File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1998/bhaskar.9804, message 30


From: Colin.Wight-AT-aber.ac.uk (Colin Wight)
Subject: Re: BHA: Reply to Michael
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 09:37:45 +0100


Hi Michael,

I accept your points but don't think I am guilty of confusing the positions,
but of arguing that the first group are incorrect. This doesn't, I should
add, commit me to denying the objective structure of say a Bach concerto,
but only that this structure is in anyway aesthetic. If you go with the
first strand of thought it seems to me that given the vast differences in
approaches to aesthetics we have two solutions. One, is to claim that
everything has aesthetic worth, or that some things do and some things
don't. The former makes aesthetics as meaningless some Foucaultian (not all)
claims that everything is power, the latter dangerously elitist - i.e. Can't
you see the aesthetic worth in this? A highbrow theory of art. Or even
worse, a Platonic proscribing of what art is good for the republic (I don't
doubt, however, that art has been used in this way). 

I don't accept Baumgarten's, nor Kant's, claim that aesthetic consciousness
is a unitary element of human experience, however I do think, with Kant,
that aesthetic judgement is unlike either theoretical judgement, or
practical judgement, because it is effected entirely subjectively (accepting
of course the manner in which subjectivity in embedded within the social).
Talk of judgement also leads me to question your assertion that 'Aesthetics
has no necessary evaluative component'; we do evaluate aesthetic experiences
and the first strand of thought (the objective structure group) seem to
imply that some judgements are better than others (they capture more of the
objective structure). Whether this aligns me with Burke or not, it seems to
me that taste and aesthetic judgement are inextricably linked.

>
>The objective aesthetic structure of, say, the Oedipus
>necessarily involves Oedipus's recognition of his sin--or,
>better, his impurity--and his blinding at the end of the play.

But this simply assumes what I am questioning - the existence an an
objective aesthetic structure.

>An Oedipus (the play) which omits the blinding (as Johnson
>argued King Lear should not have its fifth act with the
>death of Cordelia) isn't Oedipus, but some other play which
>we have either lost or never existed. 

Well, yes I agree. But this argument only preserves the structure of the
play as important and does not say whether this structure is aesthetic. The
same play watched by an Azande might induce neither fear or glee, but merely
sleep. This may still, on your terms be an aesthetic experience derived from
the structure of the play, but it seems to me that we would be stretching
things rather far here.

Thanks,


------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Tel: (01970) 621769

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