Philosophy - the aestheic attidude and the sublime

1. The Aesthetic
Attitude and the
Sublime
By: John Paul Espino
De La Salle University – Dasmarinas
Facebook.com/Johnpaul.dss

2. Aesthetic Attitude
the thought is not that there are certain people who generally see
things, so to speak, in an aesthetic light, but more aligned with what is
meant by the request that someone “have a more optimistic attitude” or
“take a more positive attitude” about a given circumstance.
 Two major implications
( according to Bullough )
First, it locates the aesthetic primarily on the side of the observer or
audience. ‘The aesthetic’ is not a type of thing, but a way of seeing or
hearing or touching (or tasting possibly).
 Second, this way of viewing the world makes anything and everything
aesthetic, potentially at any ART AND BEAUTY 20 rate. If the heart of
the aesthetic is a distinctive attitude, then whatever this attitude can be
and is applied to, will constitute an aesthetic experience.

3. George Dickie
• He is a Professor Emeritus
of Philosophy at University
of Illinois at Chicago. His
specialities include
aesthetics, philosophy of
art and Eighteenth
Century theories of taste.
• He subjects to close
scrutiny both the ideas of
‘distance’ and
‘disinterestedness’.

4. Edward Bullough
• was an English aesthetician and scholar of modern
languages, who worked at the University of Cambridge.
He did experimental work on the perception of colours,
and in his theoretical work introduced the concept of
psychical distance: that which "appears to lie between our
own self and its affections" in aesthetic experience. In
languages, Bullough was a dedicated teacher who
published little. He came to concentrate on Italian, and
was elected to the Chair of Italian at Cambridge in 1933.

5. Two parts to the aesthetic attitude:
• Attitude
is a certain state of mind. In particular, it is a way of approaching
experiences or orienting oneself toward the world.
It may help to think of someone with an optimistic attitude. He has a
tendency to see things in a positive light.
• Aesthetics
is the subject matter concerning, as a paradigm, fine art, but also the
special, art-like status sometimes given to applied arts like architecture
or industrial design or to objects in nature.

6. The Critique of Judgement
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Sublime
-is found most obviously in nature.
> Kant seems more interested in
natural than artistic beauty. But
whereas a flower, say, strikes us
as beautiful because of its delicacy
and the interplay between colour
and form it displays, a mighty
waterfall such as Niagara Falls
impresses us by the sheer chaos
of its power .

8. William Blake’s famous poem
• The Tyger
is a poem by the English poet William Blake published in 1794 as part of the Songs of Experience
collection. Literary critic Alfred Kazin calls it "the most famous of his poems", and The Cambridge
Companion to William Blake says it is "the most anthologized poem in English".

9. • Two concepts
• Contemplation
• Distance
• These are the principal elements in what has come to be known as
‘the aesthetic attitude’.
• according to Bullough
we can also view it in a psychically distant way, one that allows us to free
ourselves from this practical attitude and contemplate the fog in and of
itself, as a visual and perhaps tactile phenomenon.