An Undeleter for Criticism

Abstract

Is experience of beauty, or is it only that we sometimes choose to sort and name certain experiences by using a set of terms, originating often in ancient and medieval philosophy and theology and by a long process of mutation and manipulation arriving under the disciplinary heading of aesthetics? This question asks for at least two kinds of information. It does not only ask for about the history of the formation of the concepts of aesthetics; it also asks for about experiences. But about experiences is hard to come by. This is not only, perhaps, for the large reason that information is concerned with alien objects, rather than with experiences,' but also for the more local one that does not often attempt to describe any experiences with determined fidelity.2 I can illustrate this with reference to a branch of aesthetics in which I have a particular interest, the aesthetics of prosody. A good deal of subtle and sometimes brilliant work exists in this field. It is rare, however, to find writing which describes in any detail the particular experiences which a particular living individual has had in relation to a line of poetry.3 One is much more likely to find such descriptions in works of fiction (or, rarely, in brief reviews) than in professional writing on the topic of prosody. There seem at first to be some obvious and good reasons for this. Professional writing demands not that we merely report our own subjective experiences, but that we produce knowledge. Critics are not paid to be artists but to be a kind of scientists of art. But what if is no such science? What if there is no science of the beautiful [Kant, CJ 172]? Would that mean that the whole subject area should simply be-deleted? That this is a possibility is confirmed by the fact that in one area of thinking about aesthetic experience, it has almost happened already. While are still a number of paid professionals who understand part of their vocation to be bound up with investigating the experience of the beauty or other value of works of art, are few paid aestheticians of nature.4 There have been historical periods in which numbers of printed nonfiction