator? (Dickie 1965, 132)
> 



Though these objections turned out to be only the beginning of the
debate between Dickie and Beardsley on the nature of aesthetic
experience (See Beardsley 1969, Dickie 1974, Beardsley 1970, and
Dickie 1987; see also Iseminger 2003 for a helpful overview of the
Beardsley-Dickie debate), they nevertheless went a long way toward
shaping that debate, which taken as whole might be seen as the working
out of an answer to the question "What can a theory of aesthetic
experience be that takes seriously the distinction between the
experience of features and the features of experience?" The
answer turned out to be an externalist theory of the sort that
Beardsley advances in the 1970 essay "The Aesthetic Point of
View" and that many others have advanced since: a theory
according to which an aesthetic experience just is an experience
having aesthetic content, i.e., an experience of an object as having
the aesthetic features that it has.



The shift from internalism to externalism has meant that one central
ambition of internalism--that of tying the meaning of
'aesthetic' to features internal to aesthetic
experience--has had to be given up. But a second, equally
central, ambition--that of accounting for aesthetic value by
grounding it in the value of aesthetic experience--has been
retained. The following section takes up the development and prospects
of such accounts.


###  2.5 Aesthetic Value



To count as *complete* a theory of aesthetic value must answer
two questions:


* What makes aesthetic value
aesthetic?
* What makes aesthetic value
value?



The literature refers to the first question sometimes as *the
aesthetic question* (Lopes 2018, 41-43; Shelley 2019, 1) and
sometimes as *the demarcation question* (van der Berg 2020, 2;
Matherne 2020, 315; Peacocke 2021, 165). It refers to the second as
*the normative question* (Lopes 2018, 41-43; Shelley
2019, 1; Matherne 2020, 315).


#### 2.5.1 The Aesthetic Question



The prevailing answer to the aesthetic question is *aesthetic
formalism*, the view that aesthetic value is aesthetic because
objects bear it in virtue of their perceptual properties, where these
encompass visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile
properties. Aesthetic formalism rose to prominence when and because
artistic formalism did, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
(see Section 5.1). Because everyone then took artistic value to be a
species of aesthetic value, artistic formalism could gain prominence
only by dragging aesthetic formalism in its train. But whereas
artistic formalism has since fallen from favor, aesthetic formalism
has held its ground. The explanation, arguably, has to do with the way
aesthetic formalism honors the conceptual link between the aesthetic
and the perceptual. Any adequate answer to the aesthetic question must
meet what we may call *the perceptual constraint*, that is, it
must plausibly articulate the sense in which aesthetic value is
perceptual. Aesthetic formalism does this in the clearest possible
terms.



Versions of aesthetic formalism come in varying strengths. Its
strongest versions hold objects to have aesthetic value strictly in
virtue of their perceptual properties (Bell 1958/1914; Danto 2003,
92). Weaker versions either allow objects to have aesthetic value in
virtue of their non-perceptual content so long as that content
expresses itself perpetually (Zangwill 1998, 71-72) or require merely
that objects paradigmatically have aesthetic value in virtue of their
perceptual properties (Levinson 1996, 6). All versions of aesthetic
formalism struggle, one way or another, to accommodate our
long-standing practice of ascribing aesthetic value to objects that do
not address themselves primarily to the five bodily senses. Consider
works of literature. We have been ascribing aesthetic value to them
for as long as we have been ascribing aesthetic value to artworks of
any kind. How might the aesthetic theorist square her theory with this
practice? A first approach is simply to dismiss that practice,
regarding its participants as linguistically confused, as applying
terms of aesthetic praise to objects constitutionally incapable of
meriting it (Danto 2003, 92). But given how extremely revisionist this
approach is, we ought to wait on an argument of proportionately
extreme strength before adopting it. A second approach allows that
literary works bear aesthetic value, but only in virtue of their
sensory 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 mere
fraction of the aesthetic value we routinely ascribe to works of
literature. Suppose you praise a short story for the eloquence of its
prose and the beauty of its plot-structure. It seems arbitrary to
count only the eloquence as a genuine instance of aesthetic value. A
third approach treats literary works as exceptional, allowing them,
alone among works of art, to bear aesthetic value in virtue of their
non-perceptual properties (Binkley 1970, 269;Levinson 1996,6 n.9). The difficulty here
is to explain literature's exceptionality. If literary works
somehow bear aesthetic value in virtue of non-perceptual properties,
what prevents non-literary works from doing the same? Moreover, to
whatever degree we allow things to have aesthetic value in virtue of
their non-perceptual properties, to that degree we sever the
connection the formalist asserts between the aesthetic and the
perceptual and so undermine our reason for adopting aesthetic
formalism in the first place.



We might be forced to choose from among these three formalist
approaches to literature if aesthetic formalism constituted the only
plausible articulation of the sense in which aesthetic value is
perceptual, but it doesn't. Instead of holding that aesthetic
value is perceptual because things have it in virtue of their
perpetual properties, one might hold that aesthetic value is
perceptual because we perceive things as having it. This would be a
corollary of the immediacy thesis as defined in Section 1.1. If, as
that thesis holds, aesthetic judgment is perceptual, having all the
immediacy of any standard perceptual judgment, then aesthetic
properties are perceptual, grasped with all the immediacy of standard
perceptual properties. That aesthetic properties are thus perceptual
is Sibley's point in the following:



> 
> It is of importance to note first that, broadly speaking, aesthetics
> deals with a kind of perception. People have to *see* the grace
> or unity of a work, *hear* the plaintiveness or frenzy in the
> music, *notice* the gaudiness of a colour scheme, *feel*
> the power of a novel, its mood, or its uncertainty of tone. (Sibley
> 2001, 34, emphasis in original)
> 



Sibley says that people have to see the grace or unity of a work and
they have to feel the power of a novel. He doesn't say that they
have to see the properties in virtue of which a work has grace or
unity or feel the properties in virtue of which a novel has power: the
properties in virtue of which a work has grace or unity need not be
perceptual and the properties in virtue of which a novel has power
presumably will not be. Thus the literature problem, over which
formalism stumbles, does not arise for Sibley, nor for anyone else
committed 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 we
ascribe to literary works is aesthetic because we perceive literary
works as bearing it.


#### 2.5.2 The Normative Question



The prevailing answer to the normative question is *aesthetic
hedonism*, the view that aesthetic value is value because things
having it give pleasure when experienced. Aesthetic hedonism achieved
prominence in the 19th century, roughly when aesthetic formalism did.
Schopenhauer played a pivotal role in bringing it to prominence by
reassigning disinterested pleasure from the role it had been playing
in aesthetic judgment to the role of grounding aesthetic value
(Schopenhauer 1818 [1969], 195-200). Bentham (1789, ch. 4) and
Mill (1863 [2001]; ch. 2) arguably played larger roles by popularizing
value hedonism, that is, the view that pleasure is the ground of all
value. 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 has
to do with the apparent ease with which aesthetic hedonism explains
why we seek out objects of aesthetic value. Any adequate answer to the
normative question must meet what we may call *the normative
constraint*, that is, it must plausibly identify what a
thing's having aesthetic value gives us reason to do. Aesthetic
hedonism, locating that reason in the pleasure taken in experiencing
aesthetically valuable objects, does this in the clearest possible
terms.



Advocates of aesthetic hedonism include Schopenhauer 1818 [1969], Clive
Bell 1914 [1958], C. I. Lewis 1946, Monroe Beardsley 1982, George Dickie
1988, 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 quite
recently that any sustained opposition to hedonism has arisen, a fact
that may go some way toward explaining why hedonists, as a rule, see
no need to argue for their view, opting instead to develop it in light
of objections an imagined opposition might make.



Beardsley, for instance, leads with this simple formulation of
hedonism:



> 
> The aesthetic value of an object is the value it possesses in virtue
> of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification. (Beardsley 1982,
> 21).
> 



But he then anticipates a fatal objection. Sometimes we undervalue
aesthetic objects, finding them to have less value than they actually
have; other times we overvalue aesthetic objects, finding them to have
greater value than they actually have. The simple formulation above is
consistent with undervaluation, since it is possible to take less
aesthetic pleasure from an object than it has the capacity to provide,
but inconsistent with overvaluation, since it is impossible to take
greater aesthetic pleasure from an object than it has the capacity to
provide (Beardsley 1982, 26-27). To remedy this problem,
Beardsley appends a rider:



> 
> The aesthetic value of [an object] is the value [it] possesses in
> virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification *when
> correctly and completely experienced* (Beardsley 1982, 27, italics
> in original).
> 



Suppose we refer to the italicized portion of this formulation as
*the epistemic qualification* and the non-italicized portion as
*the hedonic thesis*. The epistemic qualification renders the
hedonic thesis consistent with overvaluation, given that you can
misapprehend an object such that you take greater aesthetic pleasure
from it than it has the capacity to provide when apprehended correctly
and completely.



Beardsley's version of aesthetic hedonism has served as a model
for subsequent versions (Levinson 2002, n. 23); at least all
subsequent versions consist of an epistemically qualified hedonic
thesis in some form. Beardsley's version, however, seems open to
counter-example. Consider Tony Morrison's *Beloved*, for
instance, or Cormac McCarthy's *Blood Meridian.* Taking
pleasure from works designed to cause shock, horror, despair, or moral
revulsion may seem perverse; surely, it may seem, such works do not
have whatever aesthetic value they have in virtue of any pleasure they
give. One way to accommodate such cases is to cast aesthetic pleasure
as a higher-order response, that is, a response that depends on
lower-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 may
ground aesthetic value. Though pleasure as a rule grounds aesthetic
value, in exceptional cases certain non-hedonic yet intrinsically
valuable 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 of
hedonism as *aesthetic empiricism*; it hasn't settled on
a name for the former variety, but we may call it *tiered
hedonism*, given the varying levels of response it takes aesthetic
experience to comprise.



Yet another objection, anticipated by hedonists, holds hedonism to
imply *the heresy of the separable experience* (Budd 1985,
125). It is a commonplace that for any object bearing aesthetic value
nothing other than it can have just the particular value it has,
excepting the improbable case in which something other than it has
just its particular aesthetic character. The worry is that hedonism,
given that it regards aesthetic value as instrumental to the value of
experience, implies that for any object bearing aesthetic value
something wholly other from it, such as a drug, might induce the same
experience and so serve up the same value. The hedonist's usual
reply is to assert that aesthetic experience is inseparable from its
object, such that for any aesthetic experience, that experience is
just the particular experience it is because it has just the
particular aesthetic object it has (Levinson 1996, 22-23; Budd
1985, 123-124; S. Davies 1994: 315-16; Stang 2012,
271-272).



Actual opposition to hedonism did not materialize until the present
century (Sharpe 2000, Davies 2004), and most all of that during the
past decade or so (Shelley 2010, 2011, 2019; Wolf 2011; Lopes 2015,
2018; Gorodeisky 2021a, 2021b). Why the opposition took so long to
show up is a good question. It is tempting to think its answer resides
in 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 this
premise. One useful way to think of the dialectic between hedonists
and their opponents is to regard each as grasping one horn of an
aesthetic version of the Euthyphro dilemma, where hedonists hold
things to have aesthetic value because they please and anti-hedonists
hold things to please because they have aesthetic value (Augustine
2005/389-391, *De vera religione* SS59; Gorodeisky
2012a, 201 and 2021b, 262). Seen this way, the fact that aesthetically
valuable things please tells not at all in favor of the hedonist;
indeed, it is precisely this fact that the anti-hedonist thinks the
hedonist cannot explain.



For instance, Wolf, in the context of an extended, nuanced case
against value welfarism, argues that aesthetic hedonism cannot account
for the fact that *Middlemarch* is a better novel than the*Da Vinci Code*,given that most people apparently like the latter
better, presumably because it gives them greater pleasure (Wolf 2011,
54-55; see also Sharpe 2000, 326). The hedonist has a ready
reply in the claim that all standard versions of hedonism are now
epistemically qualified, that while most people may derive greater
pleasure from the *Da Vinci Code*, a fully informed
reader--that is, a reader who gives both texts a correct and
complete reading--will not, assuming *Middlemarch* to be
the better novel. But it's not clear how much appeal to the
epistemic qualification ultimately helps the hedonist. The
anti-hedonist will want to know what best explains the fact that a
fully informed reader will derive greater pleasure from
*Middlemarch* (Wolf 2011, 55; D. Davies 2004, 258-259;
Sharpe 2000, 325). Suppose we say that it owes to the fully informed
reader's grasping the superiority of
*Middlemarch's* structure, the higher quality of its
prose, 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 the
greater aesthetic value of *Middlemarch*? Wouldn't that
be part of what a fully informed reader is fully informed about?



Of course, the hedonist may allow *Middlemarch* to be
aesthetically better because of its superior structure, prose,
character development, and insight; to allow this, from her point of
view, is simply to allow that these are the elements in virtue of
which a fully informed reader will derive greater pleasure. But here
it would be good if the hedonist had an argument. Otherwise, the
anti-hedonist will rightly wonder how it is that a correct and
complete experience of *Middlemarch* will be an experience of
every value-conferring feature of *Middlemarch* yet not an
experience of the value conferred by those features. She will rightly
wonder whether the hedonist fails to honor her own commitment to
externalism about aesthetic value; she will rightly wonder, in other
words, whether the hedonist fails to distinguish between a valuable
experience and an experience of value, just as the internalist about
aesthetic value fails to distinguish between a coherent and complete
experience and an experience of coherence and completeness.



Earlier we attributed the appeal of hedonism to the apparent ease with
which it explains our seeking out objects of aesthetic value.
Anti-hedonists take that ease to be apparent merely. Some
anti-hedonists, for instance, argue that at least some aesthetically
valuable objects offer up pleasure only on condition that we do not
seek it (Lopes 2018, 84-86; Ven der Berg 2020, 5-6; see
also Elster 1983, 77-85). Lopes puts the point this way:



> 
> Sometimes an agent has an aesthetic reason to act and yet they could
> not be motivated to act out of a hedonic desire that would be
> satisfied by their so acting. To get any pleasure, they must act out
> of non-hedonic motives. Strolling through the Louvre, they happen upon
> the Chardins, and they look at them. So long as they do not look
> seeking pleasure, they get the pleasure that the paintings afford
> (Lopes 2018, 85-86).
> 



Lopes's choice of example is not arbitrary. There are particular
art-critical reasons for thinking that Chardins will frustrate the
hedonically motivated viewer (Fried 1980, 92; cited in Lopes 2018,
85), and Lopes is careful to claim that only "some aesthetic
pleasures are essential by-products of acts motivated by other
considerations" (Lopes 2018, 85). But it's not as if
Lopes's claim is specific to Chardins. Consider again
Wolf's assertation that most readers take greater pleasure from
*The Da Vinci Code* than from *Middlemarch*. If that
assertion is correct, as it plausibly is, perhaps this is because (a)
most readers read for pleasure, and (b) *The Da Vinci Code*
affords pleasure to readers who read for it, whereas (c)
*Middlemarch* withholds pleasure from such readers, affording
pleasure instead on readers who read in pursuit of some non-hedonic
good.



There is an apparent tension, moreover, between the hedonist's
reliance on the epistemic qualification and her claim that pleasure
rationalizes our aesthetic pursuits. Consider the
less-than-fully-informed reader who overvalues *The Da Vinci
Code* and undervalues *Middlemarch*. The epistemic
qualification is designed to allow the hedonist to explain how this
might occur: such a reader takes greater pleasure from *The Da
Vinci Code*, and less (or lesser) pleasure from
*Middlemarch*, than she would were she fully informed. The
epistemic qualification, moreover, allows the hedonist to explain why
the uninformed reader has aesthetic reason not to undervalue
*Middlemarch:* she is missing out on pleasure that would be
hers if only she gave *Middlemarch* a fully informed reading.
But the hedonist struggles to explain why the uninformed reader has
reason not to overvalue the *Da Vinci Code*. If *The Da
Vinci Code* gives the reader greater pleasure when she overvalues
it, not only has she no aesthetic reason to be fully informed, she has
aesthetic reason not to be. It therefore seems that if pleasure
rationalized our hedonic pursuits, we would take ourselves to have
reason to experience aesthetic objects in whatever way maximizes our
pleasure. To the degree that we instead take ourselves to have reason
to experience aesthetic objects completely and correctly--to the
degree that we instead take ourselves to have reason to experience
aesthetic objects as having the aesthetic values they in fact
have--suggests that pleasure is not the aesthetic good
we'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 century
or so has owed to our inability even to imagine alternatives to it. If
opposition to hedonism has been slow to materialize, alternatives have
been slower still. To date, the only fully realized alternative to
hedonism 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 objects
of aesthetic value, given that aesthetic pleasure is at least
sometimes an essential by-product of our seeking after something else
(2018, 84-86). Lopes's deeper challenge, however, targets
the hedonist's very terms. Aesthetic considerations rationalize
a very great variety of aesthetic acts, according to Lopes:
appreciating objects of aesthetic value is one such act, but so too is
hanging a poster one way rather than another, selecting this book
rather than that one for a book club, building out a garden this way
rather than that, conserving one video game rather than another,
pairing this dish with this wine rather than that one, and so on
*ad infinitum* (2018, 32-36). If a theory of aesthetic
value is to accommodate such a vast range of aesthetic acts, without
singling out any one as more central than the others, it will have to
conceive of aesthetic normativity as a species of some very general
kind of normativity. Lopes, accordingly, conceives of aesthetic
normativity as a species of the most generic form of practical
normativity; that aesthetic acts ought to be performed well follows
from the premise that all acts ought to be performed well for the
simple reason that they are acts (2018, 135-137). As Lopes puts
it: "Aesthetic values inherit their practical normativity from a
basic condition of all agency--agents must use what they have to
perform successfully" (2018, 135). Just which competencies an
aesthetic agent may call upon to perform successfully on any given
occasion depends on the particular role they happen to be playing in
the particular social practice in which they happen to be performing
(2018, 135). It is from the fact that all aesthetic activity
necessarily takes place within the domain of some particular social
practice that the network theory of aesthetic value takes its name
(2018, 119).



In holding aesthetic agents to be performing the greatest variety of
aesthetic acts on the greatest variety of items in coordination with
one another, the network theory departs radically from hedonism. But,
as Lopes himself observes, the network theory follows after hedonism
in one fundamental way: inasmuch as both theories "answer the
normative question but offer nothing in answer to the aesthetic
question," both "are consistent with any stand-alone
answer to the aesthetic question" (2018, 48). The claim that the
normative and aesthetic questions admit of stand-alone answers implies
that *aesthetic value* is a species of the genus *value*
in a standard species-genus relation, such that what makes aesthetic
value value has no bearing on what makes it aesthetic and vice-versa.
It therefore also implies that *aesthetic value* is not a
determinate of the determinable *value*, such that what makes
aesthetic value aesthetic is very thing that makes it value.



Do answers to the normative and aesthetic questions stand alone or
stand together? If we have not yet registered the urgency of this
question, perhaps that is because no one has yet fully articulated,
let alone defended, a theory of aesthetic value according to which
aesthetic value is a determinate form of value. Such a theory appears
to be implicit, however, in Shelley 2011, Watkins and Shelley 2012,
Gorodeisky and Marcus 2018, Gorodeisky 2021a, and Shelley 2022. The
position common to these authors has been dubbed the *Auburn
view* (Van der Berg 2020, 11). It answers the aesthetic question,
and therein the value question, by holding an item's having
aesthetic value to rationalize its appreciation in a distinctively
self-reflexive way, such that part of what you perceive when you
appreciate an aesthetically valuable item is that it ought to be
appreciated 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). The
network theorist may object that the Auburn view privileges acts of
appreciation as surely as hedonism does, but such an objection, from
the Auburn perspective, begs the question. It is in assuming that the
normative and aesthetic questions admit of stand-alone answers that
the network theorist grants herself the freedom of passing on the
aesthetic question, and it is in passing on the aesthetic question
that she grants herself the freedom of treating each of a very great
variety of aesthetic acts as equally central. It is in assuming that
*aesthetic value* is a determinate of the determinable
*value*, meanwhile, that the Auburnite places herself under the
necessity of answering the aesthetic question, and it is in seeking an
answer to the aesthetic question that she places herself under the
necessity of singling out appreciation as aesthetically central. The
network theorist and the Auburnite agree that the aesthetic question
deserves an answer sooner or later (Lopes 2018, 46). They disagree,
crucially, about whether it deserves an answer sooner rather than
later.



The network theory and the Auburn view hardly exhaust the options for
non-hedonic theories of aesthetic normativity: Nguyen 2019, Matherne
2020, Peacocke 2021, Kubala 2021, and Riggle 2022 all represent
promising new directions. Yet every new theory of aesthetic value,
hedonic or not, must follow after the network theory or the Auburn
view in regarding answers to the normative and aesthetic questions as
stand-alone or stand-together. A lot hangs on the decision to follow
one path rather than the other. Perhaps it's time we attend to
it.