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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
In the twenty-five years since philosophers began to bemoan ‘the dreariness of aesthetics’, students in Wittgenstein's wake have done a great deal to eliminate the grounds of the complaint. Unfruitful essentialist theories have been largely displaced by the vigorous, if somewhat uncontrolled, growth of an enterprise which attempts to characterize and explicate aesthetic phenomena outside the desert of definition. The resulting view portrays typically aesthetic concepts as being indivisibly characterizing and evaluative, relativistic in application, necessarily linked to human attitudes, irreducible to non-aesthetic concepts, and yet as having social conditions which make them capable of intersubjective comparison and test. These characteristics are usefully summarized in saying that aesthetic concepts are concepts of appraisal. The theory of aesthetic appraisal discussed here is clearly incompatible with views which postulate dichotomies between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and value, and it is quite analogous to ‘descriptivist’ theories in ethics which reject these absolute distinctions. Moral examples are thus often useful for explicating the notion of aesthetic appraisal and the theory embodying that notion likewise has an important bearing on contemporary controversies in ethics.
1 See the symposium with Sibley, Frank and Tanner, Michael, ‘Objectivity and Aesthetics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 42 (1968), pp. 31–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The two discussions together summarize most of the elements and problems of the theory described here.
2 This term has no standard use. My use of it resembles Louch, A. R.'s in Explanation and Human Action (Oxford, 1966), Ch. 4.Google Scholar
3 First in ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), pp. 421–450Google Scholar, later in ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, same journal, 74 (1965), pp. 134–159Google Scholar, and in the articles cited elsewhere in this paper.
4 Cavell, Contrast Marcia, ‘Critical Dialogue’, Journal of Philosophy, 67 (1970), p. 350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 For the first see Cavell, loc. cit. The latter objection is made by even so sympathetic a critic as Hungerland, Isabel C., ‘The Logic of Aesthetic Concepts’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 36 (1962–1963), p. 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though Sibley mentions the interdefinability of aesthetic concepts in a footnote to his first paper.
6 Hungerland, Isabel C., op. cit., p. 65Google Scholar. The opinion quoted is supported by arguments which partially duplicate the remarks of this and the preceding paragraph.
7 For evidence, see Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961), pp. 137–138Google Scholar. There are cases, of course, in which something can be remarkable for its very normality or plainness. Further qualifications occur in the following text.
8 The charge has, in fact, been made by Searle, John R., Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1969), p. 144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Kennick, Contrast W. E., ‘Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake’, Mind, 62 (1958), pp. 330–332.Google Scholar
10 For a similar view about the evaluative connotations of moral appraisals see Hare, R. M., Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963), pp. 187–189Google Scholar. See also Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, sections 7 and 56Google Scholar, from whom some of the terminology and examples of this discussion are borrowed.
11 ‘Objectivity and Aesthetics’, op. cit., p. 46.Google Scholar
12 In this connection, see Foot, Philippa, ‘Morality and Art’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 56 (1970), pp. 131–144.Google Scholar
13 Not all distinctiveness is uncommonplace. Gestalt phenomena are very familiar and often unnoteworthy, and the analogy between them and aesthetic phenomena is incomplete. Aldrich, Contrast Virgil C., Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963), pp. 20 ff.Google Scholar
14 For parallel moral considerations see Hare's legitimate disagreements with Foot: Foot, Philippa, ‘Moral Beliefs’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 59 (1958)Google Scholar, and Hare, R. M., ‘Descriptivism’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 49 (1963)Google Scholar, both reprinted in Hudson, W. D., The Is/Ought Question (London, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 This strategy is evident, for example, in Hare, R. M., ‘Descriptivism’, op. cit.Google Scholar See also Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961), pp. 490–494.Google Scholar
16 Ziff, Paul, ‘Reasons in Art Criticism’, in Kennick, W. E., ed., Art and Philosophy (New York, 1964), p. 619.Google Scholar
