The traditional business of Aesthetics has been the study of the aesthetic experience and activity of mankind, in order to show what it is and how it can be distinguished from other experiences and activities. The assumption commonly made is that we ourselves, like others before us, have had a specifically aesthetic experience in the enjoyment of art or the beauty of nature, or have been engaged in the making of something unquestionably artistic. This basic assumption has been challenged recently (...) by I. A. Richards, who calls aesthetic experience “a phantom.” His view is shared by other contemporary philosophers, who also maintain that there is no appreciable difference between an aesthetic reaction and any other frame of mind, or between artistic behaviour and other forms of creative work. We can certainly appeal to experience for the support of a postulate usually taken for granted and say that most artists, authors, and ordinary people in fact regard their aesthetic experience as something entirely distinct from what they do or feel at other times. Analysis will show whether this common-sense opinion is illusory. (shrink)

It has long been the habit of philosophers, and is still a common failing of ordinary playgoers, to see tragedy through the coloured spectacles of an acquired philosophical or religious outlook, and to commend or condemn rather from the standpoint of partiality for a certain view about life in general than from that of one assessing the intrinsic merits of a work of art. Because we all, whether laymen or specialists, theorize about the nature and destiny of that mysterious universe (...) which, for a brief span, our minds illumine, and because the working hypothesis so engendered is inevitably tinged by our personal idiosyncrasies of temperament and taste, there have been—and, building on such a foundation, there must be—almost as many different theoretical explanations of the tragic as theoreticians speculating on this high theme. Besides introducing that personal equation which has always been anathema to science, the distorted vision for which philosophical preconceptions are responsible brings with it minor illusions that are scarcely less injurious; the reading into a play or a novel of notions that had never entered the poet's brain, or the interpolation of history with incidents that never really occurred, the discarding of much that is genuinely tragic because it happens not to fit into the mould shaped by our own ideas, and the acceptance of much that is not merely untragic, but actually inartistic—pacifist, or communist, or feminist, or religious propaganda—because it happens to display the native hue of our own convictions. (shrink)