Mode of Existence of Aesthetic Qualities

Abstract

In a recent study, “Expressiveness: Where is the Feeling Found?” Harold Osborne argues that an aesthetic, or expressive, quality is, or exists, in the work of art; that is, when we perceive a piece of music, for example, as sad the aesthetic quality of sadness ‘exists’ in the musical piece: “we perceive the sadness ‘in’ the music and we perceive this feeling directly and correctly as we perceive sadness in ourselves, not as we infer feelings in other people.”¹ It is, I think, normal for people to be sad, to be conscious of themselves as sad, and to say that they experience at times feelings of sadness; it is also normal to view the feeling of sadness as a dynamic mental state, that is, as a mental event, as a mental process whose character of sadness can be intuited and understood immediately. It is normal, in other words, to say that human beings enjoy, or have, feelings of sadness. But it is not normal, even among artists and aestheticians, to say that a feeling ‘exists’ in a work of art or that a person can, or does, experience a feeling in such a work, mainly because art works are not sentient or conscious subjects; they are inanimate objects. We should, accordingly, ask: what do we mean when we say that the aesthetic quality of sadness is experienced in Sibelius’s Valse Triste, for example? How are we to understand, or explicate, the meaning of ‘in’ in this context? Put differently, what is the ontological status of aesthetic, or expressive, qualities? In what follows I shall present a critical evaluation of Osborne’s view of the ontological status of aesthetic qualities. I shall first consider the highlights of his position and then evaluate these highlights.