Once-Told Tales (An Essay in Literary Aesthetics) || The Aesthetic Property

Once-Told Tales: An Essay in Literary Aesthetics, First Edition. Peter Kivy.© 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

1 Some Varieties of Aesthetic Properties

There is no question here of trying to give an exhaustive typology of aes-thetic properties, nor do I claim that my mode of classification is the only possible one. But I do think it would be helpful to distinguish a few differ-ent kinds.

a Simple perceptual properties

Many of the aesthetic properties Sibley enumerated, in his original essay, were properties that seem to be experienced much in the way we experi-ence simple sensible properties such as colors or tastes or smells. Thus: “graceful, delicate, dainty, handsome, comely, elegant, garish.”1 Of course these properties are not simple: they supervene on complex agglomera-tions of non-aesthetic properties. But the point is that they are experi-enced as simple. They are, in experience anyway, present to the external senses of sight or hearing; and, if they exist in silently read literature at all, it must be in some way analogous to that: in the mind’s eye or ear, as I have been suggesting above. We hear the gracefulness of a tune or see the garishness of a painting as we hear the timbre of the oboe or see the redness of the apple.

Chapter 3

The Aesthetic PropertyIts Kinds and Its Kind

1 Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics, p. 2.

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The Aesthetic Property: Its Kinds and Its Kind 27

b Complex perceptual properties

Sibley also adduces as aesthetic properties such “relational” ones as “unified, balanced, integrated ….”2 I call them “relational” because they cannot be fully perceived except as relations of parts to one another and to a whole of which they are the parts. A symphony is unified by virtue of the relationships of its themes or harmonies or counterpoints to one another in specific ways; and the unity is per-ceived and appreciated as such when the listener perceives that the themes are so related. Likewise with the balance of masses in a painting or the integration of events in a novel. Balance and integration, like unity, are complex relations of parts to each other and to a whole. And I think we can usefully contrast them to aesthetic properties of the simple, perceptual kind by saying that we “perceive” in the case of the latter but “perceive that” in the former case.

c Emotive properties

Sibley refers to the emotive properties of artworks as “aesthetic” ones, as do others who have written about aesthetic properties since. I think this is a mistake. Some are, but some are not.

On my view (which many people do not share), the emotive properties of absolute music, which is to say, pure instrumental music, are properties of musical structure and its “phenomenology,” and so are rightly denominated as aesthetic. But, when we say that music is moving, we are saying that it moves us, or has the capacity to move us emotionally; and I see no reason to call that an aesthetic property of the music, although it might be the result of its aesthetic properties and certainly is an important artistic fact about it.

As for the arts of content, the situation is a complex one. Staying exclu-sively with silently read literature, which is my present concern, a sad novel may be sad because it depicts or concerns sad events. But I see no reason to call this sadness an aesthetic quality of the novel, although it is certainly an important artistic one. A sad novel, so described, may also produce sadness in the reader. But I see no reason to call this property of causing sadness an aesthetic quality of the novel either, although it too is certainly an important artistic one. Similarly, characters may, by their nature, cause us to experience emotions towards them: anger at a character for his villainy, sorrow over a character for her misfortune, and so on. But again, I see no reason to call the power of fictional characters to arouse emotions in readers aesthetic properties, although they are certainly important artistic ones. These are, nevertheless, extremely important aspects of the novel and will be discussed at length in the appropriate place, which is to say, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.

2 Ibid., p. 1.


28 The Aesthetic Property: Its Kinds and Its Kind

Is this merely a terminological point? Whether or not I call these emotive aspects of silently read fiction “aesthetic” properties, I have agreed that they are very important artistic ones. On the other hand, they do not seem to qualify as “aesthetic” properties according to my understanding of what aes-thetic properties of artworks are; namely, “phenomenological” properties and properties of structure. And there is some real intuitive pull to under-stand them in this way, because they are the properties that seem, not entirely, but for the most part, to be distinguishable, roughly speaking, as “form” and “medium” rather than “content.” My view is that the point at issue here is not merely a terminological one. There is good reason to insist that the emo-tive, expressive properties of absolute music are aesthetic properties, whereas those of silently read literature, for the most part, are not. I will argue this view in more detail in Section 2, where the “aesthetics” of the novel will be the subject of discussion.

d Non-sensate properties of silent language

Finally, we must acknowledge the existence of properties of silently read lit-erature that are clearly aesthetic and just as clearly non-sensible properties, even to the “inner” senses: properties, in fact, of language and of literary structure that are “perceived” in the understanding. We experience the com-plexity of a Jamesian sentence, the intricacy of a Dickensian plot, and so on. We may indeed admire the beauty of a literary description without, in any way, ascribing the beauty to the mental image that the description might arouse or the sound the language of the description might produce for the “inner ear.” In fact, these make up, doubtless, the lion’s share of all the aes-thetic properties that silently read fictional works may possess (although I shall go on to argue that this is a smaller lion than might be suspected).

As I said at the beginning, this classification of aesthetic properties is offered as neither exhaustive nor the only way to carve the bird. That having been said, and with this classification, such as it is, in hand, it is now time to return to what was, after all, announced as the major topic of this study: the aesthetics of silently read literary fiction.

2 The Aesthetics of Fiction

Let us pause to take stock. Essentially, the outcome of the previous delibera-tions is that the aesthetics of non-dramatic narrative literature changed radi-cally with the advent of silently read literary fiction. Or, the way I would prefer to put it, there appeared a new art form, the novel, which presented a new problem for the aesthetics of literature: specifically, a new problem for



our understanding of aesthetic properties as defined above. For, being the “flagship” silently read fictional genre, the modern novel presents, in its most prominent and pressing form, the problem of non-perceptual aesthetic prop-erties (if there are such), and the problem, as well, of an art form that may be, even in some of its most distinguished embodiments, more or less non- aesthetic, more or less bereft of aesthetic qualities, as compared with the other major fine arts.

Non-dramatic narrative fiction, before the era of silent reading, was, as we have seen, a performing art, even when you read to yourself, since, when you did read to yourself, you read aloud. As such, it provided perceptual aesthetic properties to at least one of the external senses—the aural sense, and, indeed, to the sense of sight as well—in the public recitation of such poetry, because, obviously, the public performance would include gesture, facial expression, and “body language” as part of the spectacle. And spectacle it does seem to have been, in ancient times anyway, if Plato’s none-too-approving description in the Republic is to be credited. For the reciter of poetry, Plato tells us, “will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes; pipes, trum-pets, and all sorts of instruments: he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, and crow like a cock; his entire art will consist of imitations of voice and ges-ture ….”3 An abundance of perceptual aesthetic properties here, indeed, for both the senses of sight and hearing.

But the novel presents another aesthetic face entirely. Gone are all those aspects of performance that Plato described (and deplored), and are the stuff of perceptual aesthetic properties. The eighteenth century tried to preserve at least some of them, in a performance to the mind’s eye—with little success, as we have seen. And my own attempt to picture silent reading of literary fiction—the novel in particular—as a recital, a performance to the mind’s ear, while, I think, more successful in many respects, will certainly not preserve in abundance the sonic aesthetic properties of a live poetry recitation, even though, as Daniel Dennett has aptly put it, “Not only do we talk to ourselves silently, but sometimes we do this in a particular ‘tone of voice’.”4 What the notation of music can do for the inner ear, the notation of language cannot, where the novel is concerned, because the sound of its language is not rich in aesthetic properties, as is the sound of poetic language. The novel requires a different aesthetics, if it is to have an aesthetics at all.

Let me begin with the following “definition” of Noel Carroll’s, of what he takes to be the “aesthetic” experience of an artwork. He writes: “an experience

3 Plato, Republic, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 98 (397).4 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown, 1991), p. 59.



of an artwork is aesthetic if it involves attention to the form of the work or to its expressive or other aesthetic properties.”5 Adopting this definition for present purposes, I now want to ask how much, to what degree, the experi-ence of the silently read novel is an aesthetic experience. And, to answer, a decision must be made about properties, properly called “aesthetic,” the novel possesses. For I am going to stipulate, for my purposes, although Carroll may not want to follow me here, that the aesthetic experience of an artwork just is the experience of its aesthetic properties.

I take it, to begin with, that when we talk of attention to the form of a work we mean by this attention to the aesthetic properties of form; further, that even when we are perceiving the whole form as an entity we are perceiving an aesthetic property of the work. And novels, to be sure, do have form; their form can possess aesthetic properties or in itself be an aesthetic property.

Second, Carroll, in the above-cited passage, clearly construes expressive properties as aesthetic ones. And, again, novels, without a doubt, possess them. But whether they are aesthetic properties I have already questioned, and answered in the negative. And Carroll, interestingly enough, seems of two minds about whether to call expressive properties “aesthetic.” In the pas-sage in question he certainly seems to call them such. But in a previous arti-cle, “Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,” Carroll refers to “aesthetic and expressive properties,” and writes that “Related to the detection of expressive properties is the detection of what are called aesthetic properties ….”6 I shall return to this point again later on.

Finally, Carroll refers to “other aesthetic properties” besides expressive properties and (aesthetic) properties of structure. Discussion of these “other properties” I will postpone until the end. But what I want to talk about first are aesthetic properties of structure; for they are uncontroversial in two respects. All agree that novels have “structure” and all agree that artistic structure of any kind can possess aesthetic properties. So we may consider the relevance of the aesthetic properties belonging to novelistic structure with-out any further preliminaries.

About novelistic structure and its aesthetic properties, I have a claim to make that might on first reflection seem implausible. It is that the perception or direct awareness of novelistic structure and its aesthetic properties plays little or no part in the novel reader’s understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of novels, even when the reader is a sensitive and sophisticated one, the novel a serious or even great work of literary art. My claim here is the mirror image, for novel appreciation, of Jerrold Levinson’s claim, with regard to absolute music,

5 Carroll, “Non-perceptual Aesthetic Properties,” p. 414.6 Noel Carroll, “Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (2000), pp. 198–199.



“that insight into large-scale form simply does not enter into the basic under-standing of [absolute] music, [and] that such understanding can thus be attained without any awareness whatsoever of overall structure.”7 I hasten to add that I am in thorough disagreement with Levinson’s claim about absolute music, and have argued to that effect at length elsewhere.8 And that is an important point. For the fact, as I perceive it to be, that the perception of large-scale structural form is a vital part of musical appreciation, where absolute music is concerned, and of minimal if any importance in the appreciation of the novel, marks out an absolutely crucial difference between the two art forms and the role that the aesthetic properties of formal structure play in each.

The way I construe absolute music, it possesses no semantic or represen-tational content at all. It is not “about” anything. It serves, as art, an entirely different master. It is one of the pure “aesthetic” arts in the sense defined above. Its only artistic properties are its aesthetic properties. And its emotive, expressive properties are not properties of its content, since it has none, as they are in the novel, but properties of its musical fabric, and hence—if artis-tic properties, as they usually (although not always) are—aesthetic properties as well. Thus, as I interpret Walter Pater’s famous claim that all of the arts aspire to the “condition” of music, what he was, in effect, saying, is that all of the arts aspire to be purely aesthetic arts—arts whose artistic and aesthetic properties converge.9 It is an importantly false claim—a false claim neverthe-less, which is a point I will return to later on.

A second, very important, point to notice in this contrast between abso-lute music and the novel is that music of the kind I am discussing—that is to say, absolute music of the classical canon—is a repeatable art, whereas the novel, usually, normally, is not. By that I mean that we tend to listen to the same musical compositions, particularly the great ones, over and again in a lifetime. Thus, in our repeated listening to a musical work, we become more and more directly aware of its large, overall musical structure, whereas, in novel-reading, we are mostly enthralled with and directly aware of the story, and whatever moral, philosophical, psychological, and other propositional content the author wishes to convey. For this reason, the larger structure of absolute music, if it is not a direct object of awareness and appreciation on first or second hearing, becomes so, gradually, on subsequent ones. But, in contrast, on reading a novel for the first time, which is usually the only time, the larger structure plays little if any part in our direct acquaintance with the

7 Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 28.8 See Peter Kivy, “Music in Memory and Music in the Moment,” in Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 183–217.9 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 106.



artistic qualities of the work. It only could begin to do so if we were to experience the novel over and again, as we do musical works.

This is not to say that the large structure of the novel plays no part in our experience of it. It plays what Levinson refers to, in regard to music, as a causal role.10 In other words, in structuring her novel, the novelist makes those artis-tic properties that are directly experienced by the reader available to him in the ways that she intends them to be. What is not available to him is that structure itself, except in subsequent re-readings or in scholarly or critical scrutiny. It is, rather, like the works of a watch or stage machinery behind the scenes, making the effect, not being the effect. It is the silent artistic partner.

A crucial question now looms. What kind of reader of novels are we talk-ing about here?11 What kind of musical listener are we talking about? For it might be argued that the serious reader of novels and the serious listener to symphonies are both the same: we expect of both that they perceive and appreciate the inner structure of the novel and symphony, respectively, in contrast to the casual, surface reader or listener who perceives only the phe-nomenological “surface” of the work. And so it looks to be a false dichotomy that I have been drawing between the serious reader of novels, who does not perceive directly the inner structure of the work and its aesthetic properties, and the serious listener to symphonies, who does. It turns out, then, accord-ing to this objection, that, with regard to the inner structure of both of the two arts, the truly serious appreciator must have direct awareness of the inner structure and the aesthetic properties such structure possesses. Thus it would appear that, contrary to what I have been arguing, the serious novel reader’s experience of aesthetic properties, on this regard, is not less than that of the truly serious listener to symphonies.

This argument seems airtight. And yet the intuition persists—at least my intuition persists—that there is an important distinction to be made, in this regard, between the serious reader of novels and the serious listener to sym-phonies. How can this intuition be sustained in light of the seemingly airtight argument?

I think what one wants to say, here, to begin with, is that the simple, course-grained distinction between the serious reader or listener and the non-serious one will not do. It will not capture my intuition of a substantial, if not sharply defined, difference between the serious reader of novels and the serious lis-tener to symphonies. So let us see what can be done to sharpen it up.

Let me begin with readers of novels and say that there are four kinds of serious readers of novels. I will call the first kind of serious reader the in-it-for-the-story

10 Levinson, Music in the Moment, pp. 43–50.11 This question, and my attempt to answer it, was occasioned by an objection of Noel Carroll.



reader. This reader can best be understood by contrasting her with the non- serious reader. Both the non-serious reader and the serious in-it-for-the-story reader are in-it-for-the-story readers. The difference is in what they read, and what impor-tance the reading experience has for them.

The non-serious reader tends to read to “fill in the time.” He would prefer watching sports or sit-coms on television. But when in an airport, waiting for his plane, or on the plane or train with nothing else to occupy him, he will sometimes read a novel. It will be a detective novel, maybe sci-ence fiction, or one of the many other genres of “time wasters” that popu-late the bestseller lists and the paperback racks of magazine stands in public waiting rooms. And, of course, he is in it for the story. He wants to be cap-tured by the plot: it should be the sort of book that the reviewers or adver-tising blurbs describe as a page-turner the reader “cannot put down.” However, once it has been put down, after the story has been imbibed, it is put down—for good. It is never picked up again. After you know the story, what’s the point?

The serious in-it-for-the-story reader is distinguished from the non-serious reader first by the choice of her reading matter. She does not necessarily shun time-wasters, but her principal diet is the masterpieces of the past and the serious novels of the present that aspire to the level of those masterpieces. She is, like the non-serious reader, in it for the story, but she is after deeper, more complex, more richly rewarding stories than the time-waster can provide. Nor, second, is the reading of novels, for her, something to fill up the time when there is nothing better to do. Reading novels is, for her, something better to do. Nevertheless, because she is an in-it-for-the-story reader, she does not tend to re-read a novel except after an extended period of time, when the plot and characters have more or less faded from memory and the novel can be read “almost as if new.”

A second kind of serious reader is what I shall call the serious thoughtful reader. Like the serious in-it-for-the-story reader, the serious thoughtful reader’s staple diet is the great novels of the literary canon and the contem-porary aspirants to it. And, like the serious in-it-for-the-story reader, he is certainly in it for the story in a big way. But many, I am tempted to say most, of the great novels in the canon are not only meant by their authors to tell a story (although the importance of story-telling should never be underesti-mated). Rather, they are meant to “say something” to us; more than one “something,” usually.

According to one theory, to which I subscribe, a major artistic purpose of many of the great novels in the Western canon is the conveying of moral, philosophical, psychological, social, political, and other theses, of deep con-cern to us, which we are meant to think about or seriously consider in what I have termed, in various places, the “gaps” and the “after life of the reading



experience.”12 The gaps are the periods between episodes of novel-reading (for a novel cannot nor is it meant to be read at a single go); and the after life is the period after one has finished reading a novel, when it is still fresh in the mind and its contents still an object of thought.

The serious thoughtful reader, then, is the reader who is both in it for the story and thinks in the gaps and in the after life about the theses that the author of the novel meant to convey by the story. Both make up what I would call this reader’s literary experience of the novel or, in more general terms, his artistic experience of it. But, so far, the experience, on any reckoning, con-tains no significant aesthetic component. Neither the experience of the story nor the contemplation of the theses that the story is meant to convey have anything to do with “aesthetic properties” as loosely defined here. We enter the realm of the aesthetic in the next step.

Let me introduce to you now what I will call the serious structural reader. This reader, like the previous two, is certainly in it for the story, in a major way, and in it for the thought content of the novel as well. But unlike the others the serious structural reader becomes aware of and enjoys, from time to time, the way the novel is put together. During the gaps and the after life, and perhaps even during the reading process, the serious structural reader will perceive and enjoy the various aspects of structure that can rightly be described as aesthetic features. Part of her artistic appreciation is aesthetic appreciation properly so-called.

Finally, to complete this reader taxonomy, we pass one step beyond the serious structural reader, although this may be a difference in degree only, with a grey area in between, to what I will call the serious studious reader. This is a reader, so I imagine him, not reading the novel to artistically and aesthetically enjoy it, although he may do in the process, but a reader study-ing the novel, for the purpose, perhaps, of preparing himself to teach it in a class or to improve his own writing skills. This is certainly an appropriate way to deal with a novel. But it is not the way the author had in mind for those she hoped would be her readers. The Greek playwrights did not write their tragedies for the purpose of having Aristotle analyze them in the Poetics.

As I perceive the philosophy of art, the serious studious reader, as described above, is not part of its domain; or, if he is, he is on the peripheries. So I shall set him aside, as I will the non-serious reader. My interest lies in the first three serious readers, the serious in-it-for-the-story reader, the serious thoughtful reader, and the serious structural reader. And I want now to see what ana-logues we can find for them in the population of serious listeners to sympho-nies. For the intuition I am trying to support is that there is an important disanalogy that has to do with the perception of structure.

12 See, for example, Kivy, The Performance of Reading, Sections 24–26 and 28.



I assume, as I have above, but will not argue for here, the view that symphonies and their ilk do not tell stories: are not narrative artworks. Nevertheless, without stretching things too far, I think we can find a musical analogue to the serious in-it-for-the-story reader. I will simply put “story” in scare quotes and call him the serious in-it-for-the-“story” listener. The obvi-ous question is going to be, of course, “What’s the ‘story’?” If we say that the story of a novel is the succession of connected fictional events, then why not say, analogously, that the “story” of a symphony is the succession of con-nected musical events. And, as the serious in-it-for-the-story reader is the reader who experiences this succession of fictional events in the great novels of the literary canon, so the serious in-it-for-the-“story” listener is the listener who experiences this succession of musical events in the great symphonies (and other works of absolute music) in the musical canon. No one has described the latter better than Jerrold Levinson, in Music in the Moment, where he writes, for example, of what he calls basic musical listening that

that way of hearing is one that involves connecting together tones currently sounding, ones just sounded, and ones about to come, synthesizing them into a flow as far as possible at every point …. [W]e miss nothing crucial by staying, as it were, in the moment, following the development of events in real time, engaging in no conscious mental activity of wider scope that has the whole or some extended portion of it as object.13

But since, as I have said, I reject the notion that absolute music tells stories or contains fictional content of any kind, I must reject, as well, any sugges-tion that such music might convey, in the way serious novels frequently do, theses of a philosophical, psychological, or moral character, or any other such propositional content, through fictional narrative. That being the case, there is no listener to absolute music analogous to the serious thoughtful reader. For there would be nothing for the serious thoughtful listener to think about that is in any way analogous to what is thought about by the serious thought-ful reader.

There is, however, a direct analogue in absolute music to the serious structural reader; what obviously should be called the serious structural lis-tener. For, whereas there is no step in absolute music from the serious in-it-for-the-“story” listener to the listener who thinks about the propositional content of absolute music, as it has no such content, there is a step to the structural listener—a step encouraged by the repeated listening to such music, or, perhaps, the very motivation for repeated listening—its ultimate payoff. Indeed, it is the only step beyond in-it-for-the-“story” listening that the serious

13 Levinson, Music in the Moment, p. 29.



listener to absolute music can take that affords a deeper and more expansive artistic experience of musical works, as the next step after that, as in the case of the serious structural reader, is to the kind of attention to the work that involves studying it for reasons other than artistic and aesthetic appreciation.

Here, then, is the situation as I see it. There are four kinds of serious read-ers of novels: in-it-for-the-story readers, thoughtful readers, structural read-ers, and studious readers; and three kinds of serious listeners to symphonies, sonatas, string quartets, and the like: in-it-for-the-“story” listeners, structural listeners, and studious listeners. I am contrasting, in my argument, serious in-it-for-the-story readers and serious thoughtful readers with serious struc-tural listeners, and I am arguing that there is an important disanalogy between them. For, whereas serious structural listeners are listeners to an important class of absolute music’s aesthetic properties, serious in-it-for-the-story read-ers, and serious thoughtful readers, are experiencing a myriad of artistic fea-tures, but not experiencing, in any significant way, the aesthetic features of plots and other aspects of novel structure.

But why, it might well be asked, should I be making this comparison, which yields the disanalogy, instead of comparing serious in-it-for-the-story reading with serious in-it-for-the-“story” listening, and serious structural reading with serious structural listening, both of which comparisons yield near-perfect anal-ogies? It looks as if I have simply chosen, in a completely ad hoc fashion, just that comparison that will yield the disanalogy my argument requires.

I cannot give a fully defended answer here. What I can say, without argu-ment, is that I believe the most prevalent class of serious readers, in our tradi-tion, as well as the most demanding of our attention as philosophers of art, is the combined class of serious in-it-for-the-story readers and thoughtful readers. Furthermore, the class of structural listeners, although smaller perhaps than the class of in-it-for-the-“story” listeners, is, I believe, the class of listeners that com-posers of serious classical music have composed for and hoped for, and, there-fore, the class of listeners most demanding of our attention as philosophers of art. That is my defense; and it will have to suffice for the time being, although I will have more to say about the importance of stories in Chapter 9.

In sum, then, with the above distinctions and qualifications clearly in mind, the larger structure of the novel, although it can be and sometimes is the bearer of aesthetic properties, does not figure much in the direct experi-ence of the average, or even the above-average and sophisticated, reader; hence, it is not a source, in the usual novel-reading experience, of aesthetic properties—in direct contrast, in this regard, with pure instrumental music. For the reader’s primary motives, in picking up a novel, at least under the usual circumstances, are to be told a story, and, in the case of the thoughtful reader, to contemplate its propositional content; and it is the story that is the primary focus of attention. “Literature,” as Nick Zangwill has remarked, “is



the least formal art because it involves content first and foremost.”14 And again, as an earlier author averred, “I think it may be true to say that of all works of art, the novel is the kind which can be absorbed or consumed with the least awareness of aesthetic qualities.”15 Whereas, the listener comes to the symphony or sonata not to be told a story—there is no story to be told—but to attend to the formal structure and “phenomenal” properties of the musical work; to attend to, in a word, the musical events. So, if there are aesthetic properties to be experienced in the novel, they are, for most serious readers, in the story, not the structure. In this very important respect, then, the novel is a non-aesthetic art.

This brings us to the second category of aesthetic properties (so-called): the emotive or expressive ones. I denominate them aesthetic properties “so-called,” of course, because I have already evinced doubt about their status in that regard. And it is time now to pursue that point further. Why not think of them as “aesthetic”?

The quickest answer to this question is simply that there is no particular reason why we should call them “aesthetic.” Clearly, the way I use the term “aesthetic,” that emotive properties of novels are properties of artworks is no reason at all to call them such. Aesthetic properties of artworks, as I construe them, are not the only art-relevant properties of artworks. And the emotive properties of novels are, as I construe them, just such a case of properties that qualify as art-relevant but not as aesthetic properties.

Furthermore, the expressive properties of novels are, by and large, proper-ties of their plots: of the characters and narrated events. But fictional narra-tives, in regard to their expressive properties, are no different from factual or historical narratives, except, of course, that they are fictional. And, since there is no reason to call the expressive properties of factual or historical narratives aesthetic, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to do so in the case of fictional ones. Of course fictional narratives may possess other aesthetic properties that factual or historical narratives do not (although I by no means want to preclude the possibility of factual and historical narratives possessing aesthetic properties); and these other aesthetic properties of fictional narratives may contribute to the expressive aspects of their events and characters. But the expressive aspects remain, for all of that, artistic, not aesthetic.

The emotive features of fictional narratives that are most noticed both by readers and critics are those that attach to characters and events, and to the readers who react emotionally to them. Characters experience various

14 Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 72.15 Vivienne Mylne, “Reading and Re-Reading Novels,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 7 (1967), p. 68.



emotions in fiction as in fact. Those who read about them react in emotively appropriate ways themselves. Events, as well, both fictional and factual, may be appropriately described in emotive terms; and, as well, readers may react emotionally to them. In all of these cases, however, there is, again, no reason to call the emotions, either those of the characters or those of the readers, “aesthetic.” Some of them, of course, are artistic, which is to say, art- relevant. But that is neither here nor there, since to be aesthetic and to be artistic are two different things.

The upshot of all this is that, in the ways just stated, although rich in emo-tive qualities, the novel is not, thereby, richer in aesthetic qualities. In this respect it is, again, a non-aesthetic art.

But it must now be acknowledged that the kinds of emotive properties canvassed above do not exhaust the possibilities. There are, as well, the expressive properties of literary language itself. For not only does literary language describe for us characters and events that are sad or joyful, or what-ever, the language in which such characters and events are described can be emotively charged as well: it too, qua language, can possess expressive prop-erties. And these properties can, I think, with propriety, be described as “aesthetic” properties, in much the same sense as the expressive properties of absolute music. They are, at least in an attenuated sense of “perceive,” per-ceived properties of the linguistic medium. So here, finally, we have run up against true, undisputed aesthetic properties of the novel.

Furthermore, that they are aesthetic properties of literary language reminds us, if indeed we needed to be reminded of such an obvious and well-known fact, that literary language possesses other aesthetic properties besides the expressive ones. But before we go any further we must first give some more consideration than we have given already to the question of what kinds of properties, in general, aesthetic properties are. I hasten to add that this will not be an attempt to “define” aesthetic properties, give their necessary and sufficient conditions, or anything else like that.

3 What Properties are Aesthetic?

The two philosophers who first put the term “aesthetic” into our vocabulary were Baumgarten and Kant.

From Kant’s usage of the term we can learn a lot; but little, I think, about this particular subject—about what our own intuitions are concerning the nature of what we call aesthetic properties. For, as students reading Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” for the first time must continually be reminded, all Kant means by an “aesthetic” judgment is a judgment based upon some “inner” feeling, rather than upon a concept, according to which



usage “The rose is beautiful” would indeed be an “aesthetic” judgment, for him as for us, but so too would, for him and not for us, “The soup is delicious.”

Baumgarten’s usage is, however, another story, and more closely related to present intuitions, at least about aesthetic properties—our present con-cern. It will be remembered that, for Baumgarten, “aesthetics” is the “science” of external perception. Thus for Baumgarten, as for Kant, the term has broader application than it has for us, since it refers to external perception across the board, not merely a sub-set of it. Nor does Baumgarten, at least in the Reflections on Poetry, ever single out any particular perceptual qualities as “aesthetic,” the way we are wont to do. But he does single out poetic discourse, in which we would say “aesthetic” properties abound, as the pur-veyor, par excellence, of “sensate representations,” mental simulacra of external, and, for the most part, visual perceptions. As Baumgarten puts the point, “the representation of a picture is very similar to the sense idea to be depicted, and this is poetic …. Therefore a poem and a picture are similar …,” or, in other words, “Poetry is like a picture.”16 Thus for Baumgarten, unlike for Kant, the “aesthetic” is directly connected not with “inner feeling”; rather, with external perception. And it is this connection, I would argue, that endures in the modern conception, our conception of what aesthetic properties are.

Of course, how deep or how universal our intuitions concerning aesthetic properties are, or whether we indeed really have such intuitions, might be debated. Some years ago, the great philosopher of “ordinary language,” J.O. Urmson, pointed out to me, in conversation, that, since “aesthetic” is, as I mentioned early on, a word of recent coinage, ordinary language may not be a reliable guide and should be resorted to with a large dollop of caution. But, Urmson’s judicious warning to the contrary notwithstanding, “aesthetic” is, after all, a word used not only by philosophers but by the “man on the street” and the “woman on the Clapham omnibus” as well.17

I am not, I hasten to add, about to commit some kind of genetic fallacy by arguing that, because our concept of “aesthetic” properties has its origin in Baumgarten’s notion of the aesthetic as the perceptual, aesthetic properties therefore, as we construe them, must be perceptual ones. Clearly, as I have already pointed out, some aesthetic properties are not perceptual properties in any obvious way. Rather, what I do want to claim, which this origin suggests and further considerations will support, is that the core aesthetic properties,

16 Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, p. 52 (§39).17 This is not to say, of course, that every use of the word “aesthetic” is untainted by theory. In particular, one cannot help agreeing with Noel Carroll that “the notion of aesthetic experience is not an ordinary concept; it is not an article of common speech. It is a semi-specialized or theoretical idea.” Noel Carroll, “Aesthetic Experience Revisited,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (2002), pp. 162–163.



those we naturally feel comfortable calling “aesthetic,” are objects of the external senses, principally, but not exclusively, the senses of sight and hearing. And many of those aesthetic qualities that are not perceptual, can, neverthe-less, be seen to be derivative, so to speak, or parasitic on them: vestigially perceptual, if you will. I am trying here to avoid the term “metaphorical.” For I do not go so far as to share Nick Zangwill’s extreme position that “once we move away from the sensory, we move away from the aesthetic. And where we use aesthetic terms beyond the sensory, that use is metaphorical.”18

4 Mind Aesthetics?

But, against the view that aesthetic properties, as opposed to artistic proper-ties, are basically perceptual properties, the following objection can be brought. Writes Berys Gaut, in his impressive book, Art, Emotion and Ethics, about which I will have more to say in Chapter 4: “Attempting to character-ize this narrow sense of the aesthetic … in terms of sensuous pleasure (that is, pleasure in sense perception) is inadequate, because there are things that can be beautiful, such as mathematical proofs and thoughts, that cannot be per-ceived by the senses at all ….”19

The point is well taken, and, indeed, can be made stronger still. For math-ematic proofs and scientific theories can be tagged not only with the ubiqui-tous term “beautiful” but with more specific ones such as “elegant,” “clumsy,” and more. How can the point be met in defense of the view that aesthetic properties in the narrow sense are, au fond, perceptual properties?

Well, of course, the view that all aesthetic properties are perceptual prop-erties cannot be met by claiming that the elegance and beauty of relativity theory are perceptual properties, sans phrase. That simply is a non-starter. What can be done, however, is to show, by both history and analysis, the relationship the aesthetic properties of theories, and other “mental objects,” bear to the core aesthetic properties, which are, by and large, and by origin, perceptual properties. And I hope to convince, thereby, that the aesthetic properties of theories, theorems, and proofs, though perhaps not literally perceptual properties, are more perception-like than my skeptical reader may have suspected.

Interestingly enough, the observation that mathematical and scientific theorems and theories are bearers of aesthetic properties was made ten years before Baumgarten coined the term “aesthetic,” by Francis Hutcheson, in his Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, of 1725—the first of

18 Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, p. 143.19 Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 27.



the two works comprising his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, and arguably the inaugural work of modern philosophical aesthetics—in which Hutcheson devoted an entire section to “the Beauty of Theorems.” It will be highly informative, for present purposes, to examine what he had to say in this regard. And to do that we will have to spend some time with what we would call Hutcheson’s general theory of “aesthetic” per-ception. (He had the thing but not the word.)

Hutcheson founded his theory of aesthetic perception—the perception of what he called “Original or Absolute Beauty,” as opposed to the beauty of artistic representation—on Locke’s account of the perception of sec-ondary qualities, as Hutcheson understood that account. He wrote that “the Word Beauty is taken for the Idea rais’d in us, and a Sense of Beauty for our Power of receiving this Idea,”20 having taken seriously, it would seem, Locke’s suggestion that beyond the “five Senses there may justly be counted more ….”21

The sense of beauty Hutcheson conceived of as what he called, in the Inquiry concerning Beauty, an “internal sense,” by which he meant a sense not responsive to external, physical reality, but to complex ideas already given to us by the five external senses, or at least the senses of sight and hearing, if not the others, and the Lockean “sense” of “introspection.” These complex ideas, Hutcheson believed, causally interacted with the internal sense of beauty in much the same way the atomic or molecular structure of matter, on the Lockean model, causally interacted with the external senses to produce the ideas of the secondary qualities. And thus: “We may have the Sensation [of beauty] without knowing what is the Occasion of it; as a Man’s Taste may suggest Ideas of Sweets, Acids, Bitters, tho’ he be ignorant of the Forms of the small Bodys, or their Motions, which excite these Perceptions in him.”22 What we do know, at least what Hutcheson thought he knew, is that “The Figures [in complex ideas] which excite the Ideas of Beauty, seem to be those in which there is Uniformity amidst Variety.”23

Thus, on Hutcheson’s view, the perception of beauty is, as in the case of perceiving secondary qualities, what I call “non-epistemic perception.” Which is to say, just as we do not perceive that an object possesses a particular molec-ular structure, and then, in perceiving that, have the taste of sweet or bitter aroused in us, so we do not perceive that a complex idea possesses uniformity amidst variety, and then, in perceiving that, have the idea of beauty aroused in us. It is purely a case of efficient causation between the property and the

20 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (4th ed.; London, 1738), p. 7 (I, ix).21 Locke, Essay, p. 121 (II, ii, 3).22 Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, p. 29 (II, xiv).23 Ibid., p. 17 (II, iii).



sense: “the Pleasure is communicated to those who never reflected on this general Foundation ….”24

The basic outline of Hutcheson’s theory now in place, we can turn briefly to how it plays out in the case of mathematical and scientific theorems and theories. In essence, what Hutcheson wants to claim is that valid theorems and theories exhibit uniformity amidst variety, in that they generalize over particulars, the generalization representing the uniformity, the particulars the variety. “The Beauty of Theorems, or universal Truths demonstrated,” Hutcheson writes, “deserves a distinct Consideration, being of a Nature pretty different from the former kinds of Beauty; and yet there is none in which we shall see such an amazing Variety with Uniformity ….” “For,” he explains, “in one Theorem [uniformity] we may find, with the most exact Agreement, an infinite Multitude of particular Truths [variety] ….”25

Now what is truly remarkable about Hutcheson’s treatment of beauty in natural science and mathematics, besides the very fact that he did consider it at all, is that he construes scientific and mathematical beauty as perceptual qualities, although not, clearly, qualities perceived by any of the external senses. For, as we have seen, Hutcheson models the perception of beauty on the Lockean account of our perception of secondary qualities. Thus, as it is correct to say that, when my eye causally interacts with the atomic structure of the external world and the sensation of redness is induced in me, I perceive, I see the color red, so it is correct to say that, when my internal sense of beauty causally interacts with the complex idea (say) of the special theory of relativity and the idea of beauty is induced in me, I perceive, by sense percep-tion, as Hutcheson construes it, the beauty of that theory. And, in both cases, the perception is non-epistemic. But how can this be, in the case of science and mathematics? I do not have to understand the structure of matter to perceive redness. Surely, though, I have to understand special relativity to perceive its beauty.

Very true: the complex idea that is special relativity I make present to my consciousness by various mental activities, including the understanding. “The Mind,” as Hutcheson puts it, in Lockean fashion, “has a power of compound-ing Ideas, which were receiv’d separately; of comparing Objects by means of the Ideas, and of observing their Relations and Proportions ….”26 What is not present to my consciousness is the property of uniformity amidst variety that the object I am conscious of, special theory relativity, possesses. And that is the property that the internal sense of beauty causally interacts with, non-epistemically, producing the idea of beauty, which I do perceive.

24 Ibid., p. 29 (II, xiv).25 Ibid., p. 30 (III, i and ii).26 Ibid., p. 2 (I, iii).



Now, I am not trying to convince that Hutcheson’s is a plausible account of how the beauty of mathematics and natural science, or its other possible aesthetic properties, are perceived. It is not. What is important for present purposes is the attempt by Hutcheson to characterize what would later be called “aesthetic properties” of scientific and mathematical structures as perceptual properties. What might the significance of that attempt be?

It seems clear that, from the outset, aesthetic properties were conceived of as perceptual properties. The word “aesthetic” itself comes, after all, from the Greek word “to perceive.” And Baumgarten, the man who coined it, pre-sented aesthetics as the science of perception. It comes as no surprise, then, that Hutcheson should have tried, in his pioneering attempt at the “aesthet-ics of science,” to understand the beauty of science as a perceptual property, even though ten years before the word “aesthetics” came into being.

Furthermore, although, as I suggested above, I hold no brief for Hutcheson’s way of construing the aesthetic properties—which is to say, in Hutcheson’s case, the beauty—of mathematics and natural science as literally perceptual, there is more to be said for the view that they are perceptual than might first appear. In particular, as one recent commentator on what might be called the “aesthetics of science” has observed: “Scientists have always expressed a strong urge to think with visual images ….” He continues, “Artists and scientists alike seek a visual representation of worlds both visible and invisible.”27 And visual representations in science, it hardly needs urging, are bearers, in their structure, of aesthetic properties, whether seen on paper or “seen” in the imagination or “the mind’s eye.”

My point is not to deny that aesthetic properties can accrue to non- perceptual objects, but, nevertheless, to emphasize, first, that, in the earliest period in which we can see the concept of the aesthetic property emerging, the aesthetic properties of mathematics and natural science were seen as per-ceptual properties, and, second, that, even in rejecting this early account of such properties, we need not, by any means, relinquish all such properties to the mental and, hence, to the non-perceptual. Natural science, in any case, is not, by any means, all propositions and equations. And, when it employs visual imagery, it is open to a perceptual aesthetics.

Now, as I have said, I hold no brief for Hutcheson’s theory of aesthetic perception, either of theories and theorems or anything else. I have no wish to revive the theory of internal senses. But, that being said, there is more to be said in favor of an at least qualified account of the aesthetic properties of theories and theorems as perceptual properties. And to that seemingly outlandish claim I now want to turn.

27 Arthur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2000), p. vii.



5 Number Aesthetics?

Of course how we know or, to put it another way, how we are acquainted with “abstract objects,” such as some people take scientific theories, and mathematical theorems and proofs to be, is a thorny philosophical problem, to say the least. Indeed it is a problem that some have found so intractable they have denied the existence of abstract “objects” altogether. These are waters both muddy and deep. But before I move on I want to at least dip my toe in, and make a somewhat outlandish conjecture on which I will not abso-lutely rest my case, although I will throw it out for consideration.

One of the most disputed points in philosophy of mathematics is, of course, over the ontological status of numbers. The problem is well stated by a recent writer on the subject, Marcus Giaquinto, on whose work my outlandish conjecture rests. He writes:

Simple arithmetic entails that there are numbers, two of them between 3 and 6, for example, and infinitely many thereafter. But how do we know there are such things? If numbers exist, they would surely be abstract, and there seems to be no way of explaining our knowledge of abstract objects, short of postulating some supernatural mode of apprehending them.28

To exist is to be causally potent: to causally interact. We know the existence of “objects” through causal interaction with them, whether proximate or remote. But it is not so with numbers, apparently. “Numbers in particular do not emit or reflect signals, they leave no traces, their behavior causes no phenomena from which their existence may be inferred.”29 That is the prob-lem fairly stated. And to solve this problem Giaquinto aims to argue “for the possibility of a naturalistic account of knowing numbers, without taking them to be concrete objects.”30

Giaquinto restricts his attention to the finite cardinal numbers, which he construes not as objects but as properties. “In my view,” he writes, “they are properties of sets ….” And the position he defends is that “some [of these properties of sets] we know by acquaintance and some by description.”31

The distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, as well as the terminology to demarcate it, is owed, as most of my readers will know, to Bertrand Russell. And the principal, but not the lone, exemplar of knowledge by acquaintance is, of course, perceptual knowledge: knowledge gained from direct sense perception.

28 Marcus Giaquinto, “Knowing Numbers,” Journal of Philosophy, 98 (2001), p. 5.29 Ibid.30 Ibid., p. 7.31 Ibid.



Is Giaquinto, then, advancing the seemingly absurd hypothesis that some cardinal numbers are perceptual properties? Well not exactly, I surmise. But he is coming close, or at least drawing a close analogy. Based on various empirical results in cognitive psychology, Giaquinto concludes that

There is evidence from studies with very young children and animals for a prelin-guistic ability to discriminate cardinal numbers 1, 2, and 3. This ability may be provided by our numerosity sense, something that is predicted by a neural net-work for this sense. This prelinguistic ability is matched by an extremely fast and reliable ability in adults to sense the cardinal numbers of sets of 1, 2, and 3 visu-ally presented items, known as subitizing. So we can sense these cardinal num-bers, and once we have concepts for these cardinal numbers, we can recognize instances of them and discriminate them from noninstances.32

And the analogy to sense perception continues:

Do we have acquaintance with cardinal numbers greater than 3? My inclination is to think that we do. In our experience of counting we repeatedly meet and notice numbers from 4 to 10, as finger counting typically has an important developmental role. In so doing, we might sharpen our sense of numerosity to get senses of individual cardinal numbers beyond 3, just as repeatedly exercising one’s capacity for discriminating shades of red or types of snow sharpens our sense of those different properties or kinds. From counting experience, we get a sharpened sense of the cardinal size of 4. Our sense of 4 may not be quite as clear and strong as our sense of 3, but the difference may not be great. Similarly, we may develop a sharpened sense of subsequent numbers, each almost as clear and strong as our sense of its predecessors.33

Is Giaquinto saying that the cardinal numbers are “sensible properties”? Well, not exactly, I surmise. But it does seem as if he is saying they are very close to it. They—at least some of them—are known by acquaintance. We have a “sense” of the cardinal numbers. This sense can be “sharpened,” like our sense of “shades of red or types of snow.” And our “sense” of the higher cardinals can be made “almost as clear and strong” as our “sense” of the lower ones. A close analogy is being drawn.

Well what of it? Simply this. If we know these abstract entities, which is to say, properties, by perception-like acquaintance, perhaps it is not too out-landish to conjecture that other, “larger,” more-complex abstract entities, such as scientific theories, and mathematical theorems and proofs, might be known by such perception-like acquaintance as well. And, if so, then perhaps, furthermore, it is not too outlandish to conjecture that the aesthetic features

32 Ibid., pp. 11–12.33 Ibid., pp. 13–14.



of such theories, theorems, and proofs—the “beauty” and “elegance” that scientists and mathematicians attribute to them—are also known by percep-tion-like acquaintance. So it may turn out, after all, that the aesthetic proper-ties that scientists and mathematicians speak of in their work are not such glaring counter-examples as might be thought to the hypothesis of aesthetic properties as, for the most part, aux fond, perceptual properties. That is the conjecture on which I now want, tentatively, to rest. And, with that conjec-ture in place, it is time now to return again to the question of silently read literature.


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Once-Told Tales (An Essay in Literary Aesthetics) || The Aesthetic Property