Whether or not that concept is a recent invention, it is certainly a recent obsession. Medieval and Renaissance philosophers who approached the problems of beauty and taste—e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, and even Leon Battista Alberti—often wrote of beauty without reference to art, taking as their principal example the human face and body. The distinctively modern approach to aesthetics began to take shape during the 18th century, with the writings on art of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Batteux, and Johann Winckelmann and the theories of taste proposed by the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames (Henry Home), and Archibald Alison. This approach materialized not only because of a growing interest in fine art as a uniquely human phenomenon but also because of the awakening of feelings toward nature, which marked the dawn of the Romantic movement. In Kant’s aesthetics, indeed, nature has pride of place as offering the only examples of what he calls “free beauty”—i.e., beauty that can be appreciated without the intermediary of any polluting concept. Art, for Kant, was not merely one among many objects of aesthetic interest. It was also fatally flawed in its dependence upon intellectual understanding.
Even without taking that extreme position, it is difficult to accept that the fragile and historically determined concept of art can bear the weight of a full aesthetic theory. Leaving aside the case of natural beauty, we must still recognize the existence of a host of human activities (dress, decoration, manners, ornament) in which taste is of the essence and yet which seems totally removed from the world of fine art. It has been common, following the lead of Batteux, to make a distinction between the fine arts and the useful arts and to accommodate the activities just referred to under the latter description, but it is clear that this is no more than a gesture and that the points of similarity between the art of the dressmaker and that of the composer are of significance only because of a similarity in the interests that these arts are meant to satisfy. The aesthetic recipient
Whichever approach we take, however, there is an all-important question upon the answer to which the course of aesthetics depends: the question of the recipient. Only beings of a certain kind have aesthetic interests and aesthetic experience, produce and appreciate art, employ such concepts as those of beauty, expression, and form. What is it that gives these beings access to this realm? The question is at least as old as Plato but received its most important modern exposition in the philosophy of Kant, who argued, first, that it is only rational beings who can exercise judgment—the faculty of aesthetic interest—and, second, that until exercised in aesthetic judgment rationality is incomplete. It is worth pausing to examine these two claims.
Rational beings are those, like us, whose thought and conduct are guided by reason, who deliberate about what to believe and what to do, and who affect each other’s beliefs and actions through argument and persuasion. Kant argued that reason has both a theoretical and a practical employment and that rational beings find both their conduct and their thought inspired and limited by reason. The guiding law of rational conduct is that of morality, enshrined in the categorical imperative, which enjoins us to act only on that maxim which we can at the same time will as a universal law.
By virtue of practical reason, rational beings see themselves and others of their kind as subject to an order that is not that of nature: they live responsive to the law of reason and see themselves as potential members of a “kingdom of ends” wherein the demands of reason are satisfied. Moreover, they look upon every rational being—themselves included—as made sacrosanct by reason and by the morality that stems from it. Rational beings, they recognize, must be treated always as ends in themselves, as having intrinsic value, and never as mere objects to be disposed of according to purposes that are not their own.
The capacity to see things as intrinsically valuable, irreplaceable, or ends in themselves is one of the important gifts of reason. But it is not exercised only practically or only in our dealings with other reasoning beings. It may also be exercised contemplatively toward nature as a whole. In this case, practical considerations are held in abeyance, and we stand back from nature and look on it with a disinterested concern. Such an attitude is not only peculiar to rational beings but also necessary to them. Without it, they have only an impoverished grasp of their own significance and of their relation to the world in which they are situated through their thoughts and actions. This disinterested contemplation and the experiences that arise from it acquaint us, according to Kant, with the ultimate harmony that exists between the world and our faculties. They therefore provide the guarantee, both of practical reasoning and of the understanding, by intimating to us directly that the world answers to our purposes and corresponds to our beliefs.
Disinterested contemplation forms, for Kant, the core of aesthetic experience and the ground of the judgment of beauty. He thus concludes (1) that only rational beings have aesthetic experience, (2) that every rational being needs aesthetic experience and is significantly incomplete without it, and (3) that aesthetic experience stands in fundamental proximity to moral judgment and is integral to our nature as moral beings.
Modern philosophers have sometimes followed Kant, sometimes ignored him. Rarely, however, have they set out to show that aesthetic experience is more widely distributed than the human race. What could it mean to say of a cow, for example, that in staring at a landscape it is moved by the sentiment of beauty? What in a cow’s behaviour or mental composition could manifest such a feeling? While a cow may be uninterested, it cannot surely be disinterested, in the manner of a rational being for whom disinterest is the most passionate form of interest. It is in pondering such considerations that one comes to realize just how deeply embedded in human nature is the aesthetic impulse and how impossible it is to separate this impulse from the complex mental life that distinguishes human beings from beasts. This condition must be borne in mind by any philosopher seeking to confront the all-important question of the relation between the aesthetic and the moral. The aesthetic experience
Such considerations point toward the aforementioned approach that begins with the aesthetic experience as the most likely to capture the full range of aesthetic phenomena without begging the important philosophical questions about their nature. Can we then single out a faculty, an attitude, a mode of judgment, or a form of experience that is distinctively aesthetic? And if so, can we attribute to it the significance that would make this philosophical enterprise both important in itself and relevant to the many questions posed by beauty, criticism, and art?
Taking their cue from Kant, many philosophers have defended the idea of an aesthetic attitude as one divorced from practical concerns, a kind of “distancing,” or standing back, as it were, from ordinary involvement. The classic statement of this position is Edward Bullough’s “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” an essay published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1912. While there is certainly something of interest to be said along those lines, it cannot be the whole story. Just what kind of distance is envisaged? Are lovers distanced from their beloved? If not, by what right do they call their beloved beautiful? Does distance imply a lack of practical involvement? If such is the case, how can we ever take up an aesthetic attitude to those things that have a purpose for us—things such as a dress, building, or decoration? But if these are not aesthetic, have we not paid a rather high price for our definition of this word—the price of detaching it from the phenomena that it was designed to identify?