pleasure in apprehension. It has been argued by Addison, Shaftesbury, Burke,
Kant, and Schopenhauer, among others, that we pay attention to beauty in
nature or in art in a speciallydisinterestedway, without regard for any use of
the object apprehended in any practical project.^9 We do not undertake to
build with beautiful paintings or poems or sunsets; we simply regard them.
Taken by itself, however, this approach to both beauty and art seems to
leave the status of something as either naturally beautiful or artistically
successful too much in the control of the apprehender. It suggests that any
object–the remains of a cat’s nightly kill, or a cheap plastic fork–can
become naturally beautiful or artistically successful“for us,”if we simply
decide to attend to it in a disinterested way and then manage to do so. While
this suggestion has its charms in allowing that anything could be art as far as
its intrinsic features go, and in holding that its status as artistically successful
or naturally beautiful“depends on us,”^10 it seems nonetheless not to answer
to the powerful idea that initially motivates experience-oriented theories:
that somethinginthe object nonoptionally claims and holds our attention.
This something seems to invite, hold, and reward the attentive eye and ear.
Efforts to characterize this something-in-the-object have, however, proved
elusive. Specifications of its nature cannot reasonably be regarded as empir-
ical generalizations about causes of experience in everyone, for not everyone
in fact has the same pleasures in apprehension with regard to the same
objects. Hence we seem to have to identify artistically successful and natur-
ally beautiful objects first, in order to know whose pleasures in particular are
on the mark.^11 The situation is quite different from the case of establishing
the standard for normal vision, say, by reference to a physically healthy
majority. Whose identifications of artworks and art-relevant properties shall
count, and why?
Specifications of a property in the object thatcountsas relevant to aesthetic
pleasure are best regarded, therefore, not simply as causal generalizations(^9) For a useful survey of the emergence of disinterestedness as a central mark of our mode
of attention to artistic and natural beauty, see Jerome Stolnitz,“Of the Origins of
‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’”inAesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dickie and Sclafani,
pp. 606–25, as well as Kivy,“Recent Scholarship and the British Tradition.”
(^10) Theories thatdofocus centrally on the authority of critics and other apprehenders in
decidingwhat is art will be considered further in Chapter 7 below.
(^11) Unless, of course, Hume is right that we can agree on independent criteria for expertise
in apprehension. Again, I postpone this topic until Chapter 7.
56 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art