For much of its history, “aesthetics” – coined by Baumgarten in 1750 from the Greek aesthesis, meaning (depending on context) sensation, perception, or feeling – was tied up with beauty. And art, up until the early 20th century was, in large part, about the creation of beauty. By the 1960s, as Arthur C. Danto describes in The Abuse of Beauty, this had changed – in both artistic and philosophical circles. For more than half a century, the prevailing view has been that an artwork can look like anything, and be made of anything – often without any reference to beauty or aesthetic value. And philosophers today often assert that all claims to aesthetic value are void. Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton have argued that aesthetics lacks validity as a philosophical discipline, belonging instead to the realms of ideology in the Marxist sense of the term.
Despite a resurgence of interest in beauty in analytical philosophy (for example, Danto, Alexander Nehamas, and Roger Scruton), alongside the growth of several online “trad aesthetics” Twitter accounts (more on those later), there remains a need for a theory of aesthetic value that would allow us to identify lasting monuments to the human spirit and search for objective features of aesthetically valuable objects – Criticism, in other words.
The first step towards a theory of aesthetic value is – contra Bourdieu and Eagleton – to justify the emergence of aesthetics as a valid philosophical discipline in the first place. A subject such as ethics is justified on the basis that we cannot avoid moral judgements or concepts, since our existence as rational and social beings compels us to make use of them. Do we all make aesthetic judgements?
Scruton has argued – persuasively in my view – along Kantian lines that we do. He takes Wittgenstein’s example of the carpenter fitting a doorframe. “How does the carpenter choose among the possible doorframes that suit the given function? On the basis of what looks right. He is judging the object in terms of its appearance, and searching in this appearance for a reason that would justify his choice. [...] In choosing the doorframe for the way it looks, the carpenter frees himself from instrumental reasoning. He finds himself making a choice, in which the object chosen is not the means to an end but an end in itself. His choice is not dictated by external constraints but springs from a sense of personal involvement. He is in a certain measure expressing and realizing his own nature, and the thing that he chooses belongs to him as his creation.”
Scruton defines art as a functional kind – like table or knife – designed as objects of our rational aesthetic interest, in the way that jokes are designed as objects of amusement. As in the carpenter example, when issues of function and utility have been fully addressed, appearance is all that remains, so that an attempt to close off redundancies must find a solution in the way things look. Scruton argues that this interest in appearances corresponds to two of the conditions that Kant lays down for the aesthetic: it is bound up with sensory experience, and it is disinterested, arising only when our practical interests have been either fulfilled or set aside.
Philosophy’s discovery of aesthetic interest opens the door to a universal theory of aesthetics. Such a theory would constitute an abstract structure that simplifies, systematises, and justifies our aesthetic beliefs and practices. It would also explain reactive emotions such as a feeling of aesthetic appreciation, chills, awe, disgust, frustration, confusion, and surprise, and their relationship to form, function, and artistic expression.
The difficulty is that, on close inspection, all of the main schools of thought tend to overlook some aspect that can impact the meaning and value of art. For example, formalism's exclusive focus on line, colour, shape, composition (etc.) overlooks social, cultural, and historical contexts – as does an exclusive focus on beauty; realism limits the expressive possibilities of art; pragmatism seems to ignore qualities that transcend immediate usefulness; aestheticism overlooks art’s transformative potential; Neo-Marxism’s focus on the role of art in bourgeois culture seems to ignore, well, everything else; and so on. In each case, counterexamples are available: if formalism is true, what about Pollock? If realism is true, what about Dali? If expressivism is true, what about Kandinsky?
I maintain that we are more sure of the aesthetic value of certain exemplary artworks than we are about any aesthetic theory of value. The solution, therefore, may be to make exemplary works the reference of the theory. How? By following Linda Zagzebski’s lead in ethics.
Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory defines terms like “good person”, “virtue”, and “right act” by the acts, motives, judgments, and attitudes of exemplary persons. It is based upon the theory of direct reference developed by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke in the 1970s. They argued that terms such as “water” or “gold” or “human” can’t simply refer to their dictionary definitions. For example, the meaning of “water” cannot be “colourless, odourless liquid in the lakes and streams and falling from the sky” because we can imagine something other than water that fits the definition. You might say “water is H2O”, but people did not even have the concept of H2O, much less use it in explaining the meaning of “water”, until recent centuries.
The theory of direct reference holds that water is whatever is the same liquid as that. This demonstrative term “that” refers directly – in the simplest case, by pointing. This approach explains how it is that often we do not know the nature of the referent of a term, and yet we know how to use the term in a way that links up with that nature.
In the same way, water is a substance like that, moral exemplars are people like that. As Zagzebski explains, “it is not necessary that anybody knows what makes a good person good in order to successfully refer to good persons, any more than it was necessary that anybody knew what makes water water in order to successfully refer to water before the advent of molecular theory.”
One consequence of direct reference is that the fact that water is H2O is not an idea in our minds. What we’re talking about also depends upon a sociolinguistic network in which ordinary speakers defer to experts. For this to work in moral theory, there must be a similar socially recognized procedure for picking out instances of moral exemplars. Zagzebski argues that “we learn through narratives of fictional and non-fictional persons that some individuals are admirable and worth imitating […] Exemplars are those persons, the persons who are most imitable or most deserving of emulation. They are most imitable because they are most admirable. We identify admirable persons by the emotion of admiration, [my emphasis] and that emotion is subject to education through reflection on further experience and the emotional reactions of other persons.”
Just as we use our senses to identify water as something like that, we use the emotion of admiration to identify moral exemplars as people like that. We later discover that water is H2O; and in the same way, we later discover that exemplars personify particular virtues, perform certain acts, or have certain motives, judgments and attitudes. The theory therefore serves as a bridge between philosophical and empirical investigations of morality. It also avoids the problem of having to justify a particular foundational axiom, such as “utility” or the “categorical imperative”.
Returning to aesthetics, I suggest that the emotion of aesthetic appreciation can function analogously to admiration in Zagzebski’s moral theory. Certain objects appeal to our rational aesthetic interest and elicit an emotional response we call aesthetic appreciation – connected to awe, beauty, or a feeling of the sublime – which we, as a sociolinguistic network, can use to identify aesthetically exemplary objects as artworks like that. From there, we can begin cultural anthropology (as George Dickie put it) to discover the underlying essential properties of good art, which are likely to include certain formal, expressive, realistic (etc.) elements.
In a sense, the trad aesthetics accounts are onto something. Their strategy of posting an image of an object perceived to be self-evidently beautiful – often juxtaposed with some contemporary monstrosity, and usually accompanied with a lamenting caption about decline – works because some things are self-evidently beautiful. Occasionally they’ll miss the mark by posting a sub-par statue or deriding a decent modern artist – inviting attacks from all sides. In such cases, they err by abstracting from the self-evidently aesthetically valuable a set of rules – usually formalist or realist – which they use to include or exclude artworks that are themselves self-evidently valuable. In other words, there’s a lack of Critical depth.
Aesthetic exemplarism reopens the door to the tradition of artistic and literary criticism. It respects tradition, but does not disregard the possibility of innovation. Clearly the contemporary view of art which has little interest in beauty cannot hold, yet exemplarism does not seek to impose some theoretical construct from the past that doesn’t quite fit – beauty is part of the story, but it isn’t the whole picture.
Returning to moral exemplarism for a moment; one key question for the theory is whether admiration can do the work Zagzebski claims it can. Panos Paris has argued that admiration is at best incomplete, and at worst misleading as an anchor for moral theory. This is because admiration is so broad as to include many objects that should not be emulated or motivate us, including examples of moral vice or undesirable behaviours. Paris claims that by focusing on the structural aspects of virtue – the possession of a human power in a high degree of excellence – Zagzebski leaves out what use that power is put to, which concerns desirability rather than (mere) admirability. However, Paris believes that “excellent means” can be unified with “pleasing or desirable ends” with the concept of beauty. Paris thus introduces an aesthetic dimension to moral exemplarism, where virtue is experienced as beautiful, which will arouse the same (or equivalent) responses to appropriately sensitive observers as other kinds of beauty do.
As Paris argues, it is highly implausible that we would admire the moral beauty of a courageous terrorist, skillful villain or determined dictator; whereas exemplars such as Jesus Christ do seem morally beautiful. The difference between a (mere) excellence such as extreme determination or intelligence and a “beautiful excellence” – a true virtue – is whether they’re experienced with pleasure, and a yearning to make them part of one’s life, as in honesty or kindness.
In this modified version of Zagzebski’s theory, admiration is given an aesthetic dimension, where we use our sensitivity to beauty to identify morally beautiful people – moral exemplars. Interestingly, Paris has cleared the way for a broadening of the view explored here, where aesthetic exemplarism can account for both morality and art.
One final thought. A problem for exemplarism broadly is that the identification of exemplars depends upon a sociolinguistic network in which ordinary speakers defer to experts; today, there are few art critics who haven’t been contaminated with a narrow or outright hostile approach to good art and to criticism in general. The same may be said in the moral domain: could nefarious actors hijack the process of identifying moral exemplars? The New Atheist obsession with Mother Theresa comes to mind… For the Christian, this isn’t a problem – Jesus Christ will always be the moral exemplar and the ultimate reference point for morality. For aesthetics, things are a little trickier. Fortunately, artistic and literary criticism has a long history, and you have your own experiences of aesthetic appreciation to fall back on. Nevertheless, scepticism of contemporary exemplars is advised.