“Thick” Aesthetic Emotions and the Autonomy of Art

When defenders of “art for art’s sake” talk about literary narratives, they usually insist that understanding such works requires a detached, ethically neutral perspective upon one’s own emotional responses. But other aestheticians have argued that certain commonplace, “morally shaped” human emotions, partly constituted by ethical judgments, are indispensable for the appreciation of narrative art. Philosophers on both sides of this debate would benefit from paying closer attention to critics of the early modernist tradition (e.g., Wilde, Eliot, Bell) who tried to describe a discrete class of art-specific emotions that they thought were both ethically significant and intrinsically valuable.