ABSTRACT
Does the aesthetic have an essence? If so, can it be captured in non-aesthetic
terms or is the aesthetic an irreducible concept? Whatever the scope of ‘‘the aesthetic’’ may properly be thought to be-I
return to this issue in section II-three preliminary points. In the first place,
‘‘the aesthetic’’ ranges over items in different categories: there are aesthetic
judgments, aesthetic pleasures, aesthetic values, aesthetic attitudes, aesthetic
interest, aesthetic sensitivity, aesthetic properties, aesthetic character, aes-
thetic appreciation, aesthetic responses and so on.1 Second, aestheticians
have been inclined to privilege one of these categories of the aesthetic,
assigning to it a basic status and explicating the others in terms of it. Third, the various categories of the aesthetic are inter-definable, no matter which,
if any, is taken as basic, how exactly they are related to one another (not
everyone understanding them as being connected in the same manner), and
despite disagreements about what should properly be thought of as falling
within a particular category. Such disagreements arise from different
requirements for membership of the category. For example, whereas some
require an aesthetic judgment about an item to be one acquired through
first-hand acquaintance with the item,2 others allow a belief founded on the opinion of another to be an aesthetic judgment. Again, some of those who
agree that pleasure in the perception of a single color, sound, taste or smell is
an aesthetic pleasure operate with a notion of judgment, as Kant did, which
is such that the mere announcement of such a pleasure in the linguistic form
of a judgment-’’It’s pleasurable’’—counts as the expression of an aesthetic
judgment. Others hold that the linguistic expression of an aesthetic pleasure
or response is an aesthetic judgment-is a judgment at all-only if it claims
intersubjective validity, as no mere expression of pleasure, even one formulated in judgmental form, properly does: it would be an aesthetic judg-
ment only if it claimed an item’s capacity or suitability to give pleasure, or
that it merits a pleasurable response. I will skirt disagreements of this kind.
