British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. jg, No.

4, October iggg

THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE

Gary Kemp

I
I shall first concentrate on what I am sure is the most plausible twentieth-century
version of the aesthetic attitude theory discussed by Dickie, that due to Stolnitz.3
This is the theory that when we are aesthetically engaged with a work of art, for
example, this fact is not to be explained in terms of the special nature of the
qualities perceived, but in terms of a special attitude which we take up, the
aesthetic attitude. Our normal attitude is pragmatic, driven by practical interest or
purpose; it thereby tends to select only those features of the object relevant to the
interest or purpose. Thus Schopenhauer speaks of relational and non-relational
perception: relational perception is that which is directed by a concern with
causal relationships between the object and something else (this is what Kant
means by saying that in aesthetic experience we care nothing for the 'real
existence' of the object). Because of this, normal, interest-driven attention tends
to be engaged only long enough to identify the interesting feature; it does not
dwell upon things, or contemplate them. It is restless. It notes the relevant facts
1
2

George Dickie, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. I (1964), pp. 54-64.

There is a good book on the subject, 77ie Aesthetic Attitude, by David Fenner (Humanities Press,
1996); for discussion of Dickie, see pp. 98-110. Fenner is reviewed by Nick McAdoo in this
journal, vol. 37, no. 4 (October 1097). In the past three years, however, no article whose principal
concern is the aesthetic attitude appears in either the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism or the
British Journal ofAesthetics. This contrasts with the recent plethora of articles on aesthetic properties.
J. Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, i960),
pp. 32-42-

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IT is now well over thirty years since George Dickie's 'The Myth of the Aesthetic
Attitude'.1 The paper continues to appear regularly in aesthetics anthologies and
course reading lists, but the issue has largely receded from view.2 This might be
because significantly many aestheticians have accepted that Dickie's criticisms
reveal the notion of the aesthetic attitude to be empty, a myth. I think they do not,
and suggest that their failure can be attributed to Dickie's having attempted to
evaluate the notion of an aesthetic attitude in isolation, in detachment from the
more general sorts of theoretical commitments that historically have provided its
most cogent motivation.

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II
But Dickie's contention that the notion of interested attention collapses into that
of distraction or partial attention is surely mistaken. This is clearest where the
object attended to is a work of art. It seems straightforward that there can be cases
offull attention to a work of art which is not the sort of attention exercised in
aesthetic experience. There is a distinction to be drawn amongst cases of full
undistracted attention to the work of art that is too evident simply to be denied,
which must therefore be accommodated or reconstructed in some way or other.4
For example, a music student might listen closely to a piece in order to identify
key modulations or rhythmic groupings. This is not a case of distraction, not a case
of not attending to the music. Yet it is not an aesthetic attitude either, as the struggling music student will attest (we murder to dissect). It would be a diversion
from the potential aesthetic experience but not diversion from the music.
Now in fact Dickie does consider examples of this kind. What he says is this:

Cf. Fenner, Aesthetic Attitude, p. 104.

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and moves on. Whereas in the picture gallery, at least sometimes, we stand
arrested, transfixed: we gaze upon the object without our attention being motivated or directed by any identifiable practical concern. Thus, according to Stolnitz,
the aesthetic attitude is the attitude of disinterested attentionattention to the object
which is not driven by an interestwhich is also 'sympathetic', and 'for its own
sake alone'.
Dickie focuses on the disinterestedness requirement; I shall follow him in
ignoring the requirement that the attention be 'sympathetic', but I shall return
briefly to the idea that aesthetic attention is attention to the object 'for its own
sake'. Dickie's objection to this version of the theory is simple, and, if cogent,
devastating. To give content to 'disinterestedness', according to Dickie, you have
to contrast disinterested attention with interested attention. But when you try to
describe cases of that, what you describe is not 'interested' attention to the object
but, instead, attention to something else; but this is inattention to the object, lack
of attention, distraction. Thus the owner of the playhouse, if he is pleased by the
play only because he is thinking of the profits that the excellence of the play
will bring him, is just failing to attend fully to the play. So it is not the case that
instead of giving the play his disinterested attention, he gives it another, interested
kind of attention. But if disinterested attention cannot be distinguished from
undistracted attention, then since there is nothing peculiarly aesthetic about the
latter, there is no peculiarly aesthetic attitude. We can certainly attend undistractedly to sumo matches, conversations, or kisses without being tempted to
describe the experience as peculiarly aesthetic.

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THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE

Note that what initially appears to be a perceptual distinctionlistening in a certain
wayturns out to be a motivational distinctionlistening for or with a certain
purpose. . . . There is only one way to listen to (to attend to) music, although the
listening may be more or less attentive and there may be a variety of motives,
intentions, and reasons for doing so and a variety of ways of being distracted from the

On this point see also Dickie's exchange with Elmer Duncan in the letters section of the Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. XXIII, no. 4 (1965), pp. 517-518, and Dickie's Aesthetics: An
Introduction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1971), pp. 48-61.
The 1966 exchange between Dickie and Virgil Aldrich on this issue is frustrating because it is
framed entirely in terms of perception. See Aldrich, 'Back to Aesthetic Experience', Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. XXTV, no. 3 (1966), pp. 365-371 and Dickie, reply to Aldrich, Journal
ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. XXV, no. 1 (1967), pp. 89-91.

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That is, perhaps the attention is the same, but the purpose differs. But what exactly
does Dickie infer from this? He does not say explicitly what conclusion we are
immediately to draw. H e thinks more generally that the aesthetic attitude is a
'myth', that there is no such thing. But the present point simply does not support
that conclusion.
First, a preliminary quibble: that there is only 'one way' to listen to the music
is a substantive psychological claim, and substantively false as far as I can see. If
what is being listened to is described simply as 'the music', then there are certainly different ways of listening to it. Listening for modulationsas opposed not
only to listening more generally for enjoyment but as opposed to listening for
changes of metre or rhythmis a case in point. Another might be searching a
Jackson Pollock for faces, if we want examples outside music. It is hard to agree
that in these cases one can properly be described as being distracted from the music
or picture.
T h e crucial point, however, is that the difference in purpose or motivation to
which Dickie alludes is all that the aesthetic attitude theorist requires. T h e
aesthetic attitude theory need not be, and I think should not be, couched in terms
of perception, as Dickie assumes (Stolnitz's formulation, quoted by Dickie,
admits of being read that way, but it certainly does not demand it). That it is the
'attitude' that possesses the distinguishing feature of being disinterested does not
imply that the perception is itself what possesses that feature. 6 It might not even
make sense to speak of perceptions qua perceptions as interested or disinterested.
Insofar as perceptions are interested or disinterested, it is probably more plausible
to say that they are so only in virtue of the purposes which guide the perception. In
any case the main claim of the theory can without evident loss be put by saying
that attention is aesthetic precisely when it is not pragmatically motivated. That
there are clear cases of close, pragmatically motivated attention does nothing to
show that there is no such thing as close attention which is not so motivated. If
that is how the aesthetic attitude theory is defined, then Dickie's point does

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In his reply to Aldrich (see preceding note) Dickie acknowledges this, but takes the point as
showing that if we have the notion of an aesthetic property, then there is no need to posit an
aesthetic attitude.
Fenner (/{esthetic Altitude, pp. 104-105) aptly denies the cogency of such a move on the grounds that
no demarcation of the class of aesthetic properties is possible that does not refer essentially to
experiences of those properties. I suspect, however, that an attitude-theoristat least one inspired
by Kantought really to deny that the notion of an aesthetic property makes sense.

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nothing to undermine it. With things put that way, it does not matter if Dickie is
right to say that the interested/disinterested distinction cannot be purely a perceptual distinction. To be sure, the notion of the aesthetic attitude is meant to'
characterize a kind of experience, but not all experiential distinctions are pure
perceptual distinctions.
Alternatively, Dickie might say that the music student's attention, since it
focuses so narrowly upon one aspect of the music, necessarily excludes other
aspects or properties which may be essential to an understanding or aesthetic appreciation of the piece. As it might be put, the student gives his whole attention to
the music, but not to the whole of the music. This may ultimately be the correct
way to put it, but it would not establish Dickie's conclusion: Dickie's claim was
that the notion of disinterested attention, when we think it through, collapses
into that of full or undistracted attention. And we have just seen that that claim is
not true. All that Dickie can claim is that the notion of an aesthetic attitude
collapses into the notion of undistracted attention to all but only the aesthetically
relevant properties of the work (or perhaps: to as many of these as one can take
in).7 But this is now a substantive assertion concerning the nature of the aesthetic
attitude; it is no longer the narrowly logical point Dickie thought he could make
against the very idea of an aesthetic attitude. The point is no longer that, just by
reflecting on the concepts attention and interested, we can see that the notion of
an aesthetic attitude is empty. The point now is that the attitude has been misdefined.
But in fact the case is worse than that, and here is where the inadequacy of
Dickie's criticism becomes more theoretically important. For it would be
question-begging at rather a deep level to assume this alternative definition of the
aesthetic attitude to be preferable. For the point now rests upon the assumption
that we can replace the notion of a peculiarly aesthetic attitude with the notion of
attention to aesthetic properties. It is certainly true that if we can have the notion of
aesthetic property, then the importance and interest of the notion of the aesthetic
attitude is significantly curtailed, if it does not lapse altogether (this will depend
crucially on how the notion of an aesthetic property is explained).8 But it is
precisely the most basic commitment of the aesthetic attitude approach
especially understood as deriving from Kantto avoid the notion of an aesthetic
property. Kant held that beauty is precisely not a concept, not a property, not
something in terms of which objects can be literally described. The proper task of

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Ill
In this last section I want to develop a bit further this last point concerning the
place of the aesthetic attitude in aesthetics generally.
Dickie's criticism of Stolnitz's theory of the aesthetic attitude pretty clearly
fails. The real problem with that theory, I think, is messier. Take a slightly
different kind of case. A man attends his daughter's first concert performance as a
solo pianist. He listens intently and is pleased as she negotiates the intricate
counterpoint of Mozart's K. 533. His close attention is motivated partly by his
natural aesthetic receptivity but also, more efficaciously, by his concern for his
daughter's career. Nothing could help it more than that she should perform well
tonight. His listening is interest-driven: there is a clear sense in which he listens
closely because of a practical concern. But his attention is not thereby distracted or
partial, or need not be. The thought of his daughter's career may come to mind
during the performance, but it does not seem as if it has to, in order that his
attention be motivated by that concern. There is no reason to say that that kind of
Nick Zangwill, in 'UnKantian Notions of Disinterestedness', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 32,
no. i (January 1992), points out that Kant's claim is that aesthetic judgement is based upon disinterested pleasure, not upon a disinterested attitude or experience. Aesthetic experience might be
defined simply as that in which disinterested pleasure takes place, but it is not clear that Kant's
account actually delivers the concept of an aesthetic attitude, if by an attitude we mean not a type of
experience but something like a stance, something which can be activated at will. I think that the
philosophically most important aspect of the aesthetic attitude theory is independent of the
volitional question: the philosophically most important question is whether there is a specially
aesthetic type of experience, and if so, whether it should be explained entirely from the subjective
side, and not in terms of the distinctive sorts of objects or properties apprehended in aesthetic
experience. The cogent substance of the aesthetic attitude theory consists in its affirmative answers
to both questions. For more on the volitional question see Fenner (Aesthetic Attitude) and McAdoo's
review of same (see n. 2 above).

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a philosophy of beauty rather is to attend to the special features of aesthetic

experience or judgement. 9 The basis of that judgement is subjective, which is
precisely to say that aesthetic predicates do not express genuine concepts, do not
pick out objective properties or features of reality. Disinterestedness, of course,
was meant not only to explain the rationality of subjective presumptions of
universality, but also to help explain the peculiar value of aesthetic experience.
The later tradition, especially beginning with Schopenhauer but prefigured in
Kant's account of aesthetic ideas, takes the point beyond beauty, seeking to generalize it to all aesthetic experience, hence to aesthetic predicates generally. The
sense of properly aesthetic description should be explained in terms of the mental
propensities awakened by disinterested attention, not in terms of features literally
possessed by the objects. Aesthetic experience takes explanatory precedence in
aesthetics and the philosophy of art, not the objects of experience. If so, then it is
no objection to the aesthetic attitude theory to point out that it would be logically
adequate to define the attitude as generic attention to aesthetic properties.

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attention cannot be very intently focused, no reason to say that it must be

distracted. Where attention is motivated or even guided by a purpose, there is no
reason to say that the purpose must be held consciously before the mind, in such
a way that there is, as it were, not enough room in consciousness for both the
purpose and the object. Purpose and motive surely guide our perception and
behaviour in more subtle and complex ways than that.
Now the cases of the music student and the father are similar: attention is full,
but pragmatically motivated. The Stolnitzian aesthetic attitude theorist, of course,
assumes that when attention is full but purpose-driven, then it is not aesthetic, or
not completely so. But this now looks like a mistake. If the pianist's father is
motivated as in the example, there is no clear and compelling reason to deny that
his attention or experience is properly and purely aesthetic: he is not, like the
music student, listeningjor any particular features; he could, it seems, listen very
much as he would if it were not his daughter performing, and he were simply a
keen listener. This is, of course, not to acquiesce in Dickie's criticism, for if we
are objecting that the attitude of the pianist's father is aesthetic despite being pragmatically motivated, then we are not complaining that there is no substance to the
notion of aesthetic attitude. We are denying that the notion of disinterestedness
captures it.
Now at the close of the preceding section, I said that one sort of criticism of the
aesthetic attitude theory cannot be sustained without disputing the more general
and fundamental Kantian starting point for the theory. And with this in mind,
there are at least two rather obvious things to say about the above examples.
First, one reason to say that the music student's attitude is not properly aesthetic is that, in listeningjbr particular features, he is listening for something for
which he antecedently possesses a literally applicable concept. He brings
straightforwardly factual questions to the music. He is seeking knowledge: he is
seeking to verify the instantiation of certain concepts (modulation-up-a-fourth,
etc.). This does not seem to be the case with the pianist's father. Insofar as he is
doing this, the predicates he seeks to apply are precisely those which the properly
Kantian aesthetic attitude theorist claims do not, properly speaking, express
concepts: they express rather aesthetic notions like beauty, or aesthetic value. Such
are the qualities the father hopes his daughter's playing will exemplify. If these are
not really concepts or objective properties, then he is not, like the music student,
seeking to gratify a concern with knowledge. Since beauty, for Kant, pleases apart
from a conceptaesthetic experience involves the free play of the cognitive and
perceptual facultiesthe aesthetic attitude of the father as opposed to the
non-aesthetic attitude of the student is easily accounted for in Kant's theory.
Second, I have so far ignored Stolnitz's requirement that the attention to the
object be not only disinterested but 'for its own sake'. Stolnitz himself does not
actually make use of this idea, and he does not elaborate on it or emphasize it as
an independently significant component of his account. But a suitable analysis of

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the idea can help with the pianist's father. In fact it can actually take over for
disinterestedness itself, and do the job better. In Art and Imagination, Roger
Scruton says that an interest in an object X for its own sake is
a desire to go on hearing, looking at, or in some other way having an experience of X,
where there is no reason for this desire in terms of any other desire or appetite that
the experience of X may fulfil, and where the desire arises out of, and is accompanied
'
by, the thought of X 10

10

R. Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 148.

" Possibly this concern can be assuaged by distinguishing between knowledge of the subject-matter
of a work and knowledge of the work itself: perhaps a properly aesthetic reader of Paradise Lost
learns something about the moral universe, but does not read in order to learn facts about the work
itself, in the way that a literature student might in preparing for an exam.
12
Recent treatments of the issue within the framework of Kant's aesthetics include: P. Crowther,
'The Significance of Kant's Pure Aesthetic Judgements', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no. 2
(April 1996); C. Janaway, 'Kant's Aesthetics and the Empty Cognitive Stock', Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 47, no. 189 (October 1997); N. Zangwill, 'UnKantian Notions of Disinterestedness';
N. Zangwill, 'Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable',_|oum<j/ ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 53, no. 2
(Spring 1995); P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1997);

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Set aside the concluding thought-requirement, which is meant to exclude the

gratification of'desires arising out of animal appetite'. Unlike the simpler idea of
disinterested motivation, Scruton's formulation vindicates the father's attention:
there is a reason for his desire to go on listening, for the fact of his listening, but
this is not based upon a desire that the experience of the performance itself fulfils.
His motivating desire is not itself gratified by the experience.
Now these ways of distinguishing the student from the father may run into
other problems individually. As for the first, for example, we do not want to be
landed too peremptorily into the staunch formalist claim that art is totally
non-conceptual, or that the aesthetic value of literature has nothing to do with
knowledge.11 And if we were simply to define the aesthetic attitude as attention to
the object for its own sake as defined by Scruton, then, for example, the pleasures
of love-making, at least in the happier cases, would seem to count as exemplifying
the aesthetic attitude (though perhaps it is not positively a mistake that art and
love should be brought together in some such way).
What is not to be missed, in any case, is that both lines of thought lead us back
t o Kant. That in pure aesthetic experience we are not concerned to apply
determinate concepts is central to Kant's analysis of it (though it is only part of it);
and Scruton's characterization of the aesthetic attitude is part of a more general
Kantian theory of aesthetic experience and judgement which involves concepts of
pleasure, imagination, and normativity (together with disinterestedness these
reflect much of the substance of Kant's Analytic of the Beautiful). Whether
Kant's or Scruton's exact account is ultimately adequate is not the immediate
point.12 What I suggest rather is that the task for the aesthetic attitude theorist is

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Gary Kemp, Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: G.Kemp@Philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk.

S. Kemal, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). For a recent historical treatment
of the concept of disinterestedness which includes further references to the issue considered
historically, see A. Berleant, 'Beyond Disinterestedness', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no. 3
(July 1994).
For an excellent discussion of the importance of explanation in aesthetic theory, as opposed to
mere extensional adequacy, see Nick Zangwill, 'Groundrules in the Philosophy of Art', Philosophy,
vol. 70 (1995).

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to regiment some version or derivative of Kant's subjective orientation in

aestheticsnot only in order to yield the right answers but also to yield
explanations with respect to cases; we should want a definition which not only
validates intuitions but one which grants them theoretical substance, shows why
they are justified or important.13 As part of this, we need to be told why the
subjective orientation is correct in the first place. As another, we would want to
relieve the worry that there is no necessity in the way that the components of
such a view are woven together. It would be gratifying, for example, if Scruton's
analysis of disinterestednessof 'for its own sake'could show why only
disinterested contemplation can be conceptually free. This would tie together the
two explanations suggested above for why the father's attention is aesthetic but
not the student's. But this sort of thing is likely to be heavy going, and to require
substantial philosophical premises of a more general kind. Equally, assuming the
internal coherence of such a view, the critic of the aesthetic attitude is unlikely to
mount a cogent case without discussing those premises, perhaps not without
disputing the Kantian subjectivist starting-point in the first place. We should not
assume that we can usefully pursue questions like 'is there an aesthetic attitude?'
except in the context of a suitably rich theoretical atmosphere. More generally, we
should not be surprised if attempts at theory-free philosophical analysis, such as
Dickie's treatment of the aesthetic attitude, should sometimes turn out to be
unfruitful.