Abstract

The core of Aesthetic Sensualism Defended is a comparison between the essential phenomenological elements and structures of experience characteristic of the fine arts--particularly music, painting, and fiction--and the corresponding elements and structures of experience characteristic of what I call the "small-a arts"--food, sex, and scent. For example, I draw detailed parallels between the intrinsic sensual properties of music, including tone color, pitch, and rhythm, and those of food, such as taste, texture, and temporal organization; I also compare "natural" representational properties which in painting take the form of the depiction of objects and in sex take that of emotional and attitudinal expression; finally, I observe the commonality between "conventional" representational properties of fiction and of scent--that is to say, between the narrative imaginings governed by conventions of literary representation and the imaginative associations enjoined by perfume advertising. ;Another way in which I assimilate the fine arts to the "small-a arts" is in respect of critical reasoning in the former and dispute over taste in the latter. I argue that on the best account we now have of critical reasoning in the fine arts, suggested by Wittgenstein and expanded on by Isenberg and others, it consists in precisely the sort of further description of the object of evaluation which, as I also argue, is characteristic of dispute over taste in the "small-a arts." ;These and other parallels underline my claim that the defining values of the experience of the fine arts do not differ in kind from those of what we rightly think of as "merely sensual pleasures," but only in degree of complexity and subtlety. Thus a sensualist approach to the fine arts--on which they are valued merely in virtue of what it is like to experience them--has much more to be said for it than might first appear