Aesthetic Experience [Format Kindle] Author: Adele Tomlin | Language: English | ISBN:
B000SJY3V0 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Présentation de l'éditeur
This book re-examines the notion of aesthetic experience as well as its value. A team of internationally respected contributors bring together major voices that have directly theorised the concept of aesthetic experience or indirectly worked on topics connected to it.
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This collection of essays represents a state-of-the-art discussion of one of the most central questions in aesthetic theory. The editors are to be commended for incorporating work from a wide variety of traditions and for taking a somewhat more global look at the issue than is commonly found. Along these lines, editor Adele Tomlin suggests in the conclusion her Introduction that Kant's idea of free play might usefully be combined with the Buddhist idea that the joy experienced from such freedom goes beyond mere sensual satisfaction and "reflects the true nature of the mind" in its brilliant awareness. (Unfortunately, however, this idea is never actually explored in any of the articles.) Multiculturalism is also evident in the inclusion of philosophers from France (Cometti) and Germany (Menke, and Seel)as well as several American and British philosophers. I was also pleased to see a section that featured expansions of the notion of aesthetic experience to non-art phenomena, including sexual experience (Richard Shusterman) and food (Carolyn Korsmeyer). This goes along with an increasing interest in everyday aesthetics in contemporary aesthetic theory.
Several of the essays are of very high caliber, and all of them are interesting. I will make some brief comments here about a small number that intrigued me. In the multi-cultural direction mentioned above, Kathleen Higgins' article explores Indian and Japanese aesthetic traditions in relation to various conceptions of "refinement" paying particular attention to the role of emotions in aesthetic experience. In recommending that Western aesthetics learn from these traditions, Higgins does what "comparative philosophy" should do, but often does not.
Malcolm Budd in "Aesthetic Essence" surveys the relations between aesthetic judgment, pleasure, property, and attitude, with the view to defining the entire set in non-aesthetic terms. He favors a view of aesthetic pleasure as "non-propositional pleasure taken in the character of an item as experienced in perception and/or imagination." (22) The idea of non-propositional pleasure is useful. I had trouble however with the way in which Budd excluded a large realm of aesthetic pleasures, many of them in the realm of everyday aesthetics, by calling them "propositional." He writes that "pleasure in the reliability of one's car" is not an aesthetic pleasure but rather a propositional one since it is pleasure taken in a fact." It can be this, but pleasure in reliability of one's car can also be pleasure taken in the way one's car feels on the road under the thought, "this car sure is reliable!" This goes for the other examples he gives, for example pleasure in the purity of water. Yes, one can be pleased by the fact that the water one is drinking is pure (and this is not aesthetic pleasure), but this is different from being pleased by the taste of water known to be pure. Surely, the latter is aesthetic.
Noel Carroll's "Aesthetic experience, art and artists" argues against the traditional idea of aesthetic experience as a defining characteristic of art. Carroll does a nice job of showing how this idea came to have importance historically. He is particularly critical of the notion that, in aesthetic experience, art must be "valued for its own sake." I agree that this phrase is rather empty and that, to the extent it does have meaning, it refers to non-instrumental valuing, which is certainly not necessary for aesthetic experience of art. Medieval appreciators of art, for example, generally saw art as valuable for religious ends, and this did not make their experience non-aesthetic. Carroll, however, believes that "informed attention to the aesthetic properties of an artwork" is sufficient for aesthetic experience. This is problematic since one can easily imagine a person who engages in informed attention and yet gets no aesthetic thrill from his or her experience. Unfortunately, Carroll's content-oriented perspective of aesthetic experience leads him to defend the jaded and cynical art critic: "she does not value her experience of the formal structure of the work for the sake of having had that experience. To her, criticism has just become a job- one she does well, one that puts food on the table, but not one that she still relishes." Carroll observes that the standard characterization of aesthetic experience will reject this critic's experience as aesthetic. And so would I! Even though I agree with Carroll that the "intrinsically valued" condition in the standard model is not terribly clear, the jaded critic is hardly to be be taken as an exemplar, a position which Carroll advocates when he says: "critics, even jaded ones like this, often serve as exemplars of what it is to have an aesthetic experience." If they are, that seems an important mistake... and this poses a serious problem for Carroll's exclusively content-oriented approach to aesthetic experience.
My other favorite articles in the book, which I do not have time to discuss here, are Alex Niell's "Schopenhauer and the foundations of aesthetic experience" and Christophe Menke's "The dialectic of aesthetics: the new strike between philosophy and art."
My only complaint is that there was no dialogue between the essay-writers. It would have been interesting to see a couple paragraphs by Shusterman on Carroll's essay or one by Neill on Korsmeyer's.
Par Thomas Leddy
- Publié sur Amazon.com
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