美的知識の源泉はなにか。経験的知識は一般的に、知覚に根ざしたものだと考えられる。そういった知識は証言を通して他人に伝達可能であり、記憶に保存可能であり、推論を介して増幅されうる。しかし、肝心なのは知覚なのだ。美的知識についてはどうか。美的知識も、知覚に根ざしたものなのか。多くの人はそうだと答えるが、これは間違っている。美的知識に関しては、肝心なのはappreciationであって、知覚ではない。美的知識の究極の源泉は感情である。本論文では、情動的知識という考えそのものを明確化・擁護し、美的知識がこの属の一種であることを明らかにする。そして、この見解が美的認識論者たちを悩ませてきた厄介な問題をどのように解決するかを示す。すなわち、美的知識の直接的だと思しき性格と、批評からこのような知識を獲得する可能性を、いかにして調停するかという問題である。批評は、ある対象への人の関与をガイドし、それをappreciationに値したものにする特徴ゆえにappreciateできるようにするとき、人は批評から学ぶことができるのだ。

What is the source of aesthetic knowledge? Empirical knowledge, it is generally held, bottoms out in perception. Such knowledge can be transmitted to others through testimony, preserved by memory, and amplified via inference. But perception is where the rubber hits the road. What about aesthetic knowledge? Does it too bottom out in perception? Most say “yes”. But this is wrong. When it comes to aesthetic knowledge, it is appreciation, not perception, where the rubber hits the road. The ultimate source of aesthetic knowledge is feeling. In this essay, we articulate and defend the very idea of affective knowledge and reveal aesthetic knowledge to be a species of the genus. We then show how the view resolves a thorny problem that has bedeviled aesthetic epistemologists: how to reconcile the seemingly direct character of aesthetic knowledge with the possibility of acquiring such knowledge from criticism. One learns from criticism, we argue, when it guides one’s engagement with an object so that one can appreciate it in virtue of those of its features that render it worthy of appreciation.

What is the source of aesthetic knowledge? Empirical knowledge, it is generally held, bottoms out in perception. Such knowledge can be transmitted to others through testimony, preserved by memory, and amplified via inference. But there would be no such knowledge in the first place without perception; it is where the rubber hits the road. What about aesthetic knowledge? Does it too bottom out in perception? Is it those very perceptual states that ultimately justify our empirical beliefs that also ground aesthetic knowledge? Most say “yes”; we will call them Perceptualists.Footnote1 But Perceptualism is wrong. When it comes to aesthetic knowledge, it is appreciation, not perception, where the rubber hits the road. Aesthetic knowledge, we argue, derives ultimately from feeling; it is a kind of affective knowledge.Footnote2 This is Affectivism. In what follows, we articulate and defend a conception of affective knowledge and reveal aesthetic knowledge to be a species of the genus.

The virtues of Affectivism will be demonstrated in its solution to a thorny problem that has bedeviled aesthetic epistemologists: how to reconcile the seemingly direct character of aesthetic knowledge with the way we acquire knowledge from criticism. One learns from criticism, we argue, when it guides one’s engagement with an object so that one can appreciate it in virtue of those of its features that render it worthy of appreciation; that is, when this affective guidance happens in virtue of criticism’s rational character. There is, nonetheless, an important analogy between the fundamental roles that perception and appreciation play in knowledge-acquisition in their respective domains, a fact that helps to explain the appeal of Perceptualism. Using (what we call) the Paradox of Aesthetic Criticism as our lodestar, we will show that aesthetic knowledge bottoms out in appreciation.

Before we begin, a terminological clarification: our target in this essay is a contemporary aesthetic doctrine that we label Perceptualism. But we do not challenge the long tradition—dating back to at least the eighteenth century—of thinking about aesthetic knowledge as perceptual in a broader sense.Footnote3 Those 18th-century thinkers who held that aesthetic knowledge is a matter of feeling called this knowledge aesthetic because they regarded knowledge acquired from feeling as experiential and direct. This is precisely our view. Perceptualism, by contrast, conceives of such knowledge as perceptual in a narrow sense, and so as excluding the conative and the affective. We use the term ‘perception’ and its cognates to refer to these non-affective and non-conative receptive states. On the view we will defend, primary aesthetically knowledge (as we will call it) is constituted by a distinctive sort of feeling, by (aesthetic) appreciation. This is not to deny that one can possess aesthetic knowledge in virtue of a justified belief. But such doxastic knowledge of the aesthetic is parasitic on primary aesthetic knowledge. Perceptualists take themselves to be heirs to the 18th-century tradition, but we claim this honorific for ourselves.

1 美的批評のパラドックス The Paradox of Aesthetic Criticism

The Paradox of Aesthetic Criticism (as we call it) involves a tension between the (seemingly) first-handed, immediate character of aesthetic knowledge on the one hand, and the (apparent) epistemic function of criticism on the other.Footnote4 Aesthetic knowledge is widely held to be direct: it arises from an experience of the object, but not by way of any rational transition from such experience.Footnote5 But knowledge that arises from critical instruction would seem to be derived via reflection from a critical text. Thus, it cannot be a matter of one’s immediate response to the aesthetic object. To resolve the Paradox, one must articulate the immediacy of the knowledge afforded by aesthetic experience in a manner consistent with the power of good criticism to instruct. We formulate the Paradox as follows:

Directness: Direct experience is the only source of aesthetic knowledge.

Criticism: Aesthetic criticism is, in virtue of its rational character, a source of aesthetic knowledge.

In this section, we will diagnose the failure of two prominent approaches to the Paradox as an inevitable byproduct of their shared Perceptualist assumption about aesthetic knowledge. To see the basic difficulty, we’ll discuss the tension between Directness and Criticism in a little more detail.

Directness raises a serious challenge for any account of criticism for two closely related reasons. First, critics do not pronounce mere verdicts about the excellence of the relevant works, but explain how these works are excellent (or not) and why they are excellent (or not) in the ways that they are. They point to those aspects of the works that not only explain what led them (the critics) to respond to these works a certain way but also justify these responses as correct. Critical discussions, in other words, invoke what Joseph Raz calls the explanatory-normative nexus characteristic of rationality. In the paradigm case, the critics, in giving the reasons that support their responses, articulate their aesthetic knowledge of the works. This is what leads virtually everyone writing on criticism in recent years to agree that criticism is a “rational activity” (Hopkins 2006: 137) or a “rational enterprise” (Lord, 2019: 810). At the very least, the idea that criticism embodies a form of rationality is “a very appealing thought” (Hopkins 2006:137), worthy of preservation and explanation. Yet according to Directness, one does not acquire aesthetic knowledge via deduction from premises. And so the reasoning one finds in aesthetic criticism cannot be inferential reasoning, in which one arrives at the relevant knowledge by deducing a conclusion from independently held premises.

Furthermore, Criticism is in tension with Directness not only insofar as the reasoning appears to be the source of the critic’s aesthetic knowledge, but also insofar as it seems to be the source of the reader’s aesthetic knowledge. Criticism is, after all, not primarily self-expression or self-explanation, but a communicative practice directed at the audience. Critics do not simply express aesthetic reasons but communicate these reasons as reasons for their audience to respond in similar ways. Furthermore, critical instruction is not exhausted merely by prompting the reader to adopt a (thereby) justified belief that the aesthetic object has certain properties. A critic shows her audience how and why to respond directly to the relevant works in the way that she does. But wait: how can taking in the critic’s remarks be the source of direct knowledge of the absent artwork? The very idea would seem to be incoherent. If audiences arrive at knowledge via criticism, they must arrive at it indirectly, mediated by the argument and testimony of the critic. Hence the conflict between Directness and Criticism.

Philosophers who defend Directness from apparent conflict with Criticism often try to point to a special mode of rationality, one that shapes direct experience. They hope to explain thereby the reasoning that underlies critics’ aesthetic knowledge and guides their readers’ aesthetic knowledge. And this is the right impulse. But those taking this route have heretofore assumed that the relevant direct experience is perception (Hopkins, 2006: 137 ff., Lord, 2019: 810ff). The resulting conception of aesthetic experience, as we shall now argue, is hopeless.

Errol Lord and Robert Hopkins have each defended a version of Perceptualism. An examination of the weaknesses of their respective approaches reveals Perceptualists as caught in a dilemma: Perceptualists must, to accommodate aesthetic rationality, either deny that aesthetic reasons operate via the subject’s responsiveness to them or locate rational responsiveness inside the act of perception itself. Lord is impaled on the first horn, which misrepresents rationality, while Hopkins is impaled on the second, which misrepresents perception. In the rest of this section, we explain their errors, and in section four, after putting on the table the Affective View, demonstrate that the dilemma is false.

According to Lord’s “Enrichment View,” the justificatory structure of inference, the paradigmatic rational act, is mirrored by the justificatory relation between low-level contents of perception—what can be simply seen, as one might put it—and high-level aesthetic contents of perception. Specifically, the aesthetic content of a perceptual experience is rationally justified by the justificatory status of its lower-level content. As he puts it: “the justification one gets from an aesthetic perception is dependent on one’s justification to believe that the object has various features that indicate or ground the aesthetic features” (Lord, 2019: 830). What distinguishes this form of rationality from inference is partly that a subject, who, to use Lord’s example, believes that Olympia is intense on the basis of seeing the painting, need have no inkling of the justificatory connection between the perception of the lower-level properties and the perception of intensity:

…[the] justificatory power of his perception of the intensity is dependent on his ex-ante justification for believing certain claims about Olympia’s corresponding features (in my analysis this has to do with the facial expressions and their relations). To be clear, the Enrichment View does not predict that Alexander infers that the painting is intense from the claims about the corresponding features. It doesn’t even require that Alexander believe the claims about the corresponding features. It does maintain, though, that Alexander be ex-ante justified to believe those claims. This justification is provided by his perceptual experience of the features. (Lord, 2019: 831)

The job of the critic, on Lord’s view, is then to point out precisely those lower-level features on which our aesthetic perceptions depend:

When all goes well, one ends up with justified judgments that are epistemically dependent on ex-ante justification to believe the corresponding feature contents. By pointing out the corresponding features in just the right way, the critic both elucidates the structure of her justification and points the consumer towards the features one needs to process in order to see the aesthetic features for oneself. This, I contend, is exactly the sort of ‘perceptual proof ’ that criticism seems to wear on its sleeve. (Lord, 2019: 831)

To see the difficulty with this approach—analogous to the central difficulty in formulating an adequate view of inference in the theoretical realm—we need to return to the normative-explanatory nexus. A rational explanation of belief operates by showing the normative order grasp of which culminates in the relevant belief. It is, for example, precisely my grasp of the fact that the butler has an alibi together with the inferential significance of this fact that leads me to believe that the butler is innocent. If I do not grasp the rational connection between his having an alibi and his innocence, and do not believe that he is innocent because I grasp this connection, then I do not believe that he is innocent for the reason that he has an alibi. Paul Boghossian calls this.

The Taking Condition: Inferring necessarily involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion and drawing his conclusion because of that fact.Footnote6

Lord would reject an analogous condition on aesthetic rationality for, on his view, one appreciates aesthetically even if one does not grasp the rational connection between one’s appreciation and the ground of it—in his terms, between the higher-level and the lower-level features:

I am not claiming that one needs to have ex-post justified beliefs about the facial expressions in order to be ex-ante justified in believing the painting is intense. That requires too much. (829)