Abstract
Frank Sibley, a distinguished British aesthetician and ordinary language philosopher, analyzes in his paper “Some Notes on Ugliness“ two basic aesthetic concepts, namely that of beauty and ugliness. A reader of Sibley´s previous works has to be struck by a sharp contradiction in which results of his analysis stand to his own conception of aesthetic judgment as it was presented in his seminal paper on aesthetic concepts.
While in “Aesthetic Concepts“ Sibley defines aesthetic usage of language (aesthetic judgment) as not condition-governed, in his study on ugliness he defines aesthetic deployment of “ugly“ as deformity related or, more generally, as conditioned by an object judged being denormalized. To claim that something is out of proportion or violates normal conditions implies that there is a general standard or norm that has been transgressed.
In the similar manner Sibley analyses aesthetic use of „beautiful“ as ideal-related. I will argue that a reason why Sibley departs so dramatically from his own previous approach towards aesthetic concepts is an implicit (and untenable) division of aesthetic judgements into two categories: those of works of art, and those of natural objects.
It will be shown that what he confines himself to (in his discussion of „ugly“ and „beautiful“) are well entrenched categories of things and phenomena provided by natural sciences.Therefore the general norm in each case consists of a set of features defining a given category of animals or other natural objects and phenomena. In order not to end up with a concept of aesthetic judgment so broad that it would lack any explanatory force we should, I will argue, keep it unified, i.e. there should be only one account of aesthetic judgment for both art and natural objects.
I will support Sibley´s original view of aestehtic judgment as a judgment not governed by conditions, which clearly corresponds to the traditional understanding of what it means to judge aesthetically (Hume, Kant, Bullough).