negatively, there are possibilities at stake: alternatives to the
actual situation. The positive enhancement of the feeling of life
would then imply that there is something to be celebrated (and to
be continued), and taken that the enhancement relates to
possibilities, this celebration will regard the acknowledgement
that the situation as experienced is not nearly as necessary as it
might have seemed, but is nevertheless of such a nature that one
would want it to continue. In other words, our aesthetic
judgements express not only our awareness of the communicability
of our cognitive considerations, but also the fact that there is
no metaphysical necessity to it. We must understand aesthetic
pleasure, then, as a reflective assessment by our feeling of life,
of the contingency of the common sense that is involved in our
(everyday) determinations of the object.
vi. An ideal aesthetic experience
We think something is wrong with the elitist person judging
aesthetic matters from a purely social point of view, citing other
people's appraisals without 'looking for himself.' Yet Nelson
Goodman may be right in presupposing that in an aesthetic argument
we are more interested in information about the object than in
some rather uninformative idiosyncratic evaluation. To state an
everyday corollary to this: we do let ourselves be convinced by
arguments and descriptions of the object; we do communicate about
aesthetic values as if they were natural properties; and we hardly
ever have aesthetic experiences corresponding to the Kantian
analysis, let alone do we actually ever refer to them. Therefore,
it is no coincidence that a theoretical definition of empirical
aesthetic experiences is not available. Monroe Beardsley, for
example, has found only a set of necessary conditions, and has
argued that we are unable to state the conditions that are also
sufficient for such a definition. So we may in the end be tempted
to dismiss the involved claims and the notion of aesthetic
experience altogether, as Goodman does. However, one may as well
conclude from this situation that in arguing about matters of
taste, recourse is taken not to any actual experience, but rather
to an ideal one.
Goodman's denial of aesthetic experience also does not follow from
his remarks on what he calls the symptoms of art (avoiding the
implication of the definability of 'art'): the complex syntactic
and semantic properties of their symbol systems. Instead, this
specific complexity may be more substantial than Goodman seems to
be willing to allow for. It may be the most natural correlate to
our notion of the experience of aesthetic excellence: an
unwitting, contemporary version of Kant's aesthetic ideas.39 The
involved complex properties occasion the beholder to take an
artwork as not merely reflecting lucidly some denotatum lying
beyond it. We take account not so much of the possible referent of
