Abstract

When we engage seriously with a work of art, we "walk around it," metaphorically and often quite literally. Analogously, when we seek to act responsibly in relation to other persons, we imagine the impact our action might have on them, and try to see things from their points of view. Metaphorically speaking, this process is "walking around an action." ;In this dissertation, I investigate the complex process of serious interaction with a work of art, and the conditions necessary for this process to take place. I show that these conditions provide a training for moral deliberation, basing my reflection on Kantian and Schopenhauerian thought. Although Kant and Schopenhauer have been characterized as stressing the "non-cognitive" in aesthetic experience, there is another way to read them which stresses their continuity with Plato, Aristotle and the cognitivist tradition. The moral-cognitive importance of aesthetic experience derives, for these thinkers, from the process by which subjects become free individuals while attending to objects in their world in a seriously aesthetic way. This way of approaching the intersections between aesthetics and ethics has been eclipsed in contemporary thinking. ;In Chapter 1, I detail the subtle links, in Kant's writings, between autonomous aesthetic experience and moral judgment and feeling. Unlike other commentators, I pay close attention to the role of aesthetic experience for Enlightenment as sketched out in Kant's Religion, a role I call "subtle scripture for an invisible church." In Chapter 2, I discuss and reformulate the Kantian conditions for aesthetic experience, namely "disinterestedness" and "free-play" of the imagination. Second, I explore three ways in which ethics and aesthetics come into conflict. In Chapter 3, I turn to Schopenhauer's understanding of the relationship between disinterested aesthetic experience and the moral attitude of compassion. After performing some "metaphysical surgery," I detail a "minimal Schopenhauerian metaphysics," shorn of its more untenable trappings. In Chapter 4, I argue for my interpretation of Schopenhauer's moral-aesthetic connection: Where Kant saw beauty as a symbol of morality, Schopenhauer sees aesthetic experience as a metonymy of will-less compassion. I discuss the ways in which this moral-aesthetic connection can survive scrutiny even if the Schopenhauerian metaphysics on which it was originally based cannot. I conclude by contrasting my hybrid Kantian-Schopenhauerian view with those of Martha Nussbaum and Noel Carroll, who focus on a narrow subset of encounters with art . Against these theorists, I argue for a focus on the process of serious interaction with art in general for an understanding of the peculiarly aesthetic relations between art and morality