Feeling the Aesthetic: A Pluralist Sentimentalist Theory of Aesthetic Experience

RESEARCH ARTICLE Feeling the Aesthetic: A Pluralist Sentimentalist Theory of Aesthetic Experience Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen1 and David Sackris2 1 University of Toronto Mississauga, CA 2 Arapahoe Community College, US Corresponding author: Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen ([email protected]) Sentimentalist aesthetic theories, broadly construed, posit that emotions play a fundamental role in aesthetic experiences. Jesse Prinz has recently proposed a reductionistic version of sentimentalist aesthetics, suggesting that it is the discrete feeling of wonder that makes an experience aesthetic. In this contribution, we draw on Prinz’s proposal in order to outline a novel version of a sentimentalist theory. Contrasting Prinz’s focus on a single emotion, we argue that an aesthetic experience is rudimentarily composed of a plurality of emotions. We acknowledge and discuss significant problems that follow from such a theory, arguing that a pluralist version of sentimentalism is nonetheless the soundest position within sentimentalist aesthetics. Keywords: sentimentalist aesthetics; pluralist sentimentalism; aesthetic feeling; aesthetic emotion; wonder A central theme in aesthetics regards accounting for what exactly makes an experience aesthetic, that is, pointing out what psychological processes differentiate aesthetic experiences from other sorts of experiences. For example, while some might claim that a sunset over the Serengeti suffices as an aesthetic experience, it is still left to philosophers to explain what makes that experience psychologically different from non-aesthetic experiences. Attempts to answer this fundamental question have included many different considerations, such as: whether aesthetic experience relates to a biologically encoded propensity;1 whether these sorts of experiences are merely derived from one’s cultural heritage;2 whether there are certain properties that cause aesthetic experience;3 and so forth. In contemporary research, a growing number of philosophers and psychologists have gravitated towards explanations that posit sentiment or emotion as a foundational part of 1 Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). 2 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 3 Noël Carroll, ‘Defending the Content Approach to Aesthetic Experience’, Metaphilosophy 46 (2015): 171–88. Rosenberg Larsen, Rasmus and David Sackris. ‘Feeling the Aesthetic: A Pluralist Sentimentalist Theory of Aesthetic Experience.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LVII/XIII, no.2 (2020): pp.116–134. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.212 ESTETIKA THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic 117 aesthetic experience.4 While these so-called sentimentalist theories exhibit great diversity in their overall account, they nevertheless share the basic thesis that aesthetic experiences are intimately tied to the emotional, valuative content of our perceptions; that is, when we experience something aesthetically, this experience is to some extent undergirded by emotion processes. One of the more recent attempts at outlining a sentimentalist theory comes from Jesse Prinz, whose version emphasizes the positive emotion of wonder as the foundation of aesthetic experiences (EAV). When we are appreciating an object/event aesthetically, Prinz suggests, the undercurrent of this sort of appreciative experience is a feeling of wonder: it is a positive appreciation facilitated by a positive emotion. However, sentimentalist accounts of aesthetic experience are not unproblematic. As Noël Carroll points out,5 Prinz’s sentimentalist theory will eventually face the same sort of difficulties that philosophers associate with valuing theories of aesthetics, for instance, with the theory promoted by Gary Iseminger.6 Although Iseminger portrays aesthetic valuing as an essentially cognitive process, his theory maintains (similarly to Prinz) that to have an aesthetic experience is to have a positive experience, that is, an experience that is valued positively for its own sake. But as Carroll (and others) have rightfully pointed out, such a view seems incapable of explaining how negative aesthetic experiences are possible, as it would be unclear what it would mean to value a negative experience positively for its own sake.7 Similar to Iseminger’s proposal, Prinz’s theory will meet the same challenge of explaining how a negative aesthetic experience can be based on the single positive emotion of wonder. In this contribution, we draw on Prinz’s proposal in order to outline a novel version of a sentimentalist theory, a version we believe is better equipped to answer well-known objections to valuing approaches and sentimentalist aesthetics. Whereas Prinz posits that a single emotion (that is, wonder) is capable of explaining all forms of aesthetic appreciation, we argue that aesthetic experiences are rudimentarily composed of a plurality of emotions. An aesthetic experience, we shall argue, is nothing above and beyond perceiving an object/event while associating it with one’s (valuative) emotional response that is either positively or negatively valenced. A decisive objection to our pluralist sentimentalist proposal is that it entails that aesthetic experiences turn out to be type-identical to ordinary (non-aesthetic) experiences of valuing, thus seemingly subsuming the aesthetic into a general valuing theory; to be sure, an aspect that cuts against orthodoxies in the philosophy of aesthetics. While this consequence is seemingly unattractive, we shall argue that a pluralist version of sentimentalism is still the soundest position within sentimentalist aesthetics. The paper will proceed as follows: first we outline Prinz’s reductionist sentimentalist theory; then we present some challenges and objections to Prinz’s emphasis on wonder; thereafter, we outline our pluralistic sentimentalist account of aesthetic experience. We conclude with a 4 See Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); Edmund T. Rolls, ‘The Origins of Aesthetics: A Neurobiological Basis for Affective Feelings and Aesthetics’, in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 116–65; Jesse J. Prinz, ‘Emotion and Aesthetic Value’, in Schellekens and Goldie, Aesthetic Mind, 71–88; hereafter EAV. These theories are commonly traced back to the eighteenth-century British sentimentalists (for example, David Hume and Francis Hutcheson), though the interest in the role of emotion in aesthetic experience dates back to Plato and Aristotle. 5 Noël Carroll, ‘Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2012): 165–77. 6 Gary Iseminger, ‘The Aesthetic State of Mind’, in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 98–110; ‘Experiential Theories of Aesthetic Value’, in Aesthetic Experience, ed. Richard Shusterman and Adele Tomlin (London: Routledge, 2008), 45–57. 7 See Carroll, ‘Recent Approaches’, 166. Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic118 discussion of some key problems familiar to sentimentalist and valuing theories, highlighting the advantages and challenges that follow from a pluralist view. I. Prinz’s Sentimentalist Aesthetics Within the field of aesthetics, two major branches seem to have dominated recent discourse. There are those investigations that consider what kinds of objects, events, properties, and so on, elicit an aesthetic experience. These concerns are sometimes filed under the label of philosophy of art. And there are those approaches that consider the how of an aesthetic experience, asking what an aesthetic experience consists of, that is to say, asking what is happening in our minds when we deem something to have aesthetic value (for example, judge an object/event beautiful, sublime, ugly, and so forth). This question is sometimes addressed under the heading of psychology of aesthetics. While Prinz’s writings weigh in on both of these topics, his primary interest is in the latter how-question, namely, ‘when we praise a work of art, when we say it has aesthetic value, what does our praise consist in?’ (EAV, p. 71).8 The theory of aesthetic experience that Prinz proposes is a so-called sentimentalist value theory. It posits that aesthetic judgements – that is, aesthetic appreciation and depreciation – have an emotional basis. On a generic reading of a sentimentalist theory, we would say that when we judge that an artwork is good, what is essentially being communicated is that we have a positively valenced feeling associated with it. Similarly, when we judge that an artwork is bad, we derive this assertion from a negative feeling. Following this sentimentalist line of thought, Prinz theorizes that aesthetic experiences are the final outcome of a value assessment, which functions on two dimensions: valence and intensity (EAV, p. 77). When perceiving, say, an artwork, the emotions that we associate with it are valenced (that is, positive or negative) and the emotions are processed with a certain intensity (that is, from low to high). Thus, the feeling of a high intensity, positive emotional response as the result of looking at an art object/event equates to a highly valued aesthetic experience; medium intensity positive emotions equate to a medium-valued aesthetic experience, and so on. These are the fundamental tenets of Prinz’s theory.9 Yet Prinz does not believe that the sundry emotions that we might experience as a result of viewing an aesthetic object all count toward making the experience an aesthetic one. He eventually argues that wonder is the only true candidate emotion for underpinning aesthetic responses (EAV, p. 83). This theoretical turn is partly motivated, so it seems, by his desire to contextualize his sentimentalist theory with the kind of objects/events traditionally believed to cause or induce aesthetic experiences in the viewer (that is, the what of aesthetic 8 Prinz details his theory of aesthetics through a series of articles: ‘Really Bad Taste’, in Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology, ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 95–107; ‘How Wonder Works’, Aeon Magazine, 21 June 2013, https://aeon.co/essays/why-wonder-is-the-mosthuman-of-all-emotions; ‘Seeing with Feeling’, in Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, ed. Gregory Currie et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 143–58. These have fostered fruitful discussions in the psychology of aesthetics (for example, Carroll, ‘Recent Approaches’). See also Joerg Fingerhut and Jesse J. Prinz, ‘Wonder, Appreciation, and the Value of Art’, Progress in Brain Research 237 (2018): 107–28. 9 A central caveat here is that Prinz uses his own account of emotion as the basis of his theory. See Jesse J. Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). While this presupposition is inconsequential for the present discussion, all kinds of sentimentalist value theories will have challenges unique to which theory of emotion is assumed. For example, it will eventually matter whether you adhere to, say, appraisal theories of emotion – see Phoebe Ellsworth, ‘Appraisal Theory: Old and New Questions’, Emotion Review 5 (2013): 125–31 – or feeling theories of emotion (like Prinz’s). Due to the notoriously thorny issue of defining emotion, such discussion is too comprehensive to include in this contribution. The reader may, for the sake of the argument, assume that we agree with Prinz’s theory of emotion. Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic 119 experience).10 What he seems keen to account for here are instances of appreciating fine art and pristine natural vistas. It is in this context, then, that Prinz suggests that it is only when we truly wonder over an artwork or natural scene that we are actually having an aesthetic experience. This, in turn, explains why some experiences of, for instance, artworks are not aesthetic at all (that is, those that are not awesome, marvellous, wondrous, and so on). However, the final emphasis on wonder raises a number of challenges for his theory, which we shall return to in the next section. But before we do so, we must review why Prinz finds his sentimentalist approach more compelling than other approaches. First, Prinz believes there is something intuitively appealing about sentimentalism. For example, in comparing a sentimentalist approach to approaches that posit aesthetic appreciation as a purely rational endeavour (or the outcome of a rational process),11 Prinz thinks that a sentimentalist theory comes out as the more compelling alternative. Suppose that we carefully study a painting, and in doing so we start rationalizing the ways in which its formal qualities highlight the levels of skill and originality of the artist. By reasoning about the formal features of the painting, is it then possible to arrive at an aesthetic judgement? Prinz thinks not: ‘No deduction from these features seems to be sufficient for determining that the work is good’ (EAV, p. 75).12 Trying to make sense of, or reason about, one’s aesthetic preferences is, according to Prinz, impossible without also making inferences to the emotions we associate with our preferences (EAV, p. 79). Only when an artwork engages and triggers our emotional dispositions are we able to draw a valuative (that is, negative or positive) conclusion about the work. As Prinz states: I think an aesthetic value is a rule stored in long-term memory that can be schematized: if a work W has feature F, then, to that extent W is good to degree N. For example, we may value words that evoke certain emotions or works that surprise us or impress us with their technical skill. […] There are also negative emotion rules (corresponding to features that we depreciate), which contribute negative emotions. Each feature that we assess in this way contributes to the total emotional state that results from our encounter with the work, and the valence and intensity of that total emotional state ordinarily constitutes our aesthetic appraisal. (EAV, pp. 76–77) Put briefly, the emotional response is, according to Prinz, the value judgement. Thus, for instance, when Samuel Coleridge writes about the heavenly objects in his Dejection: An Ode that he ‘see[s], not feel[s], how beautiful they are!’,13 Prinz’s sentimentalist theory would oppose such a claim. If Coleridge truly experiences beauty when gazing upon the sky, it is because he is feeling it. 10 We can recognize in Prinz’s outline central aspects of the philosophical tradition in aesthetics. For one, he quickly rules out the possibility that pleasure is the single emotion underpinning aesthetic experience; a wellknown thesis in Kant’s third Critique. Secondly, his belief that aesthetic experience can be accounted for by a single emotion seems rooted in the British empiricists and their belief that there was a single sense devoted to aesthetic appreciation; see James Shelley, ‘18th Century British Aesthetics’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, fall 2018 ed. (Stanford University, 1997–), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2018/entries/aesthetics-18th-british/. This, of course, is mere speculation on our part. 11 For example, Iseminger, ‘Aesthetic State’. 12 Such a view is well-supported in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Sibley famously argues that ‘there are no non-aesthetic features which serve as conditions for applying aesthetic terms’. Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 424. Several other prominent philosophers of art have agreed with him, for example, Gary Iseminger, ‘The Aesthetic State of Mind’, in Kieran, Contemporary Debates, 98–110, and Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 13 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), 364. Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic120 Beyond the intuitive appeal of sentimentalism, Prinz also offers a number of empirical justifications. First, trivial introspection appears to support his theory. For example, as Prinz notes, ‘good art can be thrilling, and bad art can be depressing’ (EAV, p. 72). Indeed, the claim that emotions are in play when we have aesthetic experiences seems fairly uncontroversial, perhaps immediately supported by the sheer number of philosophy of art articles that have been dedicated to investigating the role of emotion in art.14 The second set of empirical reasons Prinz offers comes from a growing body of evidence in neuroscience and behavioural psychology, which reliably demonstrates that when people have ordinary aesthetic experiences, emotion appears to play a fundamental role. For example, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals that when engaged with standard aesthetic objects (for example, pictures normally seen as beautiful), the parts of the brain that neuroscientists believe to process emotional content is reliably activated.15 This suggests ‘that some of the [brain] areas that show up in emotion studies are also major players in aesthetic response’ (EAV, p. 72). In addition, psychologists have found that certain moods are correlated with aesthetic appreciation and preferences,16 that personality traits are correlated with preferences for specific art categories17 and with specific properties within those categories,18 and that positive affection in the form of unconscious familiarity with a certain work predicts a preference for this work when displayed among other works.19 Prinz believes that all of these reasons support the view that emotions play a necessary role in the process of aesthetic experience. But how does Prinz imagine this process taking place? Prinz wants us to differentiate between two stages of aesthetic experience, namely, the initial response and the final assessment. The former stage is where we perceive the artwork and engage with its features and properties. This can be purely rational and contemplative but may also involve and engage our emotions. The assessment stage, on the other hand, is where we form a final judgement about the work, and this judgement is necessarily informed by the emotional response triggered by the aesthetic object/event (EAV, p. 75). In reality, this entire process may unfold with immense speed or over a period of time. We can often immediately determine whether we appreciate a painting, and sometimes our initial response to a painting results in affective states that guide and limit our final assessment (EAV, pp. 76–77, 80). Central to Prinz’s reasoning is that the two-stage model can be understood more generally as a blueprint of how we come to assess and attach value to our experiences.20 For example, 14 See Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, eds., Emotion and the Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jerrold Levinson, ed., Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotions in Art (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 15 See Thomas Jacobsen et al., ‘Brain Correlates of Aesthetic Judgment of Beauty’, Neuroimage 29 (2006): 276–85; Hideaki Kawabata and Semir Zeki, ‘Neural Correlates of Beauty’, Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004): 1699–1705. 16 Alice M. Isen and Thomas E. Shalker, ‘The Effect of Feeling State on Evaluation of Positive, Neutral, and Negative Stimuli: When You “Accentuate the Positive”, Do You “Eliminate the Negative”?’, Social Psychology Quarterly 45 (1982): 58–63. Linda Mealey and Peter Theis, ‘The Relationship between Mood and Preferences among Natural Landscapes: An Evolutionary Perspective’, Ethology and Sociobiology 16 (1995): 247–56. 17 Adrian Furnham and John Walker, ‘Personality and Judgements of Abstract, Pop Art, and Representational Paintings’, European Journal of Personality 15 (2001): 57–72. 18 Tova Rosenbloom, ‘Color Preferences of High and Low Sensation Seekers’, Creativity Research Journal 18 (2006): 229–35. 19 James Cutting, ‘The Mere Exposure Effect and Aesthetic Preference’, in New Directions in Aesthetics, Creativity, and Arts, ed. Paul Locher, Colin Martindale, and Leonid Dorfman (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2006), 33–46. Prinz has elsewhere argued that the emotional basis of aesthetic judgements may account for the great diversity and variation in taste (Prinz, ‘Really Bad Taste’). 20 For instance, Prinz has also used this model when accounting for moral evaluations, namely, the judgements and experiences that involve valuing something as either right or wrong, which he believes (similar to aesthetic judgements of appreciation and depreciation) is grounded in approbation (that is, positive valence) and disap- Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic 121 when we eat a piece of sweet candy, first we respond to the feature of sweetness, and subsequently we assess whether, in fact, we appreciate or depreciate said candy (that is, do we like this experience of sweetness as caused by the candy? A positively valenced reaction leads to appreciation, and a negatively valenced reaction leads to depreciation). The next question is obvious: can we equate the mechanics of the appreciation of a piece of candy to that of aesthetic appreciation? According to Prinz, a central way to approach this question is to clarify whether aesthetic appreciation involves a plurality of emotions or a singular emotion. On the plurality-view, enjoying a piece of candy is not necessarily qualitatively different from aesthetic appreciation, since sentimentalist value experiences in general are composed of an open-ended number and type of emotions. What matters is the intensity and valence of the overall emotional assessment, not the exact emotions that make up the experience. For example, a number of emotions may go into the final value judgement of a candy regarding issues such as: is the texture pleasant, is the packaging intriguing, what is our mood at the time, do we have any nostalgic childhood associations with the product, and so on. Thus, on the plurality-view, when we speak about aesthetic appreciation, we are not necessarily denoting a discretely defined category of experience different in type from other valuative experiences. The singularity-view, on the other hand, posits that enjoying a piece of candy is not necessarily the same kind of experience as an aesthetic experience, since value experiences can be categorically reduced to specific, singular emotional responses and thereby classified. Put differently, value assessments of objects that rely on distinct, singular emotions will be more likely to constitute categorically different types of experiences. So if philosophers want to individuate a distinct kind of experience and explain how it differs qualitatively from other experiences, they will most likely have to identify a distinct type of emotion that undergirds it. Speaking to this latter observation, Prinz believes that the singularity-view – or as he calls it, a reductionist approach – is the most compelling approach for a sentimentalist account of aesthetics. The kinds of value judgements that belong to the aesthetic realm, Prinz argues, reduce to a single emotion, namely, wonder (EAV, pp. 84–85). When we are engaged with wondrous objects/events chances are that we are having an aesthetic experience. The account that Prinz proposes faces a number of challenges, many of which are general for sentimentalist theories, to which we shall return in subsequent sections. However, one challenge that is unique to his reductionist emphasis on wonder is the need to clarify whether wonder is necessary and/or sufficient for aesthetic appreciation. Prinz has already declared that wonder is necessary for an aesthetic experience (that is, his reductionist approach), but are all cases of wondrous experiences aesthetic in nature? This seems implausible. As Prinz readily admits, wonder sometimes occurs in contexts that are not normally seen as aesthetic. For example, the wonder we take ‘in a lover’s eyes or a newborn child’ (EAV, p. 85) may not be traditionally conceived as aesthetic experiences. In other words, wonder is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. But if wonder can have this non-aesthetic role, how do we know which instances of wonder are instances of aesthetic experience? Prinz concedes that wonder is a fundamental emotion invoked by a variety of stimuli. However, when we wonder over, say, an artwork, what is essentially happening, Prinz asserts, is that we have learned, that is, stored a new rule in our long-term memory, that the kind of properties associated with said artwork are wonder-invoking: ‘Aesthetic appreciation is wonder that has been re-calibrated to artworks and things that we construe as artworks.’ As such, a primitive emotion has been culturally trained to respond to a certain class of objects, and probation (that is, negative valence). See Jesse J. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic122 in this process, Prinz argues, new forms of emotions have been generated ‘by re-calibrating previously existing emotions to new classes of elicitors’ (EAV, p. 85). Prinz claims that this recalibrating of emotions is actually more common than we may think; for example, we may be culturally trained to take joy in other people’s downfall (that is, schadenfreude), or pride may be re-calibrated to be triggered by our national heritage and symbols (that is, patriotism). So, to recapitulate Prinz’s thesis, the emotion of wonder counts as an aesthetic experience when, it would seem, it is triggered by ‘artworks and things we construe as artworks’ (EAV, p. 84). When the feeling of wonder is triggered by other entities/events, it does not count as aesthetic experience. II. Wondering about Aesthetic Wonder The aim of this section is to offer objections to Prinz’s theory, in particular, his emphasis on wonder as the foundation of aesthetic experience. While we believe that Prinz’s basic theory is on the right track, we do not think that his advocacy for a reductionist approach is persuasive; or better, that any reductionistic sentimentalist approach is viable. We initiate our argument by bringing attention to the reasons we think Prinz has for pursuing a reductionist approach. Then we offer some concrete challenges to the claim that aesthetic experiences are experiences of wonder. Altogether, we think these problems undermine the very foundation of a reductionist account of aesthetic experience, which serves as our motivation for considering a pluralist version of Prinz’s theory in section three (a version Prinz himself briefly hinted at). As we discussed in the previous section, the basic outline of Prinz’s value theory – that valuations are constructs of valenced emotional assessments – can, according to Prinz himself, be accepted without further taking on board his reductionist position. One of the main reasons Prinz advocates for the reductionist position over the pluralist position strikes us as perplexing, since it appears to be rooted in practical considerations (that is, not necessarily philosophically motivated). For example, when hesitating about the pluralistic approach to aesthetic experience, Prinz says: If there were multiple different emotions that factor into appreciation [that is, the pluralistic view], it would be harder to explain how we add them all up together to make an overall assessment of a work. It would also be hard to find coherence in the phenomenon of evaluating art. Aesthetic goodness would vary from work to work, and comparison would be difficult. (EAV, p. 81) In this passage, we suspect Prinz confounds the aim of aesthetics – that is, explaining the psychology of aesthetic experience – with the desire to create a simplistic or uniform account of aesthetics. Moreover, Prinz does not appear to be giving voice to fundamental precepts in the field. In fact, that ‘aesthetic goodness varies from work to work’ and that ‘comparison [between artworks is] difficult’ are well-known truisms in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Namely, that (1) aesthetic goodness does vary greatly from work to work, that there is an open-ended number of reasons why we find one work appealing and another revolting, which in turn (2) makes it staggeringly difficult to compare and evaluate artworks within and across art forms and genres, amount to mundane observations in the field, which we think a sound theory of aesthetics ought to be able to account for instead of dismissing. In support of these two truisms, for instance, Sibley has advanced the following widely accepted philosophical thesis: ‘There are no non-aesthetic features which serve as conditions for applying aesthetic terms.’21 In other words, the non-aesthetic features that make one work graceful 21 Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, 424. Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic 123 may make another boring. Sibley’s position straightforwardly implies that goodness varies from work to work and that comparison is difficult. Thus, if Sibley is right, aesthetic theories should therefore not seek to avoid the trouble of explaining these core complexities, but rather treat them as their proper aim. Prinz, if we read him correctly, appears to propose that a satisfactory theory may circumvent this complexity. In addition, the basic tenets of Prinz’s sentimentalist account, in particular his two-stage explanation of aesthetic assessment, seem fully equipped to handle a pluralistic view. It therefore seems like Prinz is selling his own theoretical considerations short when he claims that a pluralistic view would make it harder to explain how we add emotions ‘together to make an overall assessment of a work’ (EAV, p. 81). While we certainly agree with Prinz that it would be more theoretical labour to systematize the many different emotions that go into a pluralistic approach, it does not seem to be exponentially harder to explain the mechanics of aesthetic experiences. As Prinz’s theory states, emotions are inherently valenced, and as such, positive emotions count toward appreciation and negative emotions count toward depreciation, allowing for a variety of emotional responses to be summed up, resulting in a single conclusive aesthetic judgement. Prinz considers a rule-based mechanism where we put the negative units to one side and the positive units to the other, and finally count which side (or which valence) is the most dominant (EAV, pp. 78–79). The outcome is the judgement. In this sense, the many emotional responses we undergo when engaging with, say, an artwork, count as units of either appreciation or depreciation, making the process complex for sure, but nevertheless rule-based. Thus, a person might find a work both clever and disgusting, but just so long as the finding of cleverness is in some sense stronger than the repulsive reaction, the ensuing judgement of the work will be positive.22 These are some of the reasons why we believe Prinz’s reductionist approach is unappealing. However, the dominant reason for why we believe his approach must eventually be rejected is not necessarily rooted herein. We might be wrong in implying that Prinz’s motivations are not substantial. More crucially, though, we think that his focus on wonder presents problems and paradoxes that, on their own, constitute sufficient reasons for abandoning a reductionist approach. We discuss these problems under the headings: (1) aesthetic wonder vs. nonaesthetic wonder, (2) semantic re-calibration, and (3) aesthetic depreciation. II.1. Aesthetic Wonder vs. Non-aesthetic Wonder The first criticism we offer bears on the observation that Prinz gives no clear criteria that allow him to distinguish between instances of aesthetic wonder and instances of non-aesthetic wonder. That is, his theory should be able to explain why some events/objects elicit aesthetic wonder, for example when a sunset over the Serengeti inspires feelings of wonder,23 and other events/objects elicit non-aesthetic wonder, for example, when we wonder over the fact that the neurons in a human brain could be stretched the distance between London and Berlin.24 In response to this problem, Prinz offers a story about how certain emotional dispositions (for example, that of wonder) can be re-calibrated to be triggered by new conditions (for example, certain artworks). 22 Prinz considers a metaphorical example where the outcome of an assessment is counted in units, similar to dealing out jelly beans of red and green colour, with red standing for a negative valenced emotion and green standing for a positive valenced emotion; whatever colour is dealt out in the greatest number will produce the final verdict (EAV, p. 79). This example has identical logic to the example we have just given. 23 An example of an aesthetic wonder-inspiring experience that Prinz himself recounts in his ‘How Wonder Works’. 24 Prinz uses this non-aesthetic example in ibid. Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic124 Yet this explanation doesn’t actually provide a criterion for distinguishing between aesthetic experiences and non-aesthetic experiences of wonder. To be sure, it is not the claim that emotions can be re-calibrated that we find problematic.25 Instead, the problem with Prinz’s re-calibration explanation is that we suspect it is not doing what Prinz claims it does, namely, explaining how the re-calibration of the disposition to wonder establishes a new category of experiences (that is, aesthetic experience). Prinz has merely pointed out that many different phenomena cause us to wonder (which, of course, is trivially true). We believe that a simpler explanation is more plausible: while feeling wonder when contemplating the complexity of the human brain and feeling wonder about the Serengeti sunset differ in (perceptual/intentional) content, they are nevertheless underpinned by the same basic feeling; thus, they are valuatively similar, that is, they are the same type of experience. It is not that the one is non-aesthetic and the other is aesthetic. Our emotions can be triggered by various stimuli, sometimes as a result of acculturation and sometimes as a result of our basic nature. But the different perceptual content, by itself, doesn’t make the experiences categorically different. Similarly, we do not believe that the emotion of fear as caused by a coat rack mistaken for an intruder in a darkened room differs in kind from the fear caused by walking through an eerie dark alley at night, although the circumstances and events causing the emotion differ drastically. Thus, as we see it, either both types of wonder discussed by Prinz are aesthetic, or neither one constitutes an aesthetic experience. A reductionist sentimentalist theory cannot have it both ways. In case one finds this objection unconvincing, it may be beneficial to briefly consider what follows from not accepting it. If the claim is that aesthetic wonder is simply wonder elicited by aesthetic objects/events (for example, artworks), and non-aesthetic wonder is wonder elicited by non-aesthetic objects/events (for example, non-artworks), then it would introduce the other (and perhaps much more challenging) task of defining what exactly makes something an aesthetic object/event. Now, it is uncontroversial to suggest that scholars have reached little agreement about what makes something aesthetic or artistic,26 so if it is not possible to explicitly define and differentiate aesthetic objects/events from other objects/events, Prinz would then be unable to convincingly demarcate the two alleged types of wonder from each other. In addition, and similarly problematic, insisting on differentiating between types of wonder by referencing their content would then make Prinz’s theory a content-driven theory insofar as aesthetic experience (that is, experiences of aesthetic wonder) would be essentially defined by reference to its content (that is, that which triggers or causes aesthetic wonder). But content theories27 are open to a host of objections, many of which are scarcely reconcilable with the sentimentalist claim that aesthetic experience is a thoroughly subjective and emotional matter.28 Having said this, we have little reason to think that Prinz would find this strategy compelling in the first place, since he seems to hint at the possibility that one and the same object/event can give rise to both aesthetic and non-aesthetic wonder, for instance, 25 Indeed, we certainly believe that emotions can be re-calibrated. For example, we would readily agree that we are culturally trained to associate the emotion of disgust with certain objects and phenomena. See Carolyn Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). But notice that in cases of culturally learned disgust, we still use the same word to describe our experience, namely, ‘disgust’. An individual may say she is disgusted both by rotting flesh and by eating dog meat, although, the latter is arguably the result of acculturation. 26 See David Sackris and Rasmus R. Larsen, ‘A Consideration of Carroll’s Content Theory’, Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (2020): 245–55. 27 See Carroll, ‘Defending the Content Approach’. 28 For a discussion of Carroll’s so-called Content Theory, see Sackris and Larsen, ‘Consideration’. Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic 131 they are not significant. Instead, on the pluralist view, ‘aesthetic experience’ simply refers to whatever valenced experience results from perceiving aesthetic objects as traditionally conceived. Perhaps all there really is is value-experiences of varying phenomena, which, in our opinion, makes for a much more interesting and fruitful premise for the fields of philosophy and psychology to investigate. Lastly, it may be stressed that since so many philosophers take it for granted that there is something unique about traditionally conceived aesthetic experiences, a pluralist sentimentalist scheme must then be ready to give a compelling explanation for this widespread assumption: if ‘aesthetic experience’ is not a discrete type of experience, why is it that philosophers generally assume that traditionally defined aesthetic experiences are qualitatively different from other valuative experiences, and have sought to account for this difference? This, we think, is not a question that allows for one simple answer, and it is certainly not a question we could do full justice to in this contribution. In beginning to address this question, first we have to acknowledge that for the better part of the history of philosophy, it was not widely assumed that there was something psychologically discrete about experiencing, say, an artwork. For example, Monroe Beardsley seems to track this change in attitude as something that occurs with Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers and their interest in so-called fine art.36 Similarly, I. A. Richards has argued that the philosophical qualification of aesthetics as related to a discrete type of judgement proliferated, above all, with Immanuel Kant’s third Critique.37 Before Kant, there is little indication that philosophers thought of aesthetic judgement as a distinct type of judgement.38 Having said this, we think that one reason for this widespread assumption might be that traditionally conceived aesthetic experiences simply appear as if they are a discrete type of experience. But it is quite a different thing to philosophically substantiate what appears obvious to us. For example, to any person it should appear obvious that the sun revolves around the earth, that spicy chilli burns your mouth, and that a wooden stick bends when immersed halfway in water. However, in all of these examples, the phenomenally intuitive experience is misleading. There is little doubt that the experience of a well-executed aesthetic object can be an overwhelming and memorable one. The question is whether we have any strong evidence for thinking that such an experience constitutes a distinctive type of value experience. It seems that philosophers since Kant have simply assumed that it does. In part, a pluralist sentimentalism raises doubt about this twocentury old assumption. V. Concluding Remarks Besides the intuitive and empirical reasons for advocating a sentimentalist approach to aesthetics, a core motivation is also that it may do a better job accounting for some of the challenges that opposing theories find difficult to answer. For example, a key challenge for so-called cognitive accounts of aesthetic experience, such as those offered by Kendall Walton or Noël Carroll,39 36 Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 1975. 37 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1924), 9. 38 Kant’s predecessors Hutcheson and Hume are both well-known for giving accounts of aesthetic judgement, but they do not clearly see such judgements as distinct types; in fact, we can read both as giving theories of value judgements generally, as both provide similar mechanisms for moral and aesthetic judgements. For a discussion of Hume’s aesthetics, see Theodore Gracyk, ‘Hume’s Aesthetics’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, summer 2016 ed. (Stanford University, 1997–), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/ entries/hume-aesthetics. For a discussion of Hutcheson’s view, see Alexander Broadie, ‘Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, winter 2017 ed. (Stanford University, 1997–), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/scottish-18th/. 39 Walton, ‘Categories of Art’; Carroll, ‘Defending the Content Approach’. Rosenberg Larsen and Sackris: Feeling the Aesthetic132 is to make sense of how people are able to instantaneously perceive an object as beautiful.40 As Arthur Danto succinctly put it: ‘Beauty is really as obvious as blue; one does not have to work at seeing it when it is there.’41 What we have to ask ourselves is this: how can a theory that focuses on a single cognitive process or a single emotion account for all the ways that individuals come to see beauty (in its broadest sense) in the world? One might expect that a non-cognitive approach, such as a reductionist sentimentalist theory, would be able to account for this phenomenon: we perceive and we feel, no thinking necessary, end of story. However, not all instances of aesthetic experience are underpinned by awe, even a very weak version of it; nor are they all immediate. Sometimes, for example, beauty is underpinned by attraction; sometimes it is underpinned by innocence; and sometimes it is, in fact, underpinned by feelings of awe. But the problem cognitive theories struggle with here also stands out for Prinz’s reductionist theory: it cannot adequately explain how the experience of (all kinds of) immediate beauty is possible. For instance, to say that all beauty is awe-inspiring is to discount everyday beauty. To appreciate a clear blue sky and feel happy as a result sounds quite a bit like something a general theory of aesthetic experience should want to capture, but it doesn’t sound anything like a feeling of wonder. 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DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.212 Submitted: 10 November 2018 Accepted: 10 June 2020 Published: 15 September 2020 Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Helsinki University Press in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. OPEN ACCESS