The Aesthetic Attitude

The Kantian notion of disinterest has its most direct recent descendents in the aesthetic-attitude
theories that flourished from the early to mid 20th century. Though Kant followed the British in
applying the term disinterested strictly to pleasures, its migration to attitudes is not difficult to
explain. For Kant the pleasure involved in a judgment of taste is disinterested because such a
judgment does not issue in a motive to do anything in particular. For this reason Kant refers to
the judgment of taste as contemplative rather than practical (Kant 1790, 95). But if the judgment
of taste is not practical, then the attitude we bear toward its object is presumably also not
practical: when we judge an object aesthetically we are unconcerned with whether and how it
may further our practical aims. Hence it is natural to speak of our attitude toward the object as
disinterested.
To say, however, that the migration of disinterest from pleasures to attitudes is natural is not to
say that it is inconsequential. Consider the difference between Kant's aesthetic theory, the last
great theory of taste, and Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory, the first great aesthetic-attitude
theory. Whereas for Kant disinterested pleasure is the means by which we discover things to
bear aesthetic value, for Schopenhauer disinterested attention (or will-less contemplation) is
itself the locus of aesthetic value. According to Schopenhauer, we lead our ordinary, practical
lives in a kind of bondage to our own desires (Schopenhauer 1819, 196). This bondage is a
source not merely of pain but also of cognitive distortion in that it restricts our attention to those
aspects of things relevant to the fulfilling or thwarting of our desires. Aesthetic contemplation,
being will-less, is therefore both epistemically and hedonically valuable, allowing us a desirefree glimpse into the essences of things as well as a respite from desire-induced pain:
When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless
stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thralldom of the will, the attention is now no
longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the
will ... Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us ... comes to us of its
own accord, and all is well with us. (Schopenhauer 1819, 196)
The two most influential aesthetic-attitude theories of the 20th century are those of Edward
Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz. According to Stolnitz's theory, which is the more straightforward
of the two, bearing an aesthetic attitude toward an object is a matter of attending to it
disinterestedly and sympathetically, where to attend to it disinterestedly is to attend to it with no
purpose beyond that of attending to it, and to attend to it sympathetically is to accept it on its
own terms, allowing it, and not one's own preconceptions, to guide one's attention of it (Stolnitz
1960, 3236). The result of such attention is a comparatively richer experience of the object, i.e.,
an experience taking in comparatively many of the object's features. Whereas a practical attitude
limits and fragments the object of our experience, allowing us to see only those of its features
which are relevant to our purposes,. By contrast, the aesthetic attitude isolates the object and
focuses upon itthe look of the rocks, the sound of the ocean, the colors in the painting.
(Stolnitz 1960, 33, 35).
Bullough, who prefers to speak of psychical distance rather than disinterest, characterizes
aesthetic appreciation as something achieved
by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our actual practical self; by allowing it
to stand outside the context of our personal needs and endsin short, by looking at it
objectively by permitting only such reactions on our part as emphasise the objective
features of the experience, and by interpreting even our subjective affections not as modes of
our being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon. (Bullough 1995, 298299; emphasis
in original).

Bullough has been criticized for claiming that aesthetic appreciation requires dispassionate
detachment:
Bullough's characterization of the aesthetic attitude is the easiest to attack. When we cry at a
tragedy, jump in fear at a horror movie, or lose ourselves in the plot of a complex novel, we
cannot be said to be detached, although we may be appreciating the aesthetic qualities of these
works to the fullest . And we can appreciate the aesthetic properties of the fog or storm while
fearing the dangers they present. (Goldman 2005, 264)
But such a criticism seems to overlook a subtlety of Bullough's view. While Bullough does hold
that aesthetic appreciation requires distance between our own self and its affections (Bullough
1995, 298), he does not take this to require that we not undergo affections but quite the opposite:
only if we undergo affections have we affections from which to be distanced. So, for example,
the properly distanced spectator of a well-constructed tragedy is not the over-distanced
spectator who feels no pity or fear, nor the under-distanced spectator who feels pity and fear as
she would to an actual, present catastrophe, but the spectator who interprets the pity and fear she
feels not as modes of [her] being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon (Bullough
1995, 299). The properly distanced spectator of a tragedy, we might say, understands her fear
and pity to be part of what tragedy is about.
The notion of the aesthetic attitude has been attacked from all corners and has very few
remaining sympathizers. George Dickie is widely regarded as having delivered the decisive blow
in his essay The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude (Dickie 1964) by arguing that all purported
examples of interested or distanced attention are really just examples of inattention. So consider
the case of the spectator at a performance of Othello who becomes increasingly suspicious of his
own wife as the action proceeds, or the case of the impresario who sits gauging the size of the
audience, or the case of the father who sits taking pride in his daughter's performance, or the
case of the moralist who sits gauging the moral effects the play is apt to produce in its audience.
These and all such cases will be regarded by the attitude theorist as cases of interested or
distanced attention to the performance, when they are actually nothing but cases of inattention to
the performance: the jealous husband is attending to his wife, the impresario to the till, the father
to his daughter, the moralist to the effects of the play. But if none of them is attending to the
performance, then none of them is attending to it disinterestedly or with distance (Dickie 1964,
5759).
The attitude theorist, however, can plausibly resist Dickie's interpretation of such examples.
Clearly the impresario is not attending to the performance, but there is no reason to regard the
attitude theorist as committed to thinking otherwise. As for the others, it might be argued that
they are all attending. The jealous husband must be attending to the performance, since it is the
action of the play, as presented by the performance, that is making him suspicious. The proud
father must be attending to the performance, since he is attending to his daughter's performance,
which is an element of it. The moralist must be attending to the performance, since he otherwise
would have no basis by which to gauge its moral effects on the audience. It may be that none of
these spectators is giving the performance the attention it demands, but that is precisely the
attitude theorist's point.
But perhaps another of Dickie's criticisms, one lesser known, ultimately poses a greater threat to
the ambitions of the attitude theorist. Stolnitz, it will be recalled, distinguishes between
disinterested and interested attention according to the purpose governing the attention: to attend
disinterestedly is to attend with no purpose beyond that of attending; to attend interestedly is to
attend with some purpose beyond that of attending. But Dickie objects that a difference in
purpose does not imply a difference in attention:

Suppose Jones listens to a piece of music for the purpose of being able to analyze and describe it
on an examination the next day and Smith listens to the same music with no such ulterior
purpose. There is certainly a difference in the motives and intentions of the two men: Jones has
an ulterior purpose and Smith does not, but this does not mean Jones's listening differs from
Smith's . There is only one way to listen to (to attend to) music, although there may be a
variety of motives, intentions, and reasons for doing so and a variety of ways of being distracted
from the music. (Dickie 1964, 58).
There is again much here that the attitude theorist can resist. The idea that listening is a species
of attending can be resisted: the question at hand, strictly speaking, is not whether Jones and
Smith listen to the music in the same way, but whether they attend in the same way to the music
they are listening to. The contention that Jones and Smith are attending in the same way appears
to be question-begging, as it evidently depends on a principle of individuation that the attitude
theorist rejects: if Jones's attention is governed by some ulterior purpose and Smith's is not, and
we individuate attention according to the purpose that governs it, their attention is not the same.
Finally, even if we reject the attitude theorist's principle of individuation, the claim that there is
but one way to attend to music is doubtful: one can seemingly attend to music in myriad ways
as historical document, as cultural artifact, as aural wallpaper, as sonic disturbancedepending
on which of the music's features one attends to in listening to it. But Dickie is nevertheless onto
something crucial to the degree he urges that a difference in purpose need not imply a relevant
difference in attention. Disinterest plausibly figures in the definition of the aesthetic attitude only
to the degree that it, and it alone, focuses attention on the features of the object that matter
aesthetically. The possibility that there are interests that focus attention on just those same
features implies that disinterest has no place in such a definition, which in turn implies that
neither it nor the notion of the aesthetic attitude is likely to be of any use in fixing the meaning
of the term aesthetic. If to take the aesthetic attitude toward an object simply is to attend to its
aesthetically relevant properties, whether the attention is interested or disinterested, then
determining whether an attitude is aesthetic apparently requires first determining which
properties are the aesthetically relevant ones. And this task seems always to result either in
claims about the immediate graspability of aesthetic properties, which are arguably insufficient
to the task, or in claims about the essentially formal nature of aesthetic properties, which are
arguably groundless.
But that the notions of disinterest and psychical distance prove unhelpful in fixing the meaning
of the term aesthetic does not imply that they are mythic. At times we seem unable to get by
without them. Consider the case of The Fall of Miletusa tragedy written by the Greek
dramatist Phrynicus and staged in Athens barely two years after the violent Persian capture of
the Greek city of Miletus in 494 BC. Herodotus records that
[the Athenians] found many ways to express their sorrow at the fall of Miletus, and in particular,
when Phrynicus composed and produced a play called The Fall of Miletus, the audience burst
into tears and fined him a thousand drachmas for reminding them of a disaster that was so close
to home; future productions of the play were also banned. (Herodotus, The Histories, 359)
How are we to explain the Athenian reaction to this play without recourse to something like
interest or lack of distance? How, in particular, are we to explain the difference between the
sorrow elicited by a successful tragedy and the sorrow elicited in this case? The distinction
between attention and inattention is of no use here. The difference is not that the Athenians
could not attend to The Fall whereas they could attend to other plays. The difference is that they
could not attend to The Fall as they could attend to other plays, and this because of their too
intimate connection to what attending to The Fall required their attending to.