tailieunhanh - CAN ONE BE A QUASI-REALIST ABOUT THE AESTHETIC?

Therefore Italianicity requires a stereotyped image of Italian culture as con- structed by foreigners and their tourist experience, be it personal or mediated through magazines, films or advertisements. The more this quality is estab- lished, the more it becomes transparent and thus ideologically charged on a very subliminal level, or, as Barthes put it, ‘Bourgeois ideology turns culture into nature’ (1973: 206). It requires a hegemonial reading to uncover its ideo- logical effect. As with Fredric Jameson’s notion of pastiche, it is the wearing of a mask that informs a neutral-seeming practice of mimicry (Jameson, 1984: 17) | Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 3 No. 3 December 2006 Can One Be a Quasi-Realist About the Aesthetic Christopher Dowling university of York For ordinary judgements it is often the case that it may be justifiable to change one s mind given that others agree in holding an opposing view. In the case of judgements of beauty this is never the case these are autonomous. Robert Hopkins has discussed the following familiar explanation Judgements of beauty are not genuine assertions at all rather they are expressions of some response or experience. since to acknowledge the disagreement of others is not to respond to objects as they do this acknowledgement needn t nor could it render it appropriate to change one s aesthetic judgement Hopkins 2001 166-189 . This kind of response would only be satisfactory were it able to account for another feature of our aesthetic discourse that there can be genuine disagreements over beauty - that when these occur at least one party in the conflict has infringed on the norms at issue. in this context we see the attraction of a form of quasi-realism about beauty. However Hopkins concludes that the quasi-realist account cannot be motivated. In the following analysis I want to re-open the debate with the suggestion that the quasi-realist has a potential explanation of the phenomena at issue and is able to avoid the criticisms Hopkins discusses. By shifting the onus of explanation away from the quasi-realist I think we uncover something interesting about autonomous judgements in general. 100 Christopher Dowling I. the possibility of Quasi-Realism Hopkins draws the autonomous characterisation from Kant . . TI1C judger clearly perceives that the approval of others affords no valid proof available for the estimate of beauty. He recognises that others perchance may see and observe for him and that what many have seen in one and the same way may for the purpose of a theoretical and therefore logical judgement serve as an adequate ground of .