Such considerations point toward the aforementioned approach that begins with the aesthetic experience as the most likely to capture the full range of aesthetic phenomena without begging the important philosophical questions about their nature. Can we then single out a faculty, an attitude, a mode of judgment, or a form of experience that is distinctively aesthetic? And if so, can we attribute to it the significance that would make this philosophical enterprise both important in itself and relevant to the many questions posed by beauty, criticism, and art?

Taking their cue from Kant, many philosophers have defended the idea of an aesthetic attitude as one divorced from practical concerns, a kind of “distancing,” or standing back, as it were, from ordinary involvement. The classic statement of this position is Edward Bullough’s “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” an essay published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1912. While there is certainly something of interest to be said along those lines, it cannot be the whole story. Just what kind of distance is envisaged? Are lovers distanced from their beloved? If not, by what right do they call their beloved beautiful? Does distance imply a lack of practical involvement? If such is the case, how can we ever take up an aesthetic attitude to those things that have a purpose for us—things such as a dress, building, or decoration? But if these are not aesthetic, have we not paid a rather high price for our definition of this word—the price of detaching it from the phenomena that it was designed to identify?

Kant’s own formulation was more satisfactory. He described recipients of aesthetic experience not as distanced but as disinterested, meaning that recipients do not treat the object of enjoyment either as a vehicle for curiosity or as a means to an end. They contemplate the object as it is in itself and “apart from all interest.” In a similar spirit, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that people could regard anything aesthetically so long as they regarded it in independence of their will—that is, irrespective of any use to which they might put it. Regarding it thus, people could come to see the idea that the object expressed, and in this knowledge consists aesthetic appreciation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [1819; The World as Will and Idea]).

Of a piece with such a view is the popular theory of art as a kind of “play” activity, in which creation and appreciation are divorced from the normal urgencies of existence and surrendered to leisure. “With the agreeable, the good, the perfect,” wrote Friedrich Schiller, “man is merely in earnest, but with beauty he plays” (Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [1794–95; Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man]).

Such thoughts have already been encountered. The problem is to give them philosophical precision. They have recurred in modern philosophy in a variety of forms—for example, in the theory that the aesthetic object is always considered for its own sake, or as a unique individual rather than a member of a class. Those particular formulations have caused some philosophers to treat aesthetic objects as though they were endowed with a peculiar metaphysical status. Alternatively, it is sometimes argued that the aesthetic experience has an intuitive character, as opposed to the conceptual character of scientific thought or the instrumental character of practical understanding.

The simplest way of summarizing this approach to aesthetics is in terms of two fundamental propositions:

1. The aesthetic object is an object of sensory experience and enjoyed as such: it is heard, seen, or (in the limiting case) imagined in sensory form.

2. The aesthetic object is at the same time contemplated: its appearance is a matter of intrinsic interest and studied not merely as an object of sensory pleasure but also as the repository of significance and value.

The first of these propositions explains the word aesthetic, which was initially used in this connection by the Leibnizian philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (1735; Reflections on Poetry). Baumgarten borrowed the Greek term for sensory perception (aisthēsis) in order to denote a realm of concrete knowledge (the realm, as he saw it, of poetry), in which a content is communicated in sensory form. The second proposition is, in essence, the foundation of taste. It describes the motive of our attempt to discriminate rationally between those objects that are worthy of contemplative attention and those that are not.

Almost all of the aesthetic theories of post-Kantian idealism depend upon those two propositions and try to explain the peculiarities of aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment in terms of the synthesis of the sensory and the intellectual that they imply—the synthesis summarized in Hegel’s theory of art as “the sensuous embodiment of the Idea.” Neither proposition is particularly clear. Throughout the discussions of Kant and his immediate following, the “sensory” is assimilated to the “concrete,” the “individual,” the “particular,” and the “determinate,” while the “intellectual” is assimilated to the “abstract,” the “universal,” the “general,” and the “indeterminate”—assimilations that would nowadays be regarded with extreme suspicion. Nevertheless, subsequent theories have repeatedly returned to the idea that aesthetic experience involves a special synthesis of intellectual and sensory components and that both its peculiarities and its value are to be derived from such a synthesis.

The idea at once gives rise to paradoxes. The most important was noticed by Kant, who called it the antinomy of taste. As an exercise of reason, he argued, aesthetic experience must inevitably tend toward a reasoned choice and therefore must formulate itself as a judgment. Aesthetic judgment, however, seems to be in conflict with itself. It cannot be at the same time aesthetic (an expression of sensory enjoyment) and also a judgment (claiming universal assent). Yet all rational beings, by virtue of their rationality, seem disposed to make these judgments. On the one hand, they feel pleasure in some object, and this pleasure is immediate—not based, according to Kant, in any conceptualization or in any inquiry into cause, purpose, or constitution. On the other hand, they express their pleasure in the form of a judgment, speaking “as if beauty were a quality of the object” and so representing their pleasure as objectively valid. But how can this be so? The pleasure is immediate, based in no reasoning or analysis. So what permits this demand for universal agreement?

However we approach the idea of beauty, we find this paradox emerging. Our ideas, feelings, and judgments are called aesthetic precisely because of their direct relation to sensory enjoyment. Hence, one cannot judge the beauty of an object that one has never encountered. Scientific judgments, like practical principles, can be received “secondhand.” I can, for example, take you as my authority for the truths of physics or for the utility of railways. But I cannot take you as my authority for the merits of Leonardo or Mozart if I have not seen or heard works by either artist. It would seem to follow from this that there can be no rules or principles of aesthetic judgment, since I must feel the pleasure immediately in the perception of the object and cannot be talked into it by any grounds of proof. It is always experience, and never conceptual thought, that gives the right to aesthetic judgment, so that anything that alters the experience of an object alters its aesthetic significance as well. As Kant put it, aesthetic judgment is “free from concepts,” and beauty itself is not a concept.

Such a conclusion, however, seems to be inconsistent with the fact that aesthetic judgment is a form of judgment. When I describe something as beautiful, I do not mean merely that it pleases me: I am speaking about it, not about myself, and, if challenged, I try to find reasons for my view. I do not explain my feeling but give grounds for it by pointing to features of its object. Any search for reasons has the “universalizing” character of rationality: I am in effect saying that others, insofar as they are rational, ought to feel exactly the same delight as I feel. Being disinterested, I have put aside my interests, and with them everything that makes my judgment relative to me. But, if that is so, then “the judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise there could be no room even for contention in the matter, or for the claim to the necessary agreement of others.”

In short, the expression aesthetic judgment seems to be a contradiction in terms, denying in the first term precisely that reference to rational considerations that it affirms in the second. This paradox, which we have expressed in Kant’s language, is not peculiar to the philosophy of Kant. On the contrary, it is encountered in one form or another by every philosopher or critic who takes aesthetic experience seriously and who therefore recognizes the tension between the sensory and the intellectual constraints upon it. On the one hand, aesthetic experience is rooted in the immediate sensory enjoyment of its object through an act of perception. On the other, it seems to reach beyond enjoyment toward a meaning that is addressed to our reasoning powers and that seeks judgment from them. Thus criticism, the reasoned justification of aesthetic judgment, is an inevitable upshot of aesthetic experience. Yet, critical reasons can never be merely intellectual; they always contain a reference to the way in which an object is perceived.

Relationship between form and content

Two related paradoxes also emerge from the same basic conception of the aesthetic experience. The first was given extended consideration by Hegel, who argued, in his Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (1832; “Lectures on Aesthetics”; Eng. trans. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art), roughly as follows: Our sensuous appreciation of art concentrates upon the given “appearance”—the “form.” It is this that holds our attention and that gives to the work of art its peculiar individuality. Because it addresses itself to our sensory appreciation, the work of art is essentially concrete, to be understood by an act of perception rather than by a process of discursive thought. At the same time, our understanding of the work of art is in part intellectual; we seek in it a conceptual content, which it presents to us in the form of an idea. One purpose of critical interpretation is to expound this idea in discursive form—to give the equivalent of the content of the work of art in another, nonsensuous idiom. But criticism can never succeed in this task, for by separating the content from the particular form, it abolishes its individuality. The content presented then ceases to be the exact content of that work of art. In losing its individuality, the content loses its aesthetic reality; it thus ceases to be a reason for attending to the particular work of art that first attracted our critical attention. It cannot be this that we saw in the original work and that explained its power over us. For this content, displayed in the discursive idiom of the critical intellect, is no more than a husk, a discarded relic of a meaning that eluded us in the act of seizing it. If the content is to be the true object of aesthetic interest, it must remain wedded to its individuality: it cannot be detached from its “sensuous embodiment” without being detached from itself. Content is, therefore, inseparable from form and form in turn inseparable from content. (It is the form that it is only by virtue of the content that it embodies.)

Hegel’s argument is the archetype of many, all aimed at showing that it is both necessary to distinguish form from content and also impossible to do so. This paradox may be resolved by rejecting either of its premises, but, as with Kant’s antinomy, neither premise seems dispensable. To suppose that content and form are inseparable is, in effect, to dismiss both ideas as illusory, since no two works of art can then share either a content or a form—the form being definitive of each work’s individuality. In this case, no one could ever justify an interest in a work of art by reference to its meaning. The intensity of aesthetic interest becomes a puzzling, and ultimately inexplicable, feature of our mental life. If, on the other hand, we insist that content and form are separable, we shall never be able to find, through a study of content, the reason for attending to the particular work of art that intrigues us. Every work of art stands proxy for its paraphrase. An impassable gap then opens between aesthetic experience and its ground, and the claim that aesthetic experience is intrinsically valuable is thrown in doubt.

A related paradox is sometimes referred to as the “heresy of paraphrase,” the words being those of the American literary critic Cleanth Brooks (The Well Wrought Urn, 1949). The heresy is that of assuming that the meaning of a work of art (particularly of poetry) can be paraphrased. According to Brooks, who here followed an argument of Benedetto Croce, the meaning of a poem consists precisely in what is not translatable. Poetic meaning is bound up with the particular disposition of the words—their sound, rhythm, and arrangement—in short, with the “sensory embodiment” provided by the poem itself. To alter that embodiment is to produce either another poem (and therefore another meaning) or something that is not a work of art at all, and which therefore lacks completely the kind of meaning for which works of art are valued. Hence no poetry is translatable, and critics cannot do better than to point to the objective features of the poem that most seem to them to be worthy of attention. Yet that result too is paradoxical, for what do critics see in those objective features and how are their recommendations to be supported? Why should we attend to poetry at all if nothing can be said about its virtues save only “Look!”? Why look at a poem rather than an advertisement, a mirror, or a blade of grass? Everything becomes equally worthy of attention, since nothing can be said that will justify attention to anything.