page_title: Values (Western philosophy)
section_title: Aesthetic values
hierarchical_section_title: Values (Western philosophy) / Primary values / Aesthetic values
caption_attribution_description: Fabergé Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia
context_page_description: The values that a person holds may be personal or political depending on whether they are considered in relation to the individual or to society. Apart from moral virtue, examples of personal values include friendship, knowledge, beauty etc. and examples of political values, justice, equality and liberty. It will begin by looking at the kinds of thing that have value and finish with a look at some of the theories that attempt to describe what value is. Reference will be made solely to Western sources although it is recognised that many, if not all, of the values discussed may be universal.
context_section_description: Frankena in his list of values groups beauty with harmony, proportion and aesthetic experience. There are many different kinds of value that can be included in this category and Frankena himself distinguishes between “harmony and proportion in objects contemplated” and “harmony and proportion in one’s own life”. He refers to Plato who, firstly, in the Philebus suggests that aesthetic pleasure lies in the “beauty of colour and form”, and secondly in the Republic that formal features like harmony and proportion are important not only to art and music but also to the “good life” which itself should contain “form”, “variety” and “balance”. 
  Another distinction results from the question of whether aesthetic value resides in the object contemplated or in the contemplative experience itself. James Shelley in his article The Concept of the Aesthetic notes that the term "aesthetic" in deriving from the Greek aesthesis, which means perception or awareness, tends towards the latter interpretation; George Dickie in his book Art and the Aesthetic charts the development of awareness and consciousness in their growing importance to aesthetic theory; and Zimmerman refers to G.E.Moore who wrote in relation to art and beauty that “by far the most valuable thing we know or can imagine are certain states of consciousness”. Both Frankena and Nicolai Hartmann, who Frankena mentions, begin their lists of values with groups including consciousness, life and existence, and Hartmann makes reference to Nietzsche who considered that the value of beauty in art or nature lay in an increased awareness of life as an “affirmation of existence”.
  Shelley describes another concept apart from “immediacy” or “focussing one’s attention on the subject” and this is the concept of “disinterestedness", a Kantian term which consists in looking at things objectively and impartially. He refers to Schopenhauer who realised that if perception were to be the only criterion of aesthetic value then, with a mind stripped of practical interest and cultural preconceptions, anything at all might be seen as beautiful: “One thing is only taken as more beautiful than another because it makes this pure contemplation easier”, wrote Schopenhauer, a view criticised by Sartwell for making the term beauty, ultimately meaningless. Shelley, however, manages to elucidate various criteria of aesthetic value from such a standpoint: firstly, that there is value in simple formal relations, in harmony, grace and balance, and in fact in any other objective aspect that a good critic might care to point to; secondly, that there is value in recognising that people have natural tastes and preferences, whether, for example, they prefer “drama or comicality”, or whether the work is striking in some way; and thirdly, that there is value in recognising the presence of “non-exhibited properties”, realising that the work, or perception, is located within an “art-historical context” where only knowledge of, in Danto's terminology, an “artworld” can facilitate our feeling “the proper sentiments”.
  In addition to the views that aesthetic value lies either in the object or in the subjective experience there is a third view which suggests that value lies in some kind of engagement between the two. G.E.Moore  wrote that it is neither in the “beautiful object” nor in the “conscious perception” where value is found but in the relationship between the two. Shelley too concludes with the idea that there is some reciprocal relationship between subject and object, his example being that of a Bartok quartet, where “a value originally belonging to the quartet has been transferred to the experience, before being reflected back, once again, onto the quartet.”
caption: An exquisitely beautiful Fabergé egg
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