Let's back up. I said some people believe there is such a thing as "art" because they have experiences when they contemplate certain music, paintings, poems, dramas that they claim are sui generis, of one kind. They call them all "aesthetic experiences".
So they figure they must have a sui generis cause. That cause, they declare, is what we call "art". Their reasoning there is faulty, but not circular. It's rather like a medical researcher's reasoning when he finds what he thinks is a unique syndrome and infers it must have a unique cause. "This ailment obviously has a cause. I haven't found out what it is yet, but I will. Till then I'll call it 'Agent X'." The reasoning is faulty when in fact the syndrome is not what the researcher would call one ailment but two or more, with symptoms that are similar -- for example, when it is ultimately discovered that a certain poison and a certain virus cause similar symptoms. Or when it is discovered that all the victims have a certain bacterium in their small bowel, and the researcher concludes that bacterium must be the cause -- only to find that almost everyone else also has the same bacterium but no symptoms. Similarly, if the various feelings some observers call "aesthetic experiences" are, despite surface likenesses, fundamentally dissimilar, the observers' would-be definition of "art" as "what is causing these feelings" is certain to fail. My initial campaign on this thread was to ask whether the many experiences called "aesthetic" are perhaps often fundamentally different, unconnected. Possibly I can convey the some of the idea of how this could happen by citing young Julie G. and her "love experience". Julie says she "loves" her grandfather, but she also "loves" the movie "Annie Hall", and the basement apartment where she's lived for three years, and the fact that Obama was elected, and pepperoni pizza, and her boyfriend Jack, and her dog Tracy, and Jane Austen, and living in New York, and the piano works of Brahms. She also loves "making love", swimming in the family pool, and water-skiing. "I guess I just love life," she says. All these "love" experiences of Julie's are similar in an important respect. She could describe it a bit, but if pressed to "define" it, she could do so only ostensively -- that is, by pointing at instances. "It's the feeling I get whenb&" And her efforts to convey her blurry notion are not entirely worthless. We sense a general difference between, for Julie, a love experience, and a hate experience, or a boredom experience. Some of what Julie calls "love experiences" strike her friend Diana as fundamentally different. "Julie," Diana says, "you seem to call all strongly positive feelings 'love'. But it's ridiculous say your love for your grandfather, and for Jack, and for pepperoni pizza are really the SAME feeling." "But they are!" says Julie. "I love them all!" "No. Look, you love pizza the way you love chocolate and crisp bacon. You love the way they taste. They are TASTE experiences. Your grandfather is not a taste experience!" "Yeah, but chocolate tastes different from pizza, but I can still say I love them both. I can say I love certain taste experiences, and certain smell experiences, and certain tactile experiences. Even certain sounds. If I can say I love all those things even though they're different, why can't I say I also love my grandfather?" "Because they aren't the same!" At base, Julie and Diana are arguing about the "correctness" of certain word usages, and they are confused because they don't realize how language works. But that's fodder for another posting. Here's why this is analogous with "aesthetic experience". If Julie says she gets an "aesthetic" experience from looking at a sunset or a surging ocean or an unfolding real-life drama, and Diana says none of those IS an aesthetic experience, they may THINK one of them has to be right and the other wrong -- but in the end this view is an untenable as their similar notion about the usage of the word 'love'. Ergo, any attempt to prove "good art exists" by saying, "(1) THE "aesthetic experience" exists, (2) it must have a cause, and (3) that cause is what I mean by 'art'," -- is doomed. Michael saw this, and instead of trying to define "upward" to "work of art" -- that is, from the existence of "aesthetic experience", we can infer "art" must exist -- he attempts to define downward, from the existence of identifiable WoA to the experiences they yield: Those, he says, are "aesthetic experiences". But that entails the necessity to give us a way of discerning that a given work is surely "art" -- i.e. the necessity to do something like define "work of art". Otherwise how could we know we starting "downward" from "art"? To that end, he proposes his notion of "truth conditions": "I believe the crucial, the necessary and sufficient, property of an "artwork" is the truth-conditions to which it is subjected." Michael's proposal for concluding whether a given work IS or IS NOT art will be the subject of "Against 'Good Art Exists' #4". ************** Worried about job security? Check out the 5 safest jobs in a recession. (http://jobs.aol.com/gallery/growing-job-industries?ncid=emlcntuscare00000002 )
