Abstract
Aestheticians love to argue about the rudiments of their craft. It is a professional temptation to which they are peculiarly prone. Indeed the interminable disputations on what Aesthetics is about sometimes reminds one of those committees which spend so much of their time debating their own constitution and procedure that they are eventually dissolved before they have got around to broaching the matters upon which they were set up to advise. But even when people differ most vociferously, in order for disagreement to be possible at all there must be some common ground of understanding, some unformulated awareness, however vague, of what it is they are in disagreement about. Within very broad limits, then, we know what it is we are talking about when we become involved in aesthetic discussion, and pretty well everyone would accept that mapping the anatomy of aesthetic experience is of central importance as groundwork for the exploration of aesthetic problems. But on this also there are several different lines of approach.
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References
J.O. Urmson, “What makes a situation aesthetic? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXXI (1975), Reprinted in Joseph Margolis (ed.): Philosophy Looks at the Arts (1962). Strictly, the conclusion infringes Urmson’s own restrictions on aesthetic experience, since appearance is an aspect of things and our liking/disliking is an emotional reaction.
Edward Bullough: “Phychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology, V (1912). Reprinted in Ejezabeth M. Wilkinson (ed.): Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays by Edward Bullough (1957), Mervin Levich (ed.): Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Criticism (1963) and Melvin Rader (ed.): A Modern Book of Aesthetics (4th ed., 1973). Using the example of a fog at sea, Bullough argued that in our aesthetic commerce with the world we put into abeyance our ordinary practical and personal concerns to concentrate on the appearances on things, “distancing” the object of attention by putting it “out of gear with our practical actual self, by allowing it to stand ourside the contect of our personal needs and ends …” In this way, he thought, aspects of things which usually pass unnoticed are brought into our awareness with the transformation power of a revelation. “The sudden view of things from the reverse, usually unnoticed side,” he says, “comes upon us as a revelation, and such revelations are precisely those of Art.”
Vincent Tomas: “Aesthetic Vision,” The Philosophical Review, LXIII, 1 (1959). “In every case of aesthetic vision,” he writes, “what is attended to is an appearance, and the question of what actual object … presents that appearance does not arise.” Greater critical precision was introduced into the formulations of Vincent Tomas and his views were extended to other domains of sensation than the visual by Frank Sibley in a paper “Aesthetics and the Looks of Things” in The journal of Philosophy, LVI, 19(1959) and both papers were criticised on logical grounds by Marshall Cohen in a paper entitled “Appearance and the Aesthetic Attitude,” where he introduces the distincion — something of a red herring in this context — between the work of art as a physical thing, say an arrangement of pigments on canvas, and the work as appearance, i.e. the picture. Alle three papers are reprinted in Marvin Levich (ed.), op. cit.
The most convenient statement of his view will be found in “Aesthetic Experience” in Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (eds.): The Aesthetic Point of View (1932) and in “Aesthetic Experience Regained,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23 (1969), also reprinted in the foregoing collection.
John Fisher: “Beardsley on Aesthetic Experience” in John Fisher (ed.): Essays on Aesthetics: Perspective on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley (1983), p. 95.
In The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1963).
See particulary H. Osborne: The Art of Appreciaton (1970). Also “The Cultivation of Sensibility in Art Education” in Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1984).
Ibid.
R.W. Hepburn, loc. cit., p. 197.
Roger Fry: “The Artist’s Vision,” from Vision and Design (1920).
IC.D. Broad, Examination of McTaggarfs Philosophy (1933), Vol. 1, p. 269.
Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” The Philosophical Review, LXVIII (1959), reprinted in Joseph Margolis (ed.), op. cit.
This and the assay by Gabo were published in J.L. Martin, Ben Nicholson and N. Gabe (eds.) Circle (1937, reprinted in 1971).
“The Aesthetic Import of Black-Ink Painting and its Efficacy in the Age of Technology,” in Tomonobu Imamichi (ed.): Eco-Ethica et Valor (Acta Institutionis Philosophiae et Aestheticae, Vol. 1, Tokyo), p. 18. Dr. Ki-soo Paik is Professor of Philosophy at Seoul National University.
William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. 11, p. 44.
Archibald Macleish, Poetry and Experience (1960), p. 167.
David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1941).
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1957).
Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Aestetic Point of View.” Reprinted in the selection by that name edited by Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (1982), p. 23.
J.C.B. Gosling, Pleasure and Desire (1969), p. 57.
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Osborne, H. (1986). What Makes an Experience Aesthetic?. In: Mitias, M.H. (eds) Possibility of the Aesthetic Experience. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4372-8_9
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