Abstract

This is a historical and conceptual study of the notion of the autonomy of art, with special attention to its basis in Kant's Critique of Judgment and Dewey's Art as Experience. Its central thesis is that philosophy of art would serve its subject best by rejecting the dualistic belief that works of art are valuable either instrumentally or noninstrumentally, and by working instead to articulate a view of art which emphasizes the capacity of works of art to be valuable both intrinsically and instrumentally. ;To hold the dualistic view is to suppose that the pretheoretical intuitions that works of art are valuable for what they are and for what they do are incompatible. These intuitions are termed here the autonomist and instrumentalist intuitions, respectively. Yet what may seem to be their logical incompatibility is due not so much to the logic of the concept "art" as it is to our contingent habits of using that concept. An adequate approach to a systematic theory of art--an "instrumental autonomist" approach--would, then, aim not at disjoining but at synthesizing the autonomist and instrumentalist intuitions. ;Two justifications for the instrumental autonomist approach are proposed. First, logical support for such an approach is suggested by the fact that views of artistic value which seem based exclusively on one of the intuitions often draw overtly or covertly on the other as well. Second, historical support for such an approach is drawn from close readings of the theories of fine art in two seminal, but methodologically different, texts within what is broadly termed the "Kantian" tradition: Kant's Critique of Judgment and Dewey's Art of Experience. ;In conclusion, it is noted that we still need a more nuanced understanding of the relations among the arts and other areas of practice than the tradition provides. Yet if two historical writers as diverse in their methods and aims as Kant and Dewey can share an instrumental autonomist outlook, this understanding need not require abandoning traditional texts in the philosophy of art so much as it requires reinterpreting them