Description
Students will create a 1 page-long typed response to one of three review prompts. Responses must be in MLA format.
Purpose:
Explore in writing what you have read/watched and what we have presented in the modules.
Instructions:
Reply to only 1 of 3 topics/questions located below.
Students are to submit their assignment by Jan 14th, 11:59 pm using the submission link on this page.
Use citations and supporting evidence from texts/videos found in Modules Week 1-2.
Restate the chosen topic/question in the first few sentences of your response.
MLA Format Review Purdue WebpageLinks to an external site.
Topic/Questions:
Compare and contrast beauty and aesthetics. Use examples when possible.
Reading :
How the individual thinks is unique, and how the individual sees beauty is unique. What I may think is beautiful, you may not. How do we think this way? Or what makes us think something is aesthetically pleasing?
Neuroscientist Semir Zeki discusses how we interpret beauty in the TED talk video below:
“Have you ever wondered, as you gaze at something beautiful, exactly what it is that makes it beautiful? Do all things which you experience as beautiful have a single defining characteristic? Indeed, could you even write a definition of beauty itself?
The great Irish polymath, Edmund Burke, described beauty as “for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind through the intervention of the senses”. I will explore Burke’s definition from a neurobiological perspective and show that there is a single fundamental characteristic to the experience of beauty, one which is independent of culture, education and ethnic background. Moreover, a neurobiological interpretation of Burke’s “intervention of the senses” also gives a brain-based explanation for why the search for the nature of beauty has been so elusive.”
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CHAPTER 1.
WHAT IS AESTHETICS?
ALEXANDER WESTENBERG
It is a notorious characteristic of philosophy that any attempt to define it raises more
questions than it answers: if this is true of philosophy more broadly, it is perhaps even more
true of that branch known as aesthetics. Though in some respects the modern discipline as we
know it today is traceable to eighteenth century European philosophy, the important work
done in that century was not isolated from many centuries of work prior. In addition, this
is to say nothing of the long tradition of aesthetical work in China and Japan, for example,
which can trace its origins at least as far back as the European tradition (and, as we shall see,
there are certain similarities of origin). Finally, though aesthetics is often taken today to be
concerned with works of art, this is both an overstatement today and at odds with much of
historical aesthetics.
The question, then, is not an easy one. In the face of such a dilemma, it is perhaps best to
start etymologically: what does the word “aesthetic” mean on its own, and where does it
come from? Though it was first brought into common use with the work of the German
philosopher Alexander Baumgarten ([1735] 1954), the word is Greek in origin, from the word
αἰσθητικός (aisthetikos: Liddell & Short 1940), which refers to the perception and experience
of the senses. On this understanding, then, the study of aesthetics is the study of something
sensed, in a broad understanding of that word, rather than something imagined or reasoned.
That is, the object of study in aesthetics must be, at least in part, sensorial. Of course, one
might think that this is true of science, but the difference is crucial: science is the study of
the material world in itself, whereas aesthetics—in its most fundamental sense—is about the
experience of things in that world. In particular, aesthetics is about their level of pleasantness,
as in asking whether a particular experience is pleasant or not.
At this point we begin to arrive not only at a working definition of aesthetics, but also
a statement of its most important questions. Perhaps most importantly, we can arrive at
AESTHETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE 13
an explanation of why its questions are worth asking and why it is a useful discipline to
undertake. Our definition, then, might be this: aesthetics is a sub-branch of philosophy that
examines questions of the pleasantness of our experiences concerning things in the world
(where pleasantness is taken in a broad sense to include, for example, the intellectual pleasure
of being challenged or confronted). This is still quite general, but it gives us a framework from
which to build a deeper understanding; though, as suggested at the beginning, any hopes of
narrowing it down further may be futile. Certainly, the immediate benefit of this definition
is that it highlights quite nicely a tension that resides at the heart of all aesthetic work: the
tension between personal, subjective experiences and more universal, objective experiences.
If we place all experiences on a spectrum, those at the subjective extreme, such as a personal
enjoyment of swimming or celery are clearly experiences unique to a particular individual:
though of course many people like swimming (and, apparently, celery), we do not expect
anyone else to share in this enjoyment. At the other end of the spectrum we find objective
experiences, which are so universal as to be applicable to humanity in general—experiences
such as hunger, thirst, laughter, physical attraction, tiredness, physical pain, the experience
of colour, the experience of feeling the water on one’s skin while swimming, and so on.
Objective experiences are not concerned with pleasantness; although we might find the
experience of swimming (for example) to be either pleasant or not, nevertheless the
experiences that make up the overall concept of swimming, such as the experience of feeling
the water on one’s skin, are not in themselves experiences of pleasantness, and so lie outside
the discipline of aesthetics. But so, too, do subjective experiences; although a personal like or
dislike of eating celery, for example, certainly has to do with pleasantness, it has to do with
pleasantness for you, and nobody else. Certainly, one could ask if there is anything that ties
together all people who like to enjoy celery, but if the answer is physical, then it’s a question
for physics, and if mental, psychology.
If we eliminate the experiences at either extreme, we find in between certain experiences that
hold tension between being subjective and objective, personal and universal: experiences like
listening to a song, a symphony, or the sound of the waves; looking at a beautiful sunset, a
painting by Turner or Tensho Shubun, a sculpture, a piece of graffiti or a dance; or reading
a novel or a poem. What’s interesting about these experiences is that they are undoubtedly
personal, and yet, unlike the case of liking celery, we expect these experiences to be universal,
shared by others. Unlike eating celery, which is either pleasant or not, these other experiences
involve a kind of judgment, like “this is beautiful,” making it much closer to an objective
experience like “this is yellow.” And, just as we would expect others to agree that a yellow
object really is yellow, and think their perceptions wrong or faulty if they disagreed, so too
with experiences such as looking at a beautiful sculpture such as the Winged Victory of
Samothrace, we expect others to agree that it is beautiful—in fact, at times we expect them
to agree even if they don’t like it, allowing a tension between saying “this is a good book,
but I don’t personally like it.” And yet, at the same time, these experiences remain deeply
14 WHAT IS AESTHETICS?
personal, subjective. And so we hear and use phrases like “this piece speaks to me about. . . .”
It is these kinds of experiences which are the central focus of aesthetics, and so we call these
experiences “aesthetic experiences.” This tension between the personal and the universal,
then, is the driving principle of the study of aesthetics.
If aesthetics is concerned with experiences such as these, then it becomes clear that to restrict
it to any one type of experience or to one tradition is unjustifiable, even ridiculous. And
so, though much of the work done by contemporary aestheticians has its roots in only the
last few centuries, the ancient world was no stranger to aesthetics. Plato (428/427–348/
347 BCE) famously thought the impact that the experience of art could have on people
was so powerful as to be dangerous, and that art did not have anything to offer philosophy
since it merely imitates reality, whereas philosophy seeks true reality ([380 BCE] 1974,
1
bk. X, 595a–605c). Thus, art is a form of deception, so to speak. In contrast to this, the
Epicurean philosopher Philodemus (c. 110-30 BCE) wrote a work dedicated to examining
2
the philosophical import of the Homeric corpus (see Asmis 1991), and Augustine (354–430
CE) ([386–87] 2007) claimed that the study of poetry was an important introductory step into
philosophy (2007). In China, Confucius (551–479 BCE) shared Plato’s suspicion of art, yet he
valued appreciation of beauty for the sensibilities of the self and for its moral qualities also
3
(1938), while his contemporary in India, Bharata, taught a theory of rasa as the end of the
4
arts, a concept not too dissimilar from the Aristotelian notion of catharsis (1950-1961; see
Gerow 2002).
This brief overview of the kinds of experiences we call aesthetic, however, raises another
issue that is often overlooked. Put simply, it suggests that the usual restriction of aesthetics
to artworks and to natural phenomena is incomplete. After all, it is not uncommon for a
mathematical equation to be termed “beautiful,” or for aesthetic concepts and terms to be
used in contexts such as social interactions, military maneuvers, and even politics.
AESTHETICS AS AN 18TH CENTURY DISCIPLINE
Nevertheless, it is a fact that, as I have said above, the discipline as we know it today has
its origins largely in eighteenth century Europe, and so a brief overview of this lineage
is not out of place. This section, therefore, provides an historical overview of the origins
of aesthetics as a modern philosophical subject in the 18th century, and notes its journey
1. There have been a number of recent arguments, however, that Plato has been strongly misinterpreted on this
point (Levin 2001; Planinc 2003; Pappas 2012; Sushytska 2012).
2. For further discussion of the Epicurean view that the arts could be philosophical, see Westenberg (2015).
3. Estimates of Bharata’s life range from 500 BCE to 500 CE, but most put him between 500 and 200 BCE.
4. Catharsis is a notion famously introduced in Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy. Simply put, it is the purgation or
purification of one’s emotions, achieved through a quasi-experience of those emotions during the performance
of the tragedy. See Aristotle’s Poetics ([335 BCE] 1996, 1449b21–29).
AESTHETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE 15
through engagement with fine arts to modern interest in pop culture. The discussion here is
not meant to be an exhaustive historical outline, but a demonstration of the central questions
of aesthetics through the last three hundred years. This will provide the impetus for a
discussion of aesthetics as the study of beauty.
In Paul Guyer’s (2005, 25) turn of phrase, aesthetics
was not baptized until 1735, when the twenty-one-year-old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, in
his dissertation “Philosophical Meditations on some matters pertaining to Poetry,” introduced the
term to designate “the science for directing the inferior faculty of cognition or the science of how
something is to be sensitively cognized.”
Baumgarten, however, was himself working in a field begun some twenty years earlier, with
the work of the Earl of Shaftesbury (Characteristiks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711),
and his two followers Joseph Addison (“The Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator,
1712) and Frances Hutcheson (An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and
Virtue, 1725) in Britain, and the work of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (Critical Reflections on Poetry,
Painting, and Music, 1719) in France. Shaftesbury (1671–1713) made the important
distinction, still upheld today, between enjoying something for the benefit it brings
one—whether that be physical, mental, emotional, or any other kind of benefit—and enjoying
something for its own sake, simply because it is worthy of being enjoyed ([1711] 1999,
318–319).
Shaftesbury’s answer to the fundamental question of aesthetics—how is it that our experience
is both subjective and yet in some sense objective and universal—claimed, in a rather Platonic
fashion, that the beauty of the natural world and the created works of humanity lead one’s
mind “higher,” to an appreciation of the beauty of the entirety of creation, and ultimately
to its creator, the source of all beauty (Shaftesbury [1711] 1999, 322ff). This explains how
it is we make aesthetic judgments, since we have an objective standard of beauty to which
we can refer, though we can only come to know this standard through our experience
of its instantiations, thus leading the way to a need for refinement. David Hume, though
he discarded the notion of a creator of beauty and instead argued that we move with the
imagination to a recognition of some form of utility—whether real or not ([1739–40] 2009,
463–470)—understood the need for some kind of standard to explain our use of aesthetic
judgments, and so introduced the idea of an ideal critic whose senses were perfectly refined
5
to the reception of aesthetic experiences (Hume [1757] 2000).
Another important influential distinction of the eighteenth century was made by the British
philosopher and statesman, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), who distinguished between the
beautiful and the sublime. For Burke ([1757] 2005), beauty is a social quality, “where women
5. Hume here takes aesthetic experiences to be experiences of works of art.
16 WHAT IS AESTHETICS?
and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in
beholding them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness
and affection towards their persons” (part 1, sec. 10). The sublime, on the other hand, is
the deeper experience, the more profound, “the strongest emotion of which the mind is
capable of feeling” (part 1, sec. 7). The sublime is oriented towards what is beyond our
comprehension, whereas the beautiful, for Burke, has no apparent end. So, for example, if, in
listening to “If Love’s a Sweet Passion” by Henry Purcell, one is moved to a surge of emotion,
even to tears, Burke would consider this a sublime experience, because of its power to call up
strong and passionate emotions. What is notable about this distinction is that Burke’s concept
of the sublime allows for “negative” aesthetic experiences, such as the experience of Jordan
Wolfson’s virtual-reality artwork “Real Violence,” to be considered sublime, and therefore
positively appraised. Such an artwork is capable of inducing “the strongest emotions” which,
for Burke, can ultimately lead us beyond the artwork to something greater, and thus the
experience of it is sublime.
Probably the most important philosophical work on aesthetics in the eighteenth century,
however, was written by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), namely the
Critique of Judgement (1790). As is evident from the title of his work, Kant took the question of
aesthetic judgment as paramount, making it the focus of the first half of his book. A complete
discussion of Kant’s work is outside the scope of this chapter, but a few points are worthy of
mention here.
First, Kant’s formulation of the faculty of judgment is influenced by Shaftesbury’s and
Hume’s, with its most well-known characteristic being a disinterestedness in the object of
judgment. What this means is that the observer, the person having the aesthetic experience,
has no vested interests in the thing experienced, and so the judgment is outside of any benefit
to them (Kant [1790] 2015, sec. 2).
Kant kept Burke’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, but modified it in a
way that draws together threads from Shaftesbury as well. For Kant, beauty is present when
we discern the intelligibility of what we experience without any apparent ultimate purpose.
Thus beauty is present, for Kant, at a paradox of being purposive—that is, appearing to have
been in some way designed—and being without an actual apparent purpose. As an example,
when looking at a flower that we call beautiful, its beauty seems to be designed, to have a
purpose. And yet no particular purpose is apparent, no clear concept of “what this beauty
is for.” Similarly with a sunset, we may wonder at its beauty, and feel it to be purposive, but
there is no clear, definite purpose—after all, what purpose could the beauty of a sunset have?
The sublime, on the other hand, comes into play when we stand in the face of something
so truly awe-inspiring that it rejects all attempts to understand, and we simply stand in its
presence, as it were (Kant [1790] 2015, sec. 23–29). The American Jewish poet and singer-
AESTHETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE 17
songwriter, Leonard Cohen, expressed this quite nicely when explaining the sentiment of his
most famous song, Hallelujah:
This world is full of conflicts and things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we
can transcend the [binaries] … and reconcile. … Regardless of how impossible the situation [seems],
there is a moment when you open your mouth, throw open your arms and embrace the whole mess
… and you just say “Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.” (Cohen 1988)
For Cohen, the song was about acknowledging that there are some things in our world that
are so big they are beyond us, and when we glimpse that bigger picture, even a little, our
response is to cry out, in Cohen’s words, “Hallelujah!” Cohen’s formulation is particularly
fitting because, for Kant (as for Shaftesbury), it is through aesthetic experiences such as these
that we come to know the ultimate source of beauty or sublimity.
Kant answers the tension between the personal and universal in aesthetic experiences by
linking the experience of the aesthetic with the fundamental nature of rational beings (Kant
[1790] 2015, sec. 5). For Kant, it is intrinsic and unique to rationality to be able to see things
as valuable in themselves—it is, indeed, the basis of his theory of morality in the Critique
of Practical Reason. This ability, however, can be used in two ways: pragmatically or what
I shall call “aesthetically.” In the former, we only use this ability with regards to purely
practical (especially moral) reasoning, and thus the ability to see something as intrinsically
valuable is itself a purely pragmatic ability. As an example, imagine someone comes to
you wanting funding for a music preschool. You could reason to yourself that music is
intrinsically valuable, and so worth the financial burden of funding the school, and this would
be a fair thought process. But notice in this example that the ability to see something as
intrinsically valuable is subject to the larger, practical question of “should I fund this music
preschool?” This use of intrinsic value as a tool for reasoning is even more common in
moral reasoning, where one might reason that it is wrong to hurt an animal because life
itself is intrinsically valuable and therefore is worth protecting. Notice again that there is a
“and therefore x action should be done.” Clearly, the ability to see something as valuable in
itself can become a purely pragmatic ability, that is, a useful skill, but not itself intrinsically
valuable. This is because if we only use our ability to see things as valuable in themselves to
help us with making decisions, then essentially we are only treating this skill as a tool to be
used to improve our decision making about what to do or not to do. Just as our ability to see
space (i.e., our ability for depth perception) is a tool which helps us move about the physical
world, so, too our ability to see things as valuable in themselves is, if used exclusively for
practical and moral reasoning, simply a tool to help us move about the moral world.
In these examples of “pragmatic intrinsic valuing,” though the approach may be uniquely
rational, it is still practical; but if we put all practical thoughts to the side, and stand observing
something in its intrinsic worth—nature as a whole is the most perfect object of this for Kant
(see Kant [1790] 2015, sec. 6)—then we engage in the most uniquely rational activity of all
18 WHAT IS AESTHETICS?
(sec. 49). And, if this is the case, then it follows from the fact that it is uniquely rational that it
is also, for Kant, a form of freedom for the rational being, in which rationality is not bound by
the necessity to choose or deliberate, but can purely experience the value of something simply
because it is valuable. Thus, for Kant, aesthetics becomes the most uniquely personal—even
the most uniquely human—activity, since it is the function and expression of rationality to
experience aesthetically.
These themes of 18th century aesthetics draw out that tension at the heart of aesthetics, the
tension between the personal and the universal. In particular, Kant’s notion of the aesthetic
experience as uniquely, even supremely, rational draws out this same tension. It does this
by highlighting the uniquely rational element—which is, of course, universally human—and
the uniquely personal element of standing in the presence of the source of that experience,
coupled with its role (for Kant) as instigator of a personal journey from the beautiful or
sublime thing to beauty and sublimity as such. Though, for Kant, such experiences were
largely (though not exclusively) found in the natural world, the cause—i.e., whether the
object of aesthetic experience is natural or created by humanity—is not important for our
discussion. What is important is the connection between the 18th century discipline and that
fundamental tension which I have noted earlier. Thus it can truly be said that aesthetics is
an 18th century discipline, for it is here that we find the most influential approach to that
tension which is at its heart.
AESTHETICS AS THE STUDY OF BEAUTY
As the foregoing discussion has highlighted, the origins of modern philosophical aesthetics
in the eighteenth century has tended to focus on the question of beauty (and its correlatives,
such as sublimity, ugliness, and so on). This immediately raises the question, of course, of
what is meant by beauty, for this is not a simple property like redness or squareness. Rather,
beauty is a quality, intangibly constituted by different features in different edges, and what is
beautiful in one thing might not be in another—for example, hard edges may look attractive
on a building, but not on a cat.
So the first question is, what makes something beautiful? While this topic is discussed in great
detail in due course, it may be pointed out here that if it is true that aesthetic experiences
are those that hold tension between the personal and the universal, as I have argued in this
chapter, then it stands to reason that some aspect of what it is that makes something beautiful,
6
which we might call “objectively pleasant,” must speak to this very tension. Of course, as
we have seen, this is the fundamental question of aesthetics, so this is perhaps unsurprising.
Nevertheless, it’s worth taking a moment to explore the relationship between beauty and the
tension between the personal and the universal. Raising this question does lead us, however,
6. Meaning we expect a certain level of universal appreciation for the object of our experience. People often use
this concept naturally when they say, for example, “I don’t like it, but I can appreciate it.”
AESTHETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE 19
to expand the concept of beauty and deformity (as Hume would call it) or ugliness (as we
might say today), to be something of a placeholder for any and all experiences which we might
tend to insist upon universalising. This is because it is clear that if aesthetics is the study of
beauty–as it is so often said to be–it can only be so if beauty is taken to encompass far more
than simply what is agreeable.
If we return to the working definition of aesthetics
presented at the beginning of this chapter, we
understand that pleasantness can not be synonymous
with pleasure as opposed to pain, for this would fail
to take into account the “pleasantness” of looking at
Utagawa Toyokuni’s (1769–1825) hanging scroll,
“Courtesan in Her Boudoir,” which portrays a
courtesan putting herself together after having sex,
seen fixing her hair with her clothes still partially
open. The picture is not a happy one, and to derive
enjoyment of it in a way that ignores the quiet
sadness of the picture seems perverse, certainly out of
place. Instead, we enjoy this picture precisely because
of its portrayal of a situation tinged with sadness. Or
again, the experience of a mathematical equation one
has struggled for hours to achieve may have a certain
intellectual pleasure at having overcome the Fig. 1: Utagawa Toyokuni, Courtesan in Her
difficulties presented by the equation, but has Boudoir. Accessed from the Minneapolis Institute of
nothing to do with the pleasantness of the equation Arts and used under fair dealing (Canada).
as such. Instead the pleasantness is to be found in the
elegance and simplicity of the equation, the originality of thought, and so on, in spite of the
pain, struggle, frustration, and tiredness experienced in grappling with it. The experience of
reading Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Walk,” written after his wife’s death, is another example
of this distinction:
The Walk
You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
20 WHAT IS AESTHETICS?
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.
I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.
This poem is saturated with sorrow, and when we read it we feel that same sorrow, and it
would be wrong to describe ourselves as finding pleasure in Hardy’s sorrow. And yet the
poem has pleasantness—that is, beauty—in its ability to capture, contain, and convey that
emotion.
This “objective pleasantness” that we find in these aesthetic experiences, then, is a
pleasantness that seems to be divorced from the question of our enjoyment and appraisal of
the cause of that experience. This explains how it is that we can be expected to appreciate
a book, painting, sculpture, piece of music, and so on even if we are not expected to like it,
because the pleasantness of the aesthetic experience—which we might call our appreciation
of it—seems to be assumed to be separate from the enjoyment and approval of the cause of
that experience. If it is possible to appreciate an experience—that is, to have the appropriate
response to it—and yet still not like it, then there seems to be two elements to an individual’s
experience: one purely personal, and thus not aesthetic as such, and the other personal-yetuniversal. It is this latter element that constitutes the individual’s aesthetic experience proper.
This might then explain why, despite its significance in the eighteenth century, Burke and
Kant’s distinction between beauty and the sublime is not much used today, beauty instead
becoming the overriding concept for all experiences that are universal yet personal, and
which we believe have “pleasantness.” Thus we find our answer to the question “what is
beauty?” in this unique kind of pleasantness found in aesthetic experiences, devoid of their
“goodness” or personal pleasantness.
As these examples show, beauty is not a “one-size-fits-all” concept—or if it is, it looks so
radically different in different sizes that it is only in these different forms that we can talk
AESTHETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE 21
about it in any detail. And yet, expanding the notion of beauty in this way does not thereby
render it useless. Though it seems to cover a wide range of experiences, and apply to a
diverse—and at times contradictory—range of qualities, beauty has a role as the determining
factor in aesthetic judgments. When we have an aesthetic experience, we feel words like
“beautiful” are uniquely appropriate: we describe as beautiful not only the awesome, the
inspiring, and the joy-filled, but also those experiences saturated with sorrow and
desperation. Even when the experience seems too bleak, or what is portrayed in an artwork is
too confronting or disturbing for us to be comfortable with calling it “beautiful” directly, it is
still not uncommon to hear of such a work of art as being “beautifully put together.” Beauty,
then, still remains a powerful and useful concept in the study of aesthetics.
WHY AESTHETICS?
Drawing the different threads together, we are now in a position to reconsider and provide
a more complete answer for the question of why aesthetics is worth pursuing. So far we
have spoken of the experience of a tension between the personal and the universal as the
main focus of aesthetics, but, of course, the experience cannot be had without someone
to experience it. And so the individual is a crucial element in the equation of an aesthetic
experience. The example above of Toyokumi’s hanging scroll suggests two important aspects
of this individual element.
The first aspect is to do with “proper response,” or “correct pleasantness,” as one might say.
In looking at Toyokumi’s “Courtesan in Her Boudoir” it would seem out of place to enjoy
the painting because it includes a naked breast, for example: to look on the image in this way
fails to do justice to the image as a work of art, certainly, but more than that it denigrates it
as the object of an aesthetic experience. Likewise, to enjoy it because one enjoys the idea of a
woman sold into the life of a courtesan, usually suffering not only venereal diseases but also
lead poisoning from the make-up she wore, then this too would be a grossly inappropriate
response, missing the point of the artwork and missing out on the aesthetic experience
altogether. A similar point may be made about John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men, in
which George must kill his best friend Lenny; we rightly feel for George, and find the book
pleasant in its tragedy and its highlighting of a number of injustices, such as the injustice of a
society that fails to care for its most vulnerable, the injustice of Lenny not being cared for by
anyone except George, the injustice of George being put in a situation in which he thinks he
has no option but to kill his best friend, and so on. We call the book beautiful, eye-opening,
and we recommend it to others. Yet if we were to enjoy the book because we like the idea of
shooting our friend or of killing someone with a disability, then again we have failed to have
the correct aesthetic response. So the first aspect of the individual element in an aesthetic
experience is the question of an appropriate response.
This is inextricably entwined with the second aspect, which is the question of the development
22 WHAT IS AESTHETICS?
and cultivation of appreciation and appropriate response. If the appropriate response can be
expected (irrespective of enjoyment), then one naturally turns to the question of aesthetic
education, or how this appropriate response comes about, and how one develops the
disposition from which such an appropriate response arises. It stands to reason that if
judgments about aesthetic experiences are to be universal—that is, if we expect, as indeed
we do, someone else to agree with our judgment—then we can only do this because we
believe they are capable of making the same appropriate response (since, obviously, we
assume our own judgment to be appropriate). This is because we cannot expect them to
have a response that agrees with our own if that response is random, or purely based on
personality—recalling our discussion at the beginning of the chapter, the experience must
be “objectively personal,” that is, personal yet universal. This leaves only two options: 1)
everybody is born with the exact same disposition towards having an appropriate response
that does not change as they grow; or 2) everybody’s disposition towards having an appropriate
response changes and is affected by the circumstances of each person’s life and experience.
The problem with the first option is trying to accommodate those who do not have an
appropriate response: the only way to accommodate them is to say they have an innate
abnormality. But in this case we would be unable to judge them for it. After all, we don’t
judge someone born blind for not agreeing with us that the object in front of us is yellow:
it is simply not possible for them to agree or disagree, since they are physically incapable
of experiencing the colour yellow. Likewise, if we say that all humanity is innately disposed
to appropriate responses towards aesthetic experiences, then those who do not have the
appropriate response are “let off the hook,” as it were.
It seems, then, that the only option is to acknowledge that our disposition towards an
appropriate response changes and develops over time, and thus acknowledge the possibility
of aesthetic education, that is, education in developing appropriate responses. And, though
the main focus of this chapter is the individual aesthetic experience, it’s worth noting here
that this shift in disposition towards an appropriate response that happens over time is
7
true both at the individual and also at the cultural/societal level. So, for example, for an
Ancient Greek, revulsion at disproportionality was deemed an appropriate response, whereas
in contemporary Western society, notwithstanding that this may well be the response of some
people, disproportionality is culturally acceptable, and at times even the most praiseworthy
feature of a work of art (one immediately thinks of Picasso, for example). To return to
the subject of changing disposition towards appropriate responses, in taking up this option
7. One may wonder, if a society’s position on aesthetics can change, how it can be considered universal. The
answer lies in the fact that the society as a whole changes because someone (or a group of someones) challenges
and “educates” (
