Abstract
In this chapter, I provide an account of the nature of aesthetic reality: more precisely, I say how aesthetic reality is to be like, if we accept that it exists. I focus on the merits of some of the main realist theories of aesthetic properties. In particular, I address Sibley’s epistemic notion of taste, and then go on to invoke three realist views of aesthetic properties, which I take to be compatible and complementary: as value-grounding properties (Beardsley), as higher-order ways of appearing (Levinson), and as desire-mediated properties (Zemach). I explain why, contrary to claims by Levinson and Moore, beauty should be included among the aesthetic properties.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For an introduction to the notion of aesthetic properties which remains neutral with respect to the realism/anti-realism debate, see Goldman (1992).
- 2.
The Lady of Shalott (1888). Oil on canvas, 153 × 200 cm, The Tate Gallery, London.
- 3.
For a similar listing of the ‘methods we use as critics’, see Sibley ([1959] 2001, 18).
- 4.
See Chapter 5, Footnote 31. See also Sibley ([1968] 2001, 72).
- 5.
Sibley (2001, 34).
- 6.
Most authors have focused on the difficulties of the very distinction between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘non-aesthetic’, a distinction which I am not questioning. See again Chapter 5, §5.5.
- 7.
Levinson (1994, 354, Footnote 6) makes a similar suggestion pointing in the direction of objective beauty: ‘I believe that in their original and primary employment, in regard to visual objects or appearances, [“beautiful” and “ugly”] imply particular kinds of phenomenal impression (involving harmonious pleasingness, or the opposite thereof), and not simply approval or disapproval’.
- 8.
See, for instance, Sibley ([1968] 2001, 71): ‘I deliberately ignore […] questions about evaluation, though many assertions of the sorts I discuss are relevant to whether a work has merits or defects’.
- 9.
This distinction is inspired in McGinn’s account of the moral realm (1983, 152).
- 10.
McGinn (1983, 151–152). McGinn is considering moral values only.
- 11.
McGinn (1983, 152). Cf. Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (par. 21): ‘to enable a critic the more fully to execute this undertaking, he must preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination’.
- 12.
Later on in the book, when discussing beauty, Beardsley refers to the ‘objective’ definition of beauty thus: ‘beauty and the value that inheres in it are characteristics of the aesthetic object itself, quite independently of the way anyone feels about it’ (1981, 512).
- 13.
Beardsley quoting from Freedman (1968, 52): ‘The value-tending feature of B-predicates [corresponding to aesthetic properties] is not just an incidental and acquired feature, but is the distinguishing or defining feature of them’.
- 14.
Kivy (1975) also objects to Sibley’s distinction: ‘it is usually said that “graceful” is an aesthetic term. Yet it seems false to say that applying the term “graceful” requires an ability beyond the capacities we think of as possessed by the “normal” person’ (1975, 199); and: ‘aesthetic terms would not be the only ones that require for their application some talent beyond the “normal”. To apply terms in higher mathematics requires a talent that most “normal” people do not have’ (ibid.).
- 15.
Beardsley’s example is this: ‘if he reports that the shapes in a late van Gogh seem to him tortured and tense, and that the finale of Beethoven’s D minor symphony is powerful, I don’t think we would want to say that he is “perceptive”’ (1973, 55). I would.
- 16.
Eaton (1994, 386), for instance, claims also that ‘colour attributions can be aesthetic’. Sibley could perhaps accommodate this in his account: even though colours don’t generally require a special sensitivity to be discerned, in some cases the differences are very subtle—and in those cases I think Sibley could say that the attributions are properly aesthetic.
- 17.
I am only claiming that Sibley neglects evaluation in his account of taste.
- 18.
Levinson is the only author who explicitly addresses the purported metaphysical difference between properties and qualities (1978, 2006). According to Levinson, ‘attributes’ is the basic term for ‘the respects in which objects differ or are the same’ (1978, 1). But attributes, for Levinson, divide into two metaphysically distinct kinds: properties and qualities. According to Levinson (2006, 563), properties ‘are exemplified by being red, being heavy, being wise […] and are standardly designated by gerundive expressions, most notably, “being___”’. They are conditions, ‘being-a-certain-way’ (1978, 1). And they are ‘indivisible, non-partitionable things’ (2006, 563). Qualities, by contrast, are ‘stuffs’, ‘seem to admit of quantization’ (1978, 10), and are ‘standardly designated by expressions formed from adjectives by appending certain suffixes’ (1978, 11). They are ‘exemplified by redness, heaviness, wisdom’ (2006, 563). For Levinson the difference between properties and qualities is not simply grammatical: ‘It is my contention that “being blue” and “blueness” designate distinct entities’ (1978, 10). Levinson, however, somehow deflates the distinction when he claims that the two are very closely related: ‘Of course a quality and the corresponding property are closely connected. As a rule, they will be coinstantiated; if an object has a certain condition (property) it will possess some related abstract stuff (quality) and vice versa’ (1978, 11). Given that when one is present the other is present too (they are ‘coinstantiated’), it is natural to conflate the two terms, as referring to slightly the same thing. Levinson himself occasionally calls his qualities ‘properties’ at least in his (2005), an article on ‘aesthetic properties’: first, he refers to ‘delicacy’ (2005, 219), to ‘gracefulness’ and ‘garishness’ (2005, 222); then he more clearly conflates properties and qualities: ‘aesthetic properties such as gracefulness and garishness’ (2005, 223); ‘unity, or dynamism, or fluidity’ (2005, 224); and clearly again he calls his qualities ‘properties’: ‘aesthetic properties such as human beauty and ugliness’ (ibid.). I take the two alternative ways of invoking aesthetic attributes as equivalent, at least for our current purposes.
- 19.
I believe they are higher-order because they require a sophistication of perception.
- 20.
So, despite what he claims in (1994, 354, Footnote 6—cf. Footnote 7 above), according to his account beauty cannot be objective.
- 21.
Cf. Zemach (1997, 106): ‘an aesthetic property—a degree of unified significance—is a non-aesthetic property when viewed through the medium of desire’.
- 22.
See also Zemach (1997, 70).
- 23.
Standard observation conditions (SOC).
- 24.
Zemach claims: ‘Were we to look at things as Kant’s aesthetics says we should, that is, to bracket our desire and observe things as covered by Rawls’s veil of ignorance, abstracting from what they mean to us, we could discern no aesthetic properties in nature, and art would be impossible’ (1997, 105). This might not be entirely fair with respect to Kant’s view, however. What Kant suggests, in my reading of him at least, is, rather, that aesthetic apprehension must not have other interests (that is, interests other than aesthetic ones).
- 25.
Zemach’s realist project, at least, is made clear: ‘let us now get to work: show the objective reality of the aesthetic properties’ (1997, 56).
- 26.
My aim is not to reduce aesthetic properties to something else—to define them in non-aesthetic terms—but only to see them under a possible (hopefully also plausible) description. For a definition of aesthetic properties in non-aesthetic terms, see De Clercq (2002).
- 27.
Aesthetic apprehension does not always involve sophisticated perception: some aesthetic features are grasped easily by almost anyone (so, pace Sibley, elusiveness is not an essential feature of aesthetic properties). Still, and especially with respect to art, aesthetic apprehension indeed usually requires a finer perception.
- 28.
Mothersill’s account (1984) has the merit of emphasizing and promoting the centrality of beauty in aesthetics, as Zemach (1987) emphasizes.
- 29.
I should make one note on terminology. I take ‘beauty’ and ‘aesthetic value’ as synonyms, denoting a kind of good, following Mothersill (1992) both in the account and in the caution. As Mothersill has noted (1992, 45), sometimes it is thought that ‘beauty’ is not the most appropriate term since it may suggest ‘something mildly pleasing and non-strenuous’. But as Mothersill also adds (ibid.), ‘aesthetic value’ is also problematic: ‘beauty is a good, so “value” is appropriate, but what do you say about “aesthetic”’?
- 30.
The recommendation of an emphasis on ‘appreciation’, in particular concerning the less obvious case of literature, is made by Lamarque, apparently (I am relying on Lamarque’s claims in a seminar) after Olsen (supposedly his 1987). See, for instance, Lamarque (2007, passim). Cf. Olsen (1987, 152): ‘To say that the appropriate mode of apprehension of a literary work is appreciation is to suggest that this appreciation is in an important respect comparable to the appreciation of wine, of scenic or other beauty, rather than comparable to the understanding of an utterance, a sentence, or a physical event’. This claim stresses once again the interested nature of aesthetic perception, centered on the beauty of language in the case of works of literature.
- 31.
For a congenial conflation of understanding and appreciation, see Kivy (1975, 210): ‘To describe something in aesthetic terms is to describe it; but it is also to savor it at the same time: to run it over your tongue and lick your lips; to “investigate” its pleasurable possibilities’. For Kivy this is the reason why ‘aesthetic descriptions are “terminal”, […] they lead nowhere’; they provide ‘no reason for anything except continued contemplation’ (1975, 211).
- 32.
This suggestion is also made by Roger Scruton with respect to the aesthetic judgement of works of art (2009, 99): ‘When it comes to art, aesthetic judgement concerns what you ought and ought not to like, and (I shall argue) the “ought” here […] has a moral weight’.
- 33.
Of course, the extent to which biographical information matters aesthetically is open to dispute.
- 34.
As we shall see in the next paragraph, it is not only immoral attitudes represented or promoted in a work that prevent aesthetic appreciation: for instance a personal aversion to religion may prevent a person from admiring religious music, for instance.
- 35.
Also, just as there might be aspects of reality which (happen to) remain forever unknown to us, according to realism there might be works of art (natural landscapes, etc.) which remain forever unjudged.
- 36.
This is also the central feature of Beardsley’s aesthetic conception of art. See Beardsley ([1983] 2004, 58): ‘An artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy an aesthetic interest’. I disagree with this definition of a work of art, however, as unintentional works of art exist (think of Anne Frank’s Diary), just like works can have unintentional beautiful effects. Buildings can be built for practical purposes only and yet they may be works of art.
- 37.
On the now classical suggestion that works of art must be seen within a ‘category’, see Walton ([1970] 2004).
- 38.
For two good translations (for the modern reader) of Ovid’s poetry of exile, see Ovid (1990, 2005). My preference is for Ovid (1990).
- 39.
For an excellent biography of Clare, see Bate (2003).
- 40.
I use Bate’s edition of the poem, in Clare (2004, 282).
- 41.
Cf. Kivy (1975, 210).
- 42.
Cf. Kivy (1975, 210).
- 43.
Note that one criticism often made of (some) avant-garde art is its apparent lack of skill: some people say ‘A 6-year-old could do that’. The accusation is that the work in question is not an achievement (arguably an aesthetic achievement), and so that it is not admirable as such. These criticisms thus still depend on the claim that I am exploring: that art is to be an aesthetic achievement, calling for admiration on that account.
- 44.
Beardsley ([1983] 2004, 58) describes an experience with an ‘aesthetic character’ thus: ‘it takes on a sense of freedom from concern about matters outside the thing received, an intense affect that is nevertheless detached from practical ends, the exhilarating sense of exercising powers of discovery, integration of the self and its experiences. When experience has some or all of these properties, I say it has an aesthetic character’.
- 45.
But see also Footnote 7 above.
- 46.
Moore ([1922] 1960).
- 47.
This need not mean that beauty and the other aesthetic properties would have to behave similarly in every respect. Lamarque (2001, 106) suggests, for instance, that beauty may not be an essential property of works of art. I am inclined to think that it is.
- 48.
Lamarque (2002, 142) makes what I think is a claim sympathetic to this, with respect to the identity conditions of works of art: ‘evaluative matters will turn out to be crucial in the delineation of identity conditions for works’. Lamarque, however, does not endorse an aesthetic theory of art.
- 49.
This aesthetic conception of art contrasts with the widespread institutional theory of art championed by Danto and Dickie. For an outline of an aesthetic theory of art, see Beardsley ([1983] 2004). Another author who defends an aesthetic theory of art, in particular claiming that ‘Works of art are man-made items that are pre-eminently beautiful’, is Mothersill (1992, 51).
- 50.
Sibley’s original list also includes these (e.g., ‘a poem is tightly-knit’ in [1959] 2001, 1).
- 51.
This example (included in an account of the institutional theory of art applied to literature) is offered by Lamarque (2009, 61).
- 52.
Beardsley ([1983] 2004, 60) adds, in his account of the aesthetic theory, that even though the theory can accommodate novelty, we should not ‘twist’ the definition so that it accommodates everything that aspires to artistic status: ‘I would incline toward generosity and a welcoming attitude toward novelty—but I would look for evidence of some aesthetic intention, and I see no reason to twist my definition to make room for something like, say Edward T. Cone’s one hundred metronomes running down with nobody silly enough to wait around for them’.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Morais, I. (2019). The Nature of Aesthetic Reality. In: Aesthetic Realism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20127-2_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20127-2_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-20126-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-20127-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)