Abstract

This paper places Leo Tolstoy’s often dismissed aesthetic treatise, What is Art?, in the context of the philosophical debate concerning aesthetic judgment. I examine Tolstoy’s argument for the very possibility of making aesthetic judgments, and suggest that his aesthetics proceed from an attempt to reconcile the subjective and the normative aspects of our aesthetic experience. Moreover, I show that Tolstoy, like Kant, seeks to preserve the autonomy of aesthetic judgment so that it may inform moral judgment. His polemics, his moralizing, and his denunciations of the greatest works of Western culture have tended to obscure this fact.