Abstrakt
The so-called lower senses - smell, taste and touch - and their potential for aesthetic experience and arts have been of marginal but recurring interest to recent Anglo-American aesthetics. Questions that are invoked by any consideration of aesthetic potential of smell, taste or touch concern, nevertheless, the very centerpiece of our understanding to the aesthetic dimension of experience.
In this paper, we will take some of these concerns to the fore; we will mostly ignore the other important area of inquiry: the questions aroused by a relation between these senses and art ontology (questions like: Are there arts of smell? Why (not)?). In the first part of the paper, we will present a short history of the discussion ranging from arguments presented by David Prall in the thirties, through young Arnold Berleant's defence of the lower senses aesthetics to recent studies that focus on one of the lower senses only, e.g.
Carolyn Korsmeyer's and Elisabeth Telfer's taste aesthetics, or Larry Shiner's and Julia Kriskovets's smell aesthetics. In the second part of the paper, we will ask: Which conception of the aesthetic is claimed to be hostile to lower senses aesthetics? A name to be found in this context in texts of almost all of the contributors to the discussion is Edward Bullough.
His view, that these authors claim to find in his seminal essay on psychical distance from 1912, is interpreted as an obvious disclaimer of any possibility that an aesthetic experience could be of olfactory, tactile or gustatory nature. We will show that Bullough's thoughts on this matter have been strongly misinterpreted.
In the third part of the paper, we will claim that not only has been the Bullough's view inverted, but, as a consequence, an inspiring insight into the problem of aesthetic experience, which Bullough in "Psychical Distance" provides, has been left unnoticed.