ALAN H.

GOLDMAN

The Broad View of Aesthetic Experience

abstract
Peter Kivy and Noel Carroll advocate a narrow view of aesthetic experience according to which it consists mainly in attention
to formal properties. Excluded are cognitive and moral properties. I defend the broader view that includes the latter properties.
I argue first that cognition and moral assessment can be inseparable in experience from grasp of form and expressiveness.
Second, Kivy and Carroll must extend the notion of form itself beyond ordinary usage to accommodate acknowledged
aesthetic experience. Third, the broad view has a more impressive historical lineage than the narrow view. Fourth, aesthetic
experience is appreciation of aesthetic value, and the latter is more plausibly analyzed in a broad way.

i. the narrow view Of equal or greater importance is what

I argue here against the currently dominant view
of aesthetic experience defended by both Noel
Carroll and Peter Kivy. I call their position the
narrow view of aesthetic experience. In this first
section I criticize their view, in the second section
I describe and defend the proper broader view,
and in the third section I address objections to my
position.
Carroll includes within such experience atten-
tion to formal, expressive, and aesthetic properties
of artworks. By including the latter properties he
does not mean to imply that formal and expres-
sive qualities are not aesthetic properties, but he
means to include also such qualities as the brittle-
ness of a dancers movement or the massiveness
of a sculpture. The clear emphasis is on formal
properties, although, as we shall see, Carroll may
not mean by form what you and I do. In his most
recent treatment of the topic, he writes:
There appears to be a great deal of agreement that, typ-
ically, aesthetic experience involves informed attention
to the form of a work. . . . I do not think anyone has
denied that attending to the form of the work with un-
derstanding is an aesthetic experience.1
If he is right in the latter claim, I will be the first
to deny the sufficiency of this condition.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:4 Fall 2013

C 2013 The American Society for Aesthetics
Carroll means to exclude from the domain of aes-
thetic experience, for one thing cognitive engage-
ment with artworks. He writes: Since the eigh-
teenth century, a recurrent theme in the tradition
has been that cognitive properties are not aes-
thetic properties and that the cognitive advantages
offered by engaging with artworks are not part
of the aesthetic experience proper of the works
in question.2 According to Carroll, also tradi-
tionally excluded from aesthetic experience are
moral insight, political inspiration, recognition
of representational content.3
Thus, in this passage, although perception of
form is the paradigm for aesthetic experience,
the engagement of ones recognitional capacity
as recognition of content is excluded. In an ear-
lier paper, Four Concepts of Aesthetic Experi-
ence, however, he acknowledges that discerning
the structure of many novels requires mobiliza-
tion of cognitive and emotive scripts and schemas
drawn from everyday life.4 We can ask already
whether these factors are required and whether
they are separable in the visual experience of a
representational painting as well. We can also ask
more pointedly whether this acknowledgment by
Carroll is consistent with his exclusion of cogni-
tive properties from aesthetic experience.
324
As we saw just above, Carroll also cites as
part of the approved tradition the exclusion of
moral insight from aesthetic experience. And
in his most recent paper on the subject, he
seems again to contrast moral and aesthetic
experience:
The formal, aesthetic, and expressive dimensions of art-
works are each in turn elements in the way in which
the artwork is embodied or presented; . . . aesthetic ex-
periences involve focus on the how of the work. I has-
ten to add that . . . I am not saying that these are the
only kinds of experiences that artworks qua art do af-
ford. Artworks may legitimately invite a wide range of
other kinds of experiences, including moral, cognitive,
religious, political, and sexual ones. . . . Aesthetic expe-
rience concerns how [artworks] points and purposes are
embodied and advanced. The moral, cognitive, religious,
and so on content of the work is more of the nature of
what is embodied.5
Yet in his defense of moderate moralism, he
allows that moral defects in works can be aes-
thetic defects detected in the course of aesthetic
experience.6 This is because such defects can block
the achievement of the purpose of the work, a
purpose such as the arousal of an emotional state.
And anything that blocks the achievement of a
works purpose, when that purpose is part of the
content, is by contrast a formal defect according
to Carrolls very broad definition of form. I will
assess his notion of form below, but again we can
ask already whether excluding moral insight from
aesthetic experience is consistent with allowing
moral reactions to fictional characters into that
experience.
Carroll holds that our current analysis must re-
flect traditional usage or simply change the sub-
ject, but is traditional usage as he views it consis-
tent with such experiences as they occur? And is
traditional usage as he describes it? Again in his
latest paper on the subject, Carroll represents a
view of aesthetic experience that excludes cogni-
tive properties and moral insight as a matter of
consensus, or common knowledge, rooted in a
uniform or at least consistent history of philosoph-
ical linguistic usage.7 In an earlier paper, however,
he describes the term aesthetic as a contested
technical term from the beginning with shifting
meanings.8 He distinguishes a broad notion in
which an aesthetic experience is any appropriate
response to art: aesthetic experience is experience
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
of an artwork as such.9 (I have more to say about
this characterization of the broad view below.) But
in that earlier paper, too, he already favors a con-
cept that excludes from the aesthetic experience
of reading novels appreciation of themes about
life and the world, which he calls therapeutic ex-
perience, in contrast to aesthetic.
This exclusion again seems to contrast with
the earlier quoted passage from Four Concepts.
Carroll clearly wants to exclude from aesthetic ex-
perience the acquisition of knowledge and moral
insight, but he wants to include cognitive cate-
gorization of artworks and emotional responses
to them necessary to discerning the structures es-
pecially of representational works. But if moral
emotional reactions and recognition of previously
unconceptualized character types and relations,
amounting to the acquisition of knowledge about
such character types and relations, are inseparable
aspects of the experience of grasping the structure
of narrative works, for example, and if grasping
that structure is the paradigm of aesthetic expe-
rience for Carroll, then these aspects cannot be
excluded from that experience. So I argue further
below. The question for Carroll, given what he
must acknowledge as included in aesthetic expe-
rience (because necessary for grasping form as he
defines it), is whether he can plausibly exclude
what he wants to exclude.
Kivys concept of aesthetic experience is, if
anything, yet narrower. Once more he admits a
broader use of aesthetic as referring to experi-
ence of a work relevant to its evaluation as a work
of art, but he endorses and uses a narrower sense
in which the concept picks out form as opposed
to content.10 Unlike Carroll, he excludes appreci-
ation of most expressive properties, at least those
that involve emotional engagement or response
from the audience or readers. Famously, he de-
nies that such response is necessary for recogniz-
ing expressive properties in music. The arousal of
emotions of any kind is not part of aesthetic expe-
rience for Kivy, and expressive properties whose
recognition requires such response are excluded.11
He allows that expressive properties are aes-
thetic in music, but not in novels, on the ground
also that in novels they are part of content.12
Aesthetic properties that do enter aesthetic expe-
rience include mainly phenomenological (phe-
nomenal?) structural properties, perceived prop-
erties of structures or of parts or elements of
structures.13
Goldman The Broad View of Aesthetic Experience
As indicated earlier, Carrolls main and most
recent argument for the narrow view is historical.
He refers to the origin of the term in Alexan-
der Baumgarten, for whom it referred to the sci-
ence of perception, to David Hume and Immanuel
Kant, for whom beauty consisted in perception of
forms that gave rise to disinterested pleasure, and
to the later formalist tradition instantiated most
clearly in Clive Bell, for whom aesthetic experi-
ence lay in the peculiar emotion caused by grasp
of significant form. In this historical philosoph-
ical sequence Carroll sees a consistent emphasis
on formal qualities as the objects of aesthetic ex-
perience. We saw above that attention to expres-
sive and aesthetic properties are for him also part
of aesthetic experience, but that is ultimately be-
cause they are part of the way a work is embodied,
part of its form according to his very broad defi-
nition of form (scrutinized below).
Kivy invokes traditional usage as well, but he
has another motive for defending the narrow view.
It is fair to say that while I and other more tradi-
tional philosophers of art want to emphasize com-
mon effects, if not common intrinsic properties, of
great artworks across different media and genres,
Kivy wants to focus on differences. Thus, in his
recent book on fictional literature, he argues that
novels, as opposed to music and paintings, com-
prise a mainly nonaesthetic art form in that for-
mal structure plays little role in the appreciation or
reading experience of even most serious readers.14
Even they read primarily for the story and are not
consciously aware of formal features of the novels
as they are reading.15 Such broad structure affects
ones experience of fictional works but is not ex-
perienced as such according to Kivy.
For Kivy, as for Carroll, considering or reflect-
ing on substantive themes and theses in nov-
els is part of our literary or artistic appreciation
of them, relevant to their evaluation as literary
works of art, but not part of our aesthetic ex-
perience of them, which is minimal.16 Kivy is an
aesthetic autonomistcognitive engagement and
moral or emotional response are no part of aes-
thetic experiencebut not an artistic autonomist.
Such responses are relevant to artistic evaluation.
Thus, he sharply separates artistic from aesthetic
value.17 One argument he offers for this distinc-
tion appeals to an analogy between nonfictional
and fictional literature. Expressive properties and
emotional responses to them are not part of aes-
thetic experiences of factual narratives, he claims,
325
and so not part of aesthetic experience of fictional
narratives either.18 But he offers no support for the
premise, which appears to be false. To the extent
that we recognize expressive properties in nonfic-
tional narratives, this may well enter into aesthetic
evaluation of them as powerful or beautiful, for
example. And if we evaluate them in that way,
that is because we experience them aesthetically.
Likewise for fiction.
More generally, Kivys distinction between the
aesthetic and artistic assumes the narrow view of
the former instead of supporting it. He argues fur-
ther for the distinction by claiming that there are
artistic values of works, such as originality and
creativity, which do not lie in perceptible proper-
ties, while aesthetic values and the properties that
determine them are perceptible. But first, there
are formal aesthetic properties, such as those that
characterize the broad structures of novels, which
are grasped cognitively and not perceptually. Kivy
holds that readers do not ordinarily experience
such properties while reading, but he cannot plau-
sibly deny that such formal properties are aes-
thetic properties. Second, such properties as orig-
inality in art are often noted by a comparison of
perceptible properties, and they are in a sense per-
ceptible themselves by in turn influencing the ways
we perceive works, by making a difference to per-
ception. We pay closer attention and hence per-
ceive differently the development section of the
opening movement of Ludwig van Beethovens
Eroica symphony when we perceive its originality
or difference in scope from such sections in ear-
lier symphonies. If there is no sharp distinction
between perceivable aesthetic properties and un-
perceivable artistic qualities, then this more gen-
eral argument for drawing the distinction between
the aesthetic and the artistic breaks down as well.
While I place greater emphasis on the positive
argument for the broad view of aesthetic experi-
ence in the section to follow, I do not find the his-
torical argument for the narrow view convincing
either. Carrolls appeal to Baumgartens histori-
cal context and to Kant are first of all question-
able as support for an anticognitivist view; and,
more important, the broad view can claim deeper
and philosophically more impressive roots. Baum-
garten himself emphasized the acquisition of per-
ceptual knowledge in his science of aesthetics, and
the acquisition of knowledge clearly involves cog-
nition, the application of concepts in recognizing
representational content.19
326
Francis Hutcheson, writing around the same
time, in the same early historical context for the
use of the term aesthetic, pointed to the beauty
of mathematical theorems in the way they unify
diverse data.20 Such beauty is of course once more
grasped cognitively, not perceptually; and beauty
was, and perhaps still is, the formal aesthetic prop-
erty par excellence. Kant too emphasized attention
to form, since he too focused on the aesthetic ex-
perience of beauty, but for him such experience
clearly included engagement of the cognitive fac-
ulty of understanding. Cognitive engagement is an
equal partner in aesthetic appreciation for Kant,
although not in the form of applying determinate
concepts, since there is no objective concept of
beauty.21 In the appreciation of beautiful form,
the feeling of perfect comprehensibility, the felt
harmony between understanding and the percep-
tual faculty, is as much cognitive as affective or
immediately sensuous.
To be fair to Carroll, as mentioned earlier, he
allows cognition to enter aesthetic experience in
the form of categorizing works in ways relevant
to appreciating their structure. Aesthetic experi-
ence for him lies typically in grasping form with
understanding. This may entail even more cog-
nitive engagement than Kant allows, since Kant
denies the application of concepts or catego-
rization in aesthetic experience of at least free
beauty. But the point remains that appeal to such
philosophers as Baumgarten and Kant does not
support excluding the cognitive from aesthetic
experience.
The later history of the concept of aesthetic ex-
perience veers more strongly away from a narrow,
exclusively perceptual focus. Formalists can claim
recent ancestry in Bell, but the more impressive
recent philosophical tradition runs through John
Dewey and later Monroe C. Beardsley. There are
two main aspects to Deweys account of aesthetic
experience. The first is the claim that aesthetic
experiences are coherent wholes that build cu-
mulatively toward culminations that encapsulate
the meanings of all that came before. In a dis-
cussion of Dewey, Carroll criticizes this charac-
terization as universally applicable to all aesthetic
experience.22 But he does not consider a second
and, from our point of view, more important fea-
ture of aesthetic experience according to Dewey.
This is that such experience engages the entire
live creature, uniting all faculties in its unfolding.
Dewey writes that such experiences
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carry to new and unprecedented heights that unity of
sense and impulse, of brain and eye and ear. . . . In final
import they are intellectual. But in their actual occur-
rence they were emotional as well; they were purposive
and volitional. Yet the experience was not a sum of these
different characters; they were lost in it as distinctive
traits. . . . It is not possible to divide in a vital experi-
ence the practical, emotional, and intellectual from one
another.23
For Beardsley also, it is the function of art to
produce aesthetic experience, and certainly not in
the narrow sense of Carroll or Kivy. He writes:
I propose to say that a person is having an aesthetic ex-
perience during a particular stretch of time if and only if
the greater part of his mental activity during that time is
united and made pleasurable by being tied to the form
and qualities of a sensuously presented or imaginatively
intended object on which his primary attention is con-
centrated. . . . In my idea of a unified experience the
percepts are integrated with affects of various kinds.24
For Beardsley as well as Dewey, appreciation of
aesthetic value is not limited to the perception
of aesthetic properties usually cited as such, but
consists in the full and harmonious engagement of
different mental capacities, prominently including
both perception and emotional response.
While the narrow view is tied to the formalist
theory of aesthetic value of Bell, that theory has
no more claim to historical dominance than the
equally narrow expressivist theory earlier cham-
pioned by Romantics such as Tolstoy. Bell himself
shares with Hutcheson, Kant, and Beardsley (but
not Dewey) a thesis that can be claimed to further
support the broad view. I refer to the claim that
aesthetic experience detaches us from the world of
our practical affairs.25 This detachment, the feeling
that artworks constitute alternative imaginary or
fictional worlds for us, results not from being dis-
tanced from the works themselves, as some later
theorists claimed, but from being totally absorbed
or engaged in them.26 For Bell, we could be so
absorbed in the form of the objects alone, but the
broader view makes this thesis more comprehensi-
ble and plausible. In any case, the broader theory
that includes the exercise of cognition, emotion,
and imagination in the apprehension or consti-
tution of aesthetic value can claim a philosophi-
cally more impressive heritage. The broader view
of aesthetic experience and value as cognitive,
Goldman The Broad View of Aesthetic Experience
imaginative, and emotional engagement with art-
works, along with perceptual grasp of their for-
mal structures, has a more exalted ancestry than
the formalism that dates mainly from the birth of
modernism in the post-Romantic era.
Returning from the historical argument for the
narrow view to its distinction between aesthetic
and artistic value, the latter is required as a de-
pository for the value appreciated in art that is
excluded from the narrow account of aesthetic ex-
perience. Indeed, in search of a backup depository,
both Carroll and Kivy feel the need to broaden the
notion of form beyond ordinary recognition. For
Kivy, formal properties are properties of struc-
tures or of parts or elements of structures.27 For-
mal and structural are indeed near synonyms,
but the problem here lies in the implicit claim that
being a property of a part of a structure is suf-
ficient for being a formal property. This allows
Kivy to include not only clearly formal properties
like unity, but also such properties as vibrancy and
garishness within the domain of the aesthetic, hav-
ing identified the aesthetic with the formal. Such
properties as vibrancy or brilliance of tone are
indeed paradigms of aesthetic qualities, but not
normally conceived as formal or structural.
Properties of parts or elements of structures
are not typically structural or formal properties. In
fact, virtually all properties that are not properties
of structures are properties of parts or elements
of structures, since all elements or parts of objects
enter into their structures, and all objects have
structures, either complex or simple. So it seems
that nothing is excluded from formal properties as
Kivy characterizes them, which does not sit well
with his desire to exclude nonformal properties
from the domain of the aesthetic in defense of a
narrow view. But this kind of broadening of the
concept of form beyond recognition is required if
he is not to throw out the baby with the bath water,
if he is not to exclude clearly aesthetic properties
such as vibrancy or garishness from the realm of
aesthetic experience.
Carrolls characterization of form, if anything,
sounds even broader. For him, included in form
is any way a work is embodied or presented so
as to achieve its purpose, any way it embodies
or presents its content.28 Thus, as an example, he
claims that the choice of Hitler as a tragic hero
would be a formal mistake, if the purpose of the
tragedy is the Aristotelian one of evoking pity in
the reader. But it seems clear in terms of ordinary
327
usage that having Hitler as the hero of a story is
part of its content, not its form or structure. Form
can be captured in variables, excluding proper
names. How, then, can the narrow view of the aes-
thetic be plausible if it requires not only a category
of artistic value to contain what is excluded from
aesthetic value, but also compensatory broaden-
ing of the concept of the formal beyond all recog-
nition? This broadening is again required if clearly
aesthetic properties are not to be excluded from
aesthetic experience.
Before moving to the positive arguments for
the broad view, one final argument of Carrolls
for the narrow view must be assessed. This can
be described as an argument from elimination.
Carroll considers and rejects accounts of aesthetic
experience that attempt to differentiate it from
other experience on the basis of a particular af-
fect or emotional state or on the ground that it
is valued for its own sake. He is right that there
is no single affective tone, be it awe or wonder
or pleasure, that attaches to all aesthetic experi-
ence. While emotional engagement is part of the
full absorption in artworks that characterizes the
broad view of aesthetic experience, there is no sin-
gle emotion always present. Being fully engaged
by an artwork is often but not always pleasurable
and typically not when part of that engagement
involves negative emotions. And even works that
do fully engage us might be admired for their ca-
pacity to do so without producing a feeling of awe.
The claim that aesthetic experience is valued
for its own sake is connected to the traditional
claim that it detaches us from the world of our
ordinary practical affairs, which provides goals to
which other values instrumentally attach. As indi-
cated earlier, I agree with this idea of detachment
that supports the claim of intrinsic value for aes-
thetic experience. But such experience can also
be valued for its instrumental benefits, which are
many, and many other experiences can be val-
ued for their own sake, so that this description
does nothing to differentiate the aesthetic. Having
rightly dismissed these alternatives, Carroll con-
cludes that his content-based account that focuses
on formal and other aesthetic but not cognitive
properties is the last man standing.
But first, this content-based account is not the
last man standing: Carroll does not consider the
broader view in this argument, having dismissed
it earlier with his somewhat inaccurate historical
argument. And second, an account of a particular
328
kind of experience in terms of its intrinsic subjec-
tive nature or structure is preferable to one that
appeals only to objective content, if the former
is available. Experience itself is, of course, sub-
jective, and so describing it in subjective terms is
more descriptive of its nature. We may now turn
to the positive arguments for construing the terms
of that description more broadly.29
ii. the broad view
The first argument takes off from the brief pas-
sages quoted from Dewey. He points to the in-
dissoluble connection between cognition and the
other mental faculties, mainly perception and
emotion, in aesthetic experience. Attention to and
grasp of form in complex artworks, the paradigm
of aesthetic experience according to the narrow
view, typically involve all three capacities. Grasp-
ing the broad structure of musical movements
while listening, for example, involves sophis-
ticated conceptual capacities acquired through
training and prior musical experience. It also in-
volves responding affectively to the felt tensions
and resolutions of the harmonic and melodic pro-
gressions. Musical works engage us cognitively as
well as perceptually in experiencing their com-
plex formal progressions, revealed in part through
our affective or emotional reactions as we imagi-
natively anticipate resolutions of tensions in the
unfolding melodies and harmonies. As Dewey
indicates, we can separate these aspects of the
experience of a piece only analytically in retro-
spect, much as we can note that a musical tone
involves pitch, duration, volume, and timbre, al-
though these analytically separate facets are not,
and indeed cannot be, experienced separately.
Appreciation of paintings too is guided and en-
hanced by interpretation grounded in knowledge
of the history and nature of the medium, genre,
and style, guided, that is, by cognition. I noted ear-
lier that some formal qualities are grasped purely
cognitively, for example the beauty of a mathemat-
ical theorem, as recognized long ago by Hutche-
son. One might say the same of recognizing the
broad structure, the formal relations among char-
acters, settings, and events, in a novel. According
to Kivy, most readers do not experience such for-
mal aspects while reading, although he admits that
broad structure can affect the experience of read-
ing, ones reactions to the characters and events,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
in various ways.30 But there is no sharp distinction
as he wants to draw in this case between what is
experienced and what influences the reading ex-
perience. While causes are normally distinct from
effects, in this case experiencing how the charac-
ters develop and events ensue in a fictional narra-
tive, and how those sequences are presented in the
order of the narrative, is experiencing the struc-
ture of the novel, although the reader may not be
able to articulate that structure as a whole except
in retrospect and on reflection.
The apprehension of formal structure in a novel
often depends on seeing how its characters and the
relations between them change in the course of the
narration, and this seeing requires thought and
reflection as well as emotional or empathetic re-
actions while reading. All this is an integral part of
the experience of reading. Once more we cannot
separate out, except analytically and artificially,
attention to the form alone as experienced. Kivy
may be right that most readers pay no such at-
tention to structure as a whole and in itself, but
this does not mean that they do not experience
formal qualities while reading, as this cognitive
engagement is combined with other aspects of the
reading experience.
Examples are countless, but I will mention a
few from some of the novels I examine in a just
published book.31 In Jane Austens Pride and Prej-
udice, the formal structure consists partly in the
main characters moving gradually from an initial
antagonism to a perfect harmony, while contrast-
ing with the lack of development and moral imma-
turity of all the minor characters. We imagine, per-
ceive, feel, and cognitively reflect on this pattern,
along with its masterful blend with the subtle and
not so subtle irony of the prose (a second-level for-
mal relation), while reading the novel. In Ernest
Hemingways The Sun Also Rises, the theme of
moral malaise reinforces and is reinforced by the
repetitive or cyclical structure of the narrative and
by the terse prose style.
Such implicit themes, in this case as much felt
as cognized, typically dawn on us gradually as we
read, and they help to constitute form as well as
content, uniting and explaining the actions and
events in the story. It might be objected again at
this point that most of what I have argued is com-
patible with Carrolls if not Kivys position, since
Carroll allows cognitive and emotional response
to enter aesthetic experience insofar as they are
required for discerning the form of a work. But,
Goldman The Broad View of Aesthetic Experience
as noted earlier, he clearly wants to exclude from
such experience reflection on moral and other
themes relating to real-world life, at least as they
constitute cognitive and moral insight or the ac-
quisition of knowledge. But the acquisition of such
new insight or knowledge is once more insepara-
ble in experience from our fresh emotional reac-
tions to characters as we first encounter them in
fiction and from our grasping of novels themes.
The distinction between form and content that
both he and Kivy want to emphasize is not a dis-
tinction typically found in the experience of art-
works, but emerges only later in analysis.
The role of cognition in uncovering or interpret-
ing themes in literary works is obvious. They not
only express the underlying content of their nov-
els, what they are ultimately about, but also reveal
their unity or coherence across otherwise diverse
happenings in the narratives, showing how sep-
arate strands in the story relate to each other in
formal patterns. Just as literary themes are embod-
ied in or woven into narrative, characterization,
setting, formal structure, and prose style of nov-
els, so is their cognitive recognition or inference
woven into perception of the language, imagina-
tion, and emotional response. In Joseph Conrads
Nostromo, to take a final example, the theme of
social chaos and moral disintegration goes hand
in hand with the novels somewhat chaotic formal
structure, its rapid and nearly incomprehensible
shifts in time and space. The elegance of Pride and
Prejudice, the chilling power of Nostromo, a large
part of their literary or aesthetic value, depend on
this perfect union of form and content, grasped
once more through imagination, feeling, and
thought operating together in the experience of
reading.32
Once more, as in musical appreciation, the ex-
ercise of these mental capacities in literary appre-
ciation, including cognition as memory, reflection,
inference, and anticipation, is not experientially
separable. The experience, if aesthetic, includes
cognition as an essential aspect of appreciation.
If cognition and reflective thought are so indis-
solubly linked with grasp of formal structure and
empathetic emotional reaction in imaginatively
identifying with characters and their relationships,
then all these are equally aspects of literary appre-
ciation. If literary appreciation is appreciation of
literary value, if literary value is a subclass of aes-
thetic value, and if aesthetic experience is appre-
ciation of aesthetic value, then engagement with
329
novels on all these mental levels constitutes the
aesthetic experience of reading fiction.
The simultaneous and harmonious interaction
and engagement of all these mental capacities is
matched on the objective side by the interaction of
formal, expressive, and representational aspects of
the works appreciated. Carroll himself notes such
interpenetration of aesthetic properties in the
object:
The form and the aesthetic and expressive properties of
the work also interact in various ways. Sometimes form
gives rise to aesthetic properties, such as unity, while
the succession, evolution, or juxtaposition of expressive
properties can constitute the form of an artwork. . . .
[A]nother object of aesthetic experience is the relation
of the form, the expressive properties, and the inter-
action thereof to our response to themto the way in
which they shape and guide our reactions.33
I would modify this passage only to say that our re-
sponse to such interaction of properties on the ob-
ject side is the aesthetic experience, instead of the
response being the conscious object of that expe-
rience, and to point out again that this response in-
volves all our mental faculties operating together,
prominently including cognition. In appreciating
literature, our reading response typically involves
grasping literary themes that are both contentful
and formal at the same time. Once more it is only
the philosopher or literary analyst who makes the
response her object.
A second related argument for the broad view
was introduced just above. It begins with the
premise that aesthetic experience is appreciation
in experience of aesthetic value. On a fairly narrow
notion of aesthetic value (too narrow, although
capturing a part of such value), it consists of an
objects having positive aesthetic properties. Thus,
on this view, aesthetic experience would consist
of appreciation of aesthetic properties as usually
conceived. Kivys concept of aesthetic experience
is already in trouble on this score since he ex-
cludes most expressive properties. If aesthetic ex-
perience includes appreciation of most or all aes-
thetic properties, or of all those involving affective
response, then Kivys position is far too narrow. It
certainly seems clear that being strident, soothing,
serene, jarring, vibrant, or melancholy are as gen-
uine aesthetic properties as being unified, elegant,
or disjointed. The former are expressive prop-
erties that can require affective responses to be
330
recognized (something that Kivy denies in the case
of music). Artworks can be better for having these
properties, and experiencing them can be part of
appreciating the aesthetic value of the works. They
therefore enter into aesthetic experience, even on
a narrow view of aesthetic value.
Carroll is on firmer ground here, since he in-
cludes such expressive properties in aesthetic ex-
perience, being concerned only to banish cognitive
and moral insight from the realm of the aesthetic.
We have seen, however, that, like Kivy, he too
needs a separate category of artistic value to con-
tain those exiled aspects of the experience that
are still relevant to the evaluation of artworks,
since he rightly holds along with Kivy that cog-
nitive and moral interest are so relevant. Artistic
value and its experience cannot, however, be char-
acterized by describing its subjective nature, as
aesthetic value and its experience are properly so
characterized. Artistic value is simply the value
of an artwork qua artwork. Aesthetic value is
what is appreciated in aesthetic experience; artis-
tic value is not what is appreciated in artistic ex-
perience, since there is no such experience per se
(unless it is the experience of an artist in creating a
work). It is therefore problematic to posit artistic
value as a kind of value on a par with aesthetic
value, containing distinct but similar aspects in its
experience.
We saw that Kivy and Carroll, despite prefer-
ring the narrow view, both recognize a broad con-
cept of aesthetic value according to which it is
simply artistic value. On my view, artistic value
reduces to aesthetic value in that the proper func-
tion of artworks is, as Dewey and Beardsley held,
to produce aesthetic experience. The concepts of
artistic and aesthetic value are nevertheless not
the same. The connection between aesthetic and
artistic value is not conceptual. Aesthetic value is
to be defined in terms of the production of aes-
thetic experience, while artistic value is, as said,
simply the value of artworks as such. The latter
reduces to the former, but the reduction is not
a matter of proper definition. The only way we
can give an account of the value of artworks in
aesthetic terms, however, is by appeal to a broad
concept of aesthetic experience and value. The
question is whether there is any justification or
point to separating out cognitive and moral en-
gagement and insight from aesthetic experience
so as to leave a residue of artistic value beyond
the aesthetic.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
I have so far made two main points in answer
to this question: First, these aspects are not sepa-
rable from the other acknowledged aspects of the
appreciative experience of artworks as it occurs;
and second, the argument from historical usage
of the term aesthetic fails in undercharacterizing
early usage in Baumgarten, Hutcheson, and Kant
and in omitting major later figures in aesthetics. A
third point once more appeals to usage, as I also
appealed to common usage of the term form.
While we speak of artistic value, we do not speak
of artistic properties or artistic experience (unless
it is once more the experience of an artist in creat-
ing an artwork, irrelevant here). Thus, if cognitive
and moral engagement with artworks is part of
our experience of them, and if this all engaged
experience is a subjectively distinct kind of expe-
rience, it must be part of our aesthetic experience
of these objects. There is no subjectively distinct
artistic experience to which it could belong.
I can offer one further ordinary language ar-
gument in favor of the conceptual distinction be-
tween aesthetic value and experience on the one
hand and artistic value as construed above on the
other. We can instruct or advise others to attend to
certain artworks, although we would not call this
advising them to have artistic experiences. Once
more, there is no such experience per se. We do
not because we cannot fruitfully advise or instruct
others to have aesthetic experiences, although we
can predict with more or less reliability that they
will have such experiences if they attend to cer-
tain artworks. While aesthetic experiences are in
one sense fully active, involving, as emphasized, all
mental faculties operating in concert, in another
sense they are passive. One must be captured or
grabbed by an artwork in order to have an aes-
thetic experience of it, and one cannot normally
successfully will to be so fully engaged. I can try
to exercise all my mental capacities, for instance,
to be emotionally responsive to a given work, but
if the work does not sustain that response, I will
not be successful in trying to have an aesthetic
experience of it.
It follows from this point that while, as I have
been arguing, aesthetic experience is broader than
its description by Carroll and Kivy, it is also in one
respect narrower. As indicated at the beginning
of this article, I disagree with Carrolls apparent
claim that attention to and grasp of formal proper-
ties is always an aesthetic experience. Noting that
a monochromatic canvas or the desk on which I
Goldman The Broad View of Aesthetic Experience
am typing is rectangular is grasping a formal or
structural property, but it is not an aesthetic ex-
perience. This follows not only from intuition, but
also from the point of the previous paragraph, in
that while I can certainly instruct someone to at-
tend to the shape of the canvas or my desk, I can-
not instruct them to have an aesthetic experience
of it. Thus, to attend to the shape of the desk is
not automatically to have (or in this case to have
at all) an aesthetic experience.
It is obvious that formal properties are not nec-
essarily aesthetic properties. No one has ever sug-
gested that squareness is an aesthetic property, but
it is a formal or structural property. To be fair to
Carroll, although he sometimes seems to suggest
that attending to form is sufficient for aesthetic
experience, he may only mean to suggest that it
is necessary. But he certainly claims that when
it qualifies as an aesthetic experience, it typically
constitutes the totality of that experience (given
his broad definition of form). This is what I have
denied. Aesthetic experience is narrower than at-
tention to formal properties, as the squareness ex-
ample shows. It is also broader than attention to
aesthetic properties.
I have suggested that we evaluate artworks,
including literary works, by how fully they en-
gage us on all levels, by their ability to prompt
aesthetic experience.34 Moral engagement with
a work and moral insight, as part of cognitive
and emotional response to it, which, I have ar-
gued, can be inseparable from other aspects of
the reading experience, are part of this experi-
ence relevant to literary value and evaluation.
Such engagement is most easily prompted not
by literature that gives us pat moral truths or
characters, or by works that elicit automatic ap-
proval of their implied moral attitudes, but by
literature that presents moral ambiguity, morally
enigmatic characters like Hamlet, Ahab, or Don
Quixote, or that challenges our ethical assump-
tions. Works that implicitly advocate objection-
able moral views are not aesthetically worse
on that score alone, but instead because they
turn us off from further engagement with them.
Carroll agrees. But then he wants to exclude moral
insight from aesthetic experience. The problem is
that those moral defects that turn us off and those
challenges that engage us can be experienced as
the acquisition of moral insight or knowledge.
Our responses in this regard while reflectively
reading, again imaginative, affective, and cogni-
tive responses at the same time, are clearly not
331
limited to attending to aesthetic properties as usu-
ally listed. It is more intuitive in light of this point
to say that aesthetic experience extends beyond
the grasp of particular aesthetic properties than
to say that moral properties are themselves aes-
thetic properties. Being morally admirable and
having morally enlightening themes are not aes-
thetic properties, but responses to such properties
of works, as once more inseparable experientially
from other cognitive and affective responses, are
part of the aesthetic experience of them. Express-
ing a morally right attitude is not in itself an aes-
thetic or artistic value, but prompting engagement
with a work on a moral level, as part of the expe-
rience of reading or viewing the work, is. It can
once more be an integral and inseparable aspect
of our full experience of or engagement with the
work.
iii. objections
I will conclude by briefly addressing some objec-
tions to the broad view of aesthetic experience.
The first is that, while the view is broad in including
emotional and cognitive engagement along with
perception of form in aesthetic experience, it is too
narrow for just that reason in excluding a major
realm of aesthetic appreciation. I refer to the aes-
thetic appreciation of nature and its picturesque
scenes. Here it will be noted that such aesthetic
experiences, of beautiful sunsets for example, do
not normally contain major cognitive components,
but instead consist entirely of immediate percep-
tual responses. Here is aesthetic experience that
seems to fit the narrow account and not the broad
account.
One reply would be to point out that such re-
sponses may be affective or emotional as well,
and may even include cognitive reflection. But
I would not want to insist on the necessity of a
cognitive aspect for a correct description of such
experiences as aesthetic. Nor, however, would I
characterize response to the beautiful color of a
sunset as grasp of a formal or structural property.
The better reply is to distinguish what is called
aesthetic experiences of sunsets or flowers from
typical experiences of great artworks. That we call
the former aesthetic appreciation hearkens back
to the earlier use of these terms to refer exclu-
sively to the perception of or response to beauty.
To experience nature aesthetically is to experi-
ence its beauty, or perhaps its sublimity, the latter
332
being more clearly an emotional response. But the
experience of fine artworks includes far more.
A more probable objection is that the account
is too broad, in that many activities other than
the appreciation of art fully engage our mental
capacities, competing in sports or writing philoso-
phy articles, for example. The objection assumes
that I am in the business here of definition, ei-
ther defining art by its production of a unique
kind of experience or differentiating aesthetic ex-
perience from every other kind. My main project
here has been neither of these, but that of offer-
ing a correct description of aesthetic experience. I
could, like Dewey, hold that aesthetic experiences
in the broad sense occur in contexts other than
that of appreciating artworks. Or I could hold that
the most prominent features of aesthetic experi-
ence are as I have described them, but that other
features, for example, content, differentiate such
experience from all other kinds.
I do, however, believe that aesthetic experi-
ences of artworks are distinct. Along these lines,
I could question the presence elsewhere to the
same degree or in the same way of some fac-
ulty involved in the aesthetic appreciation of art,
for instance, imagination in the case of sports or
emotion in the case of philosophy articles (I am
neither worked up emotionally against Carroll or
Kivy, whom I consider friends, nor elated at op-
posing them). But I think the best appeal here
is to the overall immediate effect of the full en-
gagement I have described as characterizing aes-
thetic experience. The effect is to seem to us an
alternative world in which we are occupied for
brief periods of escape from our ordinary affairs. I
mentioned earlier this traditional claim of detach-
ment from practical affairs, dating at least back to
Kant. In my view, it translates to full engagement
with the work of art. By contrast, exercise of our
capacities in other activities such as sports or writ-
ing articles takes place in the real physical world
and includes practical goals or interests. The mea-
sure of value of an artwork is its capacity to so
fully engage us: not so with practical goals or even
with games that set their own goals.
Carroll sees a tension between being engaged
with a work of art, a novel, for example, and be-
ing disinterested in the real world, divorced from
practical affairs, since many novels are intended
to prompt action in the real world.35 If one is sym-
pathetically engaged in such a work, one will not
be disinterested in practical affairs, since such de-
tachment will signal lack of serious attention to
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
the novels theme and point. In reply, defense of
the detachment thesis can allow that action in the
real world is a proper response to reading that
kind of literature, but it will be a response after
the fact of the reading experience. That experi-
ence can still consist of full absorption in the fic-
tional world of the work, followed by reflection
on a comparison of that world to the real one, and
finally by the response prompted by the reflective
comparison and recognition of appropriate action
in light of it. Such remote effects are irrelevant
to the proper description of the aesthetic read-
ing experience itself. While moral reflection can
be part of that experience, it will be reflection on
the moral characteristics of the characters in the
fictional circumstances in which they find them-
selves. Changed moral attitudes that might result
and actions in light of them are again separable
effects.
Finally, although I am not primarily in the busi-
ness of defining art here, I have agreed with
Dewey and Beardsley that the proper function
of artworks is to promote aesthetic experiences in
their audiences, a function that does seem to be
unique to art. This claim will give rise to two re-
lated objections. First, since producing such expe-
rience is also a measure of a works value, it might
seem that on this account there cannot be bad
or indifferent art, an objection that Carroll raises
against other definitions of art in terms of aesthetic
experience, otherwise but still positively defined.
An initial reply is that defining art in terms of
its function does not imply that all artworks suc-
ceed in fulfilling that function. It can be further
questioned, however, whether all acknowledged
artworks aim to fulfill that function as I have de-
scribed it, whether minimalist paintings have the
aim of engaging us on so many different levels, for
example. I believe we can be so engaged with such
works, if we experience them as richly symbolic or
in terms of their place and point in the history of
the genre, for example. It should be emphasized
also that this evaluative criterion is fully satisfied
only by great works that serve as paradigms. Other
artworks qualify as such by sharing a place in a his-
torical narrative or by sharing certain other prop-
erties with the paradigms, including the aim that
only the best works satisfy.
In the end, if the different genres of fine art
have anything in common, and if that common
thread has to do with the type of experience we
have of them, with the reason we value experi-
encing them so highly, it must be the production
Goldman The Broad View of Aesthetic Experience
of aesthetic experience in the broad sense. Not
that artworks do not all have some kind of formal
structure, but so do all other kinds of objects. We
certainly would not group the fine arts together or
value them on that score. We seek out works that
can so fully engage us, and critics guide us toward
them. Sensuous perception, informed by cogni-
tion, enlarged by imagination, and prompting
emotional responsesuch intense and meaning-
ful experienceis what we seek and find in such
works. Anyone who has seen and heard the clos-
ing scene of Richard Wagners Gotterd ammerung,
has read the final chapter of Herman Melvilles
Moby Dick, or stared up at the ceiling of the Sis-
tine Chapel (fill in your own favorite aesthetic ex-
periences) must recognize how impoverished the
narrow account of such paradigm aesthetic expe-
riences is.36
ALAN H. GOLDMAN
Department of Philosophy
College of William & Mary
Williamsburg, Virginia 23187
internet: ahgold@wm.edu
1. Noel Carroll, Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Ex-
perience, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70
(2012): 165177, at p. 173.
2. Carroll, Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experi-
ence, p. 172.
3. Noel Carroll, Aesthetic Experience Revisited, The
British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 145168, at p. 163.
4. Noel Carroll, Four Concepts of Aesthetic Experi-
ence, in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), pp. 4162, at pp. 4546.
5. Carroll, Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experi-
ence, p. 174.
6. Noel Carroll, Moderate Moralism, The British
Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 223238.
7. Carroll, Aesthetic Experience Revisited, p. 163.
8. Noel Carroll, Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,
The British Journal of Aesthetics 40 (2000): 191208, at p. 192.
9. Carroll, Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,
p. 193.
10. Peter Kivy, Once Told Tales (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011), pp. 13, 14.
11. Kivy, Once Told Tales, pp. 27, 30.
12. Kivy, Once Told Tales, pp. 3031.
13. Kivy, Once Told Tales, pp. 28, 48.
14. Kivy, Once Told Tales, pp. 36, 73.
15. Kivy, Once Told Tales, p. 30.
16. Kivy, Once Told Tales, p. 33.
17. Kivy, Once Told Tales, pp. 1314.
18. Kivy, Once Told Tales, p. 37.
19. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica,
Part I. Aesthetica Theoretica (Frankfurt an der Oder: Johann
333
Christian Kleyb, 1750; reprint Hildesheim: Georg Holms,
1961), p. 1.
20. Francis Hutcheson, Of the Beauty of Theorems,
in An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, De-
sign, ed. Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973),
pp. 4854.
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment,
ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000), pp. 2627, 114.
22. Carroll, Four Concepts of Aesthetic Experience,
p. 51.
23. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York:
Capricon, 1958), pp. 2223, 37, 55.
24. Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetic Experience Re-
gained, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28
(1969): 311, at p. 5, and Aesthetics: Problems in the Phi-
losophy of Criticism, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981),
p. lxi.
25. Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914),
p. 27.
26. I defend the claim that even abstract artworks, such
as pure musical works, can be described as alternative worlds
in Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995),
pp. 151155.
27. Kivy, Once Told Tales, p. 48.
28. Carroll, Aesthetic Experience Revisited, p. 165.
29. Two other recent accounts of aesthetic experience
worth mentioning are those of Jerrold Levinson, What Is
Aesthetic Pleasure? in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philo-
sophical Essays (Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 310,
and Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2007). Levinson allows that aesthetic appreciation
attends not only to form, but also to meanings or content.
But he insists that it must grasp the dependence of content on
perceptible structure, the basic perceptual configuration.
My account of course includes perception along with imagi-
nation, emotion, and cognition, but it does not privilege the
perceptual base in this way. The case of literature and aes-
thetic reading experiences shows that we need not focus on
or think of content as arising from a directly perceived struc-
tural base while having aesthetic experience. Berys Gaut
defends a broad view of experience, as I do, but he focuses
on a broader account of aesthetic properties. I argue in the
next section that this in itself is an overly narrow focus that
leads to an implausibly inflated list of aesthetic properties.
30. Kivy, Once Told Tales, pp. 32, 3637.
31. Alan H. Goldman, Philosophy and the Novel
(Oxford University Press, 2013).
32. It might be objected also that I am relying here
on my own experience of reading and on an appeal to the
readers experience of fiction. Such introspection might be
held to be a shaky basis for an argument. But surely Kivy
and Carroll are on no firmer ground in their separability
thesis. (Kivy is explicit in also making this appeal.) And we
are speaking of experience.
33. Carroll, Aesthetic Experience Revisited, p. 164.
34. I defend this claim much more fully in Aesthetic
Value.
35. Carroll, Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,
p. 196.
36. This article benefitted from comments by Bob
Stecker, Ted Gracyk, and anonymous referees for this
journal.