Aesthetic experience: Marcel Proust and the neo-Jamesian structure of awareness.

Russell Epstein’s essay (2004) is original, ambitious, and usefully speculative; he brings neurocognitive psychology together with the usually remote disciplines of aesthetics and literature. The aestheticians will probably welcome the help, because ‘‘aesthetics’’ covers a very broad domain, and for millennia there has been no consensus on any aspect of it, not even on the most basic points. These issues are so numerous and contentious that Epstein could not have been expected to explicitly address many of them. Nevertheless, since he hopes for a ‘‘. . . complete, scientific, theory of Art’’ (Epstein, 2004), in due time someone will have to respond to them. Although some of these points may seem too basic to need mentioning, I believe that much dispute in aesthetics is due to the disputants’ unspoken conflicting premises. There certainly has not been much agreement about definitions. Here is how I use some of these terms. I use the word ‘‘object’’ as including things, events, and conceptual structures. I use the term ‘‘aesthetic object’’ for an object that is the center of a person’s aesthetic experience. An aesthetic object is said to have ‘‘aesthetic value’’ for its audience. ‘‘Aesthetic value’’ is often equated with ‘‘beauty,’’ but it is not necessarily ‘‘pretty’’ or ‘‘nice’’ (e.g., Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, and Metamorphosis; Picasso’s Guernica, Munch’s The Scream). In this commentary I try to avoid the much-disputed word ‘‘Art’’ because defacto it includes whatever a culture happens to designate as art. In our culture it includes artifacts such as paintings, sculpture, or costumes; events, such as drama, dance, and music; and conceptual structures in written form such as books of poetry and narrative. Although certain conceptual structures such as scientific theories and mathematical theorems may be said to be ‘‘beautiful,’’ in our culture they are not considered art, and neither are natural entities (e.g., sunsets), no matter how beautiful they are. I use the term ‘‘Art object’’ (with a capital ‘A’) for objects that are intended or expected to elicit an aesthetic experience in an audience.