Aesthetics

"Monroe Beardsley was often joshed in a kindly way and called ‘the Dean of American Aesthetics’ by the next person we’ll talk about, Nelson Goodman. Beardsley was a lovely man. One way to understand his book, Aesthetics, is as a more rigorous version of the theory that Bell developed. It’s different, Beardsley would protest, because it’s not formalist. But like Bell, he believes that art is autonomous, separate from other kinds of concerns — cognitive concerns, moral concerns, political concerns and so on. When he began to write the book, it was in the shadow of Wittgenstein. In the first edition he didn’t even offer a definition of art because the Wittgensteinians were arguing that a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions was impossible. When he re-issued the book in the 1980s with Hackett, he did offer a definition of art, and it is a definition that gives an incredible systematic unity to his theory. It is what he calls ‘the aesthetic theory of art’ whereby the function of art is to cause or bring about or afford or sustain a certain magnitude of aesthetic experience. That aesthetic experience is understood as a combination of things mostly having to do with the non-cognitive feeling states — like a feeling of freedom, freedom from feelings of necessity, and a feeling of interpretive play. As in the case of Bell, what a work of art is conceived of is as something with a function — only that for Beardsley its function is not to cause aesthetic emotion, but to cause this other thing that is called aesthetic experience. This gave him a way of talking about quality in art: works that afforded more aesthetic experience were better than ones that afforded less. He also talks about the things that give rise to aesthetic experience in works of art: unity, variety, and intensity. So his theory told the critic what features to look for in works of art. What are reasons to say that a work of art is good? Well, if it has unity, if it has diversity, if it has intensity. You might wonder what falls under the category of intensity — it’s what he calls ‘regional qualities’ but everyone else calls expressive qualities. So, if you had a work that had an appreciable amount of unity, diversity, and intensity — so an appreciable amount of formal properties and expressive properties that would give rise to or afforded aesthetic experience — it would be a good work. Well, yes it is. Of course it’s hedged by notions like ‘a certain magnitude’ — it’s not as if he ever attempted to give numbers, nor did he tell you how you would sum a certain amount of unity with a certain amount of intensity, or how you would subtract a certain amount of intensity or a lack of intensity from a lack of unity. Nor did he ever help you discriminate — say — between features like the kind of unity that makes for aesthetic experience versus the kind that makes for monotony."