m LITERATUR UND ANTHROPOLOGIEIm Auftrag des Sonderforschungsbereichs 511herausgegeben von Gerhart v. Graevenitz

Band 10 . 2001

Verbal Art across CulturesThe Aesthetics and Proto-Aesthetics of Communication

edited byHubert Knoblauch and Helga Kotthoff

~ Gunter Narr Verlag Ttibingen

Neil Roughley

Of Dentistry and ArtistryThe Concept and some Contexts of the Aesthetic

In the context of a sociolinguistic discussion of the Aesthetics anti Proto-Aestheticso[ Communication, it seems to me, as a philosopher, worthwhile trying to shedsome light on how we might understand the concept of 'the aesthetic'. In re-cent times a number of social theorists and cultural critics have used the termto formulate claims about changes in the value-orientation of members of oursocieties. An example of this is the slogan "the aestheticisation of the life-world".1 The claim seems to be that certain kinds of properties are being givena new evaluative prominence in the everyday life of at least certain members ofour societies. As a philosopher it isn't my job to ask whether these claims arecorrect. I merely want to ask here whether it is possible to isolate conceptuallythe kinds of properties about which such claims are being made. My answer willbe that a sociological trend to 'aestheticisation' in contemporary western culturalformations would entail the increased production of conditions conducive to afocus on essentially first-hand, qualitative experience. Similarly, what is aestheticabout certain pervasive forms of communication plausibly present in all humansocieties is their triggering of this kind of experience, whether this be directlycausal or by means of frarning devices which institute norms of attention.

What I have to say is structured along the following lines: I begin with a his-torical look at the introduction of 'aesthetics' as a technical term. I contendthat its significance grounds in the irreducibility of first-person experience (1). Icompare the analysis on these lines with a proposal which sees 'aesthetic' asprimarily a term used to distinguish 'showing' from 'stating' symbolic func-tions (2). I then argue that when we are talking about the aesthetic, we aretalking first and foremost about a form of value (3), and that the peculiar formof value in question has components which are close to both theoretical (4) andpractical (5) value. This anthropological suggestion is set into relation with thesemiotic analysis of the concept of the 'aesthetic' sphere advanced by NelsonGoodman (6). I then attempt to explain the relationship between aestheticexperience, the aesthetic attitude, aesthetic objects and aesthetic qualities (7).And finally (8), I turn to the question of how the aesthetic, thus conceived,relates to the poetic function, as conceived by Jakobson.

1 Cf. for instance: Rüdiger Bubner, "Mutmaßliche Umstellungen im Verhältnis von Lebenund Kunst"; and, "Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt" , both in his Ästhetische Erfahrung,Frankfurt 1989, 121ff., 143ff.; Axel Honneth, "Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt" , in: Desinte-gration. Bruchstücke einer soziologischen Zeitdiagnose, Frankfurt 1994, 29ff.

122 Neil Roughley Of Dentistry and A rtistry 123

1. Our starting point is the idea of the 'sensual'. For Kant, aesthetics is quitesimply the "theory of the senses" ("Sinnenlehre").2 Understood this way, 'aes-thetics' clearly cannot be identified with the philosophy of the ans. The t~e-ory of the senses belongs first and foremost to the theory of knowledge, w~chin Kant's view has the bipartite structure of a theory of the senses (aestheucs)plus a theory of the understanding OogiC).3As we are, permanently 0volved inprocesses of assigning sense-impressions to concepts m o~der to onentate our-selves in the world, the difficulty would actually be to fmd some area of hu-man activity in which we are not 'aesthetically' involv~d. This. consequen~e,which has a somewhat bizarre ring, is a result of the philosophical context mwhich 'aesthetics' was first introduced as a technical term.

As is well known, the philosopher responsible for this step in the eighteenthcentury was Alexander Baumgarten. It is important that Baumgarten's move w~directed against the reigning Rationalist conception of knowledge, as formulated mthe writings of Descartes and Leibniz. Baum~arten intended, ~ one fell swoop, togive philosophical dignity to a number of different areas which had be~n held tobe equal1y unworthy of genuine philosophical attention. In European elghteenth-century Rationalism, the criteria of clar:it; and 4istinctness permltt~d only thos~entities whose components can be explicltly deslgnated - ~xemplarl~Y: geo~e,tn-cal figures - recognition as objects of ~owledge. ,Acqu~tance v.:1th empmcalobjects, on the other hand, involves havmg sense lffipreSSlOns,which are them-selves unanalyzable. Like geometrical figures, sense experiences rnight be recog-nizable if we have them a second time. However, we are, so it seems, unable toprovide necessary and suffi~ient ~onditi0I?-s for ~heir ,instantiation. T~e. c?rr~sponding concepts are thus clear (recogmzable, ldentifiable), ~)Utnot. dis~mct(definable). This means that the intraduction of the concepts m quesuon lS de-pendent on ostension: "look at the x over there!"; "sniff thatl"; "listen to this!"

One aspect of Baumgarten's intention, then, was simp~y to exten~ ~heboundaries of what can be seen as genuine knowledge to mclude empmcalconcepts. That intention is one which is not coherently possible for anyon~ toshare taday. Whatever certain philosophical sceptics may say, the na~ral SClen-ces have become our paradigm of knowledge. What Baumgarten de~lgnated .byhis terrninological transformation of the Greek atcr~n1C6<; (meanmg: h~v:ngto do with feeling or perception) would today not only cover the empmcalsciences, including just about the entirety of empirical psychology, but alsoepistemology, the philosophy of science and the p~ilosophy ?f mind. .

Once this is clear, one wonders whether anything at allls to be gamed bymaking use of a predicate originally used to situate the arts in ~ f~eld of enqui,rywhich has long since become so differentiated that we have difflculty concelV-ing it as a single field at all. This doubt can be reinforced by a I?-umber .of fur-ther considerations, of which I just want to name one here: Smce Anstotle,

2 Immanue1 Kant, Critique offudgement, trans\. J. c. Meredith, Oxford 1978, first version ofthe Introduction, XI,

J Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans\. Norman Kemp Smith,Houndmills/London 1989 B 76.

sl?e~ifi~ally linguis~ic forms of art were already dealt with in the independentdisClplines of poeucs and rhetoric, so that throwing these together with otherforms of art, never mind with all the other perceptual phenomena, threatensto b~ ~ step in the direction of lack of differentiation rather than of conceptualpreclSlon. D? we then have here what we must see as a purely historical con-Ju~cture, or lS there some systematic connection which would justify tying thephilosophy of the arts to the theory of perception?

Baumgarten, it seems to me, was onto something substantial. There is indeedsomething. about perception which connects it to experience of the arts, al-though .nelther phenomenon is anything like exhausted by this common fea-ture. It ls,.h~wever" a fea~r~ ,to which humans characteristically attach a highvalue. This lS the zrreduCtbzlzty 01first-hand experience. There are conditionsunder which the subject of an experience cannot be substituted by someoneelse, however much such a substitute explains what they saw, h~ard or felt. Ofcourse, there are many everyday situations in which beliefs we arrive at as aresult of perception could equally weH be acquired by inference or second-hand,description ..The pragmatic role of perceptuaHy induced beliefs in every-day hfe makes thlS the usual case, although there are times when we want thecertainty only attainable through direct perception. In the arts, the situation isreverse,d..~ e may read a review of a theatre or musical performance, a film oran exhlbmon and feel weH-informed. Clearly however, this is no substitute foractually witnessing the event oneself. In this respect, it turns out that the artsa~e cultur~l syst~ms whic~ exploit a significant dimension of everyday expe-nence, a dimenslOn that, m the course of everyday life, can be foregroundedto a greater or lesser extent. This dimension is foregrounded when peoplepa,:!p'articular at~ention to their experiences as their own experiences. They dothlS m the expenence of a beautiful sunset, and more mundanely in sex andeating, as weH as when feeling cold or being subject to pain by an incompe-tent dentist. In th~ l~tter kind of situation, one of the things we expect froma.c?~petent denus~ lS that she has taken precautions which exclude the pos-slblhty of t~at partlcula~ form of aesthetic experience. The appropriate kindof preventauve measure lS, of course, known as an 'anaesthetic'.

In sum~ ,,:,hat I think Baumg.arten was onto is the fact that human persons arecharactensucal1y able, and at urne unable not to take on a perspective in which~ng a subject 01exJJe:ienceoneself matters. What that precisely involves, in par-t~cular, what on~ologlcal and me,taphysical status the contents of such essential1yfirst-hand expenence have, contmues to be the object of heated debates withinanalytic philosophy. In §4 below, I will say a word or two about one dimensionof thes~ debates which is of particular importance for an understanding of theaestheuc. C?neway?r ano~her, what can hardly be reasonably disputed is, firstly,that there lS somethmg umque for human persons about their own experiencesand, secondly, that this is something to which they attach particular value.

2. There is an alternative way in which one might attempt to make sense ofwhat Baumgarten was getting at. Shying away from fuzzy talk about irreduci-ble features of subjectivity, one could see the distinction between 'distinct' and

124 Neil Roughley Of Dentistry and A rtistry 125

'confused' perception or ideas as best understood in terms of modes of sym-bolisation or reference. A predicate or concept would be 'clear' if we can pro-vide some precise condition of its correct instantiationj correspondingly, itwould be 'confused' if it can only be 'defined' ostentively.4 This non-mentalistictransposition of the distinction to the level of semantics opens up a way ofcharacterising the arts which seems to retain the spirit of Baumgarten's sugges-tion. This is in terms of the distinction between showing and stating. The artsare all forms of symbolisation of which it is the case that - even if language istheir medium - their point is not propositional. Even when a work of literatureconsists entirely of sentences which have the form of assertions5

, the truth orfalsity of those assertions cannot be the point of the exercise. Of course, non-propositionality is insufficient as a characterisation of the aesthetic sphere. The'performative' dimension of language-use, to which we can attend by abstract-ing from a speech act's propositional content6, need have nothing to do withthe aesthetic. But if we are indeed dealing with a linguistic work of art - and Ithink the same goes for forms of everyday verbal artistry, such as joke-telling-then its sentences have to be put together in such a way that they show thereader something that exceeds their propositional content.7

Taking the distinction between showing and stating as fundamental has theadvantage of focussing on a dimension which is fundamental not only to thearts, but also to a whole set of everyday practices which one might want to seeas proto-aesthetic. I can show you the way something tasted by giving you asampie of it to try yourselfj a child might draw a picture to show you what herfriend looks likej or she might do a frantic dance to show you how excited sheis, or perhaps how excited her friend was yesterday. Maybe she might evenshow you such things by dancing without being aware that she is showing youthem. An obvious disadvantage of the approach, however, is that it cannotaccount for an aesthetics of non-artefacts. If there is no intentionally actingbeing behind an object, then there is no way it can show me anything. Takenliterally, it would imply the necessity of some sort of super-mind behind natu-ral phenomena, if one wants to make sense of an aesthetics of nature. I thinkone should attempt to do so, and so doing is clearly in line with Baumgarten'sproject. This is one simple reason why the concept of the aesthetic should begrounded in a notion of the experiencing subject, rather than in a distinctionbetween types of symbolisation. There is a second, more substantial reason, towhich I shall turn below. Before doing so, it is worth pausing for abrief meth-

• Cf. GottfriOOGabriel, "Klar und deutlich", in: Jürgen Mittelstraß (00.), Enzyklopädie Philosophieund WlSSeI1SChafistheorie,vo!. 2, MannheimlViennaiZurich 1984, 403; Definitionen und Inter-essen. Über die praktischen Grundlagen der Definitionslehre, Stuttgart-BadCannstatt 1972, loH.

S Many poems fulfil this criterion, as anyone who reads Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" orEliot's "Poems 1920" can confirm.

6 John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford 1962, 14.7 Gottfried Gabriel, "Erkenntnis in Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Dichtung. Argumente für

einen komplementären Pluralismus", in Logik und Literatur. Erkenntnisformen vonDichtung, Philosophie und Wissenschaft, Stuttgart 1991, 214ff.

odological reflection on what is precisely going on when someone attempts, asI am doing, to say how we ought to understand the term 'aesthetic'.

3. What precisely are the conditions 01validity of an analysis such as that whichis being proposed here? In spite of the widespread use of the term by culturalcritics in the media, 'aesthetic' is actually a technical term with no clear placein everyday use. So the aim of an analysis cannot consist in the reconstructionof some core meaning in ordinary language. Here, we have a different situationto that which is the case in respect to the concept of art. With 'art', althoughthere is disagreement about certain sorts of cases, we do have a very large set ofobjects to which the label is applied with a great deal of consensus. There it isthe task of the conceptual analyst to mark and then attempt to explain theboundaries of what falls under the concept. In the case of 'aesthetic', however,we are looking for arguments for setting the boundaries in a certain way. Nowof course, in one sense, anyone can define anything in any way they like. So itmight seem that the entire exercise is something of a waste of time. Whatmight be the point of arguing for some kind of stipulative definition here?

In order to answer this, it again helps to take a look at the history of thephilosophical reflections in which the concept is implicated. A good case canbe made for the argument that the term only attains its peculiar significance atthe historical juncture where the concept of beauty loses its universal applica-bility as the central value-predicate in the arts. For Baumgarten, beauty simplyis aesthetic perfection, what we are aiming at whenever we are in the aestheticsphere8

- actually a rather bizarre claim, when one considers everything thatbelongs to that sphere in his conception. More significantly, it is preciselyKant's analysis of beauty in the Critique 01]udgement which serves as a modelfor an understanding of 'the aesthetic', long after the predicate 'beautiful' cameto appear appropriate only in the face of landscape and non-contemporaryforms of music and painting. If 'beauty' is in the meantime returning as a termof commendation in western art, it is returning at the most as one positivevalue-predicate amongst others. Beauty is one positive value within a set ofvalue-kinds which are to be distinguished in some way from moral and epis-temic values. What is at stake then in the question of the definability of 'aes-thetic' is the possibility of locating a central component of what is significantabout the arts in a broader context of forms of human valuation. Aestheticvalue is a sort 01value eminently accessible to beings constituted as humans are. Itsdefinition would have to be wide enough to include specific, possiblymerely local values such as beauty, without being restricted to such par-ticular specifications. An analysis of this kind would then be valid if thereindeed is such a form of value, a value which, firstly, constitutes at least acentral dimension of wh at is valuable in the arts and, secondly, extendsbeyond the sphere of the artistic to take in both non-artefacts and artefactswhich have been granted no place within the institutions of the art-world.

8 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Theoretische Ästhetik. Die grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der''Aesthetican (1750/58), trans!. Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Hamburg 1988, §14.

126 Neil Roughley 01Dentistry and A rtistry 127

The aesthetic would thus be a concept which helped to clarify what is valu-able in the ans without being definitionally tied to them.9

The suggestion, then, is that the term 'aesthetic' is used to mark out a spe-cific value-sphere, which in some way is to be distinguished from pragmatic,moral and cognitive forms of value, even though there are, as we will see, con-nections between the spheres thus analytically separated. The aesthetic is aparticular respect in which questions 01 relative goodness or badness may arisewithin human experience. T0 come back to the two related suggestions I havesketched so far: this form of value could, on the one hand, appear to be thevalue of a certain kind of showing, as opposed to stating. On the other hand,and this is what I will continue to argue for, it could result from the strangevaluative stand human persons tend to take towards what is involved in beingan irreplaceable subject of experience.

4. If the first suggestion were correct, aesthetic value would be of cognitive, orat least quasi-cognitive character. Aesthetic experience would involve qualitieswhich - either in principle or for contingent or pragmatic reasons - would notbe exhaustively translatable into proposition al terms. There are two centraltypes of case which need to be distinguished here, although aesthetic artefactswill typically mix the two. In the first, the limits of propositionality wouldresult either fram the contingent limits of oUf cognitive capacities or else fromthe semantic openness of a symbolising object. Faced with a manifold, multiva-lent or undecidable semantic system, conflicting, fragmentary, inconclusive pro-positional attitudes are likely to be appropriate. In the second case, non-transla-tability is grounded in the phenomenal qualities of what is shown. What isshown is thus what something feels, looks, sounds or smells like. In other words,the irreducibility of this kind of showing cannot itself avoid appealing to subjec-tive experience. How it feels to have certain things shown to you may be de-scribable in words, but, if it is a genuine example of the kind of cases being called'aesthetic' here, it won't be completely communicable to you, if you're not onthe receiving end yourself Giving an explication of 'showing' thus leads us fairlydirectly to the second suggestion: that is, that 'aesthetic' is a predicate charac-terising forms of experience in which the subject of experience is irreplaceable.

A second remark about this form of showing is in order here, aremarkwhich also carries over to the characterisation of the aesthetic in terms of sub-jective experience. It is controversial whether what is shown, or what is expe-

• That one can simply side-step the problem of the conceptual gap between the aesthetic andthe arts, by dismissing the traditionalline of thinking which links the aesthetic to the ety-mology of the word, is shown by the historical example of Hegel and the more recent, ana-lytically orientated suggestion of Kutschera. Both simply use 'aesthetics' to designate thephilosophy of the arts (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegeI, Vorlesungen über die Asthetik, I,Werke 13, Frankfurt am Main 1970, I, 13; Franz von Kutschera, Ästhetik, Berlin/NewYork 1989, 3). Hegels's reason for doing so is, of course, grounded in his philosophy ofhistory. Alan Goldman's - undiscussed - decision to impose the same restriction is all themore surprising in the light of his extensive use of the implications of the etymology. Cf.Alan H. Goldman, Aesthetic Value, Boulder, Colorado/Oxford 1995, 4f.

rien~ed,. in such cases is to be characterised in cognitive terms at all. One sug-gestlon lS that.we don't ~ctually come to know anything at all in this way, butcome to acqUlre a certam type of ability - to remember, to imagine and torecognize a certain type of experience.10 Now, although an ability is not a formof knowing that, it is often characterised as a form of knowing how. At stakehere is, however, not so much the question of when the term 'cognitive' isaprrol?riate, but ~ather what mechanisms are at work in such perceptual cases.It lS ~lghly plauslble that such recognitional abilities need to be explained ei-the~ ~nl~erms of .a form of repre~~ntation that is independent of linguistic ca-pacltles or else m terms of speclflCally phenomenal concepts, demonstrativesthat derive their reference fram a kind of internal ostens ion (Uthat feature ofexperience o~ly accessible to me").12 If either of these kinds of analysis arecor~ect, th.en It ~oes make sense ~o talk in terms of the cognitive componentsof lrreduclbly frrst-person expenence. Note a difference in the status of theuntranslatability resulting fram the complexity and ambiguity of symbolicsystems and that resulting from the experience of phenomenal qualities. Inpu.re ~xamples of the first case, the resulting cognitive surplus is going to be in~nnclple ~ranslatabl~ .(although this will normally be a distinctively unattrac-tlve exerclse). CogllltlVe components of the second kind, on the other hand,are going to be either logically resistant to exhaustive linguistic reformulation,or else only representable in terms of first-person propositions, which retain anessentially private character.

5. Gr~)Unding the concept of the aesthetic in the irreplaceability of subjects ofexpenence enables us to grasp a second central dimension of the aestheticwhich the alternative proposal cannot account for. A form of knowing i~which the non-substitutability of the experiencing subject is a logical barrier tofull translation into publicly accessible meaning is only one way in which theirreplaceability of the experiencing subject might be important. There areothe~ forms of experience than merely epistemic (or quasi-epistemic). And ifthe f~rst attempt to explicate aesthetic value sees it as a special form (or perhaps9.uasl-form) of theorettcal value, these further forms of experience demonstrateIts closeness to the practical sphere. Particularly prominent among such formsare kinds of emotional affictedness. Being moved, for instance being moved tolau~hte~ or tears, means finding a certain response pravoked in oneself, one,;hlCh m the kind of case mentioned, involves a kind of behavioural expres-Slon..Althoug~ such behavioural manifestations are no necessary componentof bemg emotlonally affected - one can of course be moved without showing

10 Cf. David Lewis, "What Experience Teaches", in: Ned Block, Owen Flanagan and GüvenGüzeldere (eds.), The Nature o[ Consciousness. Philosophical Debates, Cambridge, MAILon-don 1988, 591ff.

11 Cf. Michael Tye, "The Subjective Qualities of Experience", Mind 95 (1986), 13f.12 Brian Loar, "Phenomenal States", in: Ned Block, Owen Flanagan and Güven Güzeldere (eds.),

1he Nature o[Consciousness. Philosophical Debates, ibid., 597ff.

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it13-, they are nevenheless closely bound up with the emotions. Moreover,

being moved may weIl provide us with a motive to act, that is, it may be caus-ally connected not only to behavioural displays, but also to deliberate action.On the other hand, this doesn't have to be the case: if we are moved to tears,this may leave us either purified of the emotion or animated to act in somerelevant way. Which of these turns out to be the case will depend on funherfactors, but not on the nature of aesthetic experience itself. George Santayanaclaimed that a life-form of pure consciousness, which only registered the quali-ties of things, would be a life-form without aesthetic experience. That, he argued,is only accessible to "emotional consciousness" .14 Because of the epistemic dimen-sion of the aesthetic, largely captured by the idea of showing, Santayana waswrong. Nevenheless, his pithy remark does pick out nicely what is a higWysignificant component of the aesthetic sphere. It is because this aspect of aestheticexperience is imponant that emotivist theories of an had a cenain plausibility.Clearly, however, an emotivist theory of aesthetic experience is inadequate as aninclusive theory. Such an inclusive theory, which needs to take account of bothcognitive and emotive components, has to take as its staning point the conceptof an irreplaceable subject of experience. This also enables us to stick to the ety-mology, according to which sensual qualities are at the centre of concern, whilststill distinguishing specifically aesthetic concerns from those of epistemology.

Aesthetic value, then, rests in the peculiar value of being a subject of one'sown experience. There is aesthetic experience because there are individualcentres of perception and feeling. This entails that all sentient beings fulfil a centralcondition for being susceptible to aesthetic experience. However, the assignmentof positive value to ones irreducibly first-hand experiences presupposes fulfillinga set of funher conditons. Central among these are, firstly, the capacity to stepback reflectively from ones own immediate experience and, secondly, the capacityfor evaluation. Aesthetic experience is a dimension of the life of human personsbecause of the specific conjunction of capacities that characterize the life-form ofsuch individuals. On the one hand, each one of us is both able to, and unable notto, experience the world from a specific point of view that is irreducibly her orhis own. On the other hand, we can, every now and then, step back and recog-nise precisely that, a recognition which goes hand in hand with recognising itsgivenness for other such persons. Finally, we have enormous difficulty not in-vesting the type of experience thus focussed on with considerable value.1S

6. Such an analysis, which grounds the aesthetic in immediate, non-substituti-ble subjective experience, has appeared unsatisfactory to cenain modern philo-sophers, who, understandably enough, would like to transform the somewhat

13 Pace theoretical positions inspired by a certain reading of the later Wittgenstein, e.g. Rom Harre,Pbysu:al Being. A Theory for a Corporeal Psychology, Oxford/Cambridge, MA 1994, 142ff.

14 George Samayana, 7be Sense of &auty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic 7beory, Cambridge,MAILondon 1988, 15. Cf. Arthur Danto's Introduction, ibid., xixff.

15 Otherwise, those world-views which claim that we can, and should, overcome the "prin-cipium individuationis", for instance as it manifests itself in our susceptibility to pain,would not need to recommend such rigorous techniques in order to overcome it.

messy talk of subjective experience into something more scientifically exact.One such suggestion comes from Nelson Goodnian, who analyses the aestheticin semiotic terms. He explains the distinction of showing from saying by theconjunction of the two semiotic characteristics of exemplification and (syntaeticand semantic) density. In exemplification, a symbol both possesses a property andis singled out to stand for that property. A tailor's swatch exemplifies the textureand colour of a piece of fabric; a painting might similarly exemplify colour,texture, shape contrasts, etc.; language-use can exemp1ify features such asrhythm, prosody or the way language is generally used in specific contexts. Syn-taetic density characterises a signifying scheme whose characters are so orderedthat between each two there is always a third. This feature is possessed by 'ana-logue' thermostats and drawings, but not by the alphabet, a musical score or adigital watch. Semantic density, flllally, is given when the ordering of the set ofitems denoted sirnilarly always yields a third between each two. Because reality isin general not divided up into discrete units, the only symbol systems which arefree from semantic density are higWy artificial systems, where the class of itemsthat can be referred to contains no overlaps, being instead completely atomised.

Goodman argues that the application of these semiotic taols allows a demys-tification and rational reconstruction of the characteristics traditionally associ-ated with aesthetic experience. Syntactic density, typified by painting, and highsemantic density, also to be found in literature and music (a cenain level ofsemantic density characterizes all language-use), explain what is traditionallyseen as the 'ineffability' of the aesthetic, its irreducibility to propositional con-tent. And the claim that I have formulated as the necessity of first-hand experi-ence, the 'immediacy' of the aesthetic, is to be reconstrueted in terms ofexemplification. This reconstruction is to be seen as corrective, according toGoodman, because it reveals the essentially hermeneutic nature of aestheticprocesses. Immediacy is an illusion, because exemplification, like denotation, isa case of a symbol standing for something else - in this case, of a sampie stand-ing for a property. If the recipient doesn't read the exemplifying symbol in thisway, as pointing beyond itself, then there will be no experience wonh men-tioning and cenainly none with any special value.16

There is a lot to be said for Goodman's analysis, although this is not theplace to do so in any detail. One of its great advantages is that it provides adetailed explanation of why in most cases the irreplaceability of the subject ofexperience correlates with an object which is also in some sense irreplaceable.17

In the context of the present discussion, it is imponant to note three qualifica-tions with respect to its status. Firstly, Goodman's declared object of interest is'the aesthetic' dimension of symbol systems, primarily those of the variousfine ans. Thus he deliberately excludes all those paradigmatic forms of aes-

16 See Nelson Goodman, lAnguages of Art. An Approa,ch to a Theory ofSymbols, Indianapolis1976. For exemplification, SOff.;for syntactic density, 136; for semantic density, 152ff.; forthe semantic density (and thus 'proto-aesthetic' character) of everyday language, 199ff; andfor his rational reconstruction of the showing/telling distinction, 232ff., 252ff. Cf. also his"When is Art?" in: Ways ofWorldmaking, Indianapolis 1988, 57-70.

17 On this point, see lAnguages of Art, chapter m, ibid., 99ff.

130 Neil Roughley Of Dentistry and A rtistry 131

thetic experience with non-artefaets. Of course, he could argue that we only geta kick out of the experience of a beautiful sunset because we associate some-thing else with it. As an exclusive claim this would, I think, involve an under-estimation of the strength of certain causal processes.

Secondly, Goodman's reconstruction of the idea of immediacy via the notionof exemplification, although a valuable contribution to our understanding of thereception of artworks, does not reconstruct the core notion of non-substitutablefirst-hand experience. Irrespective of whether the presentation of certain formalqualities does its work by means of symbolisation, thus breaking the intentionalfocus on what is present, we still attach a high premium to being there - preciselyin order to experience the unique quality of being subject to thoseprocessesoneselfWehave here a central point at which one can see the importance of the notionof the aesthetic for an understanding of the workings both of the arts and ofother social practices: if you don't see the eclipse or the performance, read thebook, attend the funeral, match or political rally yourself, then you are going tobe missing something. The future regret which can be caused by missing out onany one of these events grounds, at least partly, in the specific and irreduciblevalue that humans attach to forms of first-hand experience. The social and cul-tural pressures obviously at work in these cases18are not the whole story.

Finally, when we are dealing with syntactically and semantically structuredartefacts - whether in the arts or in everyday communicative contexts - andwhen we can agree that exemplification and density are significantly at work,then we are still faced with the highly pertinent question: What is the point ofsuch processes? Goodman's answer is that their significance is exclusively cog-nitive. Exemplification is a specific mode of enabling access to the way thingsare; density involves the transportation of an inexhaustible complex of infor-mation, which excites curiosity and spurs on to the joy of discovery.19 As myremarks in the previous section make clear, this is a one-sided view of the mat-ter. Aesthetic experience has components which are not only (quasi-)cognitive,but also proto-practical. Although, as Aristotle knew, there is a great deal ofpleasure to be had from cognitive processes,2° there is something ridiculouslyrationalistic about the claim that all aesthetic pleasure is to be reduced to suchprocesses. Cognitive disorientation can cause specific forms of fascination orexcitement. And certain sounds or sound-patterns and forms themselves causepleasure or displeasure in us, independently of whether they stand for any-thing else. Again, those causal processes will themselves often have a culturalhistory.21 But that doesn't alter the fact that their effects may be the results of

18 Analysed in detail by Bourdieu for the sphere of the art-world in terms of 'distinctions' inhis La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris 1975. Obviously, the pressures onmembers of societies to 'be there' on specific occasions can be of multifarious kinds.

19 Languages of Art, ibid., 255ff.20 Aristotle, On the Art ofPoetry 1448b 13f., in: Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Classical Literary

Criticsm; Harmondsworth 1977,35.21 Cf. Wilfried van Damme, "Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics",

in: Neil Roughley (ed.), Being Humans. Anthropological Universality and Particularity inTransdisciplinary Perspectives, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2000, 259-283.

stimuli combining with specific dispositions, processes which circumvent anyfurther intentional directedness.

7. The approach I am suggesting has meant that a notion of experience hasbeen placed at the centre of the analysis: 'aesthetic' is primarily a predicateapplying to experience. But of course, we often find it applied to oth~rsorts of individuals. In particular, philosophers like to talk of 'the aesth~tlcattitude', as weIl as of 'aesthetic qualities' and 'aesthetic objeets'. Accordmgto my analysis, these uses are to be seen as derivative.

First, the aesthetic attitude. Like aesthetic experience, this is clearly locatedon the subjective side of things. There is, however, an important difference:However much preparation goes into the production of an experience, in theend it has to be undergone, to use Dewey's term.22 In this it differs from anattitude.23 Although an attitude can be causally brought about in someonewithout them wanting to take it on and they can even have a certain attitudewithout being aware of it, nevertheless in general an attitude is a way of attend-ing which we see as subject to the control of the person who has it. If it is de-manded of people, they are usuaIly a?le to take on a more serious attit~detowards a task or a more respectful attitude towards aperson. Now, there iS atradition in the philosophy of art which places the aesthetic attitude at thecentre of the analysis. In this tradition, the aesthetic attitude is conceptualizedas a way of attending characterised by disengagement from practical interestand, as is sometimes added, from cognitive orientation.24 This characterisationof what is aesthetic about the attitude in question is inadequate for two rea-sons. Firstly, it is purely negative and so fails to provide us with any i?-forn~a-tion about what sort of value we are after when we take on the attitude mquestion. Secondly, it makes the disjunction with the practical an~ the co?ni-tive a matter of definition, whereas our reflections have made it plausiblethat aesthetic experience can have both a (quasi-)cognitive and a (proto-)practical dimension.25 The aesthetic attitude, in the analysis I am offering, is

22 Cf. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosopby [1920], in: The Middle Works Bd. 12,Carbondale/Edwardsville 1982, 129ff.;Art as Experience [1934], New York 1980, 43ff.

23 Clearly, this everyday language use of 'attitude' i~ to be dist~guished ~rom th.e ter~no-logical use now current in the philosophy of mmd, according to WhiCh all mtentlonalstates, above all believing and desiring, are 'propositional attitudes'. .

24 Kam provides the paradigm for this characterisation of th: ~esthetic, pa~icularly. m thefirst and second moments of the judgement of taste, where It IS conceptualised as dIsmter-ested and non-conceptual (Critique of Judgement, ibid., B3-B32). Modern variants are putforward by Edward Bullough, in "Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art ~d Aestheti~ Prin-ciple", British Journal ofPsychology V (1912-13), 87-118, and Jerome Stolmtz, Aesthetlcs andthe Philosopby 0/Art Criticism. A Critical Introductior:, ~o~don 1960. . .

25 How we precisely should draw the conceptual distmctlons between the co~mtlve, thepractical and the aesthetic depends on how the former two concepts are precisely under-stood. If the cognitive is definitionally tied to the propositional, then the aesthetic can onlybe quasi-cognitive. If the practical is, as in Kam, definitionally tied to freedom, then theaesthetic will be at most proto-practical. I leave these issues undecided. What is, however,c1earwithout any further definitional ado is that the aesthetic sphere, in the broad, anthro-

132 Neil Roughley O[Dentistry and A rtistry 133

merely a way of attending to elements of a situation which enables the subjectin question to experience them aesthetically.

The conceptual dependence on the notion of aesthetic experience is also tobe found in talk of aesthetic objects or qualities. Certain characteristics of thingsare particularly conducive to bringing about the kind of experience in whichthe irreducibility of the first-person perspective is foregrounded. The aestheticattitude can actually be taken at any moment and towards virtually anything,which includes the possibility of its appearance on occasions where it is inap-propriate for other - moral or practical - reasons.26 Objects with aestheticqualities are objects in the presence of which it is worthwhile focussing on whatis only accessible to an irreplaceable subject of experience. That might meansomeone has the choice of focussing on the object in that way. It might alsomean that the mere presence of the object causes the person to see it in thatperspective. The experience of being overawed by certain natural phenomena -those that have traditionally been described as 'sublime' - would be an exam-pIe of such an effect. It is important to realise that we are not talking about anyabsolute division here. What may transpose someone in one situation into astate in which she is sensitive to particular phenomena may, under other con-ditions, have no effect whatsoever. It seems to me highly implausible that thereis anything one might call an absolute aestheticphenomenon, which would causeaesthetic experience under any circumstances whatsoever.

Most objects which possess aesthetic qualities do so in a less spectacularway. Architecture is an example of a phenomenon with which people areconfronted on a day-to-day basis, but which only becomes the explicit objectof their aesthetic attention under particular circumstances. Of course, itdepends on the people and the buildings in question. In this respect, architec-ture is in modern western culture a somewhat unusual kind of an, in that itis there all around us, often without being accompanied by any signs tellingus to take on some special attitude towards it. Contrast this with a phe-nomenon such as street theatre, which announces its difference from every-day life by means of masks or other props, so that passers-by realise that thepoint of what is going on is not simply to be read off from the kind of actionsor the kind of speech-acts apparently being performed. Devices of this kindsubstitute for famiüar frameworks in such explicitly institutionalised con-texts as the theatre or the art~gallery. In all these cases, certain framing devicesare indications that the recipient should - among other things - focus onhow the product or production in question strikes her. They signal the in-stantiation of what one might call attitudinal norms.

pological sense defmed here, is a paradigmatic object of ethical reflection. The non-substitutable first-person experiences to which people subject, or which they withhold from,each other are constitutively involved in the ethica1lycentral dimension of human weU-being.

26 The Italian Futurists' celebration of the new kinds of experience made possible by themodern technologies of war is perhaps the best-known example of such moral inappopri-ateness of adopting the aesthetic attitude.

In sum, aesthetic experience can come to us in one of three ways. It can bedirectly caused; it can result from a voluntary, even whimsical choice to takeon the aesthetic attitude; or it can be the effect of the triggering of attitudinalnorms by features of certain cultural contexts. That triggering itself can bemore or less automatic, depending on whether the subjects in question see theattitudinal changes as 'natural', whether they are 'carried away' by the frayaround them or whether they opt to enter into the goings on in the way pre-scribed by the cultural cues or frarning devices.27

8. The enormous importance of such framing devices was largely ignored bythe tradition of the aesthetic attitude. Instead, the focus there was primarily oncharacteristics which appear to inhere in the objects in question, independentlyof their social contextualization. The kind of attributes given such prominencewere formal qualities. As a result of the focus on beauty, these were restrictedin traditional aesthetics to such qualities as symmetry, completeness and har-mony of the elements.28 However, the analysis I have outlined leaves concep-tual space for virtually any formal characteristics to take on such a role. On t~eother hand, my suggestion is resistant to any attempts to restrict the aesthetlCto the purely formal. Aestheticity remains tied to the criterion of the extent towhich being there oneself matters. It may well be the formal elements of anexperience which are lost if one attempts to 'tell it like it was' to someone else.It is, however, often precisely the way in which the form and the content of anart-work, or performance of everyday verbal artistry, are interwoven that onecannot translate into propositional form. Of course, there are people whopossess great skill in 'telling it like it was', such skill that their listeners mightvery well feel compensated for not having been present at the scene which isbeing communicated. Their üsteners might even prefer listening to them orwatching them perform. That will be because the performance itself has quali-ties which it is worth experiencingfirst-hand.

The same can undoubtedly also be true of performances which are in someway standardized in their structure or other formal qualities. The issue of theaesthetic aspect of such modes of communication is then, as I see it, not in itselfthe issue of the poeticity of the language used, as defined by Jakobson.29 Lan-

27 My fairly restrictive and non-terminologica1 use of the word 'frarne' overlaps at least herewith the technical use of Goffman. At one point Goffman emphasizes the fact that what hecalls frarnes involve prescriptions of differing degrees of "involvement" for participants.(Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization o[ Experience, Carnbridge,MA 1974, 354f.) As his exarnples (an "understanding" of sexual intercourse versus that oftraffic systems) suggest, part of what being heavily 'involved' can involve is construing onesfirst-person experience as non-substitutable. .. . . ..

28 Cf. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§18-22 (Theoretische Asthetik, lbld., 13-15); Kant, CntUJue o[Judgement, §15 (ibid., B43-48);John Dewey, Art as Experience, chapter. 3 (ibid., 35ff.); CliveBell, Art, London 1914, chapters 1-3.

29 Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics", in: Thomas A. Sebeok(ed.), Style in Language, Cambridge, MA 1960, esp. 356ff. The question of .whether thedominance of this function is what makes a verbal message a work of art, which Jakobsonsees as the key question for poetics (ibid., 350), is a different question still.

134 Neil Roughley. I

Of Dentistry and A rtistry 135

guage which is used to focus the recipient's attention on the linguistic form ofwhat is being said can certainly be one source of the aesthetic quality of acommunication situation. It is, however, only one possible source amongothers. In social situations, the aesthetic aspect of such poetic language-use willoften be the way in which the effects achieved by such means are part 0/anoverall experience which matters to the individual concerned. In a ritual con-text, the effect of certain formal characteristics of the language used may bestructurally indispensable for the constitution of the ritual. The ritual's aes-thetic quality will, however, be more than merely this, as the experience inwhich being there matters to the individual is, if the ritual is succesful, an expe-rience of more than simply effects of language. I suspect that experience of thepoetic and aesthetic experience only appear to coincide under very specificconditions, such as the reception of certain forms of modernist literature.30

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