Reports from Abroad: An Interview with Professor Elisabeth Schellekens on Aesthetics and Morality

Elisabeth Schellekens has held the Chair of Aesthetics in the Philosophy Department at Uppsala University since January 2014. She obtained her Ph.D. at King’s College London, where she also held a post-doctoral research fellowship from 2003 to 2006. In 2006, she moved to Durham University, appointed first as a Lecturer and as Senior Lecturer two years later. From 2007 to 2019, she also served as editor (with John Hyman) of the British Journal of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press). Her research interests include normativity, the relations between aesthetic, moral, and epistemic value, Kant, Hume, aesthetic reasons, non-perceptual beauty, subjectivism and objectivism, realism and anti-realism. She has also worked on non-perceptual art, neuroaesthetics, and the cognitive value of art. Prof. Schellekens is currently the Principal Investigator of ‘Aesthetic Perception and Aesthetic Cognition’, a project funded by Vetenskapsrådet (2019-2022).

How did your research on art and morality begin?

I became interested in moral philosophy in general, and in the work of Immanuel Kant in particular, while an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. I didn’t choose an aesthetics option during my BA though, and it was only after some conversations with Professor Ronald Hepburn, who held the chair of moral philosophy, about what to study for my Master’s degree that I became absorbed in questions to do with aesthetics. Ronald’s suggestion was that, given the huge amount of work that had already been done on Kant’s moral philosophy, I should look at the relation between the second and third Critiques and at the links between what Kant writes about the good and the beautiful, and about moral and aesthetic experience and judgment. And that’s what I ended up doing. So you could say in a way that I came to aesthetics and morality before I even came to aesthetics as a subject by itself.

Alison Hills, in her article “Moral and Aesthetic Virtue” (2018) claims that “aesthetic virtue is fundamentally similar to moral virtue, and there are even analogies between specific virtues such as moral and aesthetic courage.” Albeit similar, these two sets of virtue seem to be, in Hills’ view, still separate. While reading your book Aesthetics and Morality (2007), I started to wonder what you think about this. Do you think moral and aesthetic virtue are similar but still separate or are there cases in which being a morally good person can help us be better aesthetic agents?

Ever since Plato, philosophers have thought that beauty and goodness are related in important ways. Throughout the history of philosophy, beauty has been thought of as something that is either metaphysically or epistemologically related to the good, or goodness and truth. This being said, if you are, like me, a philosopher interested in questions of aesthetic value and aesthetic experience, you will frequently find other philosophers coming from ethics or moral philosophy who assume that the aesthetic case works pretty much like the moral case. Hume also thought that, from a metaphysical point of view at least, what can be said about aesthetic qualities applies to moral qualities as well. And there are of course analogies. For example, in both cases we are dealing with value and with qualities that are not primary qualities, so to say. However, I think the relation between aesthetic and moral virtue is a complicated one. Sometimes, it seems that they do help each other, but at other times it seems that they have less to do with one another than is assumed. There are certainly cases where developing our moral virtues enables or facilitates the development of our aesthetic virtues. Yet, there are also many counterexamples.

What I find particularly interesting about this relation is that there is a sense in which if we train ourselves and become more experienced at spotting, detecting, and picking out aesthetic qualities, this often facilitates the discernment, the picking out, and the detecting of moral qualities too. Reflecting upon and engaging with non-perceivable qualities or qualities which are not straightforwardly present to our senses can be a way of training our evaluative sensibilities. An example I am currently working on is politeness. The more you think about the importance of politeness, the more you start perceiving the presence of politeness or the lack thereof around you, the more sensitive you become to this quality. So, if you are a person who is trained—either because of personal interest or because of your education—to pick out qualities of the world that require some form of more complex psychological process, this training can really work in your favor in other neighboring areas.

Let me give you an example. Imagine a moral agent who is particularly sensitive to injustice. There might well be some aesthetic qualities that, just because of their nature, lie closer at hand than others. For instance, injustice might be closer to grace than to kitsch. So a moral agent who is good at picking out nuances of injustice in the world might be equally good at picking out nuances of harmony and grace but not so good at picking out nuances of kitsch. However, this really depends on what kind of moral and aesthetic qualities we are dealing with. We all know examples of people who are brilliant at picking out aesthetic qualities but are morally not quite so commendable, and the other way around. So, I think there are pairs of aesthetic and moral qualities that seem to work well together, but I do not think that there is a way of regularizing and generalizing the relationship between moral and aesthetic virtue. There are cases where our moral and aesthetic virtues do more than run on parallel tracks, and the more we reflect on their relation the more possibilities there are for those two to feed into each other. Yet, there is nothing necessary about this interaction.

Moreover, the relationship between moral and aesthetic virtue will depend on our view of aesthetic virtue and aesthetic value. If one thinks of aesthetic value in formalist terms this is definitely going to affect the way one sees the connection between one’s moral and aesthetic self, which will then be seen as quite separate from each other. If one is a moralist or an ethicist about aesthetic value, then one’s moral and aesthetic self will be more strongly linked.

In your SEP entry on conceptual art, you say that, in the case of conceptual art, the artwork is more of a process than a material thing. As you say in the article, this creates problems for the acquaintance principle, which considers first-hand experience essential for aesthetic experiences. Recently, C. Thi Nguyen (2020) has criticized the acquaintance principle for not being able to explain cases in which one is acquainted with an artwork but still aesthetically subservient (because, for example, entirely dependent on an aesthetic expert’s testimony). What do you think is the importance of acquaintance for aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments?

I do not think that aesthetic experience necessarily requires first-hand perceptual acquaintance with the object. This idea is well exemplified by conceptual art where, even though you engage with a material object, artists and audience alike would agree that just going and looking at the object presented is not going to get you to the artwork itself. In some situations, having a rich and complex imaginative experience is a more important and significant way of engaging with the artwork than just going and standing in front of it.

I have recently started readdressing what it really means to be acquainted with an artwork and to have an aesthetic experience in connection with the work I am currently doing on the aesthetic value of intellectual pursuits, the aesthetic value of doing science, math, philosophy, and so on. Some historical sources definitely point in the direction of a simple version of the acquaintance principle. Yet, other sources, like Plato and Plotinus, believe that the paradigmatic and most important kind of aesthetic experience is a broadly intellectual one. The aesthetic experiences that we have of material sensory objects around us are derivative aesthetic experiences from the higher metaphysical plane, where beauty and other aesthetic values reside.

The idea that we can have a bona fide aesthetic experience only if we are standing in front of the work makes little sense for some artworks. Think of literary artworks. To stand in the bookshop with a copy of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is hardly going to count as a straightforward case of acquaintance with the artwork. It is a lot easier to think that we just need to stand in front of The Night Watch by Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to have an aesthetic experience of it. But even this doesn’t really guarantee any kind of genuine aesthetic experience of the work. Certainly, to move away from a simple version of the acquaintance experience, to one that puts more emphasis on engaging deeply and imaginatively with an immaterial artwork and its non-perceptual qualities is going to demand a lot more from us. We will have to put more time and effort into engaging with the artwork, and we will have to gain knowledge about the artists and their art. Think of it as getting acquainted with a person. It is not because I stood in front of someone on the bus and engaged with their visual appearance that I am acquainted with them. I need to put time into getting to know a person, and I need to gain knowledge about who they are. The same goes for artworks. Moreover, acquaintance can always change, develop and deepen over time. That is why we cannot really say that we are ‘done’ with an artwork. When can you say that you are done with The Night Watch? All these different elements need to be captured if we are going to adopt any helpful version of the principle of acquaintance.

This line of thinking suggests to me that what we need to do is revise the so-called perceptual model of aesthetics, and this is something I am working on at the moment together with Maarten Steenhagen. We are interested in analyzing how much, if at all, we can stretch the notion of perception and still call it perception. In any case, it is clear to us that simply exercising our senses is not going to cut it. We cannot even say that the acquaintance principle applies straightforwardly to all art before conceptual art and that everything that comes afterward should be approached using a different principle. We must not underestimate how many important artworks require a much more demanding form of engagement. 18th-century paintings, 19th-century novels, or 15th-century frescoes, just to name a few, need us to do more than look at or read them in order to have an aesthetic experience of them.

Finally, who we are as moral agents will deeply influence what we see in a painting and what we take from the painting in terms of moral perspective. We bring our moral history and moral personality to an artwork when we engage with it. This is part of what makes the aesthetic experience a form of creative process, in that there is some freedom for us to see certain things or take some things from the artworks.

This seems to put some responsibilities on the viewer and the audience, and that is a quite refreshing approach, I think. The traditional view seems to be that the weight is only on the artist and we, as viewers, just have to understand and grasp the intention(s) of the artist.

I do think it is important to respect the artwork on its own terms. Engaging with an artwork is not like opening a letter, reading it, and then you are done. As much as I am skeptical of someone exercising a sort of authority on what the artist meant to communicate—especially in cases in which we cannot talk to the artist anymore—I am also against the idea of us using the artwork as a personal playground open to endless possibilities of interpretation depending on our emotions and experiences. Our relationship with artworks and aesthetic objects is a relationship of understanding. I think—and I am not Kantian in this respect—that the distinction between the aesthetic and the cognitive or epistemic is not so clear-cut. Thinking of it as a dichotomy has done huge damage to how we think about art and aesthetic experience, and to how we philosophize about aesthetic value. Understanding is central to aesthetic experience. Many of our aesthetic experiences are epistemically motivated, and the enjoyment and pleasure we gain from engaging with aesthetic objects comes very close to an epistemic pleasure.

In her chapter “Beauty and Ugliness In and Out of Context” (in M. Kieran, Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 2006), Marcia Muldear Eaton argues—and rightly so, in my opinion—that knowledge affects what we find beautiful and ugly, and in many cases, we cannot look at the artwork in the same way anymore. At the same time, I believe that one of the merits of emotivism is that it creates space for our feelings and emotions when it comes to aesthetic experiences. Indeed, it is a common experience to go to a museum or to watch a movie just because we want to relax and watch/admire something nice. We can get tired of being moral all the time. Is there a balance between these two attitudes? Is it possible for us to “switch off” our moral evaluation of art and just enjoy it as it is?

I think it will depend on the moral perspective adopted in an artwork whether we can put the moral evaluation on hold or not. If the artwork adopts a moral perspective that is offensive but mildly so, then I think we can choose what to do and how to organize the metaphysical soup we live in. Say that you see a movie scene where some member of society is not spoken to very nicely but not worse than how we were spoken to when we were children. You might think that this behavior is not okay anymore but, at the same time, it is not so overpowering that you cannot put it aside. Yet, there are other cases where either because of our personal moral commitments—say you are vegan or a political activist of a certain kind—or because the moral boundaries are overstepped greatly, that putting aside the moral content is not an option for us.

An interesting aspect of this, which I believe has been overlooked in the literature on the interaction between moral and aesthetic value, is the importance of historical value. If you add historical value to the mix, the relation between moral and aesthetic value can be turned upside down. You might think that you cannot see the buildings in Dubai as beautiful buildings because you hold the view that they were built by slave labor. All you can see is the blood, sweat, and tears of the people who built those buildings. At the same time, you might feel entirely comfortable with traveling to Egypt and admiring the pyramids, which were erected in the same way. I am fascinated by how the more historical value the object of aesthetic appreciation has, the more willing we seem to be to let the moral value of the object float to the background. In these cases, the aesthetic value really comes to the fore in a peculiar way.

In a nutshell, putting moral value aside is going to depend on your moral principles, on the moral qualities or transgressions that are adopted by the artwork, and there are other sorts of phenomena that play a role, like the impact of historical value, which are not yet explained. Moreover, I think that the question as to whether you can still appreciate the aesthetic value of an artwork despite the moral controversies it raises only makes sense if you endorse a straightforward form of formalism. The more you open up for an account of aesthetic value that brings in context, history, and morality, the more this question disappears. Although most philosophers are not willing to endorse such a straightforward form of formalism nowadays, they partially make room for formalism in their theoretical accounts, perhaps because formalist precepts still hold a great deal of sway in the way non-philosophers conceive of art and aesthetic experience. Thus, I think we—as philosophers interested in questions of aesthetic value and aesthetic experience—should check the coherence of our own views as well.  

The Dutch Research Agenda has recently founded a research project called “Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums.” Among other things, the project aims at investigating whether artistic practices can contribute to repairing colonial injustice. Do you think artists and other aesthetic experts, such as curators, should be concerned with the morality of the artwork they deal with?

I think curators have a duty to bring this discussion to a wider group of people who, from different perspectives, can help them raise these controversies and problems in the best possible way. Museums and curators should not hesitate to take help from people who see these problems from a different perspective. I have been involved in similar discussions in my own university. Uppsala University has a huge art, archeological, and zoological collection, much of which was acquired in problematic ways. However, we need to make some distinctions. Imagine you are the curator of a museum that has controversial objects, say the museum has knowingly bought artworks stolen from Jewish families during WWII. This is a straightforward case in which the museum has participated as one of the main actors in an immoral act. In such cases, museums have a duty to create a committee with people coming from other disciplines, including philosophy and law, who can address the problem and find the best possible resolution. However, imagine that those objects turn out to have a morally problematic history years and years after the acquisition by the museum and that the museum played no active role in that. This is a different kind of case because the museum has not been complicit in the act. This does not absolve the museum from all responsibility or duty but it is a rather different kind of duty compared to the first case.

In short, I think every case is different, and that it is unlikely we will be able to find a solution that fits the many different problems that arise in these contexts. Look, I really want there to be a solution. I just do not think the solution is always going to be the same. More thought, more time, more perspectives need to be added, and every case should be handled as an individual case.

What do you think is the next challenge for scholars researching on the intersection(s) between morality and aesthetics?

I think it is going to be about how we, with our philosophical tools, can help cultural heritage and museum workers to make important decisions regarding their collections. Philosophers have a lot to bring, theoretically speaking, and they could assist the people who are at forefront of these discussions to formulate explanations that make sense to everybody.

I also see some trends in the cancel culture discussions and some radicalization of the views that make me think that we can do better there. We do not necessarily have to change our perspectives or our moral commitments, but we can stay more level-headed. I do not mean to say that there are not things that should be canceled or removed from the artistic canon, but I would like to see a deeper discussion before reaching that solution. We cannot want artists to explore the boundaries of our conventions, be provocative, be original, say uncomfortable things, and then cancel them when the things they say succeed in provoking us and making us feel uncomfortable. It can be really difficult to accept that some subjects or artists have gone too far, but I would defend their right to do what they do in most cases.

“Reports from Abroad” is designed to give readers a glimpse of philosophical research being carried out outside the United States. Future posts might include reports of conferences and symposia, short essays, and book reviews. We hope that this section of the APA blog will attract contributions from other parts of the world and from other philosophical areas. We’d love to hear from you and to read about your ideas, which you can share with us through our call for posts and our submission form.

Ilaria Flisi

Ilaria Flisi is a graduate Research Master's student in Social and Political Philosophy at Radboud University. She wrote her Master's thesis on the interrelationships between aesthetics and ethics, and - more specifically - on the ethical duties of aesthetic experts and art institutions. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Humanities for the Study of Culture at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She has been editor-in-chief of the faculty philosophical journal Splijtstof for the past three years. You'll have her most undivided attention by bringing up any of the following topics: art history, museum practices, epistemic (and real-life) injustice and discrimination, and (sour) beers.