Aesthetic Experience: Its Revival and Its Relevance to Aesthetic Education

Aesthetic Experience: Its Revival and Its Relevance to Aesthetic EducationAuthor(s): Marcia Muelder Eaton and Ronald MooreSource: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 9-23Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333754 .

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Aesthetic Experience: Its Revival and Its Relevance to Aesthetic Education

MARCIA MUELDER EATON and RONALD MOORE

Oddly enough, in the last half century the most battered and beaten notion in the lexicon of philosophical aesthetics has been its own central concept, aesthetic experience. On the one hand, there is something simple, obvious, and perfectly familiar about this notion. Any fair poll would surely show that citizens of the Western world in general are confidently familiar with aesthetic experience as a concept and as part of their lives. On the other hand, there is something about the notion that defies easy analysis, a vagueness or looseness in its application that has drawn persistent critical fire. We are

likely to be much more confident in identifying paradigmatic instances of aesthetic experience than in marking the borders of what should count as aesthetic experience in general.

Philosophical Skepticism about Aesthetic Experience

A century ago, in the heyday of neo-romanticism, philosophers could confi-

dently assert that aesthetic experience is a uniquely valuable aspect of awareness that occurs when we engage in "the moody savoring of qualities for their own sake," or the like.1 It is, they held, a distinct form of valuable reaction to things, one that enriches us and sometimes inspires us, but one whose

qualities are not reducible to others in our standard stock of values. In this

light, teachers who aimed to provide their students with the occasion and means to have an aesthetic experience did not seem to be doing anything muddleheaded, let alone esoteric. They simply wanted their charges to re-

spond to art, music, natural beauty, or the like, in a way that was reward-

ing, formative, and independent of other interests (such as the scientific, the

Marcia Muelder Eaton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota and past president for the American Society for Aesthetics. Her most recent book is Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical. Ronald Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. He is the author of Legal Norms and Legal Science; Puzzles About Art (with Margaret Battin, Anita Silvers, and John Fisher); and Natural Beauty (forthcoming), as well a nu- merous articles in philosophy of law and aesthetics journals. He serves as an editorial consultant for this journal.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2002 02002 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



10 Marcia Muelder Eaton and Ronald Moore

political, the sacerdotal). But since then wave after wave of anti-essential- istic skepticism has eroded this easy confidence. The skeptical reaction was fueled by a Wittgensteinian distrust of essences in general and by a frank

recognition that "aesthetic experience" is used in a remarkably broad range of ways in an equally broad assortment of contexts.

To many thinkers it seemed that "aesthetic experience" had become a catchall term, a wastebasket into which all manner of emotive response could be conveniently and uncritically dumped. Such was the intensity of the attack that many theorists came to despair of ever making much sense of the

concept. A good example of this cynical disenchantment can be found in a section called "Aesthetic This and Aesthetic That," in Francis Sparshott's magnum opus, The Theory of the Arts. Here, in characteristically wry and sardonic fashion, the philosopher sights his quarry and obliterates it:

The term "experience" has a clear common meaning as what distin- guishes an experienced person from a novice or tyro; but that is not what "aesthetic experience" ever means. Aside from that irrelevant use, the concept of experience is a mass of question-begging confusions.... These confusions slop over into the phrase "aesthetic experience," where they are augmented by ambiguities and muddles indigenous to the context.2

On this view, people may say that they have or enjoy aesthetic experience, but there is no way of making out what they really mean, let alone whether their claims are true, because the concept itself is amorphous. And if this is so, the only sensible strategy is retreat. If we cannot be sure we are

talking about the same thing, or if we keep missing each other's points alto-

gether, let us just talk about something else. Over the years, however, various philosophers and arts educators have

fought against this cynicism and have sought to restore clarity and respect- ability to the concept of aesthetic experience. After all, they have urged, even if there should be no clear boundaries to the notion, in this respect it is like a lot of other important concepts we continue to deploy usefully. If, for

example, Morris Weitz's celebrated anti-essentialist attack on the concept of art3 should be taken to be successful, it provides no good reason to jettison our attention to some things as artworks and others as not, let alone to ho-

mogenize our responses to both sorts of thing. Similarly, the defenders

argued, it should be possible to make good use of the concept of aesthetic

experience (say, to direct the attention of students to otherwise overlooked

aspects of things) while conceding that the concept itself is ill-defined or un- definable. After all, as Wittgenstein himself pointed out, the fact that a

country's borders are contested does not mean that one cannot be sometimes sure that one is in this country rather than that, let alone that the countries on either side of the border are blurred into one.



Revival and Relevance of Aesthetic Experience 11

Rescue Efforts, Early and Late

Those who would rescue the notion of aesthetic experience have been, for the most part, content to put aside the thankless and possibly fruitless task of providing a satisfactory definition in order to get on with the business of

analyzing its phenomenal content and application to a wide range of objects. Monroe Beardsley was an early and prominent champion of this rescue effort.

Beardsley's approach centered on identifying those features of aesthetic ex-

perience by virtue of which we find it gratifying, rather than worrying end-

lessly over whether the features we have identified are jointly necessary and sufficient. He urged us to think of a person as having an aesthetic experience just when the greater part of his or her mental activity during a particular stretch of time is "united and made pleasurable by being tied to the form and qualities of a sensuously presented or imaginatively intended ob-

ject" on which it is trained.4 However, Beardsley's characterization of aesthetic experience has proven highly controversial. Practically no element of his influential formulation has gone unchallenged: Are all aesthetic experiences pleasurable? Must the state of mind reached in aesthetic experience be unified? If so, how much unity is required, and what kind? Is aesthetic

experience limited to the forms and qualities of what is sensuously presented, or can it take into account undisplayed characteristics of things? And so on. In the wake of sharp and unrelenting criticism, Beardsley's defense of aesthetic experience has come to seem dated and vulnerable.

More recently, proponents of aesthetic experience theory have mounted a second wave of defense. The counterattack has enlisted quite a number of

advocates, but the most forceful and effective among them has been Noel Carroll.5 In his new book, Beyond Aesthetics, Carroll reviews and dismisses the three notions of aesthetic experience that have, as he sees it, been the

historically preferred conceptions of the concept, and he argues for the su-

periority of a fourth conception, which he calls "the deflationary account."6 The account is deflationary in the sense that it avowedly resists the tendency to overgeneralize, a problem that plagued the earlier accounts. Also, it does not try to make aesthetic experience the sole or uniquely important appropriate response to aesthetic objects. There are many appealing features in Carroll's conception of aesthetic experience. By being less ambitious than its predecessors it avoids the vulnerability that attaches to their extraneous claims. By concentrating attention on the content of aesthetic experiences of art rather than their phenomenology or psychological preconditions, it cir- cumvents problems that beset the "aesthetic attitude" theory and kindred forms of aestheticism. And by limiting its criterial claims to features of what Carroll calls "design appreciation" and "quality detection," it confines itself to the least controversial themes in the historical debate over aesthetic

response.




But, is this enough? Would adopting Carroll's "deflationary account" or

something very much like it allow philosophers to restore the notion of aesthetic experience to its prideful place in the center of the theory of aesthetic value? The very virtues that make Carroll's claims proof against standard criticism - such as its self-proclaimed conceptual modesty and its narrow focus on experiential content - are restrictions that may make the

concept of aesthetic experience he defends look quite unlike the concept of aesthetic experience others had earlier defended. Carroll may have purchased conceptual security by paying too high a price in conceptual relevance.

In this essay, we want to consider again the status of aesthetic experience in present-day aesthetic theory. There are, it seems to us, two questions that need answering if current efforts to defend this notion are to achieve more success than their predecessors: First, if we put aside efforts to provide a standard, necessary-and-sufficient-conditions definition for aesthetic experience, can we be confident that the notion we describe is ample enough to

carry the features traditionally taken to be part of aesthetic experience, while

remaining spare enough to escape traditional criticisms mounted against aesthetic experience theories? And, second, even if we can satisfy the first

condition, what good would this do? Would delineating aesthetic experience advance the field of aesthetics? Would it make any difference to the

way in which the concept of aesthetic experience is used in teaching contexts?

The Centrality of Aesthetic Experience in Aesthetic Education

It is in considering these two questions that Ralph Smith's substantial contribution to the continuing debate over aesthetic experience most clearly emerges. Over the years, Smith has persistently argued that aesthetic experience is central to aesthetic education and to humanities generally. After

appreciatively surveying the evolution of the concept of aesthetic experience, Smith has insisted that the key features philosophers have located in this concept are also key ingredients in the education of young people as

they come to appreciate the arts and natural aesthetic phenomena. Smith's

approach has always been down-to-earth and practically focused, even as it has been thoroughly informed by scholarship. And this is the reason his view of the aesthetic experience is so important in the development of the

concept. Aesthetic experience is not simply a conundrum about which philosophers quarrel independently of consequences in the world of application. It is also, and most importantly, a prominent element in arts education. This concept, more than any other, identifies the objective that arts teachers aim for as they try to turn the attention of their students to what is

peculiarly important in the arts.

Undeniably, philosophical aestheticians have not always been as sensi- tive as they might have been to the pedagogical application of concepts




they concoct and defend. But recent developments in the debate over the notion of aesthetic experience present an encouraging indication of the prospect of pertinence. Carroll's deflationary account is a good example of con-

tinuing philosophical efforts to salvage the concept by strengthening its ties to the practice of appreciation in relation to works of art. However misused or abused in the past, if the phrase "aesthetic experience" applies to an im-

portant instructional directive in the hands of arts educators, philosophical reflection on the concept in play should take stock of both the varieties of its

employment and their effective values. As a matter of fact, both American art educators and the teachers of art

educators have preserved through the past half century a largely untram- meled enthusiasm for, and pedagogical concern with, promoting aesthetic

experience. Inevitably some of these folks have been, in the natural course of things, infected with philosophical fashion and have begun to shy away from the concept. But for the most part, aesthetic experience has remained a central and important theme among art educators - and for good and obvious reasons. Art educators are in the business of unlocking aesthetic sensibilities in learning populations. Their work fundamentally involves the cultivation of receptiveness to features in artworks - and in the wider world - which might otherwise remain fallow. And the point of stimulating these sensibilities and receptivities is to make students aware of ways of perceiving, portraying, and responding to the world that enrich the lives of those

doing the perceiving, portraying, and responding. These ways comple- ment, but are distinct from, social, economic, political, religious, scientific, and all other forms of approach. It seems natural to refer cumulatively to the values involved as aesthetic values, and to think of the primary objective - or at least one of the primary objectives - of art education as training in aesthetic experience.

Frames of Attention and Receptiveness

As arts educators use the concept, aesthetic experience refers to three frames of attention and receptiveness. First, there is the (indefinitely) temporally extensive body of experience one might have in relation to the sensory world, a body of experience one might draw upon in making aesthetic choices or evaluations. So, for example, a museum catalogue reports that the Fifth Dy- nasty sculptor who crafted the image of a seated scribe remarkable for its lifelike realism departed from the canonical conventions of portrait sculp- ture prevalent in the third millenium, B.C., and "felt free to make a few choices on his own, filling out a given scheme with his own aesthetic ex-

perience."7 Here, the term "experience" points to an accumulation of lived

response, rather than some one moment of inspiration. Second, there is the

isolated, specific transformation of awareness that we sometimes have (and




often hope for) when we encounter impressive beauty or ugliness, or some combination of aesthetic features in an artistic or natural object and are moved

by what we find. For example, a museum educator may work hard to elimi- nate distractions so that viewers can focus on the works of art themselves,

expecting that, under appropriate cognitive, sentient, and emotional condi-

tions, they will be filled with a sense of wonder.8 And third, the term is sometimes attached to whatever states of mind occur (gratifying or not, mov-

ing or not) that occur when observers focus their awareness on such percep- tual features of a thing as its design and its sensible patterns. An art teacher

may take her students to be having aesthetic experiences about gothic art so

long as they are carefully attending to, say, the lightness and grace of cathe- dral spires as presented in photographs. This last usage is the one preferred in Carroll's deflationary account.

These three uses of "aesthetic experience" are clearly and importantly different; but it would be a mistake to suppose that their differences turn the concept into a hopeless disarray. The neutral skills of observation and

appreciation identified in the third use lay a foundation for the hoped-for emotional reaction of wonder and delight identified in the second. And the

presence of both the appreciative skills and the occasional resultant wonder is just what marks off one part of a life's various experiences as aesthetic.

Smith's insistence on the centrality of aesthetic experience in both philosophy of art and aesthetic education is the figured bass beneath much of his recent writings. What he has seen, and what so many philosophers did not see, was that elasticity is not tantamount to amorphousness. Many a

good and useful concept can be adapted, extended, revised, and yet be useful and instructive. He has seen what so many art educators did not see -

that if aesthetic experience is to be a useful concept it cannot be exploded into every positive aspect of our encounter with art or with life. Instead, it can and should be the mark of a limited but readily recognizable range of

cognitive and conative reactions that in their evolved, full-blown state, involve stimulation, controlled emotional involvement, a feeling of discovery, and a sense of self-revelation or self-fulfillment.9 The sensible position he established and insistently defended is not simply a neutral, no-man's land; it is a valuable bridge between divergent viewpoints.

Smith's Composite View

In "Philosophy and Theory of Aesthetic Education" Smith undertakes to "show the relevance of philosophical aesthetics to a theory of aesthetic education by indicating how an analysis of the idea of aesthetic experience can

significantly contribute to an understanding of our responses to art."10 His

way of doing this is to absorb and build on the foundation of Beardsley, Harold Osborne, Goodman, and Eugene Kaelin. As Smith sees it, aesthetic




experience should be thought of as something that is (as Beardsley sup- posed) essentially gratifying. But that is not to say it should always be

pleasant. It should, instead, reward our attention in a rich and expansive variety of ways. Part of aesthetic experience is its emotive aspect, its pro- pensity for delight or despair. But another part is its formative aspect, its

generation of a creative reaction to things, its invitation to realize new as-

pects of the familiar, and to appreciate things that were there all along. And, very importantly, Smith agrees with Beardsley's later view that the several criteria of aesthetic experience should be understood as jointly suffi-

cient, but individually non-necessary. So, any one could be missing without

entailing that the experience would thereby be rendered non-aesthetic.ll From Osborne, Smith extracts and embraces the idea that aesthetic experience involves the focusing of attention within a (limited) sensory field re-

sulting in a heightened awareness of the composition of that field and the relations of its components. Here again, aesthetic experience should be seen as an avenue both to intrinsic pleasures (such as a delight in formal patterns) and to wider instrumental goods (such as the increased effectiveness that comes from appreciating relations between things in life generally).

But aesthetic experience should not be understood as emotive and conative to the exclusion of its cognitive aspects. Goodman was famous for

having insisted on the contribution this experience makes to understand-

ing. Smith agrees with Goodman that artworks invite us to deploy our skills in interpreting and reinterpreting our world. And in this way they stim- ulate our capacities to make comparisons and discriminations, to make-

judgments about categorial membership, and to appreciate various (often nonverbal) ways in which one thing may represent or exemplify another.

Knowledge of this kind is not just specialized information about aesthetic

subject matters; it is a skill that lays open worlds of intelligent encounter

generally and should be prized for that reason. Finally, Smith recognizes that aesthetic experience is always to some extent institutionally framed and formed. We live in societies, use languages, accept laws, adopt fash-

ions, and so on. Within all of these, we face constraints and enjoy freedoms. As Kaelin sees it, these institutional ingredients provide the groundwork of our personal acts of expressiveness. Aesthetic experience is here understood as an interplay between surface and depth, one in which elements of institutional frame and individual freedom are in creative tension.

The picture of aesthetic experience that Smith draws in "Philosophy and

Theory of Aesthetic Education" bundles up these several observations into an appealing composite. There is certainly more to Smith's view of the con-

cept than is presented in his survey of these conceptions. Beardsley, Osbore, Goodman, and Kaelin are just leading proponents at the head of a long, long line. But one point that should be obvious from Smith's approach is that disparate factors and divergent approaches should be brought together




to give this important idea its full impact. And the next obvious point is that these disparities and divergences are no detriment to its practical, let alone its theoretical, importance. So, in the end, we are left with the Beardsleyan idea that "aesthetic experience" must be a cluster concept, a collection of

ingredients that is emendable, corrigible, and inherently loose in that none of the ingredients are essential to its realization.

Now, there are two ways to think about this kind of position. On the one hand, one can regard it as an open invitation to confusion and incoherence. After all, if ingredients can slip in or out without affecting our determination that something is an aesthetic experience, how could we ever resolve

disputes about whether a given experience is aesthetic or not? On the other hand, one can regard it as a nice escape from the lingering bonds of positiv- istic orderliness and definistic restraint. If we cannot add and subtract in-

gredients as conditions dictate, how can we trace the unpredictable evolution of this important feature of awareness? There is an obvious hazard in this latter position. It is open to the obvious complaint that conceptual freedom has been bought at too high a cost. Add how much? Subtract how much? Just as any of Shakespeare's plays could be turned into any of Albee's by adding lines here and subtracting others there, so aesthetic experience can be turned into any sort of experience you please if we insist on

keeping the concept open-ended.

Aesthetic Experience as Culture-Bound and as Cumulative

Fortunately, there is a way of avoiding this outcome and keeping the notion of aesthetic experience both elastic and coherent. There are two key points to observe. First, aesthetic experience is, along with the emotional elements it comprehends, a culture-bound concept.12 It is dependent on language and community for recognition in and by the individual. So one should not

expect that the conceptual cluster it composes will be tidily resolvable into

any simple explanatory formula for all cultures and all times. And second, as it is usually confronted within various cultural contexts, the aesthetic ex-

perience problem is what historians of philosophy call a sorites problem. If

you put a grain of sand on the table and ask observers whether it is a pile, they will surely say no. If you add a second grain, they will say the same

thing. And so on for the third and fourth and fifth. Yet at a certain point, they will agree that there is a pile of sand on the table. When? There is sim-

ply no way of knowing. It is a matter of cumulation without any decisive line of qualification. Aesthetic experience is a sorites phenomenon in that it comes into being when a number of contributory elements add up to a sufficient sum. All of the elements in the survey of theories mentioned above would count. And perhaps many others too. This strategy doesn't result in




a conceptual mess. In fact, it is a practiced and proven method in ethics. What makes anyone a good person? Not this or that feature alone, surely. Rather, we think of people who are good as kind, caring, reciprocating, du-

tiful, tolerant and so on. And no one of the traits we mention will be decisive. The position we are left with is not that anyone who has some of these traits and not others is a good person. Instead, we demand a cumulation, a

piling up, of pertinent traits before we cross a decision line that may be indistinct to us, but in the final analysis makes sense.

Taking the aesthetic experience issue to be a sorites problem frames it in a way that should be acceptable both to philosophical aestheticians and to aesthetic educators. Philosophers will appreciate the fact that a deep value is being protected here in a way that is familiar from a companion context. Aesthetic educators will appreciate the prospect of adding this and that

piece to the pile without worrying about whether they are working in the

right direction, let alone whether the pile has added up to the goal. More-

over, we need not worry so much about the attainment of some conceptual threshold that we cannot be pleased at partial results. A person who has not attained full moral goodness can still take some credit for having acquired one or more good-making characteristics. And similarly, a person can profit from the sense of discovery, the emotional engagement with a subject mat-

ter, the sense of freedom, and a heightened awareness within a field of attention that a particular episode of appreciation may involve, even if these various ingredients are not present in sufficient number or amount to

justify calling it an aesthetic experience. To illustrate this point, we return to the Carroll's deflationary account

described earlier. In a given cultural community - the art-critically savvy world of twenty-first American connoisseurs, say, design appreciation and

quality detection may well prove to be disjunctively sufficient conditions for aesthetic experience. But, to another community, they may seem only contributors, by themselves insufficient, to the attainment of that experience. The romantics to whom we earlier referred would very likely take Carroll's criteria to be altogether too spare, too cool. They would insist that experience does not count as aesthetic unless it stirs the blood in a certain way, disposing us favorably toward its objects. Others might insist that the disin- terestedness that Carroll so easily dismisses is, after all, an important con- tributor or that aesthetic experience involves mirroring, a recognition of one's

experiential involvement during its very course. Each of these qualities, and

many others, might, in various cultural contexts, be regarded as contribut-

ing to aesthetic experience while qualifying as neither necessary nor sufficient conditions. Yet, once enough of them are present, the community judgment would be that the accumulation has crossed a threshold and we are warranted in deeming the experience aesthetic.




This way of looking at things makes the determination that a given experience is an aesthetic experience analogous to the determination in recent versions of the institutional theory of art as to whether a given putative artwork is an artwork.13 Just as the institutional theory is now understood to

imply that the art-status of an artifact is achieved, rather than conferred, and achieved in light of the artworld's evolving and fluctuating criteria of

recognition, so the view we present here takes aesthetic experience to require acceptance by the community of those who have a stake in aesthetic experience, an agreement that enough contributing elements are present to war- rant the conclusion that this or that experience is aesthetic. If the institutional theory is correct, there is nothing a priori about artwork status; and if the view we are advancing here is right, there is equally nothing a priori about the status of aesthetic experience. Both ultimately depend on people in this or that community deciding that enough qualifying features are

present for the status in question to be acknowledged.

Does "Aesthetic Experience" Do Any Philosophical Work?

This brings us to the second issue. The skepticism that often characterizes

attempts to define or delineate aesthetic experience is usually accompanied by the belief that defining or delineating it would not advance the field of aesthetics very much. That is, many people believe that definitions of "aes-

thetic," like definitions of "art," do not do much, if any, real philosophical or pedagogical work. Implicit in Smith's writings is a response to this attitude: having a firm theoretical grip on the nature of aesthetic experience is crucial for adequate, let alone excellent, art education.

One of the recurring themes of Smith's work is his conviction that educators want (or should want) to enrich the lives of their students. The aes-

thetic, he rightly insists, is at the heart of such enrichment. Not all aesthetic

experiences are equal; and Smith bravely (for the nastiness of culture wars has sometimes had the effect of silencing more timid voices) argues that one can improve the lives of students only if one recognizes that some experiences are better than others.

If one believes that some aesthetic experiences are more rewarding than

others, and if one wants to enrich the lives of students, one must look for

strategies that produce significant aesthetic differences in those lives and

help students become conscious of those differences, what accounts for them, and what makes some better or more rewarding than others. This argument might seem obvious until one remembers how often, in contemporary dis- course about art, one hears the question, "What difference does knowing that make?" The "that" can refer to a multitude of facts or features - knowl-

edge about artistic techniques, information about the life and social milieu of an artist, or learning that a work is a forgery, for instance.




Aesthetic Difference and Forgery

Consider the case of forgeries. Suppose you learn that a work you have long admired and believed to have been painted by Vermeer was in fact not

painted by him but by the famous forger Van Meegeren. It is not uncommon for people to respond in the following way:

If I like it, why should I care whether it was done by Vermeer or Van Meegeren? Surely it cannot matter aesthetically. I am still pleased by the content, colors, spatial relationships, and brushstrokes. Maybe it matters economically or historically, but surely not aesthetically. My aesthetic experience remains untouched by the knowledge that a work is a forgery.

Obviously, such a response draws upon an implicit notion of what consti- tutes aesthetic experience. Here, aesthetic experience is being taken to be a

simple matter of whether or not an individual responds with or without

pleasure to what is immediately perceivable. Smith does not deny that individual response is the heart of aesthetic experience, but he insists that this

response is by no means a simple matter. If it were, aesthetic education would be unnecessary.

What aesthetic difference could historical, critical, or philosophic sophis- tication make to individual response? Smith has persistently argued that

learning in all of these areas can make a very substantial difference. It is his view that art calls upon the full range of a person's cognitive and conative

responses. So in order to maximize aesthetic responsiveness, cultivation of sense as well as sensibilities would be necessary. Intelligent appreciation of art entails an awareness of the history, cultural roles, problems and puzzles, and so on that make the artistic enterprise what it is. For this reason, Smith has been an early and steadfast advocate of integrative approaches in art

education, pedagogical designs that coordinate studio art training with in- struction in art history, psychology, criticism, philosophical aesthetics, and other related subjects. Under his editorship, the Journal of Aesthetic Education has been the nation's most prominent sounding board for new ideas in this direction.

This approach to art education, and to thinking about art in general, re-

quires that knowledge about art be firmly wedded to our responses to art. And when we are having a proper, or full-blown, aesthetic experience, we are doing something that draws upon knowledge just as much as it draws

upon emotive reaction. So, to return to the example of forgeries, it would seem that the skeptic must somehow be wrong in thinking that our aesthetic

experiences of two paintings that look just the same must be the same. To see

just why this outcome (one that seems counterintuitive to many) should be deemed compelling, it will be useful to review a line of argument developed by Goodman.




Goodman argued that knowing that a work is a forgery matters a lot to our aesthetic experience of it. An everyday example may help us catch the drift of Goodman's subtle approach. On puzzle pages in many newspapers and magazines there are sets of pictures that appear at first glance to be identical. However, a caption announces "there are at least fourteen differences between these two pictures," and challenges us to find them. These

drawings are typically of such a quality that, even if one finds all of the dif-

ferences, one's aesthetic experience (if one has any at all) is similar for each.

However, one can imagine it otherwise; for some very small differences in

objects result in very different aesthetic experiences. But someone must see

(or hear, or taste, or feel, or smell) the difference in order for there to be a difference in one's experience.

Distinctions of this kind -between differences that make a difference and those that do not - are the key ingredients in Goodman's theory. Take the case of forgeries that are attempted duplications.l4 Since no two paintings can be alike (if they are really paintings and not mechanical or elec- tronic reproductions), knowing that the painting in front of us is a forgery is sufficient for knowing that it somehow differs from the original. Suppose now that we have two paintings in front of us and are told that one is a forgery of the other. It is obvious that there must be differences, even if these differences are not immediately or easily visible to us. Like the reader of the

puzzles page, we may begin to see how many differences we can uncover. And once we begin to do this, according to Goodman, it becomes clear that there is an aesthetic difference between the two, even though we could not

immediately perceive it. That is, even if we do not see any differences, our

looking changes. We attend more closely to details, for instance. In the active engagement of aesthetic activity aesthetic difference results whenever one's engagement changes - even if that engagement may not have an im- mediate effect in the sense of altering what we actually see. People who dis-

agree with Goodman over this issue generally do so because they believe that there cannot be an aesthetic difference if no one can see a difference. You cannot care aesthetically, they would argue, if you do not respond aes-

thetically. And most specialists and non-specialists who take this position tend to believe that emotional response is paramount. They would insist that if one is emotionally moved, it matters little what may or may not be true of the object.

Now, it is clear that both of these interpretations of "aesthetic difference" have important implications for art education. If one's aim is to produce students whose aesthetic experiences grow (both widen and deepen), but one believes that change (difference) is rooted solely in emotional or expres- sive response, then emphasis will naturally have to be put on enhancing re-

sponsive behavior. Neither Goodman nor Smith denies the importance of

responsive behavior; they both insist that full and proper art experience




involves both thought and feeling. As Goodman puts it, in human experiences of artworks, the emotions function cognitively.15 As Smith sees it, aesthetic experience, whether of art or anything else, is necessarily both cognitive and emotive. Both thinkers put looking for (rather than mere looking at) at the center of such experiences - a sense of "looking for" that cuts across many divisions between aspects of human awareness.

It is difficult to say whether Smith would agree with Goodman, that the fact that there is a difference between two works in itself actually consti- tutes an aesthetic difference. Certainly Smith firmly believes that the way we look at things matters essentially to aesthetic experience. Knowing things about works in general can change our emotional or cognitive re-

sponse, and he would agree that looking for differences makes for better viewers. The central goal of education in the arts should be what Smith calls

"percipience," an enhanced capacity for reflective observation as well as an inclination to engage in such observation. Aesthetic appreciation involves careful viewing, but also the desire to view closely. Genuine aesthetic activ-

ity involves a sense that one is engaged in discoveries, and if discovery is

valuable, so must be the teaching of activity that is likely to yield those discoveries and the desire to make them.

Conclusion

The lesson that emerges from our examination of Goodman's treatment of aesthetic difference in connection with forgeries is the very lesson that per- meates Smith's writings on improving aesthetic learning in our nation's schools and museums. It is that intelligent art observers should be intro- duced to the pleasures of thoughtful scrutiny, not left just to raw reaction and titillation.16 He insists that "at their best, works of art require years of

study and half a lifetime of experience and growing familiarity for their full

appreciation."17 Simply being in the presence of a work of art is not enough; if it were, study would yield no deepening of response. We have used the

forgery issue as but one example of the difference that certain kinds of information are thought to make in aesthetic experience. Smith includes all kinds of information as having an aesthetic impact - for example, information about how and by whom and for whom something was made, its intended message, its style, and the culture in which it was made as well as the one in which it is being and has been viewed.18 All kinds of facts can make for greater percipience, for more looking for, not just looking at. Scru-

tiny, as Smith describes it, is an activity that tends to produce not just emo-

tions, but emotions functioning cognitively. Works that affect us emotion-

ally may be said to have an aesthetic impact on us; but so do activities such as scrutiny, that simply impel us to look more closely at things. According to Smith, this is why percipient individuals are more likely than are others




to have rewarding aesthetic experiences. Thus, scrutinizing in itself makes an aesthetic difference. Among other things, it is fun; if it were not, the "find the fourteen differences" puzzles would soon disappear from our

newspapers. Good art is art that repays sustained attention.19 That which sustains at-

tention is itself aesthetically valuable. Thus, if the fact that something is a

forgery (or is painted by van Gogh, or is intended to convey the message that life is short) both engages and sustains scrutiny, it is aesthetically valuable and hence makes an aesthetic difference. Art education where attention per se is considered important will be shaped quite differently from that in which emotional or pleasurable responses alone are valued. Smith is

rightly dubious about art classes that are limited to asking students how an

object makes them feel, or what images a musical composition brings to mind, or why they like something. A correct view of the nature of aesthetic experience goes to work most effectively when it exhibits its important implications for the nature of aesthetic education. And these implications are just what Ralph Smith has spent his long and distinguished career pointing out.

NOTES

1. Melvin Rader and Bertram Jessup, Art and Human Values (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976), 61.

2. Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton University Press, 1982), 472- 73. Sparshott goes on in this section to enumerate and discuss the major ambiguities and muddles.

3. Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (Fall 1956).

4. Monroe C. Beardsley, "Aesthetic Experience Regained," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, no. 1 (Fall 1969): 5.

5. Carroll is, as it happens, is Monroe C. Beardsley Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin.

6. Noel Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41-62.

7. Gigetta Regoli, et al., Louvre, Paris (New York: Newsweek, 1967), 19. 8. This objective and its preconditions are thoroughly described in Kathleen

Walsh-Piper, "Museum Education and the Aesthetic Experience," Journal of Aesthetic Education 28, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 105-15.

9. Ralph Smith, "Philosophy and Theory of Aesthetic Education," in Aesthetics and Arts Education, ed. Ralph A. Smith and Alan Simpson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 137.

10. Ibid., 135. 11. Beardsley's theory resolved a welter of ingredients into five criteria: Object di-

rectedness; felt freedom, detached affect, active discovery, and wholeness (a sense of integration, self-acceptance and self-discovery) on the part of the per- ceiver. These criteria are described in detail and discussed at some length in Albert William Levi and Ralph A. Smith, Art Education: A Critical Necessity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 146-50.

12. This point is argued at length in Part I of Marcia Eaton, Merit: Aesthetic and Ethical (Oxford University Press, 2001).




13. The revised standard version of this theory is to be found in George Dickie, The Art Circle (New York: Haven, 1984).

14. This is, of course, only one kind of forgery. Another, and more common kind, is that in which a work is presented by as having been created by someone else, but is not a copy of a work already made by that person.

15. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (India- napolis: Hackett, 1976), 248-52.

16. Ralph A. Smith, "Toward Percipience: A Humanities Curriculum for Arts Edu- cation," in The Arts, Education, and Aesthetic Knowing; Ninety-First Yearbook of the National Societyfor the Study of Education, ed. Bennett Reimer and Ralph A. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 51-69.

17. Ibid., 60. 18. Ibid., 54. Goodman has an extensive information set, too, but not as extensive as

Smith's. (That, however, is a topic for another paper.) 19. This position is developed at length in Eaton, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical.



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Aesthetic Experience: Its Revival and Its Relevance to Aesthetic Education