Art

Beauty seems to be the main quality of concern in philosophy, when it comes to aesthetic judgements. But do philosophers also busy themselves with questions of the appreciation of the cute, the cool, or the funny? What about other qualities, ones that are also, in a sense, aesthetic?

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Philosophers interested in judgments about works of art certainly do tend to focus on beauty, but other aesthetic categories have received philosophical attention.

Ted Cohen has written a book on jokes and other work has been done on the philosophy of humor. The concept of ugliness has recently received some attention from philosophers interested in Kant's aesthetics. The concept of sentimentality has received intermittent sustained attention from philosophers. There has been some consideration of categories like 'camp' and 'kitsch'--if you haven't read Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," I highly recommend it; Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains provocative remarks about kitsch.

To my knowledge, however, the concepts of the cute and the cool haven't received attention--and they should. Indeed, to my mind, at least, aesthetics is one area of philosophy that has especially suffered from what Wittgenstein would call "a one-sided diet," with too much attention to certain kinds of examples--certain kinds of art have been taken as paradigms--with too much focus on certain kinds of question.

I think that one way to begin to counteract this and to open up aesthetics would be to follow the lead of J. L. Austin and begin by making a list of the various categories that one might apply to various kinds of art, and then, systematically investigate them, tracing out their interrelations. (For a model of such an investigation into the philosophy of action, check out J. L. Austin's wonderful paper, "A Plea for Excuses.")

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