Abstract
Kant’s approach to the nature of artworks suggests that art has a metaphysical dimension that accounts for the two major elements of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic judgements are occasioned by experiences of pleasure and have an objective aspect since they are experiences with which other persons are expected to agree. More recently, Arthur Danto has argued that an artwork must be situated in an artworld. Pragmatists see aesthetic experience instead as integral to experience and requiring no special explanation other than association with consumatory moments of experience.
I want to argue that the pragmatist approach is basically correct, that contra Danto and Kant, aesthetic experience has no special implications for metaphysics. I locate this notion of aesthetic experience in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and offer speculations about the cultural relativity of concepts of aesthetic beauty.
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References
Arthur Danto, Philosophizing Art (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999), p. 71. Quoted second hand by Danto in “The Philosopher as Andy Warhol.”
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1934), p. 326.
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), p. 8.
Ibid, p. 18
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) in A Week, Walden, Maine Woods, and Cape Cod, (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 325.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” (1840) The Portable Emerson ed. Carl Bode, (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 142.
Santayana, p. 32.
Ibid, p. 28.
Ibid, p. 162.
John Dewey, Art as Experience p. 27.
Ibid, p. 19.
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present, (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 213–214.
Ibid, p. 215.
Ibid, p. 256.
Emerson, p. 14.
Ibid, p. 7.
Ibid, p. 8.
Ibid, p. 10.
Ibid, p. 11.
Ibid, p. 150.
Ibid, p. 248.
Ibid, p. 251.
Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 226.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art,” (1840), Emerson: Essays and Lectures, (New York; Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), p. 431.
Ibid, p. 434.
Ibid, p. 435.
Ibid, p. 440.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, first edition (1855), line 523.
Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. VI.
“The Philosopher as Andy Warhol,” p. 65.
Ibid, p. 67.
Jane Forsey, “Philosophical Disenfranchisement in Danto’s ‘The End of Art’,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 59 (2001), p. 404.
Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in the Post-Historical World, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992), p. 5.
Transfiguration, pp. 22, 143.
Arthur Danto, Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Maplethorpe, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 81.
Ibid, pp. 111–112.
Whitman, line 87.
Danto, Transfiguration, p. 83.
Ibid, pp. 147-148.
Joseph Margolis, Selves and Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 2001), p. 299.