ABSTRACT
I recently told a friend that I had found Twin Peaks Season 3 “admirable.” He replied by asking whether I had seriously thought that admiration is a genuine aesthetic criterion. Knowing my pride in being considered an aesthetician, in the sense of practicing and teaching the discipline called aesthetics, it was a way of touching my sensitivity. However, at the same time, I was reminded of Charles Peirce envisaging the possibility of defining the beautiful by admiration: “we appeal to the aesthete, to tell us what it is that is admirable without any reason for being admirable beyond its inherent character. Why, that, he replies, is the beautiful” (1931-1958, 1.612). Leaving Peirce to his concerns – he immediately expresses doubts as to whether “any particular quality of feeling is admirable without a reason” – I wonder if admiring is not perhaps too much for a majority of beautiful things, insofar as they achieve beauty in simplicity, without ostentatious features, but with modesty. I mean that we must reserve admiration for special cases, special beauty. When I say that Twin Peaks Season 3 is admirable, I wish to express how I feel about it: this series is the most perfect and uncanny audiovisual product I have ever seen.
