Part III: Aesthetics

Chapter 9

Study questions for What is Aesthetic Experience?

  1. From memory, consider times in your life where you had what might be classed as a powerful aesthetic experience. These might be when you were listening to great music, looking at paintings, reading a poem or standing looking at a beautiful landscape or sunset. If you can, write down descriptions of your experience – feelings and thoughts – in each case.
  2. Now consider whether your experiences in these cases had anything in common, and specifically, whether they share any of the features discussed as common to aesthetic experience in this chapter. Specifically: were they all pleasurable? Were they all in any sense non-cognitive? Were they motivated for practical ends? Were they valuable ‘for their own sake’? Doing this will help you critically reflect on the truth or otherwise of the claims being considered, by having concrete cases to consider.
  3. As we’ve seen, many philosophers have rejected the idea that the value of aesthetic experience (and art, in fact) comes from its being instrumentally valuable i.e. its leading to further valuable goals. Do you agree with them?
  4. Consider the ‘deflationary’ account, according to which there is no distinctive kind of thing that is aesthetic experience, over and above membership in various subkinds. What are the considerations in favour of this position, if any?
  5. Dewey suggests that aesthetic experience is not just appropriately had in relation to artworks and landscapes, but may also be had in relation to things like storms, meals and quarrels. Do you agree? If so, what account of aesthetic experience does this imply? Contrast to the traditional view.

Multiple Choice Questions

Weblinks for What is Aesthetic Experience?

Carlson, Allen (2010). ‘Environmental Aesthetics’. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,ed. E. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/environmental-aesthetics/. [Overview, including discussion from a partisan perspective of Carlson’s own view that aesthetic experience of the natural environment is importantly cognitive.]

Ginsborg, Hannah (2013). ‘Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/. [A detailed and helpful account of Kant’s position on beauty and aesthetic experience.]

Hume, David (1777). ‘Of Tragedy’. In Four Dissertations, http://www.davidhume.org/texts/fd.html. [Essay in which Hume attempts to explain the origin of the ‘unaccountable pleasure’ of viewing harrowing tragedies on stage.]

Kant, Immanuel (2011). ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’, trans. James Creed Meredith, originally published by Clarendon Press, http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/kant_beautiful.pdf. [Difficult but massively influential section of Kant’s Critique of Judgement.]

Leddy, Tom (2013). ‘Dewey’s Aesthetics’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/. [A useful attempt to systematise Dewey’s sometimes confusing theory.]

Shelley, James. ‘The Concept of the Aesthetic’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/. [A good historical overview of the development of the concept, and its philosophical consequences.]

Introductory further reading for What is aesthetic experience?

Carroll, Noel (2000). ‘Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions in Research’.   Ethics 110(2): 350–87. [Survey, including the debate on the relation between ethical judgement and aesthetic experience.]

Dickie, George (1964). ‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude’. American Philosophical Quarterly 1(1):   56–65. [Accessible and influential attack on the notion of a positive characterisation of aesthetic experience.]

Danto, Arthur (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Harvard University Press, chapter 1: ‘Works of Art and Mere Real Things’. [Classic text in which Danto introduces the thought experiment of ‘indiscernibles’ in order to discredit aesthetic formalism, among other things.]

Hughes, Fiona (2009). Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Continuum. [Helpful and detailed interpretation of Kant’s difficult ‘3rd Critique’, including the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’.]

Irvin, Sherri (2008). ‘The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Everyday Experience’. British Journal of Aesthetics 48: 29–44. [An interesting and accessible attempt to explain Dewey’s view, and to develop it into one which fully captures the aesthetic experience of the everyday.]

Advanced further reading for What is aesthetic experience?

Carroll, Noel (2002). ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited’. British Journal of Aesthetics 42(2): 145–68. [Recent defence of a ‘deflationary’ approach to aesthetic experience.]

Dewey, John (2009). Art as Experience. Perigee. [Dewey’s stimulating and idiosyncratic contribution to the discussion about aesthetic experience and art, originally published in 1934.]

Janaway, Christopher (1997). ‘Kant’s Aesthetics and the “Empty Cognitive Stock”’. Philosophical Quarterly 47(189): 459–76. [Accessible interpretation of Kant on the supposed non-cognitive nature of aesthetic experience.]

Shelley, James (2003). ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art’. British Journal of Aesthetics 43(4). [An intriguing defence of the idea that aesthetic experience is not essentially grounded in perceptual experience.]

Zangwill, Nick (2000). ‘In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism’. Philosophical Quarterly 50(201): 476–93. [Provocative attempt to resurrect the unfashionable position of aesthetic formalism for a restricted range of cases.]