FETISHISM AND OBJECTIVITY IN AESTHETIC EMOTION

Published in Emotion and the Arts,  ed.  Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (Oxford University Press, 1997) pp 177-189.

(Penultimate pre-publication draft  --  no footnotes or corrections)

back to  ABSTRACT:
 

One of Plato's Mad Ideas

My problem starts, as do so many, with one of Plato's mad ideas: the thought that we don't really love the people that we think we love, but only something else, beauty itself, of which our lovers merely occasioned the recollection. Thus progress in love consists in extending our love from the original individual to all those of the same type, and from there to the Type itself:

And if, my dear Socrates, man's life is ever worth the living, it is when one has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty... once you have seen it, you will never again be seduced by the charm of ... comely boys, or lads just ripening to manhood; you will care nothing for the beauties that used to take your breath away and kindle such passionate longing in you .... (Symposium 211)

In addition, Plato taught that since art merely copies life, and life is already one step away from the ideal, art is worse than useless. But when he urged us to spurn the products of art as imperfect copies, was it their imperfection that most warranted contempt or their being copies? The question seems more urgent now that we have actually become capable of making copies to an arbitrary degree of perfection, and that we are able to envisage at least a theoretical possibility of copying persons too, whether by cloning or teleportation.<1>

Whatever the answer, the common-sense of our age would say that Plato was definitely wrong about the appropriate objects of love: true love is of individuals, not types, and one may consistently love a person without loving her doppelgaenger. About art the question is not so easily answered. For at least one plausible tradition regards art as important because of the experience it affords, so that all objects capable of causing the same experience should be valued equally. This idea is closely linked to that of art as disinterested, as an island secluded from the tyranny of purpose. Art, after all, is among a small number of human activities that one would prefer to think can figure only as the premise of a justification, not (unless one is attempting to impress a banker) as its conclusion. If Art needs no justification beyond itself, it had better stand apart from the range of things that do. Such is the attraction of the idea of pure aesthetic response.

Even if there is such a thing as purely aesthetic response, however, we are unlikely often -- or ever -- to experience it unmixed. It is doubtless a safe axiom that no emotion is unmixed, and aesthetic emotions are all the more mixed for aspiring to purity. Suppose, however, that it were possible to isolate a pure strain, it is not obvious how we could know it for what it is.

These musings introduce three questions:

1. Should our attitude to art be essentially different from our attitude to people?

2. What is the role of the particular in aesthetic experience? More specifically, is the particularity of the target ever an essential part of what makes the aesthetic experience what it is?

3. Can we isolate components of our experience, in such a way as to separate the aesthetic element from other interests?

My tentative answers to these questions will emerge indirectly, by way of a question that lies on the margins of the issue of disinterestedness. I'll begin by considering what we might call "weakness of taste", or aesthetic akrasia. This will lead me to ask to what extent we can single out the several qualities that constitute the focus of our aesthetic attention, and isolate a "purely" aesthetic emotion. It will also lead me to ask in what sense and to what extent the focus of aesthetic attention is properly taken to be a particular, and to what extent it is, or should be, logically general. This will amount, for reasons that will become clear, to the question of whether fetishism is a legitimate part of aesthetic emotion, and if not, whether it is avoidable.

Aesthetic Akrasia

Just as ordinary akrasia is a failure to act on what one knows to be the best counsel, so aesthetic akrasia is a failure to react with what one knows to be the appropriate emotion: the inability to respond as one "knows one should" to some aesthetic stimulus. Typically (though not exclusively) it is a failure of enjoyment, and it can go both ways: one can like what one knows (on the basis of reliable art books) is a great work, but nevertheless find oneself quite unable to see the slightest merit in it. Assuming that the reliable art book is right, and (note the presupposition) that there is something to be right or wrong about -- this experience is more like blindness or wickedness than it is like akrasia.

Not everyone will agree that there is such a thing as aesthetic akrasia; but then not everyone is disposed to admit that ordinary motivational akrasia really exists either. Socrates argued that it is logically impossible really to think one course of action best and choose another: on this view, all cases of akrasia are similar to my "mere book knowledge" of aesthetic value. It isn't really akrasia because there's no real conflict. Socrates was surely wrong about ordinary akrasia. As to the aesthetic kind, on the other hand, I fear our efforts to justify its existence may be vain. But I anticipate.

The best available account of ordinary akrasia is based on Donald Davidson's (1970). Both the problem and the solution to it are best described in terms of the fact that the conclusions of practical arguments are not automatically detachable. What this means is that the argument's correctness is judged relative to a set of considerations, but the conclusion might be pre-empted by another argument based on a more inclusive set of considerations. The crucial element in this account for my purposes here is this: akrasia is the plugging into the motor system of a conclusion based on less than the most comprehensive set of available considerations.<2> Thus our akratic acts have the structure of intentional, rational actions, since they are determined by practical arguments and based on relevant considerations. On the other hand, we can also see what makes them irrational, since they are not based on the most comprehensive set of relevant considerations and are therefore in the literal sense partial.

But this is just where there seems to be a crucial formal difference between regular akrasia and the aesthetic kind. For while the fault in the ordinary case consists in the fact that we respond to too small a range of considerations, the fault in most cases of aesthetic akrasia is that we seem to be responding to too large a range of considerations: typically, we fail to isolate the range of considerations that are properly speaking relevant to the aesthetic question from those that are not. The failure of judgment, unlike the failure of action, may lie in responding to what is irrelevant rather than failing to respond to everything that is relevant. Judgment here needn't refer exclusively to aesthetic judgment, since in the sort of judgments made in courts of law juries are often admonished to disregard what they have just heard. Thus if cheap music is potent, this may be due to our emotional cowardice in the face of personal, or merely sentimental, or even political associations which by some standards ought not to figure in our enjoyment of music.

Some properties of the targets of aesthetic contemplation, then, are generally regarded as unworthy of consideration when aesthetic judgments are made. Typical of these sorts of unworthy properties is monetary value. One may concede that much of what goes on in the real world of art appreciation instantiates this kind of aesthetic akrasia. But inextricably bound up with it is the one that especially interests me here, namely the weight placed on associations with particular persons. Those who would pay high prices for artifacts touched by Elvis Presley or Madonna might not claim that their former owner's magic touch enhances their beauty; but then why should Salvador Dali's signature on a print make that more aesthetically valuable?

Most people would concede the possibility of self-deception in such cases. To quote Mary Mothersill (1993), I may "think it is your handsomely outfitted house that I admire whereas in fact I am flattered by being invited to visit your handsomely outfitted house." One might add: I am flattered by the very fact that I know how much all this costs: thus making explicit the link between individuality and money. But it is this association with particulars in itself which warrants suspicion. I suggest that it constitutes a special case of aesthetic akrasia, which I propose to call fetishism. This claim requires clarification of two terms: the relevant notion of particularity, and my use of the word fetishism.

Particularity is best explained by contrast with a second term that also stands as the opposite of `generality', for `generality' has two antonyms, each defining a different sense of that word. The first is specificity: in this sense, the more general is the less specific. The concept therefore admits of degrees: a concept can be more or less general, in the sense of less or more specific. Particular is the other opposite of `general'. Generality in this sense is compatible with any degree of specificity. Particularity does not admit of degrees and is a logical category rather than a category of experience: for while we no doubt experience particulars, their particularity is part of our experience only insofar as we take stock of the fact that our awareness of them is occurring at a particular moment in space and time. Particularity is not a feature of an experience, but a logical category that applies both to it and to its target.

Fetishism in my sense owes something to its use in anthropology and something to its psychoanalytic usage, but is different from both. In the original anthropological sense, a fetish is something that is held in awe because of its putative relation to something else for which it stands, particularly a deity or supernatural being. In psychoanalysis, a fetishist is someone for whom a part of the body, or a physical object of a non-sexual nature, arouses sexual excitement because of its (causal or associative) relation with something more commonly regarded as sexually significant. My special sense of fetishism abstracts from both the supernatural and the sexual connotations of the two other uses, but borrows the central idea of borrowed power, vested in an object the intrinsic qualities of which are unimportant: fetishism is the valuing of a particular object for the sake of its causal link with some other particular, which is held to be of intrinsic (or at least prior) value.

Now the assumption I shall develop in a moment is that qualitative experience, as such, cannot relate essentially to a particular as such. An experience's closest relation to a particular is to it as its contingent cause. This raises directly the second of the questions raised above, about the role of particulars in aesthetic experience.

Aesthetic experience and the particular

We prize individual works of art. These are often said to be unique. This means not necessarily that there are no others just like this one, which would exclude "original prints" or bronze statues cast in several copies, but that each copy counts as an original in virtue of having been produced by some physical process that relates it causally to the artist in specific ways. What criteria must be satisfied for something to "count" as original, however, is not easy to say. An original signature is expected on an "original print", but not on a bronze cast; Henry Moore's own hands molded the plaster maquettes now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, but someone else did the casting for the bronze that stands outside: that bronze, nevertheless, is no less "authentic" than the plaster. All this seems to have less to do with aesthetics than with the conventions and the sociology of art. Moreover there are media -- movies, for example -- which are not tied to any particular even where the work cannot be enjoyed in isolation from its embodiment in some particular hunk of matter, a case which holds also, and more obviously, for the purely abstract object that is a piece of software, and a fortiori for mathematical theorems. For a somewhat transitional case, consider the criteria that individuate a live performance, or worse a recording of a live performance -- which might in turn be taped from a later broadcast: these criteria seem to have a lot more to do with the protection of commercial interests, with issues of copyright, than with issues that have any intrinsic aesthetic significance.

Here is one more complication. Many people feel that the beauty of what they are contemplating depends in part on the (non perceptual) knowledge of how common the object is: if something exists in many copies, then perhaps it can be no more than pretty, and it loses not only monetary but also, it is felt, aesthetic value.<3> The frisson provoked by extreme rarity is familiar to collectors, and drove Leibniz to the wonderful and lunatic idea that God couldn't possibly have created two of anything. And that seems to have some sort of aesthetic flavour to it, on God's part at least. (But won't God miss the pleasure of pairs? the titillation of triplets?) Rarity is clearly a general property, in the sense that it can logically be true of more than one thing. Yet its applicability depends on its not having many instances. At the limit, it becomes equivalent to uniqueness. But the odd twist is that it still doesn't amount to particularity, for on the standard (Fregean) view uniqueness, like number or existence, is a property of (general) concepts, not of (particular) individuals. So the requirement of rarity can't be automatically dismissed as akratic on logical grounds, along with the requirement of particularity. Nor can it be assimilated to fetishism on the ground of not being connected to experience: for while the non-uniqueness of the object of contemplation can't be something directly perceived (unless the copies are simultaneously presented, like a multiple Warhol image), it might still be something that one experiences in memory: and surely it would be an absurd constraint on aesthetic experience to exclude from it anything that depends on what one remembers.

One might think to settle the question by reference to the meaning of aesthetic. Aesthetic experience has, in the classic and etymological sense of the word aesthesis, an essential connection with the sensory. It is first about perception. I shall make as much of this as I can in a moment; but I must acknowledge right away that this may not amount to as much as we might hope, for two reasons.

First, confining aesthetic response to the perceptible leaves unexplained the aesthetic pleasure we take in abstract objects, from mathematical theorems to conceptual art. The insistence on art's perceptual aspects may reflect no more than the historical fact that art was first plastic craft. Second, `etymology', though it etymologically means `true meaning', is not truly meaning. In any case there is no standard answer to the question of what are the proper objects of perception. Is the relevant sense of `aesthesis' sensation, in a purely qualitative sense, prior to interpretative understanding? Or is it interpreted perception? If the former, it is certainly qualitative rather than referential. But even if it is perception of ordinary objects, the focus of the aesthetic qua experience may still be in the object's quality as represented rather than in its particularity. Are aesthetic emotions properly directed at particular targets, or do they attach to the focus of acts of perception?<4>

Representations are not necessarily general. They can include particular references: `Ronnie', for example, may function as a representation of this particular, me. But this feat of representation is achieved in the context of a system of representation, a language, in which the tools exist to say what it is to refer to a particular. Strawson (1963) showed that this entails an anchoring in an egocentric space of particulars in which other things can take their place; and the "externalist" literature of the recent couple of decades has stressed that meaning can sometimes be anchored in some particular individual or kind.

Yet in spite of all this there is a good deal of plausibility to the idea that we should think of representation, in the sense in which it is relevant to aesthetic experience, as purely qualitative or general (in the sense that allows it, you will recall, to be as specific as you like, indeed specific enough to guarantee uniqueness in practice). I don't know how to prove this, but here are two arguments for it.

The first is rooted in the assumption that Strawson was right (which I won't attempt to argue here). If the aesthetic is really supposed to be disinterested, then I take it this means we have no motive to manipulate its objects (this doesn't mean we can't manipulate various particulars in the service of aesthetic experience.)<5> Strawson's demonstration suggests a reason for aesthetic objects to be general: if we are able to identify particulars it is because we are able to act upon them. We typically act on objects for a purpose. So if aesthetic experience is essentially purposeless, it should be accessible in abstraction from any particulars as such. Hence we seem justified in calling an aesthetic experience fetishistic if it is essentially tied to the apprehension of properties by a given individual and no other.

I'll come in a moment to a second argument for the thesis that the proper objects of aesthetic experience are qualities, not particulars. But it's worth noting in passing that if this is correct, then Plato was indeed wrong in supposing that Beauty is the true object of love. For fetishism, in my rather special sense, is not a perversion where the object of an attitude or emotion is a person: on the contrary, it would seem more than odd to value a person solely according to the universal properties they exemplify. Beauty (as the object of aesthetic experience) is logically general, whereas the object of love is logically singular. The logic of aesthetic experience is such that there is some inconsistency in deriving pleasure from a certain object, and not deriving pleasure from another that is indistinguishable from it. Love, by contrast, is generally held to be irreducibly historical: its object is its target, not the focus of any specific experience. When Alcmene was deceived by Zeus who took the shape of her husband Amphitryon, Zeus could not reasonably have deflected her complaint by merely pointing out that he had made himself indistinguishable in her experience from Amphitryon. For that is precisely how she was deceived.

In practice, the art world is highly fetishistic, as if it were modeled on the logic of love rather than on the logic of beauty. We care tremendously about whether a certain work is authentic or fake, where being authentic means that it is made by specific individual, or at least causally linked in the right way to that individual. Thus some might have paid millions for the pleasure of contemplating a van Meegeren while under the impression that it was a Vermeer, but would have felt cheated in the discovery because the pleasure of contemplating a van Meegeren knowing that it is a van Meegeren is worth only hundreds (or thousands, since after all van Meegeren is famous.) What's more, most art lovers will defend this as obviously sensible. Yet it violates the equally plausible principle that aesthetic pleasure, or the appreciation of beauty, relates to a certain range of aesthetic properties that are capable of being experienced, not merely known. This is the second reason for thinking of the proper objects of aesthetic emotion as general, and the one that takes the etymological argument as seriously as it can be taken. It is embodied in Mary Mothersill's suggested definition of what it is to take something to be beautiful:

Definition 1. Someone takes an individual to be beautiful if and only if the individual pleases him and he believes that it pleases him in virtue of its aesthetic properties. (Mothersill 1984, p. 342).

To make this more precise, Mothersill adopts a suggestion of Sue Larson's about what is to count as an aesthetic property:

[Larson's Law]. `F is an aesthetic property' means that for any x, if F of x, then for any y, F of y if and only if y is indistinguishable from x. An aesthetic property, in effect, is a property common and peculiar to individuals that are indistinguishable from one another.

Now there are notorious problems about what counts as indistinguishability: how long and with what instruments one might be allowed to look, and so forth<6>. But the key idea, which I propose to pass unchallenged here so that we can look at some different problems, is that aesthetic properties are apprehended in experience (typically but not exclusively in perceptual experience), not by extraneous knowledge of the particular in question. This doesn't mean, of course, that one's perception isn't influenced by all kinds of general knowledge, but it raises the theoretical possibility of sorting through those influences to isolate the purely aesthetic. For it seems to licence the crucial conclusion that aesthetic experience is based on properties which can logically belong to any number of particulars.

Mothersill and Larson's ideas go back to Arnold Isenberg (1949), in which he addressed the problem of how critical discourse might refer to objective qualities even though generalizations from critical remarks never seem to be supportable. Thus, for example, Isenberg (followed by Mothersill) quote a critic on El Greco's The Burial of Count Orgaz:

Like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave is the outline of the four illuminated figures in the foreground: steeply upwards and downwards about the grey monk on the left, in mutually inclined curves about the yellow of the two saints.... (p. 162, cited by Mothersill 1984 p. 336)

But while there is indeed a wavelike contour in the picture, and while one might well agree that it contributes crucially to the pleasure of the picture (to its beauty, if you like) it seems preposterous to suggest that the same contour would make a similar contribution to any other picture. Its contribution is not generalizable, but if not generalizable, how can it genuinely be said to contribute to this picture at all? Isenberg's solution is this:

It seems reasonable to suppose that the critic is thinking of another quality, no idea of which is transmitted to us by his language, which he sees and which by his language he gets us to see. This quality is, of course, a wavelike contour; but it is not the quality designated by the expression `wavelike contour'. Any object which has this quality will have a wavelike contour, but it is not true that any object which has a wavelike contour will have this quality. (ibid.)

Now Mothersill goes on to describe the situation as involving a "particular quality." (ibid). But that is a confusing expression: for qualities are by definition not particulars, but universals. She must mean that we are dealing with a maximally determinate quality, in the sense that any two determinates of it would be indistinguishable under normal observation conditions. With this clarification, it's possible to understand how the aesthetic properties in question are both genuine properties and apparently generalization-proof: generalizations involving them are logically correct, but are bound to have an air of triviality, since nothing short of indistinguishability will count as yielding the same quality.

I conclude that a reasonable case can be made for insisting that the objects of aesthetic experience are indeed essentially general. Nevertheless, our responses to art works and other objects of aesthetic interest are frequently affected by the identity of the particular target that gives rise to them. This suggests that our responses are not merely aesthetic, but compounds of aesthetic response and other sorts of response. Insofar as they are experienced as aesthetic responses, yet are tied to a particular individual, they instantiate fetishism. But if fetishism is indeed a form of aesthetic akrasia, then should we not be able to pick out the thread that belongs to the authentic response, and peel it off from the irrelevant factors?

Change of Taste and Objectivity

If we take to heart Larson's law above, then we must insist that whatever knowledge we acquire about a particular must be ruled out of bounds in terms of strictly aesthetic appraisal, unless it is acquired by direct perception. As I've already indicated, determining whether some piece of knowledge has been so acquired is a far from straightforward task. Luckily there is an argument which may dispense use from having to try. This relates to the closely related case of trying to separate out different factors in phenomenological experience. Mary Mothersill describes the case in question as follows:

One's taste changes over time, and in retrospect it may come to seem that some earlier enthusiasm, though admittedly genuine, involved a species of misperception. . . . Of course, I may be mistaken or self-deceived, dwelling fondly on my supposed superior powers when in fact my taste has progressively deteriorated. (1984 p. 264).

Now this talk of improvement or deterioration of taste implies that there are no fewer than two matters of objective fact about which one might be right or wrong. The first is the fact of what my taste is and whether it has changed; the second concerns whether my taste is or was correct.

In a moment I'll focus on the first type of fact, ignoring the second. First, though, it's worth stopping to notice that the interplay of these two "facts" leads to an intriguing puzzle, which is the appearance of a kind of hyperobjectivity of aesthetic judgment. It leads to the pleasing thought that in matters of aesthetics, as in matters of logic or mathematics, you can't both understand me and disagree with me -- except by virtue of aesthetic akrasia.

The idea that one might tax someone with a failure to understand simply because they disagree is, at first blush, preposterous. "If you don't agree, this shows you don't understand" is just too easy an argumentative gambit to be generally valid. Yet the example of logic or mathematics shows that it can sometimes be right. We would indeed reject the claim of someone who said: "I certainly understand what you are saying when you insist that the square root of 9 is 3, but I just don't agree."

In more sophisticated cases the claim makes better sense, as in "I certainly understand what you mean when you say that if the universe is unbounded then it must be infinite, but I don't agree." In cases such as this, however, it is still true that one of the parties is able to claim a more comprehensive understanding. (In this last example, the one who makes a distinction between boundedness and finitude can understand what it is to confuse them.) This tight connection between understanding and knowledge signals objectivity in the subject matter. As we go to "softer" subjects, however, it seems to be of the essence of meaning that it is distinguishable from truth, that it is the mere possibility rather than the actuality of truth. Hence most ordinary contexts allow a gap between meaning and truth, understanding and knowledge; and when disagreements become particularly difficult to settle, as in ethics, we tend to assume that the domain in question does not admit of objectivity at all. Now aesthetics is the "softest" and reputedly most "subjective" domain of all. Yet the situation seems to flip back again, as if this were once more a domain of perfect objectivity. For it can again seem plausible to insist that if one's interlocutor does not agree with one's aesthetic judgment, then that judgment hasn't been properly understood: that the experience on which it is based has not properly been shared. If you are to understand me, then you must have an experience qualitatively identical with mine. But if you and I have just the same experience, then how can you not love it or hate it as I do? Wouldn't that show that our experiences weren't the same after all? In these cases, it seems that it is the very extremity of subjectivity that licenses us to insist on universalizability. For we saw that the appropriate determinant of aesthetic emotion is not its target, but the experience it affords: a focus on a motivating aspect of the target. And pleasure (or its absence) is part and parcel of my experience; so ex hypothesi if you experience no pleasure you can't be having my experience.

The problem is that there is not, and cannot be any independent criterion for the identity of two experiences. This fact threatens the intelligibility of aesthetic akrasia. For that concept requires that we can pick out an illegitimate thread (perhaps a fetishistic one) among the components of a reactive emotion. If we cannot, then there remains nothing more to aesthetic akrasia than a vague guilt feeling about one's own aesthetic preferences. Worse, it seems there can be no systematic basis for making a difference between those of our emotions that are targeted to people and those that are targeted to art. Let us take a closer look at how this comes about.

The Case of Chase and Sandborn

In the context of a discussion of the problem of qualia, Daniel Dennett (1990) has both sharpened the description of the case of changing taste, and shown that it turns out, in the end, to involve a distinction without a difference.

Dennett envisages two coffee tasters, Mr. Chase and Mr. Sanborn, who have been tasting coffee for Maxwell House for many years. Mr. Chase confesses that he no longer likes the taste of Maxwell house coffee, although that taste is exactly the same as it was. Mr. Sanborn avows that he too, has ceased to like the taste of Maxwell House coffee, but not because his taste has changed -- he still likes the way the coffee used to taste, but perhaps his taste buds don't seem to work right any more, for it doesn't taste the same to him. (Chemical tests establish to the satisfaction of both that the change isn't traceable to any change in the coffee itself.)

Now we could simply take them both at their word: since they are, after all, reporting on their own qualia, who is to second-guess them? Even if we believe that we have some kind of privileged or even incorrigible access to our own qualia, however, what is here being reported is about how and why they have changed. And that is a causal hypothesis, not a simple report of a quale. We can envisage different cases for each man. In the case of Chase, for example,

a) Chase's coffee-taste-qualia have stayed constant, while his reactive attitudes to those qualia, devolving on his canons of aesthetic judgment, etc., have shifted...

b) Chase is simply wrong about the constancy of his qualia; they have shifted gradually and imperceptibly over the years while his standards of taste haven't budged.... he is in the state Sanborn claims to be in, but just lacks Sanborn's self-knowledge. (Dennett, 527)

As for Sanborn, he could in principle be in corresponding states of correct or incorrect belief. Or -- what makes it worse -- either could be in any of an indefinite number of intermediate states.

Could there be scientific tests to settle the matter? As Dennett points out, defenders of qualia who grant that b) is possible will surely be willing to countenance such empirical tests. But the experiments will not decide the issue. For whatever the results of the physiological tests, the phenomena available to scrutiny -- the subject's reports -- would be the product of two factors, "roughly, dispositions to generate or produce qualia and dispositions to react to the qualia once they are produced." (Dennett, p. 530). And that is just a new form of the very problem we've been facing: how to gauge the proportional contribution of different components of ones own experience. Even supposing we devise a physiological test, it won't tell us whether the subject has made any psychological compensations for the change in perception, or on the contrary whether the adjustment is made in memory:

     There are still two stories that might be told:
 

I Chase's current qualia are still abnormal, but thanks to the revision in his memory-accessing process, he has in effect adjusted his memories of how things used to taste, so he no longer notices any anomaly.

II The memory-comparison step occurs just prior to the qualia phase in taste perception;    thanks to the revision, it now yields the same old qualia for the same stimulation.
 

The Prospects for Objectivity.

Our inability to make the distinctions needed to adjudicate between the various possible interpretations of Chase and Sanborn's claims has dire consequences for our ability to detect aesthetic akrasia. For Dennett's phrase, just quoted: "dispositions to generate or produce qualia and dispositions to react to the qualia once they are produced" identifies precisely the factors that we need to distinguish if we are to determine whether a certain emotional response is a case of aesthetic akrasia. Thus we can always claim, without fear of refutation, that if our interlocutor does not share our evaluative opinion (our "dispositions to react") it is because they do not share our experience (our "dispositions to ... generate ... qualia). We can say it, but it will be wholly devoid of content because we will never be able to say about ourselves, let alone about others, what influenced our evaluation. Thus we can never know whether our disagreements relate to a difference in the relevant focus, in our perception of it, or to a separable component of evaluation that applies to that perception or focus or supervenes upon it. There will be no reliable way of comparing the components of those experiences; only the global judgment will be accessible. In turn, this has the further consequence that one won't be able to exclude the possibility that the price of a painting, or the individual origins of a manuscript, are what actually determines the dominant feeling of that global "aesthetic" judgment.

It may have been optimistic, therefore, to hope for a clear-cut distinction between love, which is properly focused on a particular, and aesthetic experience, which is disinterested, general even where it is unique, and tied only to the quality of the experiences on which it supervenes. While it seemed at first that love of persons would turn out to be properly "fetishistic", while love of art would not be, it now turns out that the distinction is harder, indeed impossible to make out.

Maybe it's proper that there should be no such thing as pure aesthetic experience. It fits well enough with the likely fact that there is no perception without action<7>; and since there is no action without a setting in a space and time occupied by individuals, including ourselves, it may well be that the roots of what I have called fetishism are deeper than the merely crass weight of association, unnaturally grafted upon the purity of aesthetic emotion. It may be, in other words, that there is no such thing as aesthetic emotion.

Perhaps this is just as well, if it means we can import our aesthetic sense into life as freely as we can import the rest of life into our aesthetic emotions.