# Aesthetic Engagement, Imagining, and the Draw of the Real  ## Metadata - Author: [[Robert Hopkins]] - Full Title: Aesthetic Engagement, Imagining, and the Draw of the Real - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses how aesthetic engagement involves perceiving things for their beauty and exploring their reality. It argues that pleasure in imagining and perceiving drives exploration, but they differ in how they sustain aesthetic engagement. The author questions whether sensory imagining can support genuine aesthetic engagement similar to perception. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/192662496 - Source File: Aesthetic Engagement, Imagining, and the Draw of the Real by Robert Hopkins.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Composing a tune in my head, can’t I enjoy its beauty or pathos, just as surely as ifI were listening to it through headphones? Contemplating what wine to pair with dinner, can’t I relish a successful combination in anticipation more or less as I will when the time comes to eat and drink? Imagining things, it seems, can provoke real responses, such as pleasure; and in responding in these ways to what we imagine we engage with them aesthetically. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b48kxaafj31fwg98etxb0t)) > What intuition suggests, theory may seem to confirm. One of Kant’s claims in the Critique ofJudgement is that, as far as beauty goes, what matters is not whether something really exists, but whether the ‘mere representation’ of it brings pleasure.² ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b497w1bzabnvw6s0asxhpx)) > Kant’s thought is that aesthetic engagement is directed at appearances, rather than the reality that underlies them. If so, since imagining captures appearances, it too should sustain aesthetic engagement. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b4b3kfz1qkn4f9fsewg43f)) > I disagree. I will argue that aesthetic engagement in perception is concerned with the reality of its objects, and not merely how they appear. In particular, it is concerned with how these objects are in certain non-aesthetic respects, those which determine their aesthetic character. For aesthetic engagement has at its core a dynamic, driven by pleasure, that requires its objects to be open to exploration. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b4dypf5dhtc4gq3a5jc6rg)) > That exploration in turn gives aesthetic engagement a fluid, open- ended, and ultimately unstable character. Imagining, in contrast, offers an envir- onment hostile to almost every element in this picture. As I have argued at length above, in general imagining fails to offer us a realm aspects of which are hidden from us, and which we might explore. It cannot therefore support anything with the fluid, open-ended, and unstable character of aesthetic engagement in percep- tion. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b4enk092ax020bryyzx57b)) > So we focus on incurious aesthetic engagement, that in which the point of engaging aesthetically lies solely in the character of the responses in us that the object elicits. When that is all that counts, what does it matter whether or not those experiences reflect how things really are? Why should the character of that engagement not be its own reward? This is especially clear when what we engage with is beauty. For, as Kant himselfemphasized, engagement with beauty takes the form ofpleasure. Pleasure has good claim to be intrinsically valuable. And ifa state is intrinsically valuable, why worry about whether it reflects how things really are? It is no doubt prudent to concern oneself with how stable the state will be—one doesn’t want it to slip away, after all. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b4v6zhd599htgnnrc8qtr1)) > He notes that pleasure tends to its own perpetuation: for a state to be pleasurable is for the subject to be motivated to remain in it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b4xwfj4m5a3mfprjq59ks6)) > If pleasure motivates its own continuance, it can do so only by motivating the subject to take some action to that end. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b4zj3fvcr44pq4q82m9xtg)) > The subject’s goal is to extend her pleasure. But pleasure here is dependent on perceiving the beautiful object: it is pleasure in that thing, sustained by perceiving it.⁷ So her primary goal sets her another, subsidiary end. To perpetuate her pleasure, she must sustain her perception. What should she do to achieve this? One answer is obvious: she should attend to the perceived object. Directing her mental focus onto it is one way to ensure that she continues to be perceptually aware of it. But another answer is also plain. She should maintain, and if necessary adjust, those relations to the object on which perceiving it depends. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b569w4ccahe3gpnh87mpmv)) > Thus, pleasure in perceived beauty sets the subject an end, continuing to perceive whatever it is that pleases her. Or, as we may just as well put it, it sets her the end of extending her perceptual awareness of that thing. Note that ‘extending’ here means both ‘prolonging’, as when the goal is to keep viewing something already fully in view; and ‘developing’, as in the case when it is to take in the rest of something only partly grasped, such as the statue. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b5gjn3rp7szz7v8kyq9m12)) - Note: sneaky move? > That is far from the end of the story, however. In motivating observation, pleasure in perceived beauty leads inevitably to discovery. It sets us the end of extending perceptual awareness, where at least often the goal is merely to prolong an awareness we already have. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b5jq0ym70efe4eyf04r5p7)) > Beauty, like every other aesthetic property, is inseparable from the non-aesthetic character that grounds it. Perhaps I can attend to the colour ofa vase and not to its shape, or to the timbre of ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b5kmkqnqb1zcsc75y2xr3d)) > the instruments but not how loud each is. But I cannot attend to the beauty of the view, the music, or anything else save by attending to at least some of their other properties, those on which their beauty depends. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b5kxe17ekgkv3a88q4z6sw)) > To keep, or bring, the beauty of something into view (or hearing, or . . . ) is ipso facto to do the same to the non-aesthetic properties responsible for that beauty. The actions pleasure motivates are indiscriminate, targeting aesthetic and non-aesthetic alike. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b5m8n3dv5jag0nys9sphqd)) > Attending or controlling perceptual relations always may, and very often will, lead to discovery. This is no less true when those actions are driven by pleasure. Even when what pleasure demands is that I maintain existing perceptual relations to the pleasing object; and even if I grasp which of its non-aesthetic features are responsible for its beauty, directing my attention to them alone; chances are that I will discover something new. I’ll notice the precise form those properties take, the relations between them, or some other property previously overlooked. ‘Discovery’ and ‘noticing’ here in the first instance take the form of expanded perceptual awareness, not new belief. Pleasure may set me the endmerely ofmakingmy existing awareness continue, but it has as its upshot awareness’sexpansion into fields anew. More or less inevitably, I become aware of non-aesthetic features that escaped me before. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b5qy709kse713pz9argfbh)) > As I clarify my perception of the precise hues in a painting, so my sense of the harmony between them may also improve. Equally, however, it may not. Sometimes sharpening our sense of the putative ground reveals that it cannot play that role after all. Now I see the precise shades ofblue and green, perhaps they no longer appear harmonious. So to the promise ofrefinement is added the risk of collapse. Sometimes, the harder we look, the less there is to enjoy. What we took to be beautiful turns out to be plain, or worse. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b5x0a9z6ef76e3rmmewcgw)) > These possibilities are not merely theoretical. Beauty is fragile, dependent on the specifics of non-aesthetic character, in a way that makes the risk of collapse real (Goodman 1968: 108). And it admits of nearly infinite specification, towards the more determinate, in a way that means the promise of refinement is also permanently present. Indeed, what is excluded, more or less, is the status quo: observing further will almost certainly lead to discovering more, and thus with equal near certainty lead to a change in what one finds to engage with aesthetic- ally. The result (and this is the further consequence I mentioned) is that aesthetic engagement in perception is inflected by a permanent sense of its own instability. The promise of refinement and the threat of collapse colour our experience of engaging aesthetically. That engagement is not only exploratory by default, but is permanently sensitive to the risks and rewards that exploration brings. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b65bkpwt8d4rjqph0kvrde)) > [1] Aesthetic engagement (with beauty) in perception has at its heart [2] pleasure, that seeks its own perpetuation, thus [3] setting an end, extension of perceptual awareness, and motivating the means to it, attention and control of perceptual relations, (that together amount to observation and) that lead to [4] discovery of non-aesthetic features (i.e. awareness of features previously not experienced) which results in [5] pleasure’s refinement or collapse, the prospect of which [6] colours engagement. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b67ghvzbt3ehks9kg018ns)) - Note: Useful summary > Second, even if this minimum action is supplemented by others, in general imagining does not allow for discovery. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b6cwzhgess1w9v4j37ca9e)) > First then, consider the minimum motivatable. Pleasurable states of imagining, like those of perceiving, will, qua pleasurable, tend to their own perpetuation. What does that tendency here motivate? What action does it suggest to the subject? The source of her pleasure is imagining. But imagining is itself either already an act or something that can be continued in one. Even though we do not always imagine intentionally, and even though we cannot always control what we imagine, in general imagining is both subject to intention and under our control. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b6dyy7kmghhej056k9gmrz)) > There may be no actual perceptual relations to imagined objects for us to control, but we at least imagine such relations [5.2]. It may not be possible to attend to imagined objects, but we can go some way to mimicking attention’s effects by isolating imagined features, or amplifying them [5.3]. So the crux is not whether imagining allows for observation, but whether the approximations for which it does allow make discovery possible. Can we, in doing these things, discover how we’ve imagined things to be? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b6n5kssbnb1z7awe6cge56)) > Suppose we imagine new perceptual relations, e.g. by visualizing the thing from a different angle or differently illuminated, or imagining the sound passing through a different medium. Or suppose we mimic attention in perception, moving from imagining the whole to isolating one of its parts, or imagining the whole but with one part or feature amplified. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b6py8anebg96x76qje4s8p)) > Of course, part of the point of Chapter 7 was to concede that what is generally true is not universally so. We saw no exceptions to the claims just made about the imaginative analogues of attending. But things stand differently for imagined perceptual relations. I gave examples in which manipulating them can indeed make us aware of hitherto hidden aspects of the imagined world. When in imagining I rotate one of Shepard’s objects to learn whether it’s congruent with the other, I discover a visible figure that it manifests of which I was in some way previously unaware. At least under the right conditions, it seems we can make discoveries about imagining’s intentional objects. We can manipulate imagining in such a way as to unpack the contents ofthe commitments originally undertaken ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b6vn3sxsqnfx82fbc88hse)) > in imagining those things. Those are not the contents of imagining itself, but they are in some sense aspects of the world as we imagined it to be. But if we can discover these aspects of how we’ve imagined things to be, does this mean imagining can progress to stage [4], after all? This brings us to the third obstacle. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b6vzb6sdwsb1dwmp8qxgrn)) > Pleasure may motivate further imagining; imagining may lead to discovery. But traversing the path taken by pleasure in beauty perceived requires more. The discoveries must be ones that pleasure itself motivates: pleasure must motivate whatever actions the subject takes that lead to those revelations. Ifnot, we have the pleasure involved in stage [2] and the possibility of discoveries required for stage [4], but no route from one to the other. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b6wn5awns97zpzdyjymwz9)) > In perception, pleasure motivates actions that themselves lead inexorably to discovery. Attending to what we perceive, or altering our perceptual relations to it, will make us aware of new aspects of that thing. We are responsible only for the observing: what is thereby revealed to us is down to the world. In imagining, in contrast, discovery requires of us not only more imagining, but imagining the right things. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b70g7jmqk7e1spdv1xcd85)) > Otherwise, later imaginings, rather than revealing any- thing about the object earlier imagined, will simply replace imagining one thing with imagining others. Here the reach of agency, and so what pleasure must motivate, covers not just the analogue of observing, but what I then ‘find’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b71ncre97wefeq6kfgag8e)) > In imagining, however, I have a further option. I can continue the rotation, but substitute more pleasing visible figures for those required by the shape originally imagined. I can, in other words, alter what I’m imagining, betraying my original commitments rather than fulfilling them.¹³ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b7m3nd2shrzf7seenw03hp)) > We have seen three obstacles to pleasure in imagined beauty motivating exploration of its object. It need motivate nothing more than carrying on imagin- ing the same. Even if it motivates more, in most cases there is nothing to discover. Even where there is something to discover, pleasure in imagining cannot motivate the exploration that discovery would require. While pleasure in beauty perceived motivates observation (stage 3), and so leads to alterations in the very awareness on which pleasure depends (stage 4), pleasure in imagining does nothing of the kind. As a result, only the former pleasure is exposed to, and coloured by, the risk of refinement and collapse (stages 5 and 6). But what is the significance of this contrast? How exactly does it bear on imagining’s prospects for sustaining engagement with its intentional objects? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b7ntzntfnn8jj46hf6dzva)) - Note: good summary > In perception, the drive to explore arises irresist- ibly from one of pleasure’s fundamental features, its tendency to self-perpetuate. Pleasure in imagining expresses its tendency to self-perpetuate in very different ways. There, no urge to explore can arise, no discoveries will result, and no refinement or collapse will ensue. These differences are striking. Perhaps they suffice for us to deny that pleasure in imagining can count as genuine aesthetic engagement. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b7scps27reyj8gvpvhgagg)) - Note: not sure I agree. comparable to enjoying dancing spontaneously? 'Let's see what I can do', so even though its experienced as self generated. there is still the sponaniety. of not know whati'll do next. > But the common sense thought is the one we began with, that the difference in value is down to the pair’s differing success in capturing appearances. The current proposal locates the deficit in a quite different place: not in the fleeting, imprecise and unstable nature of the appearances that imagining captures; but in the way it relates us to whatever appearances it does frame. They are not given as admitting of further exploration, and so not given as liable to delight or frustrate us in unexpected ways. This shortfall would survive any improvement in the stability and precision of our images. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b7yd1enmq50ddwdy5m7qy3)) > benighted ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b842j3g7f3jpj4y4tke578)) - Note: cool word. > However, while the case fits Kant’s outlook very naturally, nothing in it conflicts with Premise 1. The experiences Cypher has once back inside the matrix sustain the sort of open-ended exploration that Premise 1 demands. Finding the steak tasty, he’ll be able to savour it longer, or with more care, exploring its non- aesthetic character, thereby refining his sense of its merits, or finding it misplaced. Of course, all those experiences will be misleading, from the point of view of how things really are. But what in Premise 1 requires otherwise? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b868cae4t3drq3cxf1gfar)) > Premise 1*. Aesthetic engagement has at its heart pleasure in an object, that seeks its own perpetuation, thus motivating actions (observation) that lead to apparent discovery of the object’s non-aesthetic features, which results in pleasure’s refinement or collapse, the prospect of which colours engagement. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b8gcphjatsj6ddy1vr5t9w)) > distal overflow ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b8gpptsa7zmty12ha2bzw7)) > At any moment, they do not seem to overflow our awareness in imagining them. And any further imaginings we go on to undertake are experienced, not as explorations of the imagined object, but as fitting either of two moulds. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b8kybrrsaz9g2w8zhfx20m)) > Suppose some melody comes to a composer in the form of an auditory image. Can’t she discover whether it is beautiful by finding whether it brings her pleasure? How can she do this, if not by engaging aesthetically with the music? But that music exists only in her head, and she takes pleasure in it by imagining it. Surely the object of her pleasure is the intentional object of her imagining. And since that pleasure counts as aesthetic engagement, surely here the object of sensory imagining and the object of aesthetic engagement are one. It seems my Conclusion is false. Moreover, since nothing suggests the case involves exploration (apparent or otherwise) of the non-aesthetic character of the tune, the blame seems likely to fall on Premise 1*.¹⁹ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b8n9y838f1ee15bqmmdy16)) > (i) discovery of features implicit in the original imagining; which requires (ii) the discipline involved in elaboration; and so will be possible (iii) only when the imaginer has the relevant skill to elaborate; and (iv) where she has the requisite motivation to carry out that elaborative task, a motivation (we are supposing) independent of the pleasure itself. But, so qualified, the concession is made. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b8sbsnhx3rhcf13brhwwgy)) > The case is hardly unique: in reading a novel, we may visualize the scenes it describes; and even many works of visual art require for their full appreciation sensory imaginings to supplement perception. Indeed, some philosophers have taken guided imagining to lie at the heart of our interaction with artworks (and more humble ‘entertainments’) of every kind.²⁰ However, the score is a particu- larly clean example for our purposes. Where imagining figures in our appreciation of visual art, its role is often to enrich perception, and it is perception, not imagining, that supplies the object with which we engage. Our question has been so framed (section 2) as to set those cases aside. Even in the literary arts, the object of engagement, while certainly hard to describe, hardly reduces to what we imagine: at least in part, we take pleasure in the text. Perhaps here too the object of engagement is not the intentional object of imagining.²¹ The score, in contrast, is nothing but a tool by which to access the music. As he reads, the musician’s perceptions remain thoroughly prosaic, and the score itself is no part of what he’s enjoying. Here, it seems, the object that engages him must be the music he imagines. But is it? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b8tvnjtmp6hwjxmnqsh1fq)) > First, the object with which we engage must appear to overflow our current grasp in ways that invite exploration. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b96x225jh20cy0j9dw3g29)) - Note: how would this play out in music? > Let’s go back to the two intentional objects, the music imagined and the music the score is taken to represent, and the two states by which the musician grasps them, imagining and understanding the score. In fact, there is a third intentional object hereabouts: the music the score represents. That is the target of the musician’s understanding. His goal is to grasp it in full. But as he reads his understanding constitutes only a partial grasp of it. As he proceeds, there will be scored music he has yet to grasp. Even when he’s finished, there is always the possibility that he missed something. So, in principle at least, there’s always more to the piece scored than his understanding captures. And this is something of which he will be fully aware, as he strives to ensure that no aspect of the music eludes him. Not only does the piece overflow his understanding, but that is how things appear to him to be. And, of course, ifhe explores further, either by reading on or by returning more carefully to some passage already read, the musical content he has yet to encounter, or any detail of it he earlier missed, are there to be uncovered. The relation between the music scored and his understanding ofthe score neatly fits the bill for aesthetic engagement. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b99ehesxmhc04z9erm5gsa)) > In sum, although our musician takes pleasure in music imagined, if he aesthet- ically engages with anything, it is with the music the score represents. Imagining may be key to that engagement, but, whatever role it plays, it cannot provide ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2bwg93szmrb7rx195vy8qra)) > engagement’s object. All along our question has been whether imagining, like perception, is able to furnish objects with which we engage aesthetically. We now see that nothing in this, the most challenging case of guided imagining, argues for a positive answer. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2bwgd955w1p03bm4kthxsfb)) > In other ways, however, the case does not significantly expand the concession the fugue example forced. We can make discoveries only where we do not already ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b9ebpyfcyth1mh88hwt4s0)) > grasp the relevant facts. Since memory is a way of retaining information, it is in some ways fundamentally ill-suited to sustaining discovery. Our prodigy can only remember features she earlier experienced. The question arises, then, in what sense she can now discover what they were. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2b9d4d3a3azs0xdmd02m7wv))