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By Root 918 0

enhance it, extend it in time, and make it coherent. Even when they replace it, they do not jump to a plea sure-moment of the human organism and provide that as a surrogate everything else. In the 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen imagines a in which people step into a telephone-booth-sized cylinder called “orgasmatron” where they achieve instantly the desired plea sure-moment of sex without all the tiresome and time-consuming preliminaries (needless to say, a pleasure-moment for the moviegoer occurs when Woody gets accidentally locked in the orgasmatron). For the artistic equivalent, we would have to imagine an “aesthetetron.” Step into push the correct button, and you can achieve a plea sure-moment of kind produced by Sense and Sensibility or Lucia di Lammermoor without having to actually read the book or sit through the opera. What makes joke funny (if it is) is the absurdity of trying to imagine that there exists any particular plea sure state, like an orgasm, that a work of produces. Every great work of art is, like climbing a mountain, about specific process of experiencing it—it is not about inducing some momentary pleasure experience that results from experiencing it. Were the case, pills really would do the trick. Were that the case, pills really would do the trick.

To borrow a less comic but certainly charming analogy from the German aesthetician Eckart Voland, we might think of a moth circling lantern at night. With the arts, perhaps we should regard ourselves moths who have “succeeded in inventing a lantern in order to have circling it.” If the arts are like the lantern, the Darwinian question why we worked so hard to invent them and why we have such fun them in the first place. The evolved adaptations are there to be discovered, and so are their extensions into our artistic and aesthetic lives.

CHAPTER 6

The Uses of Fiction

I

Of the twelve cross-cultural criteria for art given in chapter 3, the last, imaginative experience, is arguably the most important. Works of art may embodied as physical objects—stone sculptures or painted canvases, dark squiggles formed by ink on paper or pixels on computer screens, or waves of vibrating air that musical instruments produce to excite mechanisms of the inner ear. But considered strictly as objects of aesthetic experience, works of art happen not in the world but in the theater of the human mind. The phrase “theater of the mind” is an apt meta phor, suggesting drama, stage sets, actors, and above all the sense of a make-believe world.

Life and the world could make no sense to us if all experience were make-believe in the way that the experience of art is. Smelling smoke feeling the emotion of fear in an instantaneous recognition that there may be a fire in the house requires precisely that a threat be understood as palpably real. Understanding that a fiction about someone smelling smoke and feeling fear is not an occasion for action is fundamental to the most ordinary experience. How this distinction between make-believe and reality plays out in art and the experience of beauty is a complex and ancient question.

In The Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant puts forward the most influential theory of art to be published between the Greeks and human intuitions about the arts, beauty in nature, and aesthetic to both. Of all the concepts central to Kant’s aesthetics, the one gained the most currency in its day and remains central to contemporary aesthetic theory is his idea of disinterestedness.

A judge who presides in a court of law is not supposed to be uninterested the proceedings: the job requires listening with careful attention and engagement. The judge is obliged, however, to be a disinterested observer with vested interests in the outcome of the case. A judge’s attention is characterized by objectivity and detachment. Kant’s use of the idea of disinterestedness in the opening paragraphs of The Critique of Judgment extends idea of judicial impartiality into the contemplation of works of art.

The opposite of disinterested contemplation for Kant occurs