Ae, well.

At the start of Art Matters, Peter de Bolla acknowledges the trickiness of defining the word “aesthetic.” He tries to spell out his meaning of the word from the outset:

What distinguishes affective or aesthetic experiences from others is the fact that they are occasioned by encounters with artworks. This proposes a mutual definition, so that what elicits aesthetic experience is an artwork and an artwork is defined as an object that produces aesthetic experience.

I consented to this definition as necessary to the rest of the book and moved on. Later, though, I felt forced to withdraw that consent.

De Bolla discusses artworks—painting, music, poetry—in such a variety of terms and interpretations that I could no longer figure out what the word “aesthetic” meant. He talks about enlightenment and knowing with Wordsworth, interpretation and intellectualism with Gould, and a plethora of other things, which began to render the a-word meaningless.

In the conclusion de Bolla returns to the theoretical underpinnings of the Introduction:

An aesthetic experience is made out of its own singularity. [….] Once again the paradox of the aesthetic raises its head. The aesthetic is both grounded and not grounded in the conceptual, both singular and universal, evaluative and descriptive. But I do not regard these difficulties and paradoxes as anything other than attempts to delimit the distinctiveness of the category of the aesthetic. It is precisely these paradoxes and difficulties that need further exploration and elaboration.

This, six pages from the end of the book. (And yes, he italicizes every “aesthetic” throughout). Delimit something that has only the vaguest of premises to begin with? I guess I just don’t see how this followed from what he had been doing before. It’s probably more due to confusion and lack of education on my part, to be honest, but it made for slow, dense reading. De Bolla’s analyses of his chosen artworks were fascinating, but I am still in the dark when it comes to aesthetics and forging my own responses to my own aesthetic experiences.