in honor of thomas munro || the elucidation of aesthetic experience

The Elucidation of Aesthetic ExperienceAuthor(s): Harold OsborneSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 1, In Honor of ThomasMunro (Autumn, 1964), pp. 145-151Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428148 .

Accessed: 21/12/2014 03:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 21 Dec 2014 03:55:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=tasfa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/428148?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


HAROLD OSBORNE

The Elucidation of Aesthetic Experience

DR. MUNRO HAS DONE YEOMAN SERVICE

over the years by his advocacy of empirical method, the backbone of the English tradi- tion in aesthetics. Even those of us who, hooked up with the inevitable pendulum's swing, hanker after a more meticulous over- hauling of principles, derive their unease from the vantage point of the massive expansion of knowledge which he has been so largely instrumental in evoking. I therefore want to take as my text for these random notes a passage written by Munro on the study of aesthetic experience which I have found inspiring and irritating in almost equal degrees. He writes,

The study of the heterogeneous group of phe- nomena denoted by this word has suffered from the usual tendency of aestheticians to rush into oversimple generalizations and arbitrary rules. Much effort has been spent in arguing that some one sort of experience is the aesthetic experience, as if there were only one; that all other ways of responding to art but the one prescribed are spurious, vulgar imitations. Right or wrong, such pronouncements need backing up with more im- partial observation of the facts than has ever taken place. Rather than to start out with an exclusive definition of what is really aesthetic experience, or a dictum as to how people ought to look at art, an experimental attitude would be to find out in what various ways they do look at art, and what the specific consequences are of each.'

The criticism is all true. But I am uneasy at the implied exhortation. Empirical investigations require working principles to give direction to research, to delimit the field of enquiry, and to indicate the nature of the interest within that field. Progress in knowledge cannot result from the mere

accumulation of data unless controlled by guiding concepts to discriminate what facts are relevant and what facts irrelevant to the enquiry. If such concepts of relevance are not deliberately formulated, they must nevertheless be latent in the selection of data; the conclusion will be dictated by these tacit assumptions. Plato argued, wrongly, in the Meno that any accession of knowledge must be recognition of something previously known. But in empirical investigations unless you know what you are after at least well enough to spot instances and reject those which are spurious, you are unlikely to find it. Empirical methods do not tell you what aesthetic experience is unless you can already recognize instances when you meet them.

The capacity for aesthetic experience is more irregularly distributed and more vari- able than some others. Its incidence follows no known rules. It differs massively in degree from one individual to another and those who lack it are less handicapped for the practical business of living in modern society than those whose intellectual or perceptual capacities, for example, fall be- low average. Even those who possess the capacity for appreciation highly developed in one field may be without it in others. People respond to works of art in a vast and intricate variety of ways, only some of which are relevant to aesthetics, however interesting they may be to the sociologist; others are marginally or doubtfully relevant. In order to pick one's way amidst the confusion, in order to classify and correctly relate information or devise significant ex-



146 HAROLD OSBORNE

periments, one must have as clear an idea as possible in the first place of the nature of the quarry. This cannot be obtained by the accumulation of empirical data alone since it is needed to put empirical research on the right track. It cannot, one supposes, be elicited deductively from a vacuum. There would seem to be need for more systematic phenomenological examination of aesthetic experience from direct observation. The matter is one of exceptional complexity and difficulty because the higher ranges of aesthetic appreciation have proved noto- riously unsympathetic to precise anatomization, whereas between the so-called simple cases of aesthetic enjoyment (sucking a toffee) and the higher ranges of mature appreciation there is lacking the sort of apparent continuity which runs from simple to complex instances of perceiving, think- ing, wanting, or imagining. Outside the contributions of Roman Ingarden, work in this field has so far been sporadic and un- sustained. Yet I believe that deeper phenomenological understanding of mature appreciation can alone give the fillip that is needed for further fruitful progress in experimental or analytical aesthetics.

A plea for a closer phenomenological study of aesthetic experience was put for- ward by Jerome Stolnitz in a paper read in the course of a symposium on Analytical Philosophy and Aesthetics at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aes- thetics in October 1962.2 Without this the most admirably executed analytical reasoning may strike wide of the target. A justly esteemed paper on "Aesthetic Concepts" by Frank Sibley3 distinguishes the broad group of aesthetic concepts as those which require the exercise of taste or perceptiveness for their application from the group of non- aesthetic concepts, which do not. This paper then argues, in the first place, that non- aesthetic concepts never provide logically sufficient conditions for applying aesthetic terms and, further, that aesthetic concepts are not, except negatively, governed by conditions at all. Correcting the logic of this paper, Isabel Hungerland has shown that aesthetic qualities as a sub-group of gestalt qualities do have in common with them cer-

tain logical connections with non-aesthetic qualities. Non-aesthetic features cannot provide logically sufficient conditions for the ascription of aesthetic qualities but can provide necessary conditions in the sense that certain defining accounts of aesthetic terms carry logical presuppositions as to non- aesthetic features. Hungerland concludes that "ordinary perception is far closer to aesthetic perception than traditional phi- losophers have thought." 4 The effect of her paper is rightly to show that Sibley exaggerated and made too absolute a distinction which exists. But we are left with another distinction-that between aesthetic features proper and the wider class of gestalt qualities to which they logically belong. Hungerland suggests that they are distin- guished "only in requiring a very special degree of sensitivity and training for their apprehension." But is this the only and adequate ground of discrimination between apprehension of the aesthetic quality of a fine portrait and apprehension of, say, the cheerfulness-gestalt in a face whether portrait or actual? To answer this would take us close to the core of aesthetic understanding, but the answer, I would opine, requires more knowledge than we yet have in the phenomenology of appreciation.

In his paper on "What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?" 5 J. 0. Urmson regards aesthetic judgments as appraisals rather than judgments of attribution. Accepting as paradigmatic such elementary situations as our delight in smelling a rose or the timbre of a bird's note, he defines (unsophisticated) aesthetic judgments as the class of appraisals for which the sole and sufficient reason is the pleasantness of the experience. The paper was important-and perturbing- because it brought back with all the authority of clear and cogent analytical exposi- tion a view which had seemed inadequate to most people since Kant's repudiation of sensuous charm as a criterion of aesthetic judgment. Kant argued that "mere pleasantness in sensation" varies from one man to another and can have no universal validity. (Most men like smelling roses but Sir Edward Barry-if we may accept Humphry Clinker-found "uncommon satisfaction



The Elucidation of Aesthetic Experience 147

from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose.") Uniformities of likes and dislikes in this region are empirical and cannot acquire normative force. But the aesthetic judgment (in Kant's view) claims universal validity and therefore cannot be about sensuous pleasure. Having reached this position by a priori reasoning, Kant then supported it by a phenomenological analysis in the obscure section which he headed: "Investigation of the question whether in the judgment of taste the feel- ing of pleasure precedes or follows the judging of the object," a section whose importance he emphasized by describing it as the "key to the Critique of Taste." 6 He here describes the sort of pleasure that attends an aesthetic experience as the pleasure we take in the "harmony of the cognitive faculties" or "the free play of the Imagination and the Understanding" which is activated in apprehension of objects which we call beautiful. The pleasurability of aesthetic experience is, in this view, the incidental pleasure which is associated with successful exercise of a skill-specifically a skilled faculty of non-conceptual cognition. The analogy is with the pleasure experi- enced by an expert billiard player in making a difficult cannon and not to the satisfaction with which he drinks a pint of beer while waiting for his opponent to play. The exercise of any expertise in a situation where skilled faculties are fully extended is apt to be pleasant and in this sense the aesthetic pleasure is universal. It may, but need not, be a psychological criterion for making an aesthetic judgment; but in no case is the judgment about the pleasure. On Kant's phenomenological analysis of aesthetic experience we can base, as he did, a view of the universality of beauty judgments in the sense that when we say anything is beautiful (has aesthetic excellence) this is tantamount to saying that it is adapted to sustain the skilled faculty of appreciation (a cognitive faculty) in any suitably competent observer. We should not, perhaps, speak of good and bad works of art: a bad work of art would be a construct held out to be suitable for sustaining appreciation but in

fact unsuited for that purpose. When we speak of particular aesthetic values we should mean features which, either in a particular object or else more generally, are judged to be favorable towards evoking or supporting appreciation.

It is not possible to decide between Kant and Urmson on empirical grounds. Urm- son's logic of what he calls "very simple cases of aesthetic valuation" cannot well be impugned; it would be accepted by Kant, but Kant denies their relevance. We need to know whether Urmson's elementary aesthetic experiences are really paradigmatic, whether there is really a continuity from them to mature appreciation of complex works of art. This is not susceptible of deci- sion by empirical procedures. It is not a matter of counting heads or even of amass- ing data. When we are dealing with the structure of mental functions, with modes of experience, we achieve enlightenment by direct observation but in reflection rather than through the senses. The sort of knowledge that is available is akin to our knowledge that the color green lies between yellow and blue or that an emotion of remorse involves situation appraisal.

We do not know these things by logic: a person without color experience or the experience of emotion would not know them. But neither do we know them by empirical generalization from much observation. However many experiences we ob- tain or observe, our conviction is not strengthened from the intuitive knowledge we achieve by reflection on one experience or a few. In this context accumulation of data is not necessary to underpin knowledge and does not have this effect. But the knowledge so obtained may be used as a canon of relevance to guide empirical research.

The study of aesthetic experience in this manner presents special difficulties and is particularly backward. Its furtherance is, I believe, the most pressing present need if it can be done both systematically and from a richly versatile aesthetic endowment. Hav- ing thrown out this suggestion I propose in the remainder of this paper to illustrate briefly the sort of difference there might turn out to be between a full experience of



148 HAROLD OSBORNE

aesthetic appreciation and what is called taking up an aesthetic attitude towards anything at all, and what sort of thing might be meant by describing appreciation as the exercise of a skill.

I

Appreciation, or the enjoyment of an experience of beauty, involves more than adopting an aesthetic attitude towards a thing, although the aesthetic posture of attention is a necessary condition for aesthetic enjoyment. We can take up an aesthetic attitude towards anything at all which enters into experience. We do so by directing attention upon the felt quale of the presentation in awareness, discounting practical implications of cause and effect, "when, by a mere shift in attitude, we hold something away from nature and outside the web of conventional needs." 7 Stanislaw Ossowski has described it as zycie chwylq, living in the immediate experience.8 The greater part of our conscious life is passed in such a way that our present experience is subordinated to the impact of the future. This happens not only when we envisage some far-reaching aims, when we are plan- ning future activities or exercising foresight; our quotidian and most ordinary percep- tions are interpreted for their implications and are attended to only so far as they hold practical significance. As we go about our ordinary occasions, whenever we are expectant; whenever we are anxious or apprehensive, hopeful, confident, or exult- ant; whenever we experience something as auspicious, dangerous, or innocuous-in all these and similar situations we are deter- mining the present experience in the light of its practical implications for the future. So also much of our emotional grasp of experience is colored by a reference to the past. When we are surprised, disappointed, filled with regret or self-congratulation, we are experiencing the present in the light of a selected past. All these attitudes and emo- tions are foreign to the aesthetic posture (although they may, of course, enter into the content of a work of art). When we take up an attitude of aesthetic awareness towards

an object we savor the presentation as it is here and now in its intrinsic essence without implications of any sort. If it looks menacing, we do not (if our mental stance is an aesthetic one) feel menaced but savor the menacing appearance for what it is. In an admirable account of aesthetic awareness Pepita Haezrahi has said:

It is the perception of the appearance of the object in all the immediate plenitude of its concrete sensual attributes, its individual colors, its particular sounds, its special linear forms, plus-and this is most important-the perception of the pattern, the overall structure and formal organ- ization of the whole. In aesthetic perception we stress what differentiates this object from other objects of its kind and minimize what they have in common. We adopt a procedure directly op- posite to the formation of concepts.9

(Descriptions tend to be expressed in terms of the apprehension of sense objects; they can be adapted so as to apply to aesthetic apprehension of moral or intellectual objects.) I do not think it is necessary to elaborate further. This aspect of aesthetic apprehension has been pretty amply docu- mented in recent literature. What I want to stress is the insufficiency of this account for the anatomization of that full aesthetic enjoyment which we call appreciation. We can, and on occasion we do, take up the posture of aesthetic awareness towards anything and everything which enters into experience. But only a small minority of the things we experience are capable of sustaining appreciation. With appreciation we begin to discriminate, calling some things beautiful and others not. For appreciation presupposes a more or less prolonged or repeated and fruitful act of contemplation with expansion of awareness within the aesthetic stance; it is the activation with heightened alertness of a non-discursive cognitive skill which tends to lie dormant through most of the practical business of life. It is called into play and given scope only by objects which are suitably endowed; the vast majority of objects which enter into experience are not so endowed and if appreciation of them is attempted, it is frus- trated and starved. There is a widely held insight that appreciation is closely, though not uniquely, connected with apprehension




of organizational gestalt properties and

perhaps (though this is disputed) with a special class of these properties which I have tried with imperfect success to discriminate under the name of organic unity. But however that may be, it seems that a clearer systematic understanding of the essential nature of appreciation must proceed pari passu with elucidation of the properties which render an object of experience apt for sustaining appreciation. It is to research in this field that we must look to give fresh direction and new stimulus to empirical investigation.

II

I want now to consider in rather more detail the implications of treating aesthetic appreciation as the exercise of a skill.

For this purpose I propose, following Polanyi10, to define skill as a capacity for performance of the sort which involves following a set of rules not all of which are known to the performer. He is unable at will to become fully conscious of the rules by which his performance is guided or to formulate them fully in a set of precepts which others could understand and follow. An example of a skill is the ability to ride a bicycle. The ability to play chess is not a skill in this sense. A person who has learned the legal rules of the game and has them at his finger tips, as we say, can plan his play in accordance with them even though he does not recite them constantly to himself or hold them consciously before his mind while deliberating his moves. But he is able at any moment to bring the rules completely to mind if need be. Of such a person we say that he knows how to play chess, or that he can play, but we do not for that reason say that he is a skillful player. A skilled chess- player is one who, within the framework of the rules, is able to perform more effectively than the average. He has available other, additional principles of procedure which are not completely specifiable by him. In addition to knowing the legal rules of the game, and in addition to learned technique, he had a good sense of position, ingenuity, intuition of partially visualized and im-

perfectly calculated possibilities, depth of conception, and so on. In these qualities which constitute his skill he cannot instruct others by exact precepts but, if at all, by means of general maxims, demonstration, and example.

The traditional crafts may be cited as instances of socially fostered skills. Others may be sought in the spheres of sport and ritual. Because their rules are not completely specifiable they are transmitted by contact and not by precept alone. The ap- prentice learns by watching and copying performances, by trial and error, by sub- mitting to the maxims and criticism of authority until he acquires his own judgment and stature. In principle it is not im- possible that the rules of any skilled craft should come to be completely understood and should be exhaustively specified; and when this happens we no longer call it a craft but a science. Indeed one of the re- quirements of progress in an industrialized society demands the exhaustive specifica- tion of rules of craftsmanship, turning skills into science. Most of the fine arts now prac- tised have emerged fairly recently from the pre-industrial and luxury crafts. Until lately artist and craftsman were not held separate. And even today many of the arts continue to incorporate an important admixture of craftsmanship. In the fine arts the pressure to reduce to science and rule the inherited techniques taken over from the ancient crafts is less strong than in the commercial arts of weaving, brewing, ceramics, and so forth. To the extent to which the artist relies upon the craftsman's techniques he is a user of skills. But in the consensus of contemporary opinion (as distinct from ancient and medieval opinion) production of aesthetically fine objects is not a skill in the sense we are describing. The capacity to create works of art cannot, it is believed, be imparted. And this apparently not merely for the reason that, as in craftsmanship, the rules of performance have not been completely specified; the production of fine works of art is not a sort of performance subjected to rules which could, even theoretically, be exhaustively specified. The full implications of this belief would carry



150 HAROLD OSBORNE

us too far for the present paper. Suffice that it is an intimation of this fact-or apparent fact-which has lent plausibility to the romantic concepts such as genius and in- spiration in connection with the fine arts.

The two main branches of skill are craftsmanship and connoisseurship and the two commonly go hand in hand, the one rein- forcing the other. The skilled craftsman is a connoisseur of his materials and of the things made from them by the exercise of his craft. A craft is an art of making or manipulating, while connoisseurship is an art of apprehending, testing, selecting. As a skill it consists of a capacity for performance in accordance with rules which are not completely specifiable, but they are rules of knowing, of diagnosis, not rules of doing. A great surgeon has both branches of skill. His ability to recognize symptoms diagnosti- cally goes beyond the mechanical application of precepts and formulations which are the common property of all in the medi- cal textbooks; and his skill with the scalpel is not something which can be taught with words. Appreciation is a skill in appraising complex aesthetic properties which are not completely analyzable by any specifiable structural principles into natural or lower- level aesthetic properties. Whether the principles could theoretically be exhaustively specified in some such manner as the industrialist seeks to substitute measurable qualities such as elasticity, toughness, dura- bility, for the craftsman-connoisseur's appraisals of materials, or whether there remains an element of ultimate unspecifi- ability corresponding to the uniqueness of works of art, remains in question. The point which I want for the moment to stress is that when appreciation is brought under the heading of connoisseurship, a category of skill, this is tantamount to denying that it is merely an expression of personal preference, a matter of individual liking or disliking. Although personal likes may be associated with it and may sometimes serve as a touchstone at a certain stage in the exercise of the skill, the judgments of appreciation cannot be judgments about personal likes and dislikes if it is true that appreciation belongs to connoisseurship. It will be a cognitive skill, purporting to rec-

ognize and discriminate qualities which are present in the object and which can be tested by others who have the skill. A connoisseur is not a man who just happens to like good things-though it may help if in fact he does like them. He is a man of discerning taste who can discriminate, com- pare, and describe those qualities of which he is a connoisseur and reject things in which they are not genuinely present. He is not as a rule a man whose likings coincide with those of the majority; his own tastes will often be esoteric. The expert wine- taster is not paid because he likes what the average wine-drinker likes but for a superior ability to discriminate the savors and bouquets of many different wines and to describe them.

There is an apparent, but only apparent, circularity in saying that appreciation consists in the exercise of a skilled capacity for discerning what things or qualities are well adapted for appreciation. Most skills envisage a purpose beyond themselves and are fostered by society on account of the value placed upon the ends which they promote. Although in the individual case a skill may be nurtured for the delight in its exercise and the particular satisfaction which comes from the maturation of an innate talent, this is not the social justification of skills. The mechanization of industry is not retarded because it will diminish opportu- nities for skilled craftsmen to find satisfaction and self-fulfillment in the exercise of their skills. But appreciation is a cognitive skill which envisages no ulterior purpose except the satisfaction deriving from its own performance. In this respect it has an analogy in the skills cultivated for the purpose of sports and games. The lack of any purpose outside itself is a feature which aesthetic appreciation also shares with trained intelligence when intelligence is applied in philosophy or science not for practical ends but for the sheer delight of exercising skilled reason in accordance with its own laws of right performance. The idea of a skilled performance which is directed to no purpose other than its own exercise and perfection connects with the concept of a "self-rewarding" activity-a concept which holds little of the mysterious in itself but




has important bearings for value theory. It may have been one of the notions obscurely locked up in Kant's portmanteau idea of "purposiveness without purpose." When we speak of aesthetic values we are assuming a point of view from which appreciation is a self-rewarding activity. Hon. Editor, British Journal of Aesthetics

1 Toward Science in Aesthetics (1956), p. 61. 2Printed in The British Journal of Aesthetics,

III, 3 (1963), 210-222. 3 The Philosophical Review, LXVIII (1959), 421-

450. This and the paper by J. 0. Urmson on "What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?" are reprinted in the anthology Philosophy Looks at the Arts (1962), ed. Joseph Margolis.

4Paper on "Aesthetic Perception," Proceedings of the IV International Congress on Aesthetics (Athens, 1960). Professor Hungerland also makes the point that aesthetic terms differ from non-aesthetic terms in that the contrast between appear-statements and really-is statements lacks any important application for them. Urmson adduces as a second class of aesthetic judgments those which are expressed in the statement that an object looks as if

it possesses some desirable non-aesthetic quality: e.g., a motor car looks fast, and is (aesthetically) valued for that look. Professor Hepburn has main- tained that knowing such an appearance to be false weakens or destroys the aesthetic appeal: "If I know that the tree is rotten, I shall not be able again to savour its seeming-strength." "Aesthetic Apprecia- tion of Nature," The Brit. J. of Aesthetics, III (1963), 206.

5 "What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?" Proceed- ings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Vol. XXXI (1957), 75-92.

8 Critique of Judgment, sec. 9. It is generally agreed that Kant went something too far. Immediate sensuous charm plays some part in mature aesthetic appreciation-as, for example, the enjoyment of good intonation in musical performance or purity and brilliance of color in painting. Yet this element in appreciation remains difficult to assimilate and its import is still not well understood. There is a sense in which the quality of a musical composition is appraised without regard to the sensuous beauty of particular performances; and a listener who speaks too glibly of the beauty of the singer's voice may often be but poorly aware of the quality of the song.

7Paul Weiss, The World of Art (1961). 8 Stanislaw Ossowski, U Podstaw Estetyki, 3rd ed.

(1958), p. 271. 9 The Contemplative Activity (1954), Ch. 11.

10 Personal Knowledge (1958).



in honor of thomas munro || the elucidation of aesthetic experience

Documents