Mutual attention and shared conceptual schemes: Murdoch as a guide to aesthetic common sense

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant introduces the idea of an aesthetic common sense as the “precondition” of the judgement of taste. I argue that he leaves this thought unfinished, and that the scope of the third Critique cannot elaborate the implications of aesthetic common sense, which suggests, I assert, a necessarily social context to aesthetic judgements. I propose that we can elaborate on Kant’s suggestive but underdeveloped notion of aesthetic common sense by turning to Iris Murdoch’s characterisation of attention as the fundamental mode of moral activity. I show that we can establish a symmetry between Murdoch’s notion of attention and Kant’s characterisation of the disinterestedness of the judgement of taste. I assert, however, that Kant cannot help us to adjudicate questions around our actual, lived, particular experiences of art. I argue that art objects are unique among aesthetic objects in that they are (a) defined as art objects by virtue of the fact they are not something else, and (b) thus provoke and require a distinct mode of attention from us, because their primary telos is to be merely contemplated. I borrow from Murdoch’s argument about the role of concepts in facilitating our attention, in order to advance an interpretation of aesthetic common sense which understands it to be a mode of mutual attention which elaborates shared conceptual schemes. Per Murdoch, I see these conceptual schemes as both facilitating proper aesthetic experience and being a product of it. I claim that we can understand this ongoing, social process as a form of aesthetic common sense