are controversial, but they have clarification much more clearly in view as an
aim, even if (some may judge) not wholly successfully, and they do not
involve otherwise violating criminal law. Works such as paintings by
Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade are made within a recognized
medium of art but predominantly as a commercial enterprise, not a clarifi-
catory one.
Second, the making of a work of art as a clarificatory enterprise is overde-
termined by a combination of communicative and formal reasons, as an
artist undertakes to present a subject matter as a focus for thought and
emotional attitude, distinctively fused to the imaginative exploration of
material. Formal considerations of arrangement to appeal to the eye and
ear will interact with considerations of emotional attitude and thematic
intent. As Marcia Eaton aptly notes,“human experience–including the
experiences of making and attending to art–is not segregated into the
moral, the aesthetic, the religious, the political, and so on. Aesthetic experi-
ence is special, but that does not imply that it is separate from the rest of
one’s life.”^93 In developing this thought, Eaton further notes that philoso-
phers such as Cora Diamond, R. W. Hepburn, and Iris Murdoch, who have
urged that the making of art is a moral enterprise of clarification, have
widened the sense of“the ethical”away from moralizing about right and
duty and toward the enterprise of reflecting, in Diamond’s phrase, on one’s
“texture of being.”^94 Ted Cohen has argued similarly that there is no clear
distinction to be drawn between so-called“aesthetic”and“nonaesthetic”
(including moral) terms.^95 When we praise James for his subtle(^93) Marcia Eaton,“Morality and Ethics: Contemporary Aesthetics and Ethics,”inEncyclopedia
of Philosophy, ed. Kelly, vol. III, pp. 282–85 at p. 284A.
(^94) Ibid., p. 284B, citing Cora Diamond,“Having a Rough Story about what Moral
Philosophy is.”
(^95) See Ted Cohen,“Aesthetic/non-Aesthetic and the Concept of Taste: A Critique of Sibley’s
Position,”Theoria29 (1973), pp. 113–52; reprinted inAesthetics, ed. Dickie and Sclafani,
pp. 838–66. Against Cohen, Monroe Beardsley suggests that we should distinguish not
between aesthetic and nonaesthetic terms but between terms used in an aesthetic sense
and terms used in a nonaesthetic sense. He claims that“restful”has a clear nonaesthetic
sense in“I had a restful vacation”but a clear aesthetic sense in“Kandinsky’s paintingAt
Resthas a restful character”(Aesthetics, p. xxvii). I see no difference in sense or meaning
here, but only a difference in the kind of object to which the term is applied, and the
examples mentioned in the text seem to me still not to sort readily into aesthetic versus
nonaesthetic uses or senses of the terms deployed.
246 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art