A Cornerstone of Philosophical Aesthetics?

Introduction

The cornerstone of philosophical aesthetics, conceived as an area of philosophy primarily concerned with aesthetic and artistic experience, has long been its connection with perception. Ever since the formal inception of the discipline in the mid-eighteenth century, aesthetics (from the Greek aesthesis) has taken that which pertains to the senses, or sense perception, as its subject-matter (Baumgarten 1750; Kant 1790). More particularly, the study of aesthetics has typically concerned itself with the perceptual experience of aesthetic value. Twentieth-century analytic aesthetics sought to maintain this inheritance, and is famously founded on the tenet that “aesthetics deals with a kind of perception” (Sibley, 1965:137). As Frank Sibley put it, “[p]eople have to see the grace or unity of a work, hear the plaintiveness or frenzy in the music, notice the gaudiness of a colour scheme” (Ibid.).

These precepts raise serious questions. How, on the perceptual model, do we explain the ascription of aesthetic value to non-perceptual entities such as mathematical proofs and conceptual art? Can we reconcile the insistence on first-hand perceptual experience in aesthetic judgement with the phenomenon of expertise?

Metaphysics and Epistemology

To answer these and related questions, we will focus on two prominent aspects of the relationship between the aesthetic and the perceptual. The first is a metaphysical one: aesthetic properties are only (fully) manifested or realized in our perceptual experience. That is to say, aesthetic properties can only genuinely be instantiated by objects which are, to use Monroe Beardsley’s phrase, “perceptual objects”, or “object[s] some of whose qualities, at least, are open to direct sensory awareness” (1981: 31). Further, the essentially perceptual nature of such properties is typically taken to entail that they are, in some sense, necessarily response-dependent.

The second aspect is epistemological: bona fide aesthetic judgements must be formed on the basis of first- hand perception. Richard Wollheim, for example, famously advocated an ‘Acquaintance Principle’ according to which “judgements of aesthetic value […] must be based on first-hand experience of their object” (1980: 233). In a similar vein, Philip Pettit argues that “[a]esthetic characterisations are essentially perceptual”, by which he means that perception is the only route to “full knowledge […] of the truths which they express” (1983: 25). In other words, since aesthetic qualities are fundamentally perceptual, our ascriptions of or judgements about them can only be founded in our own subjective perceptual experience. Other sources – such as testimony from reliable informants or enumerative induction from past cases – which serve as commonplace sources of knowledge elsewhere are inadmissible in the aesthetic case. These two aspects of what we will call the ‘perceptual model’ have long been axiomatic to the study of aesthetics in analytic philosophy. However, while various interpretations of these claims have recently been subject to increased critical scrutiny, the underlying motivations behind them are rarely considered (let alone contested).

Areas of concern

These putative axioms raise difficult (and still unanswered) questions of their own, particularly when we try to disentangle the metaphysical and epistemological commitments from each other. At least three areas of concern can be identified.

First, the perceptual model is unable to capture certain features central to our aesthetic practice. For, how are we to reconcile the epistemic insistence on individual first-hand perceptual experience in aesthetic justification with the phenomenon of aesthetic expertise (or the idea that some such perceptual experiences take priority over others)? It seems, for example, that there are some individuals – such as the kind of persons postulated by David Hume (1757) as “true judges” – who, by virtue of possessing superior knowledge or discrimination, have a genuine claim to being authorities with respect to aesthetic taste (Levinson 2002; Shelley 2013) while the first-hand aesthetic judgements of many other agents seem to be problematically compromised by factors such as snobbery and personal bias (Kieran 2010; Meskin 2006). In short, how should we reconcile these facts with the claim that each individual should rely on their own perceptual judgement rather than deferring to the judgement of others?

Second, the perceptual model relies on a view of aesthetic judgement as fundamentally sui generis. But what are the grounds for assuming that aesthetic judgement- formation operates in isolation from or so differently to other kinds of judgement-formation? The perceptual model proposes a number of fundamental differences, both epistemic and metaphysical, between judgements in aesthetics and those in other domains. (True, it has become commonplace (Hopkins (2007), Hills (2009)) to claim that we cannot form moral judgements on the basis of testimony but even here it is never suggested that such judgements are essentially perceptual.) In the absence of some independently motivated explanation, though, such contrasts can seem problematically arbitrary. As such, it has been a matter of some interest for defenders (and critics) of the perceptual model to investigate whether such an explanation can be offered (Hopkins 2006, Robson 2014).

Third, on the perceptual model, the remit of aesthetic attributions seems unduly limited. For how, if at all, can this model explain the frequent ascription of aesthetic qualities (such as elegance, beauty and simplicity) to non-perceptual entities or objects of appreciation? It seems, at least prima facie, as if we regularly attribute aesthetic properties to a range of objects or entities which are not straightforwardly perceptual, such as mathematical demonstrations (Breitenbach 2013), philosophical arguments (Warner 2016), people’s characters (Novitz 1991), transcendent religious entities (Robson 2013), and even certain typical artworks in the conceptual tradition (Schellekens 2007; Shelley 2003). The challenge for proponents of the perceptual model is, then, to either account for such attributions in a manner consistent with their view or to convincingly paraphrase them into non-aesthetic language.

The way forward

What is needed is an investigation of the extent to which these (and other) persistent questions derive from ambiguities built into the foundations of philosophical aesthetics. For example, while many extant discussions of the perceptual requirement clearly intend for the term ‘perception’ to be used in an ordinary sense, others explicitly reject this interpretation. For example, Eaton (1994: 392) suggests that the key notion of “[d]irect inspection […] must include more than perception” ordinarily so called and even Sibley (2001: 34) includes examples which are not straightforwardly perceptual, such as feeling the power of a novel, in his account of aesthetic perception. It is unclear, though, exactly what this extended sense of “perception” (or “direct inspection”) amounts to, or precisely which sources of aesthetic judgement it is intended to include (or exclude). Similarly, while most interpreters have taken Wollheim’s Acquaintance Principle as an epistemic requirement, this majority view has sometimes been challenged. McIver Lopes (2014: 175), for example, has suggested that the Acquaintance Principle is best interpreted as a principle concerning aesthetic appreciation, and even Wollheim himself (1980: 233) considers an interpretation of the principle which relates to the semantics, rather than the epistemology, of aesthetic judgements. Again, though, there has been very little focus on fully explicating and defending these alternative interpretations of the perceptual requirement.

Given these ambiguities, one may reasonably ask whether the worries we have highlighted above really do strike at the heart of the perceptual model or whether they are merely an artifact of the manner in which aestheticians have, thus far, chosen to explicate the view. We contend that it is impossible to provide a satisfactory answer to this question without in-depth consideration of precisely how the perceptual requirement should be formulated. As such, we take it to be crucial to provide a thorough examination of the traditional perceptual model—the cornerstone of philosophical aesthetics—with a view to developing a stronger and more plausible version, better able to accommodate problematic cases and to overcome the difficulties mentioned above.