The Experience of Art: Some Problems and Possibilities of Hermeneutical Analysis

Abstract

The dominant twentieth-century conception of aesthetic experience is, broadly speaking, a formalist one. It holds characteristically that aesthetic experience arises when, say, we perceive a painting in relation to its qualities of line and colour and their interrelations, rather than in relation to the content which those lines and colours represent. Such perception will be, in essence, 'disinterested,' i.e., pursued for its own sake, rather than for some theoretical, or other extrinsic end. This kind of approach to the experience of art first emerged in the eighteenth-century philosophies of 'taste' and finds its earliest systematic statement in Kant's doctrine of aesthetic judgement. That it should reappear so extensively in the present century, is due substantially to the trend towards nonrepresentational art. It is true, of course, that Edmund Bullough proposed a very influential literary version of formalism in I907; but it is with Clive Bell and Roger Fry's attempts to justify avant-garde developments in the visual arts, that formalist theory is really injected into modern philosophy of art. Those working in the tradition of existential phenomenology, however, have not appeared to accept the formalist position. Sartre, for example, tells us that