The (Very Social, Extremely Pluralist) Engagement Theory of Aesthetic Value
Here are some data-points about aesthetic life. First, we often avoid simply accepting aesthetic judgments based on the testimony of experts. Second, we often avoid using scientific methods — evidence-gathering, categorization, generalization, and inference to come to conclusions. Instead, we tend to arrive at our judgments through personal encounters with specific objects. Some have tried to explain these data-points as the results of the metaphysics of aesthetic properties, or aesthetic perception. I claim, instead, that they are best understood as social norms: norms that tell us to avoid testimony, and avoid scientific inference. And the best explanation our adoption of these norms is that they function to plunge us into a particular kind of engagement: an autonomous, sensuous, and particularist kind of perception and cognition. Aesthetic life is a social practice, constructed to restore to us certain valuable parts of life that we have lost, in the drive towards the efficiencies of science. And aesthetic value turns out to be a plural cluster — of the many values that arise from that particular sort of autonomous and sensuous perception. Aesthetic life is something like a game, where we adopt unnecessary constraints to construct some specific kind of lushly valuable activity. In particular, aesthetic activity is a social practice designed to further a particular kind of community: of unending, delicious conversation. Furthermore, borrowing a page from Michael Strevens’ solution to the demarcation problem in science, I suggest that these norms can solve the demarcation problem for the aesthetic domain. The “aesthetic realm” turns out to be a construct, the result of a social practice built around following certain social norms.