Answer to Question #221439 in English for PHESH

Question

Write a brief essay in response to this statement: “The term ‘aesthetic’ is meaningful despite the difficulties faced in attempting to define it.” You should outline the various arguments, but not the examples, that Marcia Eaton puts forward to explain the difficulties faced in defining the aesthetic. 

Answer 1

Aesthetic is an important part or chapter in life but there are so many obstacles surrounding it in trying to define it as it is broad and varies according to different perspectives of people.

Eaton does of course advocate bringing in the artist's life, the history of the work of art, and its political repercussions. She rejects the Beardsleyan notion of the "intentionalist fallacy" and allies herself with John Berger who gained a lot of popularity through his Ways of Seeing TV series and book and who advocated looking at paintings in terms of subject matter. She quotes with approval his discussion of a Franz Hals painting in terms of how the sitter must have felt about his life, perhaps seeing life as absurd. (This projection of an existentialist sentiment back to the 17th century, however, seems anachronistic.) Then she boldly claims that subject matter is itself an aesthetic property.

After saying that subject matter is an aesthetic property it is not surprising that Eaton wonders whether "aesthetic" can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. She concludes that it can be, asserting that "what is aesthetic remains constant even though specific features pointed to as aesthetically valuable may change." Her examples of things the once were aesthetic qualities but may be no longer is fascinating. One example is taken from Quintilian, the Roman writer, who said of some trumpets, "the louder the concert of their notes, the greater is the glorious supremacy of our arms over all the nations of the earth." Quintilian valued loudness in the sounds of trumpets, and largely for socio-political reasons. As Eaton puts it, "being big and loud are a source of delight; and they mattered for Quintilian and his contemporaries aesthetically as well as militarily." Eaton even goes so far as to argue that "considerable uproar" can be an aesthetic property when taken in the context of standards operative in a medieval wedding feast in Normandy where "performed at his best" indicates that the properties were experienced with pleasure. The sentence analyzed is: "Everyone performed at his best and the noise of the instruments and the voices of the narrators made a considerable uproar in the hall."

Another, rather brilliant in my view, extension of the concept of the aesthetic made by Eaton is to the notions both of unifinishedness and finishedness. The point is that this all depends on earlier valuations that is of imagination or craftsmanship.