GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

The Infinite Staircase offers readers a metaphysics and an ethics shaped by the 21st century’s understanding of how the world came to be. It has little to say, however about esthetics, and that is too large a part of human experience to neglect. With that in mind, I am going to address the topic in two short essays.

The first essay, the one you have in hand, is an interaction with The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy’s entry on the topic. I found myself constantly quarreling with it, and I wanted to sort out why, hence this piece. What I see now is that I was clearing a space to dig deeper into the issues I truly care about. That’s what the second essay is intended to do.

Of course, this begs the question, do you even need to read this essay? I mean, just because I have to clear my throat before I speak doesn’t mean you have to listen to it. That said, if you are academically oriented, or have ever taken courses in philosophy, I suggest you do read this if only to clarify your own point of view. If, on the other hand, you are simply interested in the nature of the esthetic experience itself, feel free to ignore this piece, but do keep an eye out for the next essay.

Essay #1: A Dialog with Cambridge

NOTE: The format of the dialog is to present the Cambridge material in blockquote format and my responses to it in normal text.

Aesthetics: the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our experience of art and of the natural environment.

The purpose of esthetics, as of any academic discipline, is to investigate a body of forces in order to better understand its nature and determine how best to incorporate it into our strategies for living. In the case of esthetics, the forces under study create psychological experiences, and it is these experiences that provide the data upon which the discipline is based.

Because the concept of experience is central to the understanding of esthetics, we need to get clear about its meaning. In particular, we need to distinguish between two common understandings of the term, one of which is central, the other of which is tangential to our purposes.

Here are the two definitions, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. The actual observation of facts or events considered as a source of knowledge.
2. The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event.

Definition 2 is the one that is central to our purpose. We are interested in the impact of an object on a subject, what it is like to be “consciously affected,” something that depends very much on the properties of both the subject and the object. We investigate this experience first by examining the residue of its impact on the subject and then by seeking attributes in the object that account for it.

This is where Definition 1 comes in. It is a tactic we use in pursuing a better understanding of what is happening under Definition 2. But we need to be careful here as we cannot objectively observe the facts in question—they are inherently subjective and can only be contemplated internally or reported externally. That means there can be no purely objective basis for esthetics. We must keep both subject and object in view at all times, focusing specifically on what is happening when we are being internally affected by an externally occasioned event.

It emerged as a separate field of philosophical inquiry during the eighteenth century in England and on the Continent. Recognition of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy coincided with the development of theories of art that grouped together painting, poetry, sculpture, music, and dance (and often landscape gardening) as the same kind of thing, les beaux arts, or the fine arts.

The fine arts are indeed all within the scope of esthetics. As a group, however, they are highly refined. Their force tends to be more ethereal than many people can experience, particularly modern audiences that are more global and less privileged than the eighteenth century thinkers who created the concept initially. As a result, we should not position the fine arts as the centerpoint of our category but rather at one end of a more inclusive spectrum, albeit one we have as yet to define.

Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry (1735) as the name for one of the two branches of the study of knowledge, i.e. for the study of sensory experience coupled with feeling, which he argued provided a different type of knowledge from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by “logic.” He derived it from the ancient Greek aisthanomai (to perceive), and “the aesthetic” has always been intimately connected with sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it arouses.

“Sensory experience coupled with feeling” is as good a starting point as any for capturing the full spectrum of aesthetic experience. It is still too general, as there are many such experiences that are not aesthetic, but it gives us a point of departure. The challenge is that when we try to convert any such experience into knowledge, of necessity we must express ourselves in language, and this can be confusing because the experience itself is pre-linguistic.

That is, to use the framework of The Infinite Staircase, sensory experience coupled with feeling takes place on the stairs of desire, consciousness, values, and culture—all prior to the stairs of language, narrative, analytics, and theory. When we use these higher stairs to explain what is happening on the lower ones, we are prone to imposing their structure in ways that ride roughshod over the subtleties of the actual experience. This is reflected throughout the list of questions that follow.

Questions specific to the field of esthetics are: Is there a special attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we should take toward works of art and the natural environment, and what is it like?

The answer is no. This is an example of analytics seeking to reposition experiences that arise from below by proposing that they descend from above. That is, the refined analytical intellect is positioning itself at the center of an experience during which it was not even present. This is a big mistake, one that implies aesthetic experiences are reserved for the few who possess refined sensibilities when in fact they are universal.

Is there a distinctive type of experience, an aesthetic experience, and what is it?

The answer is yes, and in the lexicon of philosophy, it falls into the category of qualia. The entry on qualia from Wikipedia provides a useful introduction, defining it as subjective conscious experiences, examples of which include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, and the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characteristics of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.

Now, to be fair, pain does not qualify as an aesthetic experience, but the taste of wine and the color of red certainly do. The key point is that all the examples stand in contrast to propositional attitudes, the domain of analytics, which can be about aesthetic experience but not integral to it.

Is there a special object of attention that we can call the aesthetic object?

Yes, there is. It is whatever body of forces that are creating the impact on the subject, be that the wine, the evening sky, a painting, a story, or a piece of wood. But the object alone cannot be said to be inherently aesthetic. Only after it has evoked a sensory experience coupled with feeling can it be so termed, and then only with respect to subjects in whom that experience has been evoked.

Finally, is there a distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with moral, epistemic, and religious values?

Yes, there is. To put things in perspective

• Moral value consists of behavior that is beneficial to others and consistent with social norms.
• Epistemic value consists of justified true beliefs that lead to effective action in the world.
• Religious value consists of spiritual experiences and commitments that provide sacred and undeniable guidelines for life in the world.

In such a context, aesthetic value consists of pleasurable, contemplative, non-utilitarian, resonating experiences that we characterize as beautiful, refreshing, and inspiring.

Some questions overlap with those in the philosophy of art, such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and whether there is a faculty of taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic character and value of natural objects or works of art.

The nature of beauty is indeed an elusive topic, one where we need to be humble, but with respect to the faculty of taste, we can be more assertive. In the eighteenth century, judgments of taste were appropriated by a social class that privileged refinement and intellect over sensibility and joy. In the nineteenth century, the Romantic movement aggressively worked to overthrow and reverse this polarity, and in the twentieth, cultural relativism worked to deny the validity of any aesthetic judgments that extended beyond the personal preferences of the person making them within the norms of the culture they are inhabiting. All three positions contain an element of truth, and none by itself does a good job of accounting for the overall nature of beauty. The good news is that they are not incompatible with one another, so a synthesis of all three can potentially provide a stable foundation for esthetic theory.

Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of art. The most central issue in the philosophy of art has been how to define ‘art’. Not all cultures have, or have had, a concept of art that coincides with the one that emerged in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What justifies our applying our concept to the things people in these other cultures have produced?

It is justifiable to apply our concepts to our experience of things other cultures have produced and how they stack up against our cultural norms. We just should not apply them to their experiences or the status of the things in their culture. The temptation to do so derives from seeking to locate the aesthetic force solely in the object. That is not a tenable claim.

There are also many pictures (including paintings), songs, buildings, and bits of writing that are not art. What distinguishes those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art from those that are not?

They do not evoke the pleasurable, contemplative, non-utilitarian, resonating experiences we call beautiful, refreshing, and inspiring.

Various answers have been proposed that identify the distinguishing features of art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and social roles or uses of the object.

None of these topics is off limits, but each one can take us down a rabbit hole if we try to use it as definitive of what constitutes art. That begs the question of how we would define art, but we will leave that to the second essay.

Since the eighteenth century, there have been debates about what kinds of things count as “art.” Some have argued that architecture and ceramics are not art because their functions are primarily utilitarian, and novels were for a long time not listed among the “fine arts” because they are not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates continue to arise over new media and what may be new art forms, such as film, video, photography, performance art, found art, furniture, posters, earthworks, and computer and electronic art. Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt, feces, or various discarded and mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze. There is often an explicit rejection of craft and technique by twentieth-century artists, and the subject matter has expanded to include the banal and everyday, and not merely mythological, historical, and religious subjects as in years past. All of these developments raise questions about the relevance of the category of “fine” or “high” art.

When discussing esthetics in general, over-rotating to fine or high art is simply a mistake. It is a valid subcategory, but not to the exclusion of other sensory experiences coupled with esthetic feelings. Once again, we see the analytical intellect overstepping its bounds, seeking to impose itself as an arbiter of aesthetic value when its proper role is to be an interpreter of aesthetic experience.

Another set of issues in philosophy of art concerns how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and understood. Some views emphasize that artworks are products of individual efforts, so that a work should be understood in light of the producer’s knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others see the meaning of a work as established by social conventions and practices of the artist’s own time, but which may not be known or understood by the producer. Still, others see meaning as established by the practices of the users, even if they were not in effect when the work was produced. Are there objective criteria or standards for evaluating individual artworks?

All these views are legitimate in their own right, provided we surface the context in which the judgment is made. What is not legitimate is to overrule a rival approach, asserting one’s own as the only valid one. Overall, the goal is to get as much insight as possible into the body of forces at work in an esthetic experience, any way we can.

There has been much disagreement over whether value judgments have universal validity, or whether there can be no disputing about taste if value judgments are relative to the tastes and interests of each individual (or to some group of individuals who share the same tastes and interests). A judgment such as “This is good” certainly seems to make a claim about the work itself, though such a claim is often based on the sort of feeling, understanding, or experience a person has obtained from the work. A work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally distinguished from simply liking it. But is it possible to establish what sort(s) of knowledge or experience(s) any given work should provide to any suitably prepared perceiver, and what would it be to be suitably prepared?

With respect to this question, we should acknowledge that university degree programs in the humanities do purport to teach this kind of knowledge and thereby suitably prepare the perceiver to appreciate the works being studied. As a practical exercise, this is invaluable. Where things can go astray is when the judgment “this is good” floats free of its moorings in culture-specific subject-object relationships and imposes itself as objective fact.

It is a matter of contention whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of its moral, political, or epistemic stance or impact.

They are independent. Clearly works of art can have moral, political, or epistemic dimensions, but these are outboard of the aesthetic dimension. When criticism seeks to interpret art through these kinds of filters, be they Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, or the like, we have left the realm of the humanities behind and ceded authority instead to the social sciences.

Philosophy of art has also dealt with the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, representation, expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to art.

The paragraph above represents a laundry list of what for me are all the interesting topics. It warrants an entire essay of its own. That will be the subject of the essay to follow.

Work in the field has always been influenced by philosophical theories of language or meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and continues to be heavily influenced by psychological and cultural theory, including versions of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism.

Here we see more ceding of authority to the social sciences. It is not that they have nothing to add. It is that they are appropriating the aesthetic experience to promote another agenda. That agenda may indeed be worthwhile, but it cannot substitute for aesthetic analysis.

Some theorists in the late twentieth century have denied that the aesthetic and the “fine arts” can legitimately be separated out and understood as separate, autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that these conceptual categories themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of cultural attitudes and power relationships. These theorists urge that aesthetics can and should be eliminated as a separate field of study, and that “the aesthetic” should not be conceived as a special kind of value. They favor instead a critique of the roles that images (not only painting, but film, photography, and advertising), sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional constructions have in expressing and shaping human attitudes and experiences.

And this is the ultimate ceding of authority to the social sciences, to which I am viscerally opposed.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Part Two coming soon!

Image Credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.