On Liking Aesthetic Value

Abstract

We often describe our responses to films, novels, songs, landscapes and other aesthetically valuable objects in affective terms: we "hate" or "love" them, "admire," "enjoy" or "detest" them, or find that they "leave us cold." Most often, we communicate our aesthetic responses in terms of our likes and dislikes. Tradition has a succinct explanation of this way of speaking: aesthetic value is essentially connected to feeling, particularly to a certain kind of liking or pleasure. Is that true? Should we endorse a non-contingent connection between aesthetic value and a feeling of liking or pleasure? Call this The Affective Question.

Aesthetic obligations

“…But it is hard to see how aesthetic objects themselves can be sources of obligation, particularly once we deny that aesthetic objects are bearers of rights or have interests in a non‐metaphorical way, and even Moran registers the objection that “we create an unnecessary air of mystery by speaking of something normative or demanding as issuing from the beautiful itself” (2012, p. 323). One final possibility, therefore, is a primitivist position on which there is no true explanatory value‐claim to be had about how aesthetic value is reason‐giving, just as there is no true explanatory value‐claim about how, say, well‐being is reason‐giving (Ginsborg, 2015; Gorodeisky, 2019a; Shelley, 2011). But such a view would seem to be dialectically unable to defend the existence of aesthetic obligations as opposed to reasons, at least not without supplementation by some of the resources canvassed in this section.…”

“…8 8 For examples of the growing consensus that aesthetic values can provide reasons to act as well as to feel, see Cross (2017b), McGonigal (2017), Hills (2018), King (2018), Kubala (2018, 2020), Lopes (2018, 2019), Nguyen (2019), and Whiting (2020). One notable exception to this trend is the position defended in Gorodeisky and Marcus (2018), Gorodeisky (2019a), and Gorodeisky (2019b), on which aesthetic reasons bear fundamentally on appreciation , understood as a hybrid cognitive‐affective contentful state of pleasurable liking, and only derivatively on action.…”

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

“…First, it is fast becoming standard among hedonism's critics to flag a distinction between two questions that a complete theory of aesthetic value should answer (Shelley, , p. 1; Lopes, , pp. 41–43, Lopes, ; King, ; Gorodeisky, ; Matherne & Riggle, n.d.; Matherne, n.d.; Peacocke, n.d.). The “demarcation question” asks what makes aesthetic values aesthetic —what distinguishes them from values in other domains?…”

“…715–720). His account—which we might well call the Auburn view of aesthetic value (see also Gorodeisky, , §6; Watkins & Shelley, , pp. 349–350)—makes aesthetic value into a normative primitive that cannot be analyzed in terms of further normative concepts.…”

“…Other critics of aesthetic hedonism include Sharpe (), Davies (), Kieran (), Wolf (), Watkins and Shelley (), Riggle (, ), Gorodeisky (), Matherne and Riggle (n.d.), and Peacocke (n.d.). …”