Aesthetic Concepts and value

The eighteenth century was a surprisingly peaceful time, but this turned out to be the lull before the storm, since out of its orderly classicism there developed a wild romanticism in art and literature, and even revolution in politics. The aesthetic concept which came to be more appreciated in this period was associated with this, namely sublimity, which Edmund Burke theorized about in his “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” The sublime was connected more with pain than pure pleasure, according to Burke, since threats to self-preservation were involved, as on the high seas, and lonely moors, with the devilish humans and dramatic passions that artists and writers were about to portray. But in these circumstances, of course, it is still “delightful horror,” as Burke appreciated, since one is insulated by the fictionality of the work in question from any real danger.

“Sublime” and “beautiful” are only two amongst the many terms which may be used to describe our aesthetic experiences. Clearly there are “ridiculous” and “ugly,” for a start, as well. But the more discriminating will have no difficulty also finding something maybe “fine,” or “lovely” rather than “awful” or “hideous,” and “exquisite” or “superb” rather than “gross” or “foul.” Frank Sibley wrote a notable series of articles, starting in 1959, defending a view of aesthetic concepts as a whole. He said that they were not rule- or condition-governed, but required a heightened form of perception, which one might call taste, sensitivity, or judgment. His full analysis, however, contained another aspect, since he was not only concerned with the sorts of concepts mentioned above, but also with a set of others which had a rather different character. For one can describe works of art, often enough, in terms which relate primarily to the emotional and mental life of human beings. One can call them “joyful,” “melancholy,” “serene,” “witty,” “vulgar,” and “humble,” for instance. These are evidently not purely aesthetic terms, because of their further uses, but they are still very relevant to many aesthetic experiences.

Sibley’s claim about these concepts was that there were no sufficient conditions for their application. For many concepts—sometimes called “closed” concepts, as a result—both necessary and sufficient conditions for their application can be given. To be a bachelor, for instance, it is necessary to be male and unmarried, though of marriageable age, and together these three conditions are sufficient. For other concepts, however, the so-called “open” ones, no such definitions can be given— although for aesthetic concepts Sibley pointed out there were still some necessary conditions, since certain facts can rule out the application of, for example, “garish,” “gaudy,” or “flamboyant.”

The question therefore arises: how do we make aesthetic judgments if not by checking sufficient conditions? Sibley’s account was that, when the concepts were not purely perceptual they were mostly metaphoric. Thus, we call artworks “dynamic,” or “sad,” as before, by comparison with the behaviors of humans with those qualities. Other theorists, such as Rudolph Arnheim and Roger Scruton, have held similar views. Scruton, in fact, discriminated eight types of aesthetic concept, and we shall look at some of the others below.

Aesthetic Value

We have noted Kant’s views about the objectivity and universality of judgments of pure beauty, and there are several ways that these notions have been further defended. There is a famous curve, for instance, obtained by the nineteenth century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, which shows how human arousal is quite generally related to complexity of stimulus. We are bored by the simple, become sated, even over-anxious, by the increasingly complex, while in between there is a region of greatest pleasure. The dimension of complexity is only one objective measure of worth which has been proposed in this way. Thus it is now known, for instance, that judgments of facial beauty in humans are a matter of averageness and symmetry. Traditionally, unity was taken to be central, notably by Aristotle in connection with Drama, and when added to complexity it formed a general account of aesthetic value. Thus Francis Hutcheson, in the eighteenth century, asserted that “Uniformity in variety always makes an object beautiful.” Monroe Beardsley, more recently, has introduced a third criterion—intensity—to produce his three “General Canons” of objective worth. He also detailed some “Special Canons.”

Beardsley called the objective criteria within styles of Art “Special Canons.” These were not a matter of something being good of its kind and so involving perfection of a concept in the sense of Kant. They involved defeasible “good-making” and “bad-making” features, more in the manner Hume explained in his major essay in this area, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). To say a work of art had a positive quality like humor, for instance, was to praise it to some degree, but this could be offset by other qualities which made the work not good as a whole. Beardsley defended all of his canons in a much more detailed way than his eighteenth century predecessor however: through a lengthy, fine-grained, historical analysis of what critics have actually appealed to in the evaluation of artworks. Also, he explicitly made the disclaimer that his canons were the only criteria of value, by separating these “objective reasons” from what he called “affective” and “genetic” reasons. These two other sorts of reasons were to do with audience response, and the originating artist and his times, respectively, and either “The Affective Fallacy” or “The Intentional Fallacy,” he maintained, was involved if these were considered. The discrimination enabled Beardsley to focus on the artwork and its representational relations, if any, to objects in the public world.

Against Beardsley, over many years, Joseph Margolis maintained a “Robust Relativism.” Thus he wanted to say that “aptness,” “partiality,” and “non-cognitivism” characterize art appreciation, rather than “truth,” “universality,” and “knowledge.” He defended this with respect to aesthetic concepts, critical judgments of value, and literary interpretations in particular, saying, more generally, that works of art were “culturally emergent entities” not directly accessible, because of this, to any faculty resembling sense perception. The main debate over aesthetic value, indeed, concerns social and political matters, and the seemingly inevitable partiality of different points of view. The central question concerns whether there is a privileged class, namely those with aesthetic interests, or whether their set of interests has no distinguished place, since, from a sociological perspective, that taste is just one amongst all other tastes in the democratic economy. The sociologist Arnold Hauser preferred a non-relativistic point of view, and was prepared to give a ranking of tastes. High art beat popular art, Hauser said, because of two things: the significance of its content, and the more creative nature of its forms. Roger Taylor, by contrast, set out very fully the “leveller’s” point of view, declaring that "Aida" and "The Sound of Music" have equal value for their respective audiences. He defended this with a thorough philosophical analysis, rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as truth corresponding to an external reality, with the people capable of accessing that truth having some special value. Instead, according to Taylor, there are just different conceptual schemes, in which truth is measured merely by coherence internal to the scheme itself. Janet Wolff looked at this debate more disinterestedly, in particular studying the details of the opposition between Kant and Bourdieu.