absorbing experience, where this affordance seems to be a function of the
arrangement, form, or pattern of elements composing the work.
In thinking about the special nature of art compared to other things,
reference to this kind of experience naturally comes to the fore. According
to the traditional formula of Horace (following Aristotle), the office of art was
to“please and instruct.”Yet many representations that are not particularly
artisticare instructive, including computer manuals, scientific theories,
assembly instructions, mathematical proofs, and recipes. Attention to how
art is distinctly pleasurable seems naturally to claim pride of place in the
theory of art.
Historically a shift away from representation theories of art to pleasure-
and experience-oriented theories was specifically motivated by a growing
sense of the claims of the modern mathematical-experimental sciences of
nature to have a central title to accuracy of representation and instruction,
apparently leaving no room for art in fulfilling these functions. Sir Francis
Bacon, for example, writing in 1605, held that reason, exemplified in experi-
mental inquiry,“doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things”;^3
that is, it gets things right. In contrast, poetry is“Feigned History.”It submits
“the shews of things to the desires of the mind”;^4 that is, it produces
appearances–not recordings of the real–that please by giving the mind
whatitwants.
Theorists concerned to describe how art satisfies the desires of the mind
were led to talk of both a special faculty for a distinct kind of satisfying
experience and special objects of that faculty. In England, Joseph Addison in
hisSpectatoressays developed the idea of works of art as objects oftaste,“a
faculty of the soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure,
and the imperfections with dislike.”^5 In Germany, Alexander Baumgarten(^3) Sir Francis Bacon,Two Books of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Human and Divine
in Bacon,Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1879), vol. I,
pp. 343–44, cited in Monroe Beardsley,Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short
History(University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1975), p. 170.
(^4) Ibid.
(^5) Joseph Addison,The Spectator, ed. Alexander Chalmers (New York: D. Appleton, 1879),
paper no. 409, vol. V, p. 20, cited in Peter Kivy,“Recent Scholarship and the British
Tradition: A Logic of Taste–The First Fifty Years,”inAesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed.
George Dickie and Richard J. Sclafani (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), pp. 626– 42
at p. 628. Kivy’s essay is a fine survey of the logical shape and structure of
seventeenth-century theories of taste.
54 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art