In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 139-143, 1983 Printed in Great Britain AESTHETICS FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS Elmer H. Duncan 0024-094X/83%3.00+0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd. D. Best, The Aesthetic and the Artistic, Philosophy 57, 357 (1982). Best begins with a complaint: “In the literature and discussions on aesthetics there is a widespread failure either to recognize that there is a significant distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic, or to characterize the distinction properly” (p. 357). Sometimes these terms are used as if they were two names for the same thing. More often, the term “aesthetic” is used for almost anything that moves us-sunsets, football games, beautiful women, logic proofs-while “artistic” refers only to art works. Thus, “aesthetic” is the more inclusive term; “artistic” is much more restricted. But D. Best thinks this a mistake. “My proposed account gives emphasis on a characteristic which is central to the notion of an art form, rather than to a work of art within that medium: it is intrinsic t o an art form that thereshould be the possibility of the expression of a conception of life-issues” (p. 363). It is possible to express through a novel or a painting the political conviction that capitalism rather than communism is in accord with human nature,good for the average citizen,etc. But sunsets cannot do this. It is always possible to ask of an art work, What does it mean? and expect an answer in Best’s terms of life-issues. On the other hand, one cannot ask this question of a sunset or a rushing stream. Best himself raises the question of whether his account is merely a stipulation (p. 364), but he does not take the possibility seriously enough. He says only that there is a distinction to be made between the aesthetic and the artistic, and that this is one way to make it (p. 364). But it is one thing to say that there are good reasons for using words in a certain way and quiteanother to say that they are, in fact, used in that way. And if they arenot now distinguished as Best suggests, it is surely improperfor him to say as he does, “It is clear that Reid and Ruth Saw are mistaken” because they permit certain sports “to be regarded as legitimate forms of art” (p. 363). T. D. Campbell, Francis Hutcheson: ‘Father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, in Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1982)p. 167. Campbell’s essay is not primarily devoted to aesthetics. But it is of importance for the history of aesthetics. Many scholars (J. Margolis among them) argue that the study of aesthetics began with the publication of The Critique ofJudgmeni by I. Kant in 1790. Other scholars maintain, with equal vigor, that the actual date should be 65 years earlier, in 1725, the year of the publication of An Inquiry into the Originalof our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue by F. Hutcheson. Campbell’s essay is an excellent general introduction to the work of F. Hutcheson. Campbell notes that Hutcheson was “a major and often very personal influence on the two most important eighteenth century Scottish philosophers” (p. 167). A. Smith and D. Hume. He also claims that “Hutcheson’s ideas were widely disseminated by Scottish emigres in the American colonies and played a part in the political thinking used tojustify or even initiate the American Revolution” (p. 167). As were so many other eighteenth-century writers. Hutcheson was “consistently and vehemently anti-Hobbesian” (p. 172). Hobbes argued that human action is motivated solely by selfinterest . One way to show the falsity of this position is to produce a convincing counterinstance, and aesthetic judgments offer a paradigm of disinterested human motives. Indeed, moral andaesthetic judgments hardly seem to be motivated at all; they typically are passive. Hutcheson, a religious man, argued that God has endowed us with special senses-a moral sense and a sense of beauty-to make such judgments. Campbell explains: “Adopting the terminology of Locke, he calls these powers ‘internal powers’; they are senses because the...

pdf

Share