ABSTRACT
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TEXT of penultimate draft
I begin with the phenomenon of "aesthetic akrasia": Can we distinguish,
within the total emotional experience elicited by an art work, a "purely
aesthetic" component, from a component that is grounded in "aesthetically
irrelevant" emotions such as the awe one feels at the price it fetched
at auction? One form of aesthetic akrasia might be called "Fetishism":
a preoccupation with the individuality of the work, as opposed to its aesthetic
properties. Fetishism is obviously rational in the case of people, but
not obviously so in the case of art objects. The general problem
is to identify and distinguish the different kinds of properties in question:
which are purely aesthetic, which are non aesthetic, and which are evaluative
responses to either. The problem can be sharpened in the light of the phenomenon
of change of taste. Compare: (1) "My taste has changed: I no longer enjoy
THIS experience, i.e. the experience afforded by the contemplation of THIS
particular thing X", and (2) "The experience I get from contemplating
THIS particular thing X has changed, and I don't enjoy this new experience
(though I would enjoy the experience X USED to afford me.)" Dennett has
claimed that (1) and (2) express no real difference at all. If so then
we cannot pry apart a purely aesthetic emotion from "fetishistic" responses
based on the thought of the particular hand that shaped a work, or how
much the work fetched at auction. There is then no clear distinction
between the emotions proper to people and those proper to art objects.