engleski

Reacting to beauty: aesthetic consciousness, autonomy and agency

Most discussions regarding the aesthetic judgments, or judgments of taste, focus on the question of whether such judgments are manifestations of subjective preferences, or whether they depict features that the objects objectively possess. Quite often, these discussions take a turn into a debate regarding the proper role of critics and critical judgments, and the question of whether one should modify one’s own taste if one finds oneself disagreeing with others, most notably, the critics. In that sense, a theoretical framework within which the problem of aesthetic judgments is discussed consists of debates regarding realism vs. anti-realism of aesthetic properties, and regarding one’s entitlement to one’s aesthetic judgments and their subsequent justifiability. As I argue in this paper, contemporary findings of cognitive aesthetics offer valuable and much needed solutions to both of these debates. To show that, I position the problem of aesthetic judgments against a slightly different framework, the one provided by the empirical approaches to aesthetic issues, most notably cognitive and evolutionary theories about development of human aesthetic preferences. More specifically, I show that traditional philosophical armchair theories of taste, particularly those advanced by Hume and Kant, were in fact anticipatory of some of the most contemporary conclusions advanced by cognitive aesthetics. I am primarily concerned with showing how some of Kant's most contentious claims get corroborated by contemporary findings of cognitive aesthetics, emphasizing four in particular: his notion of autonomous judgments, his idea about the empirical interest in the beauty and its connectedness to sociability, his notion of sensus communis, and his notion of the ideal of beauty. At the core of my proposal is the notion of aesthetic agency, which I define as one’s innate capacity to notice and react to the aesthetic features of the world and one’s own experience of it, and to make judgments about these features that are grounded solely in one’s being conscious of such experience, where it is rightly assumed that one is not mistaken about it. Theories developed by evolutionary scientists give convincing reasons to claim that such consciousness is hard-wired into our brains, and cognitive psychologists working on ‘aesthetic’ responses to art and environment suggest that aesthetic preferences are widely shared. This gives empirical force to Kant’s view on sensus communis, but it raises two problems: that of explaining wide disagreements in aesthetic judgments, and the one concerning the sense that our aesthetic judgments are expressions of our most personal, inner, subjective selves, rather than our shared human nature. To solve these, I look at some of the factors that cognitive scientists underline as affecting our aesthetic preferences, and I use their insights to provide a more coherent account of aesthetic agency, which sees it as mediating between our personal, private selves, and our social interactions. An addendum to my paper is a discussion on the methodological and theoretical value of introducing scientific research into philosophical debates, which, on some views, threaten to put philosophers out of business.

aesthetic agency, aesthetic judgments, aesthetic experience, Huma, Kant, evolutionary biology, cognitive sciences

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