Aesthetics for Contemporary Artists

Leonardo. Vol. 12. pp. 156160. Pergamon Press Ltd. 1979. Printed in Great Britain. AESTHETICS FOR CONTEMPORARY ART1STS V. C. Aldrich, Aesthetic Perception and Objectivity, Brit. J. Aesth. 18,209 (1978).In 1963,Aldrich published his Philosophy oJAri (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall). The first part of that work included a ‘new theory of perception’ (p. 209). Aldrich is convinced that many of his readers have misunderstood this part of his book, and this has led them also to misunderstand the views on aesthetics that were based upon it. His discussion (in the 1963 book) used a rather involved technical vocabulary, e.g. he distinguished the ‘physical object’ from the ‘material object’. In the present essay, Aldrich admits that he meant to siipulute ‘a use of “material” that distinguished it from “physical”’ (p. 210). In the book (pp. 2&21) he had claimed that to see something as a physical object is to observe it in a certain way, whereas to speak of something as a ‘material object . . . is a use free of presuppositions’ (p. 21). This, if accepted, leads to the possibility of a different kind of ‘categorial aspectation’, seeing something us an aesthetic object. This is complicated and technical. It is not surprising that Aldrich has had his critics, e.g. J. S. Morreall, in his Aldrich and Aesthetic Perception, Brit. J. Aesth.. 17, 275 (1977). So readers must be grateful for the clarifications to be found in Aldrich’s most recent essay. Critics will, in all probability, continue to have doubts, not about this or that technical point, but about the more general question of whether the notion of the aesthetic can be understood as a type of perception. Suchcritics as G. Dickie and J. Margolis may be expected to continue to reject Aldrich’s analysis for this reason. M. C.Beardsley. Languagesof Art and Art Criticism, Erkenntnis 12,95(1978).In the Introduction to his book, LogicalPositivism (New York: The Free Press 1959),A. J. Ayer tells the story of a group of Austrian philosophers, headed by M. Schlick, who becameknown asthe ViennaCircle.They had been trained in the sciences and tried to bring scientific precision to philosophy. Ayer says of them, ‘The missionary spirit of the Circle found a further outlet in its publications. In 1930it took over a journal called Annalen der Philosophie,renamed it Erkenntnis. and made it, under the editorship of Carnap and Reichenbach, the principal organ of the positivist movement’ (p. 6 of Ayer’s Editor’s Introduction). It is perhaps not too much to say that in the 1930sErkenntniswas one of the two or three most prestigious philosophical journals in the world. But when World War I1 came, the journal was forced to cease its operations. The good news is that it has recently resumedpublication and is once more available to scholars. The first two issuesof Vol. 12of Erkenntnis areconcerned with ‘the Philosophy of Nelson Goodman’. This first issue features several papers on his aesthetics principally as it is found in his Languages of’ Art, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co.. 1976). In his contribution, Beardsley discusses Goodman’s work as it applies to interpretation and evaluation in art criticism. The discussion is long and complicated-as perhaps it should be, sinceGoodman’s type of analytic philosophy isquite technicalbut suffice it to say that Goodman is concerned with matters of symbolic functioning and cognitive efficacy. That is, he sees art as language and is, therefore, interested in how art functions linguistically and what art ‘languages’can carry of a cognitive nature. Briefly,Beardsley notes that Goodman does not givethe critic enough help in understanding how art can be said to exemplify certain properties or emotions, ‘We need at least some clues to what in an artwork can, by appeal to a plausible convention, be cited in defenseof treating it as exemplifying’(p. 104). Beardsley thinks that Goodman gives the reader hints, but these are not enough. More seriously. Beardsley asks how Goodman’s views, concerned as they are with cognitive efficacy,can accommodate the extremely broad range of appraisal terms that are, in fact, employed by practicingcritics. He notes that ‘Thegracefulnessof the dancer, thedynamic tension of a painting, the chasteelegance of...