London Aesthetics Forum | James Lewis (Cardiff): “Aesthetic Community and Appreciation (or Vice Versa)”
- Event type
- Seminar
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- The London Aesthetics Forum
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- Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
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- IP@sas.ac.uk 020 7664 4865
Aesthetic Community and Appreciation (or Vice Versa)
James Lewis (Cardiff)
Aesthetic practices afford social goods, principally, communion. We sing and dance together, we tell stories to, and make handsome objects for one another. Creative expression is (or at least often seems) a social act for which the appreciation of another person is an internal goal. This insight has prompted some aesthetic theorists – recently including Nick Riggle (2022, 2024, forthcoming) and Jessica Williams (forthcoming) – to develop theories of the nature of the aesthetic domain which treat the social function of aesthetic practices as foundational. These views call themselves aesthetic communitarianism. Aesthetic communitarianism holds that the social goods afforded by aesthetic practices play a central role in explaining the normativity of aesthetic value. In this paper, I argue that such theories get the explanatory relation the wrong way around. Social goods do not explain aesthetic value, but they are explained by it.
Through a series of examples, I consider why it is that aesthetic practices can be a site of communion, or togetherness. Drawing from a broader project about the nature of such social goods, I articulate the role of joint attention and external value in what it is like for people to commune with one another. Attending to this subject matter reveals that communion must have an object: something with respect to which parties are joined together. The examples also show that the value of communion must be understood with reference to the value of its object. The value of the principal social goods of aesthetic life are grounded, partly, in that of their aesthetic object: the song, the dance, or whatever. It follows, I argue, that the aesthetic value of those objects cannot also be grounded in that of the social goods they afford – contrary to aesthetic communitarianism.
The London Aesthetics Forum (LAF) is a Forum of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. With lectures on topics in aesthetics and philosophy of art, LAF aims to stimulate philosophical reflection on art. Our events are free and open to all.
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