What makes a piece of art aesthetically pleasing? Is it the skill of the craftsman? Is it the choice of colors, shapes, and lines? Is it purely an emotional connection with the piece? Is the idea of aesthetics a combination of these things? One perspective on these questions is the perspective of Derek Matravers, who, in turn, shares his opinion with Immanuel Kant. In Derek Matravers’ article, entitled “ The Aesthetic Experience,” he explains in depth Kant’s views on aesthetics, how they coincide with his own ideas about aesthetics, and the of an object having a certain aesthetic value.

Matravers first talks about the distinctions Kant has made with regards to visual delight. Kant believes that there is visual delight that is simply agreeable, a visual delight that is good, and a visual delight that ultimately leads to one’s personal judgment of taste.[1] It is between the ideas of visual delight in the agreeable and visual delight in the good that Kant believes the idea of aesthetic delight lies.[2] Defining the terms visual delight in agreeable and visual delight in good will help in defining the terms aesthetic value and aesthetic delight.

According to Kant and Matravers, a visual delight is agreeable if it simply gratifies us. They also go on to say that even animals can have delights that are agreeable because it makes no call on our rational. So, delights in the agreeable sense occur when something gratifies out senses. An example of this, in Matravers words, would be lying in the sun sucking a toffee and having a massage. These are all agreeable delights in the sense that they all gratify or please the senses of the body.[3]

Visual delight in the good, as stated by Kant and Matravers, is consequent upon forming the belief that the object has a good purpose. In other words, delights in the good occur when it is our own belief that something serves a good purpose and we are pleased by it. An example of delight of good may be seeing a Boy Scout help an old lady across the street. This is an example of a delight of good because we feel as though the Boy Scout was of a good purpose.[4]

After defining these two delights, agreeable and good, Matravers begins to explain Kant’s and his definition of the term aesthetic delight. As stated before, they believe aesthetic delight to lay between delight of the agreeable on one side and delight of the good on the other.[5] Also, they believe aesthetic delight is in some way bound up with cognitive faculties.[6] The cognitive faculties that they are referring to are those of imagination and understanding. A summary of Kant’s account of aesthetic is as follows: if someone is not interested in an object, but the object has the right formal appearance, it will stimulate our cognitive faculties.[7] This stimulation gives us a sense of pleasure and this sense of pleasure leads to us considering the object as beautiful. So, in this way, the aesthetic is not the same as the agreeable because it involves the cognitive faculties.[8] The aesthetic is also separate from the good due to the fact that it combines the cognitions with concepts.[9]

At this point, Matravers alters one of the delights. The delight previously called good is now called cognitive because this delight, he claims, should not be limited to the ethical. Using this new term, he claims that we have delights that are neither agreeable nor cognitive. This claim is basically a reiteration of Kant’s claim stated earlier about aesthetic delight falling somewhere between agreeable and good delights.[10]

After defining the delights, he criticizes the conclusion that Kant has come up with thus far. The conclusion is that visual delight is aesthetic if it contains the following three things: firstly, it is an experience including the experience of cognition; secondly, it has non-instrumental value; and thirdly, that value is grounded in the cognitions.[11]

Matravers has a few problems with this definition. The first problem he sees is that cognitions have no phenomenology, that is to say, there is nothing that is similar to having a belief. Therefore, Matravers claims, cognition cannot be experienced. He also believes our beliefs to be instrumentally valuable, that is to say, that their value resides in their effects on our beliefs, opinions, etc. Knowing this, it is not possible for this delight to be non-instrumentally valuable.[12]

After this, Matravers goes on to analyze other philosophers and their ideas about the aesthetic experience. He follows this with his conclusion. He says he has made two main claims at this point. The first is that it is a necessary condition for being an aesthetic experience of delight that cognitions figure into the experience. Secondly, he said he has tried to map out the grounds for which the value of this experience could be expressed. He says that Monroe Beardsley’s idea of “active discovery” best fit his account. The idea of active discovery is explained by Monroe Beardsley as follows:[13]

A sense of actively exercising constructive powers of the mind, of being challenged by a variety of potentially conflicting stimuli to try to make them cohere; a keyed-up state amounting to exhilaration in seeing connections between percepts and between meanings, a sense (which may be illusory) of intelligibility.[14]

This idea is supposed to account for the cognitive experience within the experience of aesthetic delight.

The first problem I have with his conclusion is that I do not agree with his first claim. At the beginning, when he was talking about Kant’s theory, he argued against the definition with which Kant devised for the aesthetic experience. I believe that he was right to argue this point, but I do not think he went about it in the right way and I do not think that his criticism was complete.

The reasons I do not believe that his criticism was enough is because I do not think the three delight distinctions are correct. The idea of the delight in the agreeable and the delight in the good were a good start. Then, the delight in the good got changed to cognitive delight because he claimed it was not right to restrain the idea to the ethical. This is where I believe things first went wrong. He broadened the idea of the delight in the good to the cognitive delight, but left the delight in the agreeable the same. This error is one that led to others later. If the idea of the delight in the agreeable were changed to a more broad term, then the relationship between the two of them would have become clearer. The delight in the agreeable, when broadened, should have been called non-cognitive delight because the idea behind the delight of the agreeable was that it was delight that did not involve cognitions.

After making that mistake, another mistake is made in making aesthetic delight its own delight. There are many problems with the definition given to aesthetic delight. One of the problems is that they say that aesthetic delight falls in between the delight in the agreeable and the delight in the good. This does not work because of the error stated above. The delight in the good is also called cognitive delight and the delight in the agreeable should have been called non-cognitive delight. So, saying that something “falls in between” is also like saying it is similar to both. In this case, it would be a contradiction if the delight in the aesthetic were to be similar to both cognitive delight and non-cognitive delight. If we let aesthetic delight be A and cognitive delight be B the schematic formula will show the counter diction:

A > ( B · ~ B )

This can also be said as following: If A then B and not B. Spoken this way the contradiction is obvious. A cannot be both B and not B at the same time. Knowing now that the definition of aesthetic delight is flawed, a new definition is needed.

If we let C be any delight, then this valid formula will show that all delights have to be either cognitive (B) or not cognitive (~B):

C > ( B v ~ B )

Spoken, this would sound like: If C then B or not B. In other words, all delights fall under either the cognitive or non cognitive delight. The aesthetic delight is no different; it must fall within one of these two delights.

When considering the definition of cognations (imagination and understanding), it becomes obvious that Kant was correct in saying that aesthetic delight spawns from cognitions. If aesthetic delights spawn from cognitions, then it is obvious which delight aesthetic delight falls under: cognitive delight. That is to say that all aesthetic delights are cognitive delights and, also, that not all cognitive delights are aesthetic delights.

The main problem that I have with Matravers and Kant’s view on aesthetic delight is that they make the term too broad. They made its scope equal to that of cognitive and non cognitive delights and that was the major error, not recognizing that aesthetic delight was entirely part of cognitive delight.

Bibliography:

Derek Matravers. “The Aesthetic Experience.” British Journal of Aesthetics 43:2 (British Society of Aesthetics: 2003) 158-174.

This is a link to an article by an author previously talked about in this blog, Derek Matravers. In my opinion Derek Matravers is a great writer of philosophy and I will soon be posting a paper on the Philosophy of Aesthetics that is greatly inspired by this article, it’s a good read from anybody interested in the topic of art and aesthetics and my paper should be up with the next week or so.

Here’s the link.

http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/43/2/158