Beardsley, Monroe C. (1982). Aesthetic Experience. In The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays. Cornell University Press. 285-297.
Though some members of each opposing party would impugn so balanced a judgment, it is in my opinion still an open question whether it is possible—or, if possible, worthwhile—to distinguish a peculiarly aesthetic sort of experience. The question of possibility involves the debatability of the claim that there is a common character that is (1) discernible in a wide range of our encounters with the world and (2) justifiably called “aesthetic.” The question of worthwhileness involves the debatability of the further claim that, once distinguished, this character is sufficiently substantial and noteworthy to serve as the ground for important theoretical constructions such as we shall come to in subsequent essays.
Before we begin our own search for this character, or ‘inquire whether it has already been found, we ought to consider carefully what it is we are searching for, and how we shall know that we have found it. Our hope is to end up justified in saying that some experiences are marked by aesthetic character and some are not; and of those that have it, that some have it more markedly than others. Experiences with such character need not be universally associated with objects that belong to familiar artistic categories. (It is convenient to have the term “artkind instance” to cover poems, paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, dances, and so on, without—at this stage—raising or begging questions about the definition of art in general.) But to deserve the epithet “aesthetic,” such experiences ought (1) to be obtainable commonly through, or in, the cognition of artkind instances, (2) to be obtainable in their most pronounced character from artkind instances that have been judged to be outstanding examples of their kind, and (3) to be obtainable in some degree from other objects or situations (especially natural objects) that are often grouped with artkind instances in respect to an interest we take in them.
It is not surprising that it has proved very difficult to distinguish and articulate an aesthetic character of experience. Accurate phenomenological description, especially of common strains in so richly varied a class of phenomena, requires more care and effort than (I am afraid) many of us have been willing to make, and perhaps were too easily discouraged because we often had unreasonable expectations of exactness in our results. It is also, and consequently, not surprising that there has been a good deal of honest difference of opinion about what the aesthetic character is, even among those who agree that there is such a thing. But here we must not follow those who have magnified and emphasized these differences in order to cast doubt on the whole inquiry. Some features very widely and frequently found in experiences of artkind instances have been noted by perceptive aestheticians, and very often their divergent descriptions, when carefully analyzed in relation to the examples offered, turn out to be quite close in meaning. Moreover, if we do not insist a priori that the aesthetic character must be a single and simple one, but look instead for a set of central criteria, we may find that we can accommodate and reconcile insights and discoveries from several quarters.
This last conclusion, I must confess, is one that I have come to only over a long period of intermittent reflection on the problem and after a gradual recognition that my earlier attempts to capture the aesthetic character were defective and incomplete in ways that either became apparent to me as I tried to apply them and work out their consequences or were thoughtfully called to my attention. My struggles with the problem have taken two forms, which are not utterly hopeless, but which have not managed to satisfy me fully.
For some time I tried working with the concept of aesthetic experience, trying to make the most of Dewey’s inspiring ideas (as they have always struck me) by sharpening them and seeing how they can actually be applied to concrete artkind instances. In my Aesthetics,’ |made a somewhat sketchy attempt to fix this concept usably, and ten years later, in Essay 5, I tried to revive and renew it, after it had wilted somewhat in the intervening climate of opinion. I must say that I am stil a partisan of aesthetic experience; I don’t fully understand how anyone could deny that there are clear and exemplary cases of such experience, described in Dewey’s words (at least as supplemented and qualified by mine!). And ifthere are such experiences, Ido not understand how anyone could reasonably refuse to call them “aesthetic.” But I have come to see that, even so, only a very limited account of our aesthetic life can be given in such terms. Aesthetic experiences— one of Dewey’s most insistent and most eloquently made points— have an unusually high degree of unity in the dimension of completeness, and when you listen, for example, to an entire string quartet, the experience has this character to a very marked degree. But even if you tune in the quartet in the middle, and listen for a minute or two before you are torn away, there is no doubt that something aesthetic has happened to you—without completeness or consummation. During that stretch of time, your experience has taken on a character (and not just the property of being a music-hearing experience) that is strongly different from what was present before you tuned in or after you tune out—though some of it, of course, may linger even as you turn to the jangling telephone or the inopportune (even if welcome) television repairman at the door. So it seems important, indeed essential, to introduce a broader concept of the aesthetic in experience, while reserving the term “aesthetic experience,” as a count noun, for rather special occasions.
<aside> 💡 ビアズリーが快楽主義に若干の懸念を示している箇所。今日的には重要そう。 快楽に還元してしまうのを嫌がる理由としては、批評家による理由付けられた評価が全部快楽に還元できるわけではないから、というふうにまとめてよさそう？
</aside>
It was such considerations as these that led me, as in Essays 1 and 2, to explore the possibility of treating the aesthetic character as a species of hedonic quality, working with the terms “enjoyment,” “satisfaction,” and “pleasure.” Here I believed myself to have a good deal of support from a number of eighteenth-century thinkers, especially in Great Britain. And again, I am stil persuaded that there is important truth in this doctrine: I haven’t found any serious and cogent refutation, at least, of the proposition that experiences with aesthetic character are intrinsically enjoyable (which is not to say they are intrinsically valuable, of course; see Essay 3). Examples of unpleasant objects that have been placed in galleries (for example, the famous figures of decaying corpses by Gaetano Zumbo—but choose your own examples; they are not hard to find these days) only go to show that unpleasant objects have been placed in galleries, unless we go on to argue (1) that our experience of them has aesthetic character and (2) that, taken all in all, our experience of them does not involve an enjoyment that encompasses or assimilates the disgust (the small size of Zumbo’s figures creates a certain detachment). Still, enjoying is taking pleasure in, and a particular kind of enjoyment must in the end be a function of the kind of thing in which pleasure is taken. There is something threateningly reductionistic about taking the defining feature of aesthetically characterized experiences to be a particular kind of pleasure; and there are theoretical problems that arise in relating such a view to the justification of reasons in art criticism (see Essay 2). So I have thought it worthwhile to cast about for a promising alternative.
私が現在考えているのは、五つでセットとなった、経験が美的性格を持つ基準に取り組むというものだ。私の考えでは、これらの基準は、ひとつの必要条件を例外として、家族として適用されている。ある経験が美的性格を持つのは、次の特徴のうち最初のものを備え、かつ、ほかの特徴のうち少なくとも三つを備えているとき、かつそのときに限る。（しかし、私は特定の公式に固執しているわけではなく、むしろさらなる探求の道を拓こうとしているのだ。基準のリストを拡大したり、「美的性格」という用語の適用のために規定される特徴の数を減らしたりすべきかもしれない。）
- 対象志向性：物事がうまくいっている、またはうまくいったという感覚とともに注意を向けている、知覚的または志向的な場の現象的に客観的な性質（質および関係）によって、一続きの心的状態に対して進んで受け入れられる導き。
- 自由感：過去と未来に関するなんらかの先行する心配による支配から解放された感覚、提示されたものや、それによって意味論的に引き出されたもの、それによって暗黙的に約束されたものとの調和がとれてリラックスした感覚、そのため来るものが自由に選ばれたような雰囲気を持つこと。
- 情動の切り離し：関心が集中する対象が感情的に少し離れたところに置かれているという感覚。陰鬱で恐ろしいものに直面し、それらを鋭く感じるときであっても、圧迫されることなく、むしろ乗り越える力を意識させるよう、情動をある程度切り離すこと。
- 能動的発見：心の構築的な力を積極的に行使している感覚、潜在的に相反するさまざまな刺激に挑まれ、それらを一貫させようとしている感覚。知覚したものや意味の間につながりを見つけてウキウキするような興奮状態、理解可能性の感覚（錯覚かもしれないが）。
- 全体性の感覚：人としての統合の感覚、（排除だけでなく包括的な統合を通して）気を散らし破滅をもたらす影響力から全体性を取り戻したという感覚、それに応じた満足感、たとえ妨げとなる感情を通しても自己受容と自己拡張を伴うような満足感。(Beardsley 1982: 288-9)
- 原文
Each of these features calls for a little commentary; and the last one takes us back to a continuing controversy that I should like to resume briefly.
<aside> 💡 細かいところだが、今回の立場で《泉》の経験もまた、美的性格を持った経験としてカバーできるので、芸術作品としてもカバーできるかもしれない。
</aside>
The first feature, object directedness, is one on which I believe general agreement can be had. It is, of course, framed to apply quite broadly. I have in mind not only the plain and obvious cases where we are intensely absorbed in the contemplation of a painting or paying close and undivided attention to the course of a musical composition, but also other cases where the object or situation in question is merely intentional: we are concerned with what is happening in the world of a novel, we are thinking intensely and seriously of the symbolic significance of a figure in a painting, or, confronted with an instance of conceptual or “idea” art, we consider a proposition or a theme or a possible state of affairs the artist brings to our attention. When the work embodies instructions for apprehending it in a determinate serial order, we follow the way it works itself out, and this is a process of discovery; but even in the case of a painting or a sculpture there is of course the same process of discovery, of gradual revelation of its nature as we explore it probingly; and thus there can be the same controlling or emerging sense that something is worked out and is accepted for what it is. This willing surrender, limited and actively engaged as it is, has often been noted as characteristic of our experience of artkind instances. And, as I suggested above, it seems to me plainly present even when what we are dealing with is a tragedy of horrors or a poignant and (by itself) painful reminder of real evils about us. If we are repelled and turn away, of course there can be no claim that the experience, even while it lasted, had aesthetic character (we looked because we were forced to, or ordered to, or in some other way involuntarily, not because we willingly accepted the object’s control over our mental states). If we choose to continue the experience because we must actually see and feel the working out of what is there, and the rightness of that working out, then our experience satisfies at least the first— and necessary—criterion of aesthetic character.
Felt freedom is perhaps the hardest feature to talk about very definitely. I point to it as a notable ingredient in that experience I alluded to earlier, of turning on the radio and suddenly hearing, say, the first-movement second subject of Mozart’s String Quartet in A: that lift of the spirit, sudden dropping away of thoughts and feelings that were problematic, that were obstacles to be overcome or hindrances of some kind—a sense of being on top of things, of having one’s real way, even though not having actually chosen it or won it. Much deeper senses of “freedom’”—metaphysically and epistemologically speaking—have been invoked in talking about the arts, by Kant and Schiller and others; I am staying with what I take to be phenomenology here, however, without moving to transcendental psychology (of course there is a good deal of valid phenomenology in Kant and Schiller, too). It is, Itake it, this felt freedom that has been so feared and condemned by the Puritan—religious or political—as a temptation to dangerous escapism and failure of nerve amid the actual trials of the religious or the revolutionary life. And he is right to be concerned. For it is in respect to this second feature that art has affinities with certain drugs, which can also generate (though of course not through their mere cognition) intense forms of felt freedom. It is in this respect that art can be enervating and anti-social, and many other unfortunate things it has often been accused of. I am convinced that this second feature is real and significant. Nevertheless, I do not want to make it a necessary condition of the aesthetic; in our encounter with artkind instances that are intricate and puzzling and hard to make out, that offer resistances and obstacles to understanding or perception, this felt freedom may be absent or at a low pitch. Yet even such experiences may have the aesthetic character if they meet the other criteria.