Aesthetics

The debate over beauty's objectivity is ancient. Plato located beauty in the Form of Beauty — a perfect, mind-independent reality that beautiful things participate in, the way circles participate in the Form of Circle. This is a maximally objectivist position: beauty is as real and independent of minds as mathematical truth.

Hume took the opposite view: beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder. "Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." Aesthetic judgments express sentiment, not perception of mind-independent properties.

Kant's position in the Critique of Judgment (1790) is more subtle and more interesting. When I judge something beautiful, I do not merely report a private pleasure — I make a claim that seems to demand universal agreement. "This sunset is beautiful" is not like "I prefer vanilla" (which no one can dispute) nor like "The sunset is red" (a verifiable factual claim). It occupies a peculiar middle ground: it is based on subjective feeling but expressed with the pretension of universal validity. Kant's explanation: aesthetic judgment engages the "free play" of imagination and understanding in a way that is universally communicable, even if it is not conceptually determinable.

The definition of art is both philosophically fascinating and practically urgent (as anyone who has argued about government arts funding knows). The institutional theory (George Dickie, following Arthur Danto) holds that something is art if and only if it is treated as art by the "artworld" — the network of institutions, practices, and agents that constitute the art system. This explains how Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (a urinal placed in an art gallery in 1917) could be art: the artworld's acceptance is constitutive, not merely recognitive.

The expression theory (R.G. Collingwood) holds that art is the expression of emotion — genuine art externalizes an emotion the artist was experiencing. The problem: this excludes purely formal music, abstract art, and craft, and seems to make the artist's biographical state relevant to the artistic quality of the work.

The representation theory (mimesis, going back to Aristotle) holds that art imitates or represents reality. This works for portraiture and realist fiction but fails for abstract art, instrumental music, and architecture. No single definition has achieved consensus — which some philosophers take as evidence that "art" is an irreducibly family-resemblance concept rather than a natural kind.

One of the most productive puzzles in contemporary aesthetics is the paradox of fiction. We know that Sherlock Holmes doesn't exist. Yet readers report genuine feelings of admiration for him, anxiety about his cases, grief at the Reichenbach Falls. How is this possible? How can we have genuine emotional responses to things we know don't exist?

The "willing suspension of disbelief" (Coleridge) is not quite right — we don't literally forget that fiction is fiction. We seem to maintain two attitudes simultaneously: knowledge that this is fiction, and something like belief in the story for the duration of reading. Kendall Walton's "make-believe" theory holds that engaging with fiction is participating in a game of make-believe, where it is "fictionally true" — true within the game — that these characters exist and have these experiences. Our emotional responses are quasi-emotions — they have the phenomenal character of real emotions but are triggered by fictional rather than actual beliefs.