Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

Abstract

This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives.

Is suicidality an outcome or a cause of extreme relationship-seeking in borderline personality disorder?

“…The present paper uses some loose terms that require clarified definitions. The word "beauty" and its meanings are contentious in philosophy ( Van der Berg, 2019). Solely for the purposes of the present paper, I define beauty as something that produces emotional change that the experiencer subjectively values or perceives as a cause of awe or interest.…”

The aesthetics of food

“…Once we leave aside the classification question, food's aesthetic value might seem unproblematic (or at least, not uniquely problematic among other aesthetic objects). Aesthetic hedonism is the view that a work's aesthetic value consists in its tendency to bring about a certain kind of pleasurable experience (see Van der Berg, 2020). This is intuitively appealing in the case of food, since food and pleasure are closely linked, but the thought is too quick, because not all kinds of pleasure contribute to aesthetic value, and here again we seem to run into a problem of demarcating the aesthetic value of food from other types of value or pleasure we might derive from it.…”

“…On the one hand, we have the very basic pleasures of sweetness or saltiness, which seem too primitive to be classified as aesthetic value, so we need a way to delineate aesthetic pleasures from other kinds. (I won't delve into the details of the debate over hedonism here; interested readers can consult Van der Berg, 2020; Shelly, 2019). On the other hand, in light of the various social, historical, and personal meanings food involves, as well as the various sensory modalities with which we encounter it, pleasure might seem overly narrow as an account of its aesthetic significance.…”

Reasons, normativity, and value in aesthetics

“…33 33 See Van der Berg (2020) for an overview of hedonic response theories, and Beardsley (1982), Mothersill (1984), Levinson (2002), Matthen (2017, 2018), Gorodeisky (2021) for influential presentations of such views. …”