Aesthetic Experience

Theories of aesthetic experience may be divided into two kinds according to the kind of feature
appealed to in explanation of what makes experience aesthetic. Internalist theories appeal to
features internal to experience, typically to phenomenological features, whereas externalist
theories appeal to features external to the experience, typically to features of the object
experienced. (The distinction between internalist and externalist theories of aesthetic experience
is similar, though not identical, to the distinction between phenomenal and epistemic
conceptions of aesthetic experience drawn by Gary Iseminger (Iseminger 2003, 100, and
Iseminger 2004, 27, 36)). Though internalist theoriesparticularly John Dewey's (1934) and
Monroe Beardsley's (1958)predominated during the early and middle parts of the 20th
century, externalist theoriesincluding Beardsley's (1982) and George Dickie's (1988)have
been in the ascendant since. Beardsley's views on aesthetic experience make a strong claim on
our attention, given that Beardsley might be said to have authored the culminating internalist
theory as well as the founding externalist one. Dickie's criticisms of Beardsley's internalism
make an equally strong claim, since they moved Beardsleyand with him most everyone else
from internalism toward externalism.
According to the version of internalism Beardsley advances in his Aesthetics (1958), all aesthetic
experiences have in common three or four (depending on how you count) features, which some
writers have [discovered] through acute introspection, and which each of us can test in his own
experience (Beardsley 1958, 527). These are focus (an aesthetic experience is one in which
attention is firmly fixed upon [its object]), intensity, and unity, where unity is a matter of
coherence and of completeness (Beardsley 1958, 527). Coherence, in turn, is a matter of having
elements that are properly connected one to another such that
[o]ne thing leads to another; continuity of development, without gaps or dead spaces, a sense of
overall providential pattern of guidance, an orderly cumulation of energy toward a climax, are
present to an unusual degree. (Beardsley 1958, 528)
Completeness, by contrast, is a matter having elements that counterbalance or resolve one
another such that the whole stands apart from elements without it:
The impulses and expectations aroused by elements within the experience are felt to be
counterbalanced or resolved by other elements within the experience, so that some degree of
equilibrium or finality is achieved and enjoyed. The experience detaches itself, and even
insulates itself, from the intrusion of alien elements. (Beardsley 1958, 528)
Dickie's most consequential criticism of Beardsley's theory is that Beardsley, in describing the
phenomenology of aesthetic experience, has failed to distinguish between the features we
experience aesthetic objects as having and the features aesthetic experiences themselves have.
So while every feature mentioned in Beardsley's description of the coherence of aesthetic
experiencecontinuity of development, the absence of gaps, the mounting of energy toward a
climaxsurely is a feature we experience aesthetic objects as having, there is no reason to think
of aesthetic experience itself as having any such features:
Note that everything referred to [in Beardsley's description of coherence] is a perceptual
characteristic and not an effect of perceptual characteristics. Thus, no ground is furnished for
concluding that experience can be unified in the sense of being coherent. What is actually argued
for is that aesthetic objects are coherent, a conclusion which must be granted, but not the one
which is relevant. (Dickie 1965, 131)

Dickie raises a similar worry about Beardsley's description of the completeness of aesthetic
experience:
One can speak of elements being counterbalanced in the painting and say that the painting is
stable, balanced and so on, but what does it mean to say the experience of the spectator of the
painting is stable or balanced? Looking at a painting in some cases might aid some persons in
coming to feel stable because it might distract them from whatever is unsettling them, but such
cases are atypical of aesthetic appreciation and not relevant to aesthetic theory. Aren't
characteristics attributable to the painting simply being mistakenly shifted to the spectator?
(Dickie 1965, 132)
Though these objections turned out to be only the beginning of the debate between Dickie and
Beardsley on the nature of aesthetic experience (See Beardsley 1969, Dickie 1974, Beardsley
1982, and Dickie 1987; see also Iseminger 2003 for a helpful overview of the Beardsley-Dickie
debate), they nevertheless went a long way toward shaping that debate, which taken as whole
might be seen as the working out of an answer to the question What can a theory of aesthetic
experience be that takes seriously the distinction between the experience of features and the
features of experience? The answer turned out to be an externalist theory of the sort that
Beardsley advances in the 1982 essay The Aesthetic Point of View and that many others have
advanced since: a theory according to which an aesthetic experience just is an experience having
aesthetic content, i.e., an experience of an object as having the aesthetic features that it has.
The shift from internalism to externalism has not been without costs. One central ambition of
internalismthat of fixing the meaning of aesthetic by tying it to features peculiar to aesthetic
experiencehas had to be given up. But a second, equally central, ambitionthat of accounting
for aesthetic value by tying it to the value of aesthetic experiencehas been retained. Indeed
most everything written on aesthetic experience since the Beardsley-Dickie debate has been
written in service of the view that an object has aesthetic value insofar as it affords valuable
experience when correctly perceived. This viewwhich has come to be called empiricism about
aesthetic value, given that it reduces aesthetic value to the value of aesthetic experiencehas
attracted many advocates over the last several years (Beardsley 1982, Budd 1985 and 1995,
Goldman 1995 and 2006, Walton 1993, Levinson 1996 and 2006, Miller 1998, Railton 1998,
and Iseminger 2004), while provoking relatively little criticism (Zangwill 1999, Sharpe 2000, D.
Davies 2004, and Kieran 2005). Yet it can be wondered whether empiricism about aesthetic
value is susceptible to a version of the criticism that has done internalism in.
For there is something odd about the position that combines externalism about aesthetic
experience with empiricism about aesthetic value. Externalism locates the features that
determine aesthetic character in the object, whereas empiricism locates the features that
determine aesthetic value in the experience, when one might have thought that the features that
determine aesthetic character just are the features that determine aesthetic value. If externalism
and empiricism are both true, there is nothing to stop two objects that have different, even
wholly disparate, aesthetic characters from nevertheless having the very same aesthetic value
unless, that is, the value-determining features of an experience are bound logically to the
character-determining features of the object that affords it such that only an object with those
features could afford an experience having that value. But in that case the value-determining
features of the experience are evidently not simply the phenomenological features that might
have seemed best suited to determine the value of the experience, but perhaps rather the
representational or epistemic features of the experience that it has only in relation to its object.
And this is what some empiricists have been urging of late:
Aesthetic experience aims first at understanding and appreciation, at taking in the aesthetic
properties of the object. The object itself is valuable for providing experience that could only be
an experience of that object . Part of the value of aesthetic experience lies in experiencing the

object in the right way, in a way true to its nonaesthetic properties, so that the aim of
understanding and appreciation is fulfilled. (Goldman 2006, 339341; see also Iseminger 2004,
36)
But there is an unaddressed difficulty with this line of thought. While the representational or
epistemic features of an aesthetic experience might very plausibly contribute to its value, such
features very implausibly contribute to the value of the object affording such an experience. If
the value of the experience of a good poem consists, in part, in its being an experience in which
the poem is properly understood or accurately represented, the value of a good poem cannot
consist, even in part, in its capacity to afford an experience in which it is properly understood or
accurately represented, because, all things being equal, a bad poem presumably has these
capacities in equal measure. It is of course true that only a good poem rewards an understanding
of it. But then a good poem's capacity for rewarding understanding is evidently to be explained
by the poem's already being good; it is evidently in virtue of its already being good that a poem
rewards us on condition that we understand it.
Other empiricists have taken a different tack. Instead of trying to isolate the general features of
aesthetic experience in virtue of which it and its objects are valuable, they simply observe the
impossibility, in any particular case, of saying much about the value of an aesthetic experience
without also saying a lot about the aesthetic character of the object. So, for example, referring to
the values of the experiences that works of art afford, Jerrold Levinson maintains that
if we examine more closely these goods we see that their most adequate description
invariably reveals them to involve ineliminably the artworks that provide them . The cognitive
expansion afforded us by Bartok's Fourth String Quartet, similarly, is not so much a generalized
effect of that sort as it is a specific state of stimulation undetachable from the particular turns and
twists of Bartok's carefully crafted essay . even the pleasure we take in the Allegro of Mozart's
Symphony no. 29 is, as it were, the pleasure of discovering the individual nature and potential of
its thematic material, and the precise way its aesthetic character emerges from its musical
underpinnings . there is a sense in which the pleasure of the Twenty-Ninth can be had only
from that work. (Levinson 1996, 2223; see also Budd 1985, 123124)
There is no denying that when we attempt to describe, in any detail, the values of experiences
afforded by particular works we quickly find ourselves describing the works themselves. The
question is what to make of this fact. If one is antecedently committed to empiricism, it may
seem a manifestation of the appropriately intimate connection between the aesthetic character of
a work and the value of the experience that the work affords. But if one is not so committed, it
may seem to manifest something else. If, when attempting to account for the aesthetic value of
Bartok's Fourth String Quartet in terms of the value of the experience it affords, we find
ourselves unable to say much about the value of that experience without saying something about
the quartet's particular turns and twists, this may be because the value resides in those twists
and turns and not in the experience of them. To affirm such a possibility, of course, is not to
deny that the value the quartet has in virtue of its particular twists in turns is a value that we
experience it as having. It is rather to insist on sharply distinguishing between the value of
experience and the experience of value, in something like the way Dickie insisted on sharply
distinguishing between the unity of experience and the experience of unity. When the empiricist
maintains that that value of Bartok's Fourth String Quartet, with its particular twists and turns,
consists in the value of the experience that it affords, which experience is valuable, at least in
part, because it is an experience of a quartet with those twists and turns, one may wonder
whether a value originally belonging to the quartet has been transferred to the experience, before
being reflected back, once again, onto the quartet.