In this paper I wish to defend a particular form of the traditional, and now almost wholly unfashionable, notion of an aesthetic attitude

Todd, Cain Samuel

English

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10Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 1, No. 1, April 2004IMAGINATION, ATTITUDE, AND EXPERIENCE INAESTHETIC JUDGEMENT1CAIN SAMUEL TODDLANCASTER UNIVERSITYIn this paper I wish to defend a particular form of the traditional, and now almostwholly unfashionable, notion of an aesthetic attitude. It may seem that this notion is arather quaint fossil of the now outdated disputes that raged in the early days of analyticaesthetics. I shall argue, however, that it offers the non-cognitivist the best basis forunderstanding the nature of aesthetic judgement. I shall not be concerned here withdirectly countering realist arguments for the existence of objective aesthetic properties,nor with confronting the error theorist or sceptic who denies that aesthetic utterances arein any meaningful sense judgements. Putting these extreme positions aside, the problemfacing the non-cognitivist, of course, is to explain how aesthetic judgements quaexpressions of some ‘yet-to-be-defined’ aesthetic response or other, take the propositionalform of genuine assertoric judgements that describe objects in a certain way. I believethat if the imagination is given a prominent role in these responses we can provide aplausible explanation of this phenomenon. To show how this can be, I draw upon thetheory of the aesthetic attitude developed by Roger Scruton in his book, Art andImagination.  Essentially, what I propose is a form of quasi-realism regarding aestheticjudgements, and although I shall not be concerned with developing aesthetic quasi-realism here, I think that Scruton’s own theory can best be interpreted along these lines.2                                                           1 This paper was presented at the Graduate Philosophy Conference, Southampton University, 2003.2 For a discussion and defence of the quasi-realist theory of aesthetic judgment see C. Todd (forthcoming)'Quasi-realism, Acquaintance, and the Normative Claims of Aesthetic Judgment', British Journal ofAesthetics, where some of the issues raised below are discussed in greater depth.  The only otherphilosopher I know of who explicitly links quasi-realism with an explanation of aesthetic judgment, andmentions Scruton's theory in this context, is Hopkins (2001).CAIN SAMUEL TODD11IAesthetic attitude theories derive their impetus from the fact that the vocabulary ofaesthetic appraisal can in principal be tacked onto anything, which is seen as anindication that anything at all can be appreciated aesthetically. They thus take their pointof departure from our linguistic intuitions regarding the broad connotations of ‘aesthetic’,combined perhaps with the historical variety of tastes, cultural relativism, and worriesabout the nature and existence of ‘objective’ aesthetic properties. The thought behind theconcept of the aesthetic attitude is that the adoption of some sort of special attitude mightaccount for the (apparently) unitary nature of aesthetic appreciation and appraisal.The aesthetic attitude is usually characterised by the central notions of‘disinterestedness’ or ‘appreciation of x for its own sake’. As far as they go, these twonotions, or at least the latter, offer prima facie plausible ways of demarcating what isspecial about aesthetic interest and appreciation from other (non-aesthetic) types ofappraisal, such as the moral or cognitive or purely sensual. Moreover, the idea of anaesthetic attitude suggests that we can adopt such an attitude to any object at all.However, are there really no conditions an object must satisfy if it is to become the objectof aesthetic appreciation? There is a central confusion running through the literature onthis subject.3We are well acquainted with the idea that perception is always cognition-laden andthat the attitudes we adopt, or that are evoked in us, are responsible for the differentvalues and meanings we attach to the world around us. Attitudes are dispositions, and it isan important question how much control we have over adopting certain attitudes at anygiven time towards any given thing. But the idea of adopting an attitude at will is far fromclear. For being ‘subject to the will’ can in fact mean one of two things: on the one hand,it may indicate that we can choose to cultivate a certain way of looking at things, namelydisinterestedly or ‘for their own sake’, by developing the habit or disposition throughtraining so that it comes into play in certain contexts and circumstances, or whenconfronted by certain objects. On the other hand, it might mean that we can arbitrarily                                                           3 My treatment of the following issues is indebted to the articles of Kemp (1999) and Dickie (1964).CAIN SAMUEL TODD12adopt a certain attitude to anything at all whenever we like, irrespective of context orobject.Yet another distinction that needs to be made clear here, however, concerns the notionof appreciation, which suggests on the one hand the activity of enjoyment of some thing,and on the other hand some dispositional attitude of ‘aesthetic interest’. Now it mayindeed be theoretically possible to adopt the aesthetic attitude towards some object orevent, and it clearly makes sense to think that sometimes, perhaps, we may through aneffort of will force ourselves to regard any object at all with an eye to appreciating it forits own sake. We might call the position that holds that any object so regarded just will beappreciated aesthetically a strong version of the aesthetic attitude.It is clear, however, that even if we can adopt an aesthetic attitude at will towards anyobject, only some objects may actually repay the attention and become thereby objects ofaesthetic appreciation. We might, for instance, try to regard a certain picture or a cricketmatch disinterestedly (for its own sake) and, for one reason or another, remain completelyunmoved and indifferent to it. It is thus also clear that, for any number of reasons, wemay not in actual fact always be able ‘at will’ to regard things disinterestedly; if we aretoo personally involved with something, interested in it exclusively for various emotional,political, or economic reasons, for example, or simply too familiar with it, we may not beable to take the necessary step back.Furthermore, if we are right in thinking that some objects will reward our aestheticattention, then, if we understand the aesthetic attitude as the possession of a certaindisposition to appreciate certain things aesthetically, we can make better sense of the factthat some objects may simply strike us as being aesthetically worthy without ourchoosing to adopt any such attitude at all. Our attitude of appreciation may, so to say, besimply thrust upon us. Yet, if this can happen, it might seem to be the case that we do notoften exercise any great control over the aesthetic attitude at all, and that it is misleadingto talk in anything but an abstract theoretical way of being able to adopt the aestheticattitude at will towards any object.The two types of attitudinal attention just outlined need not be mutually exclusive. Itmay well be the case that we can adopt a certain attitude ‘at will’, at least theoretically ifnot always practically, even if, as a disposition, it is more often than not ‘activated’ in theCAIN SAMUEL TODD13presence of some objects - those that reward our aesthetic attention - and not others,without our really exercising any conscious control. The crucial point here, however, isthat even if we can in principle adopt the aesthetic attitude whenever we like, once weunderstand that only some objects will actually repay our aesthetic attention, and thatthese may do so in a way that ‘induces’ aesthetic appreciation in us, the idea of anaesthetic attitude cannot offer us a sufficient explanation of aesthetic appreciation.Rather, even if it is a necessary condition of aesthetic appreciation that we possess acertain disposition to regard things as potentially of aesthetic interest, the nature of theobjects on which such attention is fixed must play a central role in our account. Clearly,therefore, if some range of objects can be identified as repaying aesthetic interest, orbetter still, as having the prime function of doing so, we will go a long way towardsunderstanding the nature of aesthetic appreciation.In this light, it might naturally be thought that art works, of all objects, best rewardaesthetic interest and induce aesthetic experience more readily than anything else. AsSchopenhauer says: ‘art plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of theworld’s course and holds it isolated before us’.4  Yet, if art is thought to play a specialrole in aesthetic appreciation, by, as it were, lending itself especially to it, rewarding ouraesthetic interest and hence inducing the aesthetic attitude or at least facilitating it, and ifwe can only fully grasp the notion of aesthetic appreciation by reference to the nature ofthe objects of that appreciation, it might be thought that the very idea of an aestheticattitude is rather superfluous to explanatory requirements. For we need only appeal to thenature of objects, such as art works, to explain the nature of our interest in them. In whichcase, the aesthetic attitude could be accounted neither a necessary nor sufficient conditionfor aesthetic appreciation, and at best it will collapse into the rather weak position thatbeing in the aesthetic attitude is simply a precondition for the awareness of aestheticproperties. The problem of providing plausible accounts of the judgement andappreciation of art has, therefore, been the real bane of aesthetic attitude theories.The chief problem lies in explicating the relation between the supposed ability tovoluntarily adopt the aesthetic attitude to any object, which is needed to explain howanything can be viewed aesthetically, and the passive ‘arousal’ of aesthetic experience by                                                           4 Schopenhauer (1969) vol. 1: 185.CAIN SAMUEL TODD14objects that specifically reward the attention directed at them. For it seems that if theaesthetic attitude is construed too ‘actively’, we will not understand why some objectsshould reward appreciation more than others. But if it is too ‘passive’, the objectsthemselves will assume centre stage and we will be able to do without the aestheticattitude altogether. It is, in other words, unclear exactly how much work the aestheticattitude is supposed to do in delineating the aesthetic nature of our appreciation.In effect, this is a deep problem about the interaction between attitude and object - ofdetermining how much the aesthetic object of appreciation is ‘given’ to us and how muchit is a result of being in an aesthetic attitude. The choice to be made has sometimes beenframed in terms of deciding whether a causal or intentional story is to be told about thenature of our aesthetic responses and judgements. In fact, however, we do not have todecide between a causal and intentional story, for the relationship between attitude andobject of appraisal is to be a two-way street in which subject and object both playimportant interactive roles, where we may be able to adopt some attitude or other, toready ourselves for appreciation, but that we must be helped in developing and sustainingit by the nature of the object. We can see this works in the following way.IIExpressivist theories do not often clearly distinguish the expression of attitudes fromthe expression of experiences. But rather than seeing our aesthetic judgements as directlyexpressive of a variety of different aesthetic attitudes, it is more plausible, I believe, toregard them as expressive of some experience which is the result of viewing an object ina particular way; that is, viewing it with the aesthetic attitude, where this in turn meansviewing it as an object of aesthetic appreciation. For this reason, it seems that we ought tomake the aesthetic attitude a rather minimal notion, a necessary rather than sufficientcondition of aesthetic judgement. We can best do this, I suggest, by adopting the mostcomprehensive and plausible aesthetic attitude theory available, that of Roger Scruton.Scruton begins with the traditional, intuitive idea that what demarcates aestheticinterest from other sorts is that it involves the appreciation of something for its own sake,and he spells this notion out thus:CAIN SAMUEL TODD15a desire to go on hearing, looking at, or in some other way having experience of X, where there is noreason for this desire in terms of any other desire or appetite that the experience of X may fulfil, andwhere the desire arises out of, and is accompanied by, the thought of X.5The vital point to note here is that the ‘character of aesthetic appreciation will be entirelydictated by its object’, for the ‘principle manifestation of aesthetic interest is attention toan object, which, since it cannot go beyond the object in the manner of practical ortheoretical judgement, must come to rest in the perception of the object itself’.6As it stands, of course, this does not tell us very much. But this interplay betweenmind and world, between the freedom of our aesthetic responses and the causalconstraints imposed by the object, Scruton thinks lies squarely within the parameters ofthe activity of imagination. He defines the imagination by appeal to these two conditions:1) Imagination involves thought which is unasserted, and hence which goes beyondwhat is believed, beyond ‘what is strictly given’, and to this extent our imaginationis indeed subject to some extent to our will.2) ‘Not any way of going beyond the ‘given’ will count as imagining X’, however,for imagination is a rational activity and involves relating thoughts to an object in away appropriate to the object.7When combined with the idea that aesthetic interest is the appreciation of an object for itsown sake, we can understand the central role that imaginative attention must play inaesthetic judgement; we go, as it were, beyond the given, but only in a way appropriate tothe object. Scruton provides the example where my admiration for the character ofMarcus Aurelius becomes embodied, part of the appearance as it were, of the bust ofAurelius which I look at in a museum. Here, ‘my attention ceases to stray beyond what Isee to the thoughts that are inspired by it, but comes to rest in the perception itself’. Andthus, in ‘aesthetic appreciation we might say that the perception of an object is broughtinto relation with a thought of the object…this is one of the main activities of                                                           5 Scruton (1974): 148.6 Ibid., 154.7 Ibid., 97-8.CAIN SAMUEL TODD16imagination…an aesthetic attitude towards a present object will lead to the thoughts andemotions characteristic of imagination… the object serves as a focal point on which manydifferent thoughts and feelings are brought to bear…’. In this way the activity of theimagination shows what is involved in appreciating something ‘for its own sake’.8  In sofar as the imagination is free, therefore, we can choose to adopt the aesthetic attitude, butthe resulting experiences and judgements will largely be determined by the nature of theobject itself.For this reason, it is not surprising that the general nature of an aesthetic attitude as Ihave just outlined it could not, by itself, possibly explain the intricacies of aestheticjudgement and evaluation. This is particularly so regarding the case of art works, giventhe range of myriad factors playing some role or other in the complicated institutional art-world - economic, social, political, and perhaps even aesthetic. It is clear that judgementsconcerning art are encrusted by deep layers of convention, comprising the art world andits critics, historical context and contingency, and are governed by all those connectionsbetween the world of art and the broader society, with its politics, economy and culture,of which art forms an important part.Nevertheless, the aesthetic attitude can, I would suggest, make some sense of how theinstitution of art appreciation arises in the first place, by giving us an idea of how acertain way of regarding objects enables them to cater to our aesthetic interest. It isevident that in describing the relation between attitude and object in the case of artappreciation, the attitude seems to be, so to say, institutionally prescribed. That is, weachieve a certain distance from our practical and other concerns and enter a disinterestedspace of attending to objects for their own sake simply by virtue of the fact that art ‘takesplace’ in museums and galleries - we are institutionally isolated from the everyday worldand ‘forced’, as it were, to ‘attend aesthetically’. And obviously the idea of appreciatingsomething for its own sake is of great importance in our experience of art works, objectswhich are (on the whole) created and exhibited and observed as fulfilling just thisfunction.This remains true even if the purpose of some works is to shock, entertain or otherwiseeducate us by representing or referring to real life events and the world outside art; or                                                           8 Ibid., 154-5.CAIN SAMUEL TODD17even if works of art are, or have been, created for specific purposes, such as to eulogisesome particular person, to earn money or prizes, or simply to adorn a wall. Certainly artworks may make references to this ‘real’ world, provide knowledge about it, or have beencreated for ‘non-aesthetic’ or purely artistic reasons (whatever that might mean), but thisreveals merely that our appreciation of art should not and cannot be completely divorcedfrom the rest of our experiential lives. This is made sense of by Scruton’s criteria of theimagination. ‘Disinterest’ has often been construed too puritanically, but if we understandby it that all sorts of relevant associations are imaginatively brought to bear upon someobject, we can make better sense of the aesthetic value of art. Certainly, it may be that ourattitudes, our aesthetic tastes and preferences, are so highly culturally and sociallycontingent, such that any talk of the aesthetic attitude equipping us with the abilityvoluntarily to see any object at all as being of aesthetic interest, is simply misguided. Butthe idea of an aesthetic attitude does offer at least a minimal explanation of thephenomena, an explanation we ultimately need to understand the complex problemssurrounding the notion of aesthetic judgement.REFERENCESDICKIE, G., (1964): ‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude’, American PhilosophicalQuarterly, 56-65.HOPKINS, R., (2001): ‘Kant, Quasi-Realism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgement’,European Journal of Philosophy Vol. 9: 166-189.KEMP, G., (1999), British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 39, 392-99.SCHOPENHAUER, A. (1969): The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. Payne(London: Dover).SCRUTON, R. (1974): Art and Imagination (London: Methuen).

Imagination, Attitude, And Experience Inaesthetic Judgment

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Imagination, Attitude, And Experience Inaesthetic Judgment

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