Another deduction of aesthetic judgments: Overcoming the Fact/Value Dichotomy

Abstract

Starting point of the paper is a reconsideration of Putnam’s influential essay, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, from the point of view of Aesthetics. The first move is an analysis of the aesthetic properties, and of related judgments as a paradigmatic case of overcoming the old dichotomy. The thesis is that aesthetic judgments are cognitive in a non-conceptual way and normative without presupposing definite norms. Unifying in a single term levels of (negative) descriptivity with levels of (positive) evaluation, aesthetic judgments undermine irreversibly the solidarity of physicalism and emotionalism. The paper pursues therefore the objective of a deduction in the Kantian sense of aesthetic judgments, connecting, however, two levels of the analysis that Kant keeps strategically distinct, i.e. the level of empirical (physiological) exposition of aesthetic judgments and that one of their (transcendental) deduction. The theoretical core of the deduction is the idea of an underlying “aesthetic mechanism” as the natural basis for the epigenesis of aesthetic.