ABSTRACT
In twentieth-century aesthetics, George Dickie’s criticism of the notion of disinterestedness has been most influential. It still is often assumed that Dickie successfully buried this notion entirely. In the first part of this chapter, I prove that his criticism is not as convincing as has often been assumed. In the second part, I show that my account does not imply formalism. Indeed, the adoption of a disinterested attitude excludes all practical or personal relations to an object, but it does not exclude the application of concepts or the interested attention to contents. Moreover, it does not exclude all somatic or affective experiences. In contemporary aesthetics, our relations to artworks are often studied as particular emotional or affective experiences, and the somatic dimension of these experiences has recently become an important topic as well. Hostility towards the notion of disinterestedness often arises from the assumption that the adoption of a disinterested attitude can lead neither to a somatic nor to an emotional or affective experience, but rather must lead to an abstract relation between a cold, disembodied recipient and some formalistic presentation. I show that this assumption is false. One might wonder, though, whether it is actually possible to disengage oneself from all practical and personal relations while relating to an object. In other words, one might wonder whether it is possible to disengage oneself from one’s own perspective in such a radical way. Even if this is possible, we face the further question of whether artworks really ask us to disengage in this way. Is it not the case that we must approach them from our own perspectives, and if so, how could we ever expect universal agreement with respect to our aesthetic judgments? In the last part of this chapter, I address these questions by discussing some arguments that Gadamer introduced.1
